Martin Grönberg from myGengo has some advice for those who still need to rely on cold calling for some of their marketing:
Use our company's extended network, and particularly LinkedIn, to an extreme. We flip the standard target prioritization process around: We make the people in our extended network (within 2 degrees of separation) the starting point and ask ourselves "how can myGengo help this person and company better do business". Then we go ahead and prioritize those contacts based on common business metrics (value potential, strategic fit, etc) and use the network that initially lead us to the target for reaching out.
Not much to add to this, other than to link to a post which appeared here earlier, by Iqbal Gandham, about Generating B2C and B2B links systematically.