Essential Tips For More Effective Cold Calling
Cold calling is an essential part of your marketing strategy, and when used correctly, it can be an effective tool for generating more leads and attracting more customers. If you can adequately prepare for your cold calls, you can make each call much more productive. Proper preparation will also ensure that you feel a lot more confident while talking to prospects, build a better relationship with potential customers and clients, and have a higher success rate at turning cold leads into confirmed sales.
Research Every Prospect
Before making a cold-call to any prospect, you need to do some research on the prospect that you’re targeting before you make the call. This research should be a pre-call ritual that you complete every time. After all, excellent prospect research is vital for nonprofits and other businesses. If you put some time into finding plenty of helpful information about every prospect that you reach out to, you can make sure that every call has value for the prospect and will hold the interest of the person you are approaching. If you miss out on doing this essential research, you will appear uninterested and as though you are putting very little investment into offering any solutions to the person you have cold called. Your prospects will notice the extra effort that you have put in, and appreciate that you have been able to personalize the call to them. With more personalization and a better beginning relationship, you will also be better able to have a much more productive talk.
Write An Outline Of What You Need To Say
Prepare a brief cold call script that takes under thirty seconds to deliver during a call. You can turn to this script while you are on the telephone. Resist the urge to turn to this script and just read it out loud. Instead, you should use the script as a guide to deliver your message confidently and clearly. With the script for support, you are less likely to feel nervous, even if the call is difficult. When preparing your script, remember that the primary goal of all your cold calls should not be to pitch straight away during that call. Instead, you should aim to persuade the prospect to agree to a meeting with you at another time further to discuss your products and services and their benefits.
Take A Couple Of Hours To Go Through Your Call List
To get through more calls and make each call go quickly and productively, you must make the calls without any distractions. You should never try to make calls while doing something else, like checking your emails or typing meeting notes. The only things you should have on your desk or in front of you while you are making calls are the list of people you need and the script you have prepared. Having other things in front of you can be a distraction. If you’re distracted, you won’t be entirely present with the other person on the line during the call, and they may be able to tell you are distracted. You can also use tools like Call Cowboy Auto Dialer to speed things up and make more calls.
Work Out How Many Calls You Need To Make To Hit Your Goals
How many cold calls must you make to hit your monthly quota? If you don’t know, you need to work it out. You can figure out this number by starting with your goal and then working backward from this point. You can then pinpoint roughly how many cold calls you will need each day, and from there, how many calls in total each month you will need to make to reach those goals.
Prepare A Strong Opening Sentence
When making a cold call, you have roughly ten seconds to catch the prospect's attention and convince them they want to speak to you. To make a successful call, you must stand out immediately from the dozens of other cold callers most companies are contacted by. Once you have introduced yourself, immediately move the focus onto the prospect and off you. Do this by using some information from your research that allows you to tailor the call to the prospect.
For example, you could start your call by giving the prospect a sincere compliment on a recent accomplishment that you have learned about while doing your research on the prospect. This could be congratulating them on an award win or mentioning a recent media coverage they have earned. This shows you understand them and pay attention to what they do and will start the conversation on a positive note.
Be Motivated By Rejection
Rejection is never pleasant, and nobody likes to have to face it. This unpleasantness can mean it is too simple to become discouraged if a call goes badly and then struggle with the calls you need to make later. If you become discouraged, you must not allow this to interfere with other calls you must make. Instead of becoming put off, try to maintain a positive attitude. Pick up the phone again, and make more calls, using what you have learned from calls that have gone less than perfectly.
Practice Makes Perfect
Go into every call adequately prepared. To feel more confident on every call you make, prepare by taking some time to rehearse what you will say. If you’ve spent some time practicing what you want to say, you will be better able to perform well on the call.
Overcome Reluctance To Make Calls
One of the main reasons salespeople fail at making successful cold calls is that they are reluctant to make them. It is expected to feel somewhat awkward about making a cold call, but with proper preparation and confidence in your services, you can set aside reluctance and make those all-important calls.
You could try several methods to ease any nerves before making a cold call. Regardless of the outcome of any calls, learn to see every one as an opportunity to learn. Even if the call doesn’t go as you hoped, you can learn from your mistakes so the error is not repeated. Embrace the positives instead, and remember what worked.
Use Trigger Events To Find An Opening
You need to time the contact right. If you reach out to someone just after agreeing to work with a competitor, you are wasting your time and theirs.
However, if you know that a prospect is in the market for a new vendor, you should reach out before they start the search so you can get ahead of the competition.
Getting this timing right doesn’t have to be as difficult as you think. Some great moments can be capitalized on, known as trigger events. Monitor publicly available information, such as in the media. You can use services like Google Alerts to watch for these trigger events. Good things to look out for include:
New executive hires
Winning large contracts
Large customer announcements
Company expansions
Mergers and acquisitions
Funding
Behavioural indicators
All these things suggest a potential need for a new vendor due to an increased budget or new blood in charge, making this a great time to make a cold call.
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