Cold Calling Tips: Proven Strategies to Engage Prospects
Learn proven cold calling tips, strategies, and techniques to boost sales success, overcome objections, and close deals.
Cold calling has long been a staple in sales strategies, but the environment has shifted dramatically over the years. The rise of automated spam filters has made it easier for people to screen out unknown numbers.
Today customers are also flooded with multiple channels of communication, such as emails, text messages, and social media, which leaves cold calls as just one of many ways to connect. This has led to lower response rates, which makes it more important than ever for sales teams to stand out and engage prospects if they want to close more deals through cold calls.
On top of this, customers now expect more than a generic sales pitch. They look for personalized solutions, which means cold calling must be targeted to cut through the noise.
In this blog, we have listed the strategies needed for successful cold calling for cold callers to provide a compelling reason to continue the conversation.
What is Cold Calling?
This proactive sales approach aims to initiate a conversation with prospects to turn them into customers. Usually, cold calling is targeted at businesses that find value in your product or service.
Often, the target with cold calls is a decision-maker of the business. The aim is to guide them through the sales funnel, from awareness to consideration.
Success in cold calling is measured by how many calls result in a positive outcome, like scheduling a demo, booking a discovery call, or even closing a sale.
7 Benefits of Cold Calling
Cold calling offers a range of benefits for sales teams to ensure sales success. Here’s why:
1. Direct communication
Cold calling creates a direct line of communication with the decision-maker. This helps sales reps to engage in an immediate and meaningful conversation. It’s an opportunity to pitch your product/service directly rather than hoping the prospect reads your outreach email or sees an advertisement.
2. Personalization
During a cold call, sales reps can tailor their conversation to fit the prospect’s interests and needs. By understanding the prospect’s business and challenges, they can position their product/service as a valuable solution.
3. Immediate feedback
Using cold calls, sales reps can gauge a prospect’s interest, adapt their sales pitch based on the prospect’s responses, and overcome objections on the spot. Such dynamic interactions are rare in other forms of sales outreach.
4. Building relationships
Cold calling sets the foundation for fruitful business relationships. Successful cold calls lead to discovery calls, demos, and sales.
5. Learning opportunity
Every cold call is a chance to learn and improve. Even a cold call that does not result in a sale provides gems of wisdom that can be used to refine future cold calls. For instance, cold calling helps sales reps understand what captures a client’s attention and how to handle objections on the spot.
6. Scalability
Cold calling can be scaled according to your business needs. Cold calling as a sales strategy can be adapted to fit, no matter whether your sales team is large or small.
7. Gaining market insights
Making cold calls gives sales reps insights into the market and your target customers’ challenges. These insights can be used to inform future marketing strategies and product development.
Cold Calling Success Rates Statistics for 2024
According to a study by Cognism,
Cold Calling vs Warm Calling
Cold calls and warm calls differ in three main areas: sales rep effort, lead awareness, and prospect trust. Let's explore each in detail:
1. Sales Rep Effort
Sales reps make several cold calls to connect with prospects and drum up sales. That’s why many businesses have an entire team dedicated to cold-calling and reaching out to potential customers.
Warm calling also requires hard work but a different type of effort.
In cold calling, sales reps must find inbound lead generation opportunities, find contact information, and sometimes also face rejection. But, the success rate of warm calling is higher than that of cold calling.
So, warm calling requires less effort on the part of sales reps than cold calling. However, it also depends on how much effort you put into making a warm call!
2. Lead Awareness
When you cold call a prospect, they are completely unaware of your business and your products or services. But that's not true for warm calls.
Warm calls are made to people who have heard of your business before. They are also familiar with your products or services.
This level of lead awareness is important, especially in B2B sales, where the cost of products or services is higher than in B2C sales.
3. Prospect Trust
Who will you trust more: the one who buys from you regularly or the one whom you have never met before? Obviously, the former one.
We are more likely to trust people we know, no matter how little we know them.
Sales calls are similar. Your prospects will trust you more if they already know about your business and what you sell. Because you are not a stranger.
Cold Calling Strategies to Get Started
Here are a few cold-calling tips that will help you increase your sales call success ratio:
1. Start it right
In cold calling, there is no second chance. It is now or never! So, once you annoy your prospects, they will never answer your phone call again. Hence, it’s important to create an impact as soon as they get on the line.
Your opening statement should be strong enough to give them a reason to further listen to you. Organize your thoughts before calling your prospects, and come up with an opening statement that piques your prospect’s interest. It must be impressive enough to get out a response from your prospects like “tell me more,” providing permission to further question them to discover their business needs.
