Nevertheless, cold calling still remains the most popular sales activity; many companies already began to experience struggles towards it. Why? That’s exactly what we are going to discuss below.
By Jenna Brandon
Obviously, cold calling is an activity you are familiar with for decades of years, but is it still efficient way of increasing your revenue? Umm… Not really, unless you do it right.
More and more people constantly shirk away from phone calls and this leads to even lower conversion rates. However, this doesn’t mean that people completely stopped using their phones to call each other – this means that number has just considerably decreased and you, as a “bounty hunter”, should deal with it every day.
Cold call agents, in 2018, have to either show a super fast performance (because of the sky-high rejection rate and low conversion rates around 1-2%) or turn cold calls into warm calls which may boost up conversion rates up to 30%.
Of course, you shouldn’t forget about learning how to professionally overcome different objective and flawlessly understand your current product to turn more reaches into qualified leads.
Maybe you cannot succeed because your focus lies upon wrong metrics?
Occasionally, there is not enough to know your input & output metrics to understand where your strategy has dire straits. Always consider precise analysis to find and fix issues in your sales funnel.
While analyzing your funnel, it’s important to consider these numbers at each step you make:
- How many leads do you have in total?
- How many dials have you done?
- How many people did you reach?
- How many of them are qualified to buy your product?
- How many actually bought your product?
These analytics will help you understand your weak sides and improve them right away.
Not all cold calls should generate money
Probably, you already get used to the fact that cold calling is all about increasing revenue, but today, more and more companies are using such called cold canvassing to boost up their sales department results efficiency. Cold canvassing is used to get more information about company’s potential clients in order to get to the bottom of client problems and be more effective in further cold calling efforts.
Cold canvassing is all about asking particular questions (not aimed to sell) that can give your sales departement a priceless information about your client’s needs and give more awareness about your product to your target audience.
Some examples of cold canvassing questions:
- Have you ever used *your product*?
- For how long you’ve been using *your product*?
- What particular features to you consider the most useful in *your product*?
- What can play a decisive role in picking one brand of *your product* upon another one?
- For how long have you’ve been using this particular brand of *your product*?
- For what purposes do you mostly use *your product* ?
- What do you think *your product* needs to improve its functionality?
- How would you manage to solve *problems your product solves* without *your product* involved?
Even though people are considering cold calling to be dead in 2018, eventually, it is not. The amount of successful calls depends on various reasons: professionality of an agent, frequency of the calls, the understanding of a product, the timeframes and the quality of a pitch to name a few. In a word, cold calling ain’t dead – you just have to do it right.
To keep productive and successful cold calling strategy in 2018, you have to understand that:
- Cold calling will still remain a sales tool in the nearest future, however, not the best one.
- Neglecting precise analysis of your funnel is not the best idea
- Your product have to be comfortable for people to buy it over the phone.
- Your cold calling campaign won’t become successful, unless you turn cold calls into warm ones.
- Including cold canvassing in your phone sales campaign helps understand the needs of your potential customers
- Working on and practicing overcoming objections is an essential practice in cold calling
Moreover, if you’re the one who makes cold calls – bear in mind – any negative experience is more important for your personal development as a salesman than no experience at all.
Don’t be afraid to experiment and find new approaches to improve your cold calling strategy. Good luck!
Jenna Brandon is a blogger, copywriter, and digital marketer at Writology.com. When she’s not busy creating articles on content marketing, social media, and consumer psychology, she takes stunning pictures of California or cooks pizza. Jenna is also an avid traveler, and she is secretly Italian at heart.
Cold calling stock photo by
By James Steidl
/Shutterstock
