When I started in sales, one the most difficult problems we had to solve was how to find the identities of prospective clients. You couldn’t google “CIO Amgen” or perform an advanced search by title on LinkedIn to get a name.
For public companies, some clues might exist in the Annual Report, but they took weeks to arrive by mail, if at all. If you were lucky to have an client file or old business card on the account, you might call and ask for a referral. Or play dumb, say you dialed the wrong extension, and ask them to transfer your call. More often than not, we did a lot of cold calling into the main office line asking to speak to the “Vice President of Department Name about a very important matter”, and try to cajole the switchboard operator to put us through to the prospect’s “secretary”.
Yes, Virginia, there were secretaries back then. Later, the job evolved into the more politically correct “Administ
rative Assistant” which could be staffed by any gender. The secretary would write on a pink “While you were Out” memo saying “Mr Smith” from “Acme Soft” would like to speak with you about “21CFR11 compliant applications for hyperlinked eCTD publishing”. It was always a struggle just to get the message transcribed properly, spelling, technical terms, etc. We spent lots of time developing rapport with the secretary to get some phone time with their boss, telling jokes, sending cards or flowers, whatever it took.
Then along come voice mail. Secretaries became an extinct species. Executives had to manage their own telephone messages in a burst of office productivity. Sales reps became experts with the popular 
voice mail systems; memorizing keys to play back and record multiple times until we delivered a really compelling message. The rules were clearly record your contact info at the beginning and end of the message so the prospect doesn’t have to replay the whole voicemail. One consultant advised us to smile while recording to improve our tone. There were also advanced voice mail hacks, like forwarding the message to a subordinate’s extension to make them think you have been in contact with their boss.
Caller ID appeared in 1991 as a separate device you could lease for your land line. 
This was the beginning of the end for the spontaneous sales call. We were taught to make “100 calls a day” to be successful in sales. Today if you were to make 100 calls you would be directed to voice mail 100 times. Back then, you could catch busy execs before 8am prepping for a meeting, or get them to answer at 5:30pm thinking their spouse is calling to ask about dinner. Not any more. Today, if the prospect does not recognize the number, and have a reason to speak with you, it will go right to voicemail.
And forget leaving a compelling message, no one listens to voicemail anymore. Long messages actually make people angry. When was the last time you left a detailed voice mail for a client only to have them call you 5 minutes later and ask “What’s up?”
Email used to be an effective way to get your message across. The most difficult problem was how to figure out the corporate email address pattern and whether the client went by bob.smith or robert.smith. A persistent email campaign + voicemail reinforcement gave you a 30% chance for a phone conversation if you had the right message.
I think the tipping point came about 3 years ago. There is just so much email traffic nowadays prospects delete emails with extreme prejudice just to survive the day
. Remember the old outlook read receipt feature? I always felt it was kind of creepy and only used it for formal occasions, like when an RFP response was due by 5:00PM and you needed a record of delivery. At my last company, they had a Gmail application that inserted a “tracking pixel” into every email. This pixel performed the tracking function without any recipient response. It provided NSA quality surveillance and statistics: date mail opened, re-read, forwarded to whom, etc. I was disappointed to discover 98% of all my prospecting emails were never opened. Probably 50% of mail to existing clients met the same fate.
Just like Caller ID, if the prospect doesn’t recognize your email address it’s “swipe left”. Chances are they are deleting that message on their phone, in the bathroom, between meetings, in the back of an Uber, or some other easily distracted venue. The only mental real estate we have left to make an impression in email is the Subject Line and 40 characters of the Preview Pane.
So the sales prospecting arms race continues. Social media is the current battleground. However, I already see diminishing returns on Linked In and who knows what Microsoft will do to the platform. Prospects don’t accept invitations to connect with frequency and InMail gets swiped left with everything else. Texting can be effective if you have a cell phone number, until they block you. For now, I am exploring Instagram and SnapChat as frontier prospecting tools!
The internet has solved our initial problem: how to identify a prospect, and gather lots of details about their backgrounds for use in a sales call. Ironically, it is much more difficult today to actually speak with them, even if you have their direct line or cell phone number! To paraphrase the Good Book, “Technology giveth and Technology taketh away.” The rodeo ain’t for city slickers. Happy trails.