Here are some statements you should not use as an opening statement for a cold call:
- Sales reps try to show respect for the prospect’s time with questions like “Did I catch you at a bad time?” but it often results in negative responses and backfires. You are 40% less likely to book a meeting if you use this statement to open a cold call.
- One of the most commonly asked questions that shows your prospect an exit door to avoid the talk is, “Do you have a minute to talk?” as no one has time to hear a sales pitch.
2. Define your prospect’s list
Prepare a list of prospects you wish to cold call. I understand that simply dialing the numbers you get is much more time saving. But is it effective? Not really.
This is one of the cold-calling tips that is tedious, and you have to do some brainstorming. Cold calling is much more than how many calls you make.
You can call 50 prospects and complete your daily target, but it might not help you achieve your monthly sales target. Instead of approaching any and everyone under the sun, you need to narrow down your prospect’s list.
Target prospects who fall under your ideal customer profile to ensure your cold-calling efforts don’t fail. Create a strong list of prospects by defining your target audience.
View the testimonials on your competitor’s website or reflect on your existing customer database to find your ideal prospect. Try to find the decision-maker of the company by browsing their social media profile, website, or press releases.
If you want to find the contact numbers of your target audience, you can find them in many places, such as:
3. Cope up with your fear of rejection
You need to be mentally prepared for rejections if you have selected sales as a career. The negative responses from potential prospects shouldn’t bog you down.
I have seen many sales professionals getting extremely stressed due to rejections and then giving up. They are unable to give their best performance owing to their negative mindset.
The biggest mistake any sales professional can make in their career is paying attention to the rejections instead of facing them. They don’t try to explore new opportunities and stick to current customers.
Retaining your current customers is an excellent sales strategy, but you still need to approach new sales prospects.
Now you might ask: but how to cope up with the fear of rejection? Here's how:
4. Avoid distractions when making cold calls
The biggest enemy of any professional is distraction. Cold calling your prospects demands your undivided attention.
Distraction will trap you into saying things you might regret later. It disconnects you from your conversation by disturbing the flow of communication.
Besides, your prospects will get annoyed if you ask them the same question multiple times. This mostly happens when you are trying to multitask or your attention is divided between different things.
It is only possible to continuously cold call by taking breaks. But those breaks should be rare. Some sales reps tend to take breaks frequently only to avoid cold-calling their prospects.
Keep your concentration intact by ignoring temptations while making sales calls.
“Starve your distraction and feed your focus.”
Here's how you can mute the distractions while cold calling:
5. Focus on the time duration of your cold call
You only have a few seconds to create an impactful first impression. You can either waste it or use it to extend the call by convincing the prospect to listen to you. Mostly, successful cold calls are longer, so as a cold caller, you need to be an expert in buying time. The chances of taking a sales deal forward become better when the call becomes longer.
Plan every step well in advance. Know what you will say next to keep them on the phone for a longer duration by capturing the prospect’s interest.
6. Build rapport by narrating customer success stories
Once you draw your prospect’s attention with a strong one-liner, it’s time to break the ice now. Build rapport with your prospect by sharing your experience of helping others with the same issue. This will assure them that you are qualified to solve their problem.
Show the positive results your clients have experienced by using your product or service. Narrate a customer success story something like this:
“Martina, who also belongs to the construction industry, told me how our product helped them increase their team efficiency by automating most of the tasks, save time by organizing project-related documents in one place, and kept them updated about their project status for taking real-time action. Which of these is important for you?”
The idea is to pick a few business problems that your product or service has solved for clients from a specific industry. Target businesses from the same industry and strike a meaningful conversation by highlighting the solutions to those problems.
Be very explicit while discussing the problem so your prospects can relate to it. Become a storyteller and visualize them with the journey you will take them through.
To create impactful success stories, you can also bring your current customers on the cold call and ask them to demonstrate their experience with your product or service. Know how much money they saved or gained by using your product or service or what they like or dislike about it. Some might even give you interesting details that will help you to connect with new sales prospects.
7. Ask relevant questions
Focus on building a strong relationship with your contact instead of being impatient. Collect information for future interactions by asking relevant questions. Be genuinely interested in helping them. Focus on the prospect’s issues, and set up the first meeting to give the demo of your product.
Here are a few questions that you should ask your prospect on the first call:
Your prospect’s answer will contain a wealth of information that will help you to close the deal. So, be attentive when asking these questions.
