How to sell when no one picks up the phone

19 April 2025

(And why you need to stop pretending that your sales team is driving growth.)

Here’s a choice that you don’t want to make.

Do you want a happy sales team or a fast-growing business?

I’m sure you’d like to say “both” and reject my implication that these options are mutually exclusive. But they are: so you can’t!

When I was growing up in sales, every executive took pride in the phone on their desk. They even answered it when it made noise! And, when cell phones hit the market, executives queued to purchase them and proceeded to use them for their intended purpose: making and receiving calls.

Increasingly, executives (and normal folks) no longer answer their phones. I spent a couple of hours with a software development team a couple of months ago, and each developer had a phone on their desk. Every phone was muted. And all phones were blinking forlornly as a parade of inbound calls went unanswered.

This is why some salespeople are reporting that they can spend four hours attempting outbound calls and only manage to connect with one or two of their intended targets.

Notice I say “some salespeople”. There are two groups of salespeople who are not complaining. There are those who sell into project environments or who target buyers who are compelled to speak with them. And then there are those who never attempt to pursue new accounts on the telephone and who, consequently, don’t have to endure this pain.

I would hazard a guess that over 80 percent of salespeople fall into this second category.

Can salespeople sell if prospects don’t pick up the phone?

In theory, salespeople can find ways to win new business if their prospects don’t pick up the phone. But, in practice, these workarounds don’t scale, meaning that you’ll get a very poor return on a very expensive sales team.

In theory, salespeople can attend industry events and build personal networks. They can even blog, become Insta-famous, and star in their own YouTube channels.

But you can’t bank theory. Salespeople who are capable of doing this are unicorns. They are hard to find, expensive, and often disruptive to the larger organization.

If your prospects are not picking up your salespeople’s calls, you obviously have no choice but to rely on inbound sales opportunities; however, expecting salespeople to generate inbound is a fool’s errand.

Inbound: the honest truth

I started Ballistix 30 years ago, promoting the inbound idea. This was long before the widespread adoption of the Internet and certainly long before the Hubspot guys wrote the book popularizing the concept.

We used our own growth as evidence of the efficacy of this approach. We utilized advertising and public speaking to generate subscriptions to a print newsletter, and then relied on the newsletter’s compelling content to drive inbound inquiries.

The problem with the inbound approach is that we couldn’t replicate our success in our clients’ businesses. It was easy to sell the idea, but challenging to manifest the promised results.

The truth is that the inbound marketing framework works only to the extent that the organization’s content is compelling, controversial, and new. If your organization distributes HVAC components, you have a steep hill to climb.

If you examine organizations that prosper from inbound marketing, you’ll discover that they either have a truly compelling proposition (emerging from a unique perspective) or a founder who has developed themselves as an online personality (think of Gary Vee and Wine Library TV).

The cold, hard reality is that a truly compelling proposition requires true innovation, driven from the very top of the executive suite. A truly compelling proposition won’t emerge from your marketing department, and it certainly can’t be generated by your sales team.

Unpicking the relationship between sales and growth

I used to preach that organizations should determine their intended rate of growth, calculate the number of sales conversations—and ultimately, the number of salespeople—required to generate this growth, and then hire those salespeople.

The next step was to get those salespeople busy pursuing new business (new accounts and new categories from existing accounts). This required a mix of inbound and outbound activity.

Because inbound (under normal circumstances) suffers from rapidly diminishing returns, I would counsel organizations to expect just 10% of their opportunities to originate from inbound and the balance to be driven by outbound campaigns.

We would then insist that salespeople spend 4 hours a day on outbound calls, 90% of which involved following up on those outbound campaigns (yeah, baby: cold calling).

Now, those outbound calls were always easier if salespeople were calling existing accounts (pitching new categories), so if the organization was an industry leader, with a large installed base, salespeople were a lot more productive than they would have been if they were dedicating most of their time to the pursuit of new accounts.

This meant that sales was much easier for established organizations than it was for new entrants. And the same applies today, except that the situation is much worse.

Today, in the absence of an existing commercial relationship, it’s almost impossible to get executives to pick up the phone. It no longer makes sense to size your sales team based on your growth aspirations (particularly if you are a smaller business).

It’s time to reflect on why we have salespeople in the first place.

It’s not to manage transactions, or even accounts; both should be the responsibility of Operations. It’s to drive growth.

But if salespeople’s outbound activity becomes unproductive, we need to size our sales team based on the volume of inbound enquiries we can consistently generate, and explore other approaches to growth.

A critical requirement here is a new perspective. We need to recognize that it’s growth that’s important, not sales. Sales is just one component of a larger growth formula.

Salespeople may not like this new perspective!

The origins of growth

Growth comes from new accounts, new products, new territories, and new acquisitions.

New accounts require innovation, which enables the generation of inbound sales opportunities. New products require new-product development, in conjunction with salespeople cross-selling to existing accounts. New territories require that you move your sales team inside, enabling them to sell to the entire continent (or even the entire world) via video conferencing. And, new acquisitions require a concerted and consistent effort to acquire the customer bases of weaker competitors.

That’s the formula!

A new front-of-house. A new organization design.

This formula will have a significant impact on the design of your organization’s front-of-house.

For starters, you need to automate as much transactional business as possible. This means e-commerce, vendor-managed inventory, and a larger, more capable customer service team. It also means that Operations will need to take responsibility for managing customer accounts.

Account Managers should exist, but they should be part of the Operations team, providing a concierge service to “named” accounts.

The design of solutions and the generation of proposals should be centralized, either within Engineering or as part of a Proposal Team.

Now that salespeople have no choice but to focus on the pursuit of new business, the executive suite will be forced to recognize that there is no longer a justification for a large field-based sales force.

Existing sales team members with strong technical skills can be converted into Field Specialists (folks who perform discrete field tasks at the behest of either Sales or Operations), and a new sales team can be staffed with a small number of highly capable, very well-paid, telephone-based sales executives.

This new sales team should be part of a Growth Group, not part of the general organization. In fact, the organization should be split into two loosely coupled subsystems.

There’s the Business as Usual Group, responsible for converting the organization’s portfolio of accounts into money in the bank. And then there’s the Growth Group, responsible for the growth formula described above.

In a mid-sized organization, I’d eliminate the VP of Sales (or CRO) role and replace it with the VP of Growth (or CGO). This is not a cosmetic change. The new sales team is large enough to require a line manager, but not large enough to warrant a middle management layer.

It’s better to make Sales one team within the larger Growth group.

If we return to the original question: how do we sell when no one picks up the phone?

The answer is that it’s the wrong question. The question implies that growth is a byproduct of sales. In truth, sales will be the byproduct of your organization’s growth!