A sales rep or business development rep makes a cold call to establish initial conversion with a lead, make an introduction, follow up on a prior interaction, or sell their products or services.
Here we will cover the followings:
What is Cold Call? 📱
The cold call is the marketing strategy where salespeople call the potential customers for solicitation of business who have had no prior contact with that person. It is a strategy to convince potential customers to purchase either the company product or service.
Generally, it is referred to as an over-the-phone strategy, which makes it a source of telemarketing, but can also be done in-person by a door-to-door salesperson. Though cold calling can be used as a legitimate business tool, scammers (a confidence trick to defraud a person) could also use cold calls as well.
A cold call occurs when a sales rep calls a lead who has no prior contact with the person placing the call or the company he is representing of. The recipient of a cold call may have briefly interacted with your company in the past or not, maybe a member of some event that was conducted by your company, or is an employee of some other company that the salesperson is targeted as a client.
How Cold Call Works? ⚙️
The cold call is a technique handled by a salesperson where they contact individuals who haven’t previously expressed interest in the offered company products or services. It is typically referring to solicitation through phone calls or telemarketing, but also includes in-person visits, such as with door-to-door salespeople.
Successful cold-call salespeople should be persistent and willing to endure hearing repeated NO’s. To be successful, they must prepare themselves by researching the demographics of their prospects and the current market. Also, professional salespeople who rely heavily on cold calls typically have a high attrition rate.
Warm Call vs. Cold Call 🥊
There is a key difference between cold and warm calls. A warm call involves contacting a potential customer who has had prior contact with your company. They might have shown some form of interest in your product or service, so when the sales rep call, they don’t seem like a surprise call.
By having a connection with a prospect before you call, you will have already built a certain level of trust with them and created trust over your company. Due to this, potential customers will be more likely to listen to you and will consider whether your product or service can fix their current needs.
Cold calls are less immediate but warm calls start by having connections through some sales strategy other than an unsolicited call, which means the sales rep should have been waiting for a long-time to take the next step.
Cold calls are more complex while warm calls are reliving on several methods of communicating with prospects from social selling to direct mail. It just requires corporation and coordination between multiple departments and sales reps.
For well-developed companies, these issues are easy to overcome but for start-ups and small businesses, cold calls should have to remain as a primary part of their sales strategy.
How to Improve Cold Calls? 🔥
Whether your company updated to warm calls, or if you are still using cold call strategy, there are always improvements you can make in the process. Here are the five ways to ensure that your marketing outreach is effective:
- Clean Up Your Existing Data 🛁
Cold calls are already an outdated strategy but doing it with bad contact information will definitely guarantee failure.
Low-quality data or outdated data are the biggest issues facing by B2B sales reps today. So take a step back and make data maintenance a priority. Without proper data collection, a massive number of cold calls that you make will be dead on arrival. - Prior Research 🧐
The prospect may not expect your call but you knew about the surprise call so you should always prepare for it. Gather all information about the company such as their goals, recent performance, growth, potential needs, etc.
While facing a long list of prospects, sales reps understandably avoid extensive, and time-consuming research. Also, placing any call completely blind is a step for failure. - Listen to Your Prospect 👂
While cold calling a prospect, it is important to remember that they haven’t shown interest in your product or service. Telling about your product or service at the beginning of the call will put you on the fast track of rejection.
Instead, focus to learn on the information that your data and research haven’t provided. Show you are interested to learn about the prospect’s issues that they are facing and in return, they will want to learn about your business. - Social Selling 😊
Social media has changed the way we do business, which includes research and reach potential buyers. It is a valuable tool at every step of the selling process from prospecting and targeting to engage and connect with potential customers.
Using social channels is effective in initiating your audience and then also in providing the best pitch or nurture message. Social selling takes a little more patience, but allows you to have an easy communication flow between conversions, messaging, and touchpoints. - Referrals 🤝
While comparing B2C selling, B2B selling relies mostly on building and focusing on customer relationships. Also, those customers can be a golden ticket to your next level of business.
Don’t freak the prospect out of the blue with nothing but your sales pitch to back you up, consider seeking a referral. If you have any mutual connections with the prospect that can give you a formal introduction make use of it, which will lead you to a better conversation.
Key Takeaway
If you are still using cold call as a part of your sales strategy, don’t freak out. Instead, examine ways to change your cold call into a warm call or perfect your cold calls with the right data, preparation, and improve the communication way.
However, every sales strategy has its time and place to get an effective one and that includes cold call.
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