Some people say that cold calling is dead. However, thousands of salespeople use the phone to successfully qualify prospects, set appointments and open sales conversations. When you don’t use cold calling for lead generation, here’s the impact on your effort.
Lower response rate. Regardless of industry, engagement rates using the phone are higher than response rates using email and social selling. One study shows that 57% of people who receive prospecting emails believe them to be spam without even opening the email*. The majority of people that you send emails to likely won’t even end up opening them.
Lost competitive advantage. When you rely on email and social media to reach out to your prospects, you are lost in the sea of emails and social media posts. So much sales communication has shifted to email and social that phones are not ringing nearly as much as they did in the past. Cold calling lets you stand out. Even if you gather all the social intelligence available on a prospect, that information isn’t going to give you much of an advantage over your competitors, who have access to the same tools and information.
Loss of relationship intelligence. A personal phone call allows you to learn through conversation the prospect’s pain points and goals. Conversations allow you to uncover nuances about their business and their challenges. Not only does email not enable you to do that, but the tone of emails can result in complete miscues.
Less meaningful connections. Emails don’t build relationships. Calling can give the prospect a sense of importance and a sense of immediacy. Phone calls allow you to customize your points based on what the prospect says. Prospects are more likely to do business with people that they know, like and trust.
Opportunities left on the table. Believe it or not, the success rate of cold calling has actually proven to be higher than many people would think. One study has found that cold calling outperforms emails by a significant margin (8.2% vs 0.03%)**.
Social-selling tools are great for research, identifying trigger events, and finding mutual connections. Emails help keep you and your business top of mind, but no lead generation method builds relationships like, or is as effective as, cold calling.
A customized prospecting list is critical for your cold calling campaign. Although every element of a cold calling campaign needs special attention, prospect lists need the utmost care. Selecting and cleaning your data can be tedious and time consuming but it will bring about rewarding results in the end.
Start your campaign with confidence in your database. Conduct a SIC code lookup for your target industries and personnel, and build separate lists to accommodate multiple industries. This will enable you to customize your approach and assess results by industry.
Regardless of where your data comes from, it will need to be cleaned before you begin the campaign. As much as 25% of the data could be missing or incorrect. People move between roles and between companies. In addition, some companies may be incorrectly classified within SIC codes, some may be out of date, or some records may be incomplete.
List cleaning starts with reviewing the data for errors in SIC classification, records that just don’t make sense like incorrectly formatted emails, and for missing pieces of the data. Eliminate those records that don’t apply then start “filling in the blanks”. If your source for the data doesn’t provide any further insights, missing data can be researched on online through LinkedIn, Google searches and company websites.
Cleaning your prospect list takes time and may delay the ROI of your lead generation campaign, but it is well worth it. Once you have cleaned your data, your campaign will progress more efficiently. You will be talking to the people you want to talk to and therefore it will deliver a higher level of engagement. The goal is to build a targeted and accurate database. It is well worth the effort to clean up your lead list because a good list leads to qualified appointments and lead nurturing not just for the short-term, but also for the future. Like anything else, it takes time and skill to do this.
Bad data is bad business, and there’s a cost to it –wasted time and missed new business opportunities. A finely tuned prospect list is your best sales tool.
Bringing Sales Teams & Cold Callers Together Produces Greater Success.
Many sales organizations have a team of cold callers who feed leads to the sales team. Often the leads or appointments are simply handed over from one team to the other. Your cold calling efforts will be more effective and provide added benefits when you bring these two sets of people together. Collaboration between cold callers and the rest of the team is critical in order to get the most out of your cold calling campaign.
What is needed to make cold calling a successful part of your sales process? It is critical for these two teams to meet to:
Discuss first time appointments and opportunities
Share key information about the prospects
Classify hot, warm and cold leads in the pipeline
Identify and address any issues concerning the process
Review objective and outcome metrics
It is detrimental to view your cold calling team as a separate silo in your sales and marketing organization. They need to be privy to any discussion about sales strategy, various marketing materials and campaigns, and any market intelligence.
The lead generation team contributes a great deal to the entire effort as well. Cold calling is like a new sales team building a book of business. There will be a lot of information garnered from this effort that can be used in the sales process even when an appointment is not set at that time.
The outset of a cold calling campaign is the time when objectives are discussed, when changes are made to the scripting and when kinks in the process are worked out. An in-depth weekly review ensures that nothing is lost in the mix. As the campaign progresses, it may suffice to meet on a bi-weekly basis.
A lead generation campaign builds over time so success takes time. In addition, its success depends on the complete engagement of your cold calling team with your entire sales organization.
