Tips to Improve Your Cold Calling
Struggling to make effective cold calls? Here are some tips to warm them up!
B2B Cold calling is a tough and challenging task. In a study by Zippia, 63% of sales reps said that B2B cold calling service was the worst part of their job. With an uninterested and wrongly targeted contact at the end of the line, cold calls become even less effective.
What is Cold Calling?
Cold calling is a sales strategy whereby a salesperson calls prospective customers of a company without any prior contact to convince them to buy a product or service of that company.
Tips to make cold calling effective
What is the best way to close more sales with cold-calling? Are there cold-calling tips which will radically increase your success rates?
Here are proven cold call best practices to improve cold calling and boost sales.
- Know your prospects, do proper research
- Avoid scripts at all costs
- Be attentive & avoid distractions
- Be warm and friendly
- Ask the right questions
- Overcome rejection with confidence
Know your prospects, do proper research
Researching your prospects and getting information about their demographics and firmographics is key to successful cold calls. Research is key in any cold calling strategies.
Knowing your prospects well before calling them helps you deliver value and facilitates communication between you and your prospect.
Researching your prospects doesn’t just mentally prepare you before a cold call but also lets you personalize your message and focus on features that the prospect finds most relevant.
Cold-calling becomes more impactful and less frustrating for the recipient because you’re selling features that will specifically benefit them.
LinkedIn is a good source to find accurate information about your prospects, especially for B2B cold calling. You can also find additional data about them from the likes of other social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and from their company website.
You can use affordable CRM database platforms to download accurate contact information for your target leads. Datagenie is the best sales intelligence platform to download user data and can be used on its own platform and/or directly from LinkedIn and company websites. via its browser extension. You can filter data by, for instance, location, industry, job title, company revenue, and more.
Get started with Datagenie B2B prospecting platform
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Avoid cold calling script at all costs
To make conversations with prospects less strained and more natural is to avoid, at all costs, using scripts. Scripts make the caller sound robotic and stilted and the conversation bland and ineffective.
Alternatively, create a list of questions you must answer. Focus on these important questions they will have to give yourself direction: –
- Who are you?
- What company are you calling from?
- What is your company about?
- What do you want to sell?
- How will it benefit me?
Think about what roles a prospect might play in their organization and think about how you can tailor your messages to them accordingly.
Remember, salespeople who can identify their prospects’ needs and can answer most of their queries and questions will close more deals.
Be attentive & avoid distractions
Make sure to remove distractions and organize the workspace before making calls. To avoid disturbances, especially if WFH, if possible, be in an empty room.
While on a call, avoid any kind of multitasking. Listen and be in the moment. Be of service.
Be warm and friendly
A cold caller needs to be friendly, empathetic, and confident at the same time. To make your cold calls friendly, make your prospect a significant element throughout the call.
Start the conversation and build rapport by greeting the person and engage in something specific to them, their interests, where they work, their industry or just check the weather where they are and make small-talk around it.
‘Looks like you have a thunderstorm coming’, ‘I noticed your company is expanding’, ‘How do you think the news about X is going to affect your business?’ Align yourself to them.
Give a quick introduction about yourself and then get to the point. If they’re not interested, try to buy some time with some unrelated small talk. But if they outright tell you that they aren’t interested, thank them for their time and say goodbye. Don’t waste their time but more importantly, yours.
Ask the right questions
Make sure you get all relevant information you require during the sales process as soon as possible. Find out what the pain-points are. Who are they buying from now? What would you like them to do better? Ask the right questions so you can tailor the rest of the call.
Best cold call opening lines will elicit more insights, build rapport, and arm you with the information to close the deal.
Overcome rejection with confidence
It’s okay to have a bad call. Expect them. Be persistent, stay positive, and keep going. Work out how much a successful sale earns you, divide it by how many calls you need to get to a sale and after every call know you have earnt at least that amount.
And in summary…
Cold calling is not for the faint of heart. That’s the good news. As long as you are persistent and follow the advice you will rise above the pack. Happy calling!
To help you with this, Data Genie offers 100 million contacts from 15 million companies across the globe. All the contact information is cleaned, verified and validated in real-time to keep you on top of your market.