Cold calling refers to the solicitation of sales by businesses to customers who have never interacted with the company before. It may take the form of personal visits (door-to-door sales) or telemarketing (solicitation via phone).
However, although cold calling initially began as a strategy of making indiscriminate calls to random people in the hope that they would turn out to be buyers, the method has significantly evolved.
Today, although the method is still referred to as ‘cold calling,’ its execution is anything but cold. Instead, businesses prefer to pursue warm leads or prospects who are likely to be interested in their products.
The departure from the traditional indiscriminate method of hitting up strangers out of the blue was necessitated by the amount of failed cold call attempts that sales reps had to suffer.
Also, compared to the past, today’s consumer is likely to turn down an unsolicited call over products they have little interest in.
Here are some critical cold-calling mistakes you should avoid for a successful campaign.
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1. Failure to have a verified contact list
As we mentioned, today’s cold call campaigns are centered on warm leads. That means having a list of validated contacts who have an interest in your offerings.
Generating a verified email or messaging list may seem arduous as it takes time to build one up from scratch.
For most startups, getting a robust subscriber list might take ages!
Thankfully, we have a team of dedicated and professional sales strategists with excellent returns to help you along your cold calling journey.
They provide solid, reliable contacts to promising leads and take charge of your LinkedIn prospecting and other forms of cold calling on your behalf.
These sales development reps will also send out follow-up emails whenever necessary to ensure that the calls yield results.
2. Taking rejection personally
Cold calling can be an awful misery, as nearly everyone who has done it will often admit.
According to statistics supplied by Gartner, 48% of salespeople are reluctant to make cold calls.
Yet on the flipside, cold calling results in a conversion rate of about 2%, according to data supplied by LinkedIn.
Also, it typically takes a salesperson 18 or more rings to reach a single tech prospect. It’s a complex process that occasionally results in personal assaults, frustration, and rejection.
It is little wonder that most businesses prefer to reap the fantastic benefits of cold calling by outsourcing their cold calling function altogether.
Even the most enthusiastic, eager, and driven salesperson can frequently lose motivation after hearing that.
However, one of the worst mistakes you can make when cold calling is to let the more challenging portions of the process get to you.
One of the best ways to cope with rejection when cold calling is by recognizing that it is a challenging and frequently ineffective exercise and that rejection is a reality in sales, especially when cold calling is involved.
Maintain movement in your legs and quickly put any poor decisions behind you. Somewhere down the line, you’ll have to persuade a prospect, so keep going until you do.
3. Inadequate product knowledge
Never delve into a cold calling campaign with insufficient knowledge of your product.
To your clients, you will come across as inept at best and unprofessional at worst. Either way, the prospect will have no reason to believe in what you say or invest in the product.
Also worth noting is that potential customers don’t want to be treated as just another name on a list. Their firms have specific problems that call for distinctive appeals.
If you wish your discussions to be fruitful, you need to know who is on the other end of the line and focus on their business issues.
Customize your delivery as much as possible.
Although you may make hundreds of calls weekly, you can’t consider your prospects as a single entity if you want to get the most out of your conversations.
You might be communicating with businesses that operate in various verticals and industries. Make sure you understand the unique requirements and interests that go along with those characteristics.
4. Using run-of-the-mill script
Closely linked to the point above, the other mistake that novice marketers make when cold calling is using generic scripts.
Once you are done with your research, it is time to toss your cold calling script and instead focus on the prospect’s value addition.
With the benefit of thorough research, you have no reason to rely on a poorly written, generic sales script. It would be best if you instead wrote a customized sales script for each of your prospects.
Achieving a customized script is relatively easy. Highlight the prospect’s recent achievements and congratulate them for their recent endeavor.
After that, proceed to offer insights on any new challenges they may be facing and point out how your product is set to help them surmount those challenges.
5. Closed-ended questions
A cold call is as much a pitching opportunity as a data gathering excursion.
Consequently, the adept sales rep actively listens to what the prospect has to say while also pitching their product to them.
Therefore, engaging the individual on the other end of the phone with pertinent questions helps move the conversation along.
You may show that you are a good listener and genuinely interested in learning what the prospect wants by asking open-ended questions on the matter at hand. Additionally, you can focus on their problems by asking a few sales discovery questions.
Just be mindful not to pose closed-ended inquiries. Simple “yes” or “no” questions make it more challenging to continue the conversation and give potential customers a quick method to end a call.
