Welcome to this week's training. The frameworks, tactics, and know-how you need to kick arse and take names in the trenches. Today: 4 min read. This edition is presented by:

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Walk into any sales meeting, any LinkedIn comment section, any industry mastermind, and you'll find the same argument on repeat.

Which is better? Cold calling or networking?

One camp swears by actively building relationships, joining associations, building your circles of influence, and letting referrals feed you on auto-pilot. The other camp swears by getting off your rear, getting on the phone, making the dials, and controlling your own destiny.

Both sides firm in their convictions. Dug in, defending it, and trying to dunk on the other one.

Can I shoot you straight? It's a dumb argument.

I've learned firsthand, leaning too hard to one side will cost you revenue and years.

This isn't an either/or question. It never was. Treating it like one is short-sighted and dogmatic, and dogma is expensive when it's your income on the line.

Guilty over here.

The real answer is both/and.

Not both at 50/50. Both, in a sequence that changes over time as your career matures. Cold calling and networking aren't competing strategies. They're the same strategy: the strategy of building relationships with people who can eventually become clients or referral sources. But using different modalities.

It's like a golfer deciding to hit a fade or a draw. Who cares? Both have the express purpose of getting the ball as close to the hole as possible.

Do whichever you want.

There is one slight catch, though.

When you're new, you probably don't have much of a network.

And if you do have one, you can probably call everyone you know before lunch. You definitely don't have a reputation, because you haven't written squat. Which means you don't have clients who'll vouch for you at the country club or the Rotary breakfast.

Networking requires two things you simply don't have yet: a track record people will vouch for, and a web of relationships big enough to spin off warm introductions on repeat.

So what do you actually have? Time, a phone, and hopefully some intestinal fortitude.

Cold calling is how a new producer controls their own destiny. Every call is a rep, every rep sharpens the saw, every rep becomes a case study to learn from. It's slow, it's uncomfortable, but it's the only lever a producer with no name recognition can pull on day one.

The upside is, it produces fruit immediately. You don't have to wait for trust to build in the market to do it. You can literally go out into the market and find the low-hanging fruit yourself.

For a new producer, that immediate ROI on effort is the key to survival.

On the flip-side:

You don't need to wait until after validation to build your network.

Ideally, you're planting the roots of your network at the exact same time you're banging the phones. Don't wait until you're "successful" to start investing in those COI’s. Start investing in relationships from day one, even while cold calling is doing all the heavy lifting. They take time to grow.

You have the time. You have zero clients to manage and 24 hours in your day. Clearly you're not going to make calls from sun up to sun down.

The difference is timing of payoff. Cold calling pays you now. Networking pays you later, but it pays exponentially.

Think about it like this:

Word of mouth isn't linear, it's quadratic. Every new relationship is a new node in your network, and each of those nodes can introduce you to more nodes. A referral doesn't just replace a cold call, it replaces hundreds. Plus, it arrives pre-sold, with built-in trust you'd otherwise have to earn through your due diligence process. That's an asymmetry cold outbound can never match, no matter how good you get at it.

So the producers who are 15 years in (like me) and didn't lay the groundwork missed the boat entirely. They could be writing 2x what they're writing now, with zero extra effort.

Here's my advice, for what it's worth:

Do both whether you’re newer or seasoned.

Newer producers, cold call to put skins on the wall today, and plant the seeds of relationships that will bear fruit tomorrow.

Seasoned producers, harvest the fruit you planted, but keep a cold-calling floor so your pipeline and your skills never go soft. You never know when you'll need to hunt again.

It was never networking versus cold calling.

It's both. It was always both.

Nuance and context matter. Go build your business accordingly.

-MS