Cold calling and hiring an army of awesome sales people seems crazy to many entrepreneurs that haven’t seen that side of successful technology startups. Google does an amazing job of putting its engineers front and center as the all-stars while having thousands of sales people behind the scenes selling stuff. Neil Patel just put up a post talking about competing with Omniture in web analytics and how he underestimated the importance of sales people.
Another big benefit of cold calling is gathering market intelligence.
Here are some examples of market intelligence from sales cold calls:
- Competitor customers (e.g. what companies are using your competitors)
- Existing vendor contract terms (e.g. when the competitor’s contract is up)
- Product functionality (e.g. features that are most important to a prospect as well as features missing from competitive products)
- Non-public industry news (we once learned a competitor was going out of business from one of the competitor’s customers before news hit the industry)
Cold calling doesn’t work for all industries but for ones that are fast growing and suffer from lack of market awareness, cold calling works great.
What else? What are some other types of market intelligence gained from cold calling?
David Cummings on Startups 
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