8. Use a local number for calling
Having a local number for your business helps you to gain your prospect’s trust. Your prospects will experience a high level of comfort when they come to know that you are working in the same city as them. It will create a sense of accountability in their mind
You can get a local virtual number of the UK, USA, Australia, or any other place with the help of a virtual phone system. Some sales CRM also come with an in-built calling feature. Call your prospects from within your sales CRM using the virtual phone system and eliminate the use of third-party applications.
9. Practice your craft
Cold-calling mistakes result in bad sales outcomes. Sometimes even experienced sales professionals need help facing questions or buyer hesitancy during a sales call. To avoid it, you must practice well before calling your prospects.
You must practice various sales scenarios to succeed and brush up your skills. Here’s how you can practice your craft before calling:
10. Don’t sound scripted with cold calling scripts
Most sales reps create the best cold-calling scripts for their campaigns. But, the campaigns’ success depends on how well you use the scripts. You will begin to sound like a robot if it isn’t used smartly.
Scripts are only a guide to ensure you keep track when having a conversation with high-potential sales prospects. As your prospects expect a naturally flowing conversation, you should only partially depend on scripts.
They prefer speaking to a human, someone who can hear them patiently and understand their business problems. Add your personality when using the cold calling scripts.
11. Use technology to your advantage
Work smart and use the right technology. Many sales tools are available in the market to ease the work of sales professionals. CRM is one of the most useful tools on that list.
Nowadays, most CRM systems have grown way beyond just storing contacts and have advanced features. As a sales-driven organization, you might already be using CRM software.
Use CRM with a built-in calling feature. Why use two applications when you can manage cold calls and contact lists from one platform? You can instantly make calls from the platform with just a click.
You can even take notes and record calls for future reference. Besides, you can automatically log all inbound and outbound calls to save time.
12. Reach out at the best time
Timing is everything, even in sales. No matter how many cold calls you make to your prospect in a day, it becomes pointless if you don’t reach out at the right time. Hence, it is important to find the apt time to contact them.
A study by CallHippo that analyzed over 15,000 sales calls concluded that Wednesday is the best day of the week, in which cold calls are more likely to connect by a long shot. If you like percentages, this means that 33.9% of cold calls made on Wednesday are likely to be connected. The study also found that Monday and Friday are the worst days to cold call.
The same study suggests the best times to cold calls are 10–11 AM and 4–5 PM, and 7 AM is the worst time to connect with prospects. Making a cold call before 10 AM is tricky.
Note that the time mentioned here relates to your prospects' time zone, not the caller (your sales rep).
The following things need to be done to take the chill out of cold calling:
5 Common Mistakes to Avoid on Cold Calling
Even with all the tips to make cold calls perfectly, something’s are bound to go awry. Here’s how to avoid mistakes most sales reps make and be smart about cold calling.
1. Don’t call based on a static list
While cold calling is an excellent way to improve outreach efforts, there’s a lot of rejection involved in randomly calling prospects, especially if that list has become static.
You should spend some time weeding out the dormant contacts from your database for a higher success rate.
2. Don’t stick to the script
While it’s important to have a script that helps you introduce yourself to the prospect, it’s also important to make them feel that the call has been personalized to suit their needs and listen to their challenges.
3. Don’t call without researching the prospect
If you fail to read about the prospect or their business before calling, that’s a failed call right there. Think as if you are getting only one opportunity to speak to someone from that business and convert them.
Before you take that chance, try to understand their pain points and pre-empt where your product or service can fit into their needs.
4. Don’t forget about your USP
When cold calling, some sales professionals tend to get too wrapped up in the prospect’s needs. While it’s important to listen to your prospects, it’s also important to remember why you are calling them in the first place and how you can get the message across.
To do this skillfully, sales professionals need to know their product inside out. The minute the prospect talks about an issue, the sales professional should be able to find a way to stitch their product into the conversation in order to solve the prospect’s problem. This will help create trust with your product and help the prospect assess how well you know the business.
5. Don’t be too friendly
When conducting cold calls, maintain a balance between striking up a conversation with the prospect on the other end and maintaining a certain level of professionalism.
Maintain a consistent tone and use formal language with the prospect. Speak to them in a familiar and confident tone that conveys seriousness.
Final Words
Cold calling is an art, so you must enjoy it. Have fun with your sales calls by adding humor while interacting with the prospects (but don’t overdo it).
Step in your potential customer’s shoes and think from their perspective if you want to help them overcome their challenges genuinely. The cold-calling tips in this article will help you make successful cold calls.
Lastly, use excellent quality tools and apps to ease your calling experience.
Smarter Sales.
Faster Deals.
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