Cold calling can be scary. Sales people making the call are afraid of rejection. Call recipients are fearful of picking up the phone, afraid of having their time wasted. Scariest of all is the bottom line, when dozens of man hours and thousands of dollars produce no, or poor quality, leads.
If this fright fest is familiar, you need to try our winning approach to cold calling which drives qualified leads and bottom line results!
At One of a Kind Sales, I’ve carefully trained my team to deliver exceptional sales results, using our proprietary process. If your company is struggling with your sales process, here are some of our winning strategies that you can incorporate to BOO’st your frightful cold calling results:
Define your sales process. I have found that the more structure you can put into your qualified lead generation process, the easier it will be to educate and train your team. An efficient and clearly defined sales process increases production and gets new sales reps up and running quickly.
Be results oriented. In order to deliver results, a team must know what is expected of them and when. Establish high but achievable goals. Make sure everything in your process is working toward achieving those goals.
Train and train again. Don’t rest on your laurels. Strive to constantly make your team better. Even after years of success, One of A Kind Sales continues to train on consultative selling skills and how to draw out information from prospects. We have found that giving your team opportunities to share
Coach constantly. Make no mistake, I have found that coaching drives production better and faster than any other single practice. The highly effective sales managers I work with place a high priority on coaching to build confidence and optimize results. I suggest you take advantage of every opportunity to provide feedback that will make sales reps perform better.
Provide the right technology and tools. Don’t let your team wing it. I encourage you to provide your inside sales team with scripts that can be personalized and used to progress the conversation. The right CRM will ensure higher productivity.
When your sales people are properly trained on our proprietary call process, they are more engaged and effective. Business people who receive calls from these well trained sales people are more receptive and interested in learning more about your products and services. Your investment pays off in warm leads that convert to sales.
People think of cold calling as picking up the phone and continually dialing prospects until you have success. But cold calling is not a random process and you will have much greater success if you set up your process and prepare the right documents before you get started. Successful sales professionals don’t wing it. Cold calling is all about planning and execution. Here’s what you need to do before you start Cold Calling:
Research – Compile a list of decision makers and whenever possible obtain their phone numbers and emails. Collect information about the prospect that allows you to engage them in a meaningful conversation.
CRM – Leverage the power of a CRM to set benchmarks, quantify KPI’s, and track your results. This is the best way to collect information about the prospect, to monitor who you have called, where you are in the process and quantify the outcome.
Telephone Scripts – To ensure that you sound professional and your calls are productive, prepare scripts for your initial call, and follow-up calls as well.
Voice Message Scripts – Often you won’t be able to reach your prospects directly by phone. So it will be necessary to leave a brief but meaningful voice mail messages. Have them prepared before you start dialing.
FAQ’s – You want to be prepared when the prospect asks questions. Anticipate and prepare responses to potential objections. Spend some time to document what questions they might ask and what your responses should be.
Training – It’s important that each salesperson is well versed in all the steps and potential outcomes of the process. Role playing is a good way to accomplish this.
Practice – Practice is the only way for you to know your pitch cold and to sound natural on your calls. Your goal is to have a conversation with the prospect, not sell them.
Think of your process as your secret weapon, helping you manage your efforts and more easily achieve your objectives. Need help establishing an effective process for yourself and your sales team? Give us a call at 908.879.2911 or email Leads@OneofaKindSales.com, we can help!
Certainly not everyone is away and those that are away are not gone for 2 months. Generally, those in the workforce take one or two weeks.
So why do so many people stop cold calling in the summer? This has a detrimental, long-term effect on sales quotas and year-end results.
Instead, use this time to your advantage to keep your plan on target and get a leg-up on the competition.
Stay committed
Just because people are on vacation doesn’t mean that you should be making only a half-hearted commitment to qualifying leads. In a given week, you’ll reach some people and not others, but you can keep the process moving ahead.
You may reach a prospect before they leave for vacation and the process may drag out because of it. When they return, you can pick right back up where you left off. If you need to, adjust your daily and weekly activity goals.
Don’t assume
Just because it is the summer, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone. You don’t know if your prospect is away. Engage your usual call campaign, leaving brief messages, following up with emails and calling again.
Use time to your advantage
Because you may have a little more time on your hands, summertime is a good time to reconnect with in-process leads. Review your accounts, check in with them and find out what is new with them, personally and in business. A little interest goes a long way in your relationship.
Call on leads you might have overlooked at other times of the year, opportunities that, for whatever reason, didn’t materialize. As your competitors take a break from cold calling, this is your opportunity to get in front of these folks and build rapport.
Keep your pipeline full
When you take a hiatus from qualified lead generation your pipeline dries up and you have a huge fall-off in closed sales in a month or months following. There’s a ripple effect in your work flow that can have a substantial negative impact on sales for the year.
Let’s say you stop cold calling July 1st and resume September 1st. What will you or your team be working on at the end of July, in August or in September or October? You’ve created a gap in qualified leads that could last months. You’ve lost the momentum of the campaign.
A cold calling campaign is a process of initial calls, emails and building rapport. Interfering with this process will set you back, possibly months.
The pace may lighten up during the summer, but sales activities need to continue. Stay committed and don’t let your business stagnate.
If you cannot stay committed to your inside sales effort, contact One of a Kind Solutions. We can help.
