What is a lead? It is a qualified contact ready to take any action related to your activity, generally an act of purchase. Therefore, knowing how to generate leads is essential for any business. Quantity is obviously essential to have a minimum return on investment, but it is essential to also be interested in the quality of these contacts in order to make the most of it.

The balance between supply and demand is a real key to success: you are responsible for 60% of the quality of a potential customer. The reliability of the information contained in the potential customer generally represents 20% and the purchase intentions of the users also 20%. But to generate qualitative leads, you must choose the right channel, that is, the one that will achieve your goal more effectively according to your expectations.

The two main cold prospecting techniques are cold email and cold calling. How to choose yours according to your need?

Cold email: the most practical

Cold email has significant advantages, especially if you have to contact large numbers of people. In fact, this method saves you a lot of time, being perfectly scalable. Today, thanks to the tools that allow you to easily carry out mass emails, contacting 100 or 10,000 people through this channel will take you the same amount of time once you have created your contact base.

But by sending an email you are in real competition. The person you’re trying to communicate to probably already has around 100 unread emails in their inbox. The probability that your message will be deleted even before it opens or ends in spam is generally high.

In addition, with an email you do not have the same control over the reception of your message by your interlocutor. The most important thing is that you cannot correct it if your message is misunderstood. Finally, it is quite impersonal and the person receiving it often feels less concerned. It’s even possible to negatively influence your brand image with overly aggressive email strategies – if your emails really don’t interest your target, it will end up being considered spam.

In summary, cold email is very practical because it can reach large numbers of people very quickly, but it is not necessarily the best way to get your message across.

Cold calling: the most effective

Cold calling, on the other hand, has both advantages and disadvantages. This method is often more difficult to use because rejections are done live, unlike emails that often end simply in the absence of response.

This confrontation can de-motivate certain teams, particularly commercial teams, some of whom actually fear cold calling. The other downside to cold calling is the amount of time it takes – this process is impossible to scale as you have to communicate with each potential customer one by one. If you want to dialogue with 10,000 people, the workload on your teams will be considerable.