Cold calling has been one of the major selling tactics over the years, requiring reps to approach complete strangers and win them over through excellent interpersonal skills that persuade the prospect to covert. Cold calling can be very challenging, but there are some tactics that could help improve your success. Here are some thoughts on how to improve B2B cold calling success rates.
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How to Improve Cold Calling Success Rates
If done effectively, cold calling can yield great success. Take the technological giant Uber for example. Did you know what laid down the foundation of Uber and ultimately the entire trend of the sharing economy? A cold call.
According to founder, Travis Kalanick, he dialed a number of people he found on Google when searching for ‘San Francisco chauffeur’ out of which three replied. The rest, as they say, is history.
With so many organizations deriving great returns from their cold calling strategy, if it’s not working for you, chances are that you may need to tweak your strategy. Don’t worry! This article will offer tips that can help enhance your cold calling success:
Improve The Quality Of Your Data
62% of organizations rely on prospect data that can be inaccurate or incomplete by as much as 40%. Not only does this result in wasted effort, it also costs your business valuable resources. According to a report by Harvard Business Review, ‘bad’ data costs businesses more than $3 trillion each year in the United States alone.
As consumers become increasingly aware of sales tactics, they tend to only respond to products and services that are tailored according to their needs. If your sales reps are reaching out to prospects based on incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete data, you are bound to get underwhelming results.
Consider investing in solutions like SalesIntel that allow you to analyze your database and identify any lacking information that adversely affects your quality. Additionally, optimize your prospect data collection strategy. Adding relevant questions to your forms and allowing prospects to express their answers in detail can significantly improve the quality of your data.
Talk Less, Ask More
The art of converting prospects through cold calls is heavily dependent on what you do after the prospect picks up. You can have the most suitable product that can solve your consumer’s problems, but if you don’t have the right tone, chances are you might not close the deal.
The number of questions and the relevancy of your posed questions also play a big part. An extensive survey that analyzed 519,000 cold calls found a directly proportional relationship between the number of questions posed by the sales rep and the percentage of closed deals. To put it simply, it was found that asking 11-14 questions over the course of your call significantly increases the chances of your success.
However, be careful to not overdo it. Sales reps who asked 15+ questions only fared marginally better than sales reps that asked 7-10 questions.
HireDNA offers advanced training tools and customized content-based training methods to enhance your sales performance. Learn More.
Take Rejection As A Learning Opportunity
Regardless of how much value your product can add to your prospect’s business, the fact remains that cold calls often result in rejection. And over time, rejections can become demoralizing. The hallmark of a successful sales representative, however, is their ability to take these things as part of the business and continue to tweak their sales strategy to counter such rejections.
If you are giving up too easily, then cold calling will never bear fruit. You need to be motivated to pick up the phone with a defined purpose every time. Whenever a prospect hangs up on you, ask yourself, would it be any different if you hadn’t tried calling them?
Focus on the key takeaway: why did they hang up? Did your opening statement fail to catch their attention? Did you not address their pain points adequately? By learning from such challenges, you can quickly turn such prospects into paying consumers.
Explore our blog on How to Motivate Your Sales Team When Sales are Down for strategies to inspire your team even in the face of defeat.
Hire Top Talent
Beyond training your existing reps, bringing in highly skilled sales reps can be a quick and easy way to improve your team’s overall B2B cold call success rate. When you hire top talent, they will often have a track record of success. If cold calling is a priority for your business, be sure to make that known in the hiring process, and consider including interview questions or posing scenarios centered around cold calling when vetting candidates.
HireDNA predictive sales candidate assessments allow you to predict success before hiring with proven data and science, not impressions and instincts. Learn more.
Train Your Sales Reps For Unprecedented Success
Cold calling is far from dead. But many organizations need to work on their strategies to enhance their effectiveness. That’s where HireDNA comes in.
We offer sales performance evaluations to uncover skills gaps in your team, and we deliver advanced training through a customizable cloud-based learning platform to improve performance. Not only do we customize our learning offerings according to the skill gaps found in each individual salesperson, but our interactive approach ensures your team absorbs every bit of it with quizzes, role play scenarios, guides, and action plans.
Get in touch to learn more about our sales recruiting, evaluation, and training offerings. Create your winning sales team today!