As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, we can lose sight of the importance of staying in touch with prospects. Customer relationships are at the core of sales. When you nurture relationships, you endear your customers to your brand and your business. Without this, your leads will go nowhere and sales will fall far short of goals.
Building a relationship and converting a prospect into a sales-ready lead, raises awareness and establishes a 1:1 personal relationship with each prospect. A successful lead generation campaign engages on many levels.
Keeps their attention. Engage and get the buyer’s attention through a multi-touch approach, routinely throughout the year. Response rates rise with each subsequent outreach attempt. But most sales pros give up after less than two touch points. In fact, on average, salespeople don’t even get to a second touch point when reaching out to a decision maker. This is such a lost opportunity!
Cultivates the relationship. B2B customer acquisition isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time to develop a relationship. Cold calling fails when call campaigns are not given enough time to mature. Continuous one-on-one communication using various channels helps cultivate the relationship.
Maintains awareness for when they are ready to convert. A prospect may not convert to an appointment by the end of one call cycle or even four, but that doesn’t mean that the prospect won’t be interested at a later date. Repeat the cycle to keep you and your company top of mind for when they do want to take the next step.
Engages on multiple levels. Being top of mind is one of the best ways to reinforce your relationship and turn leads into appointments. A multi-level effort using calls, voicemail, email and LinkedIn, with sales and marketing working together can be very effective in raising awareness, keeping you top of mind and getting the prospect ready to make the commitment for an appointment and subsequently a sale. The multiple touches and the continuity of the effort are crucial components of lead nurturing. Touch points are opportunities to prepare leads for the final stage in the buying journey, the point of decision-making. The better the experience and the more valuable each of these touch points are to leads, the more likely they’ll be ready to make a buying decision and convert to paying customers.
A successful cold calling campaign is more complex than you may be able to develop yourself. Contact One of Kind Solutions to see how we can help.
Your leads have been properly qualified as a good fit for what you are selling. But the leads aren’t getting closed.
When qualified leads don’t turn into sales, cold calling campaigns can be erroneously considered to be root of the problem. The failure to close sales cannot be attributed to the cold calling campaign when other conditions may be in play.
Proper training, preparation and having the right tools on hand will ensure that qualified leads result in closed sales.
Training and role-playing. Often reps are not properly trained to take the call/meeting to closure. The goal of the salesperson isn’t to just make a one-time sale but to position themselves as someone that understands the customer’s needs, someone to be trusted, and someone that the customer can turn to for solutions to their problems. Role-playing techniques help salespeople to become comfortable using this consultative selling approach.
Preparing and planning. When it comes to sales calls, don’t wing it. Prepare by becoming knowledgeable about the company and the prospect you will be speaking to. Have on hand all paperwork, forms, etc. that the customer will need to move forward. Plan by anticipating any objections that might arise and knowing how to respond to them.
Tools. Scripts are a useful tool to guide how the call or visit should go. Base scripts on the ultimate goal for the meeting but be as specific as possible when goal setting and writing scripts. Be sure to include thoughtful questions that will open the prospect to discussion. Leverage rather than read your script to make sure progress is made through the call to reach your goal.
Hiring. There is no training or preparation in the world that will make a rep successful if that person does not possess the need for achievement, an underlying competitiveness and overall optimism. If a rep is still not successful after the proper training, planning and preparation, it’s time to re-examine your hiring process because you are not attracting the right people.
Select people who are suited for the job, and train and prepare them properly to sell and close. Then you are ready to launch a cold calling campaign and turn qualified leads into sales.
Start the New Year off right with a resolution to avoid unrealistic expectations for your cold calling efforts in the coming year. This may seem straightforward, but setting realistic expectations actually requires quite a bit of consideration about your company and the marketplace, as well as understanding the process. Answer the following questions and then you’ll be able to set realistic expectations for your lead generation campaign.
About your company and what you sell
What are your goals?
Where is your revenue now and where do you want it to be in 1 year? In 2 years?
What are the biggest opportunities and the biggest threats to your business?
Does your brand communicate a unique and powerful message?
About the marketplace
Who is your target audience? How would they best learn about your company?
Who are your competitors? What sets you apart from your competitors?
What is the greatest flaw in your industry as your prospects may perceive it?
What is your value proposition? What does your company offer that is considered value-added?
Why do customers buy from you?
About the process
Has your sales team been trained on these key areas about your company, your audience and your competitors? An effective campaign cannot be realized without imparting this information to the team.
A call campaign takes 6-9 months to ramp-up. Do you have the patience to see it through?
Calling from a cold list requires scrubbing which increases ramp-up time. Do your expectations account for this?
Without answers to these questions, your campaign will fall short of your goals. A lack of understanding of your business means a much higher chance of things not going according to plan. Once you have gathered all this information, then you can set realistic time frames and outcomes. Cold calling, if done correctly, is an investment that will pay off in the long term.
As technology permeates every aspect of our lives, we can lose sight of the importance of staying in touch with prospects. Customer relationships are at the core of sales. When you nurture relationships, you endear your customers to your brand and your business. Without this, your leads will go nowhere and sales will fall far short of goals.
Your leads have been properly qualified as a good fit for what you are selling. But the leads aren’t getting closed.
