Cold calling entails contacting a prospective customer you’ve never talked to with the intention of selling them a product or service.

14 Cold Calling Tips For Sales Success

Contrary to what many people would assume, cold calling in 2021 isn’t dead. Many startups and established businesses are still using the method to get potential clients and to increase their revenue.

Cold Calling 101

However, cold calling is hard and frustrating, and the road to success doesn’t come easy. This is even made worse because no two calls can be the same, making your effort double.

But for the call to be effective, you shouldn’t be using the same techniques as those used back then. Instead, it’d be best if you adapted to the changing times.

Here are some tips on how your cold calling could translate to increased sales:

1. Identify Your Prospects

Cold calling through Call Cowboy Predictive Dialer and others is a process one shouldn’t take lightly because it doesn’t just involve picking up the phone and calling a random individual.

Instead, you need to do first an in-depth internet search of your potential client before making the call to know as many details as possible. Knowing this allows you to customize your sales pitch and to increase your chances of selling the product or service.

If you use a common sales approach for all your clients, you risk sounding impersonal and lower your chances of making a sale. To address this issue, you need to make a sale pitch template that can be quickly customized by adding specific details.

Prospective customers will feel a lot more inclined to go ahead with a purchase after they know you just aren’t guessing on their interests but did your research to better understand their needs.

2. Always Value Your Clients

When making a cold call, there’d be times you might be doing it at an inappropriate instance. Usually, a call might not be welcomed or you might be disturbing the client as they go about with an important task.

Because of this, you need to make sure your call provides care and value right from the start. This can either be solutions to their needs, a follow-up from their Mass Texting Application subscription, or a valuable piece of content.

To always offer value when making a cold call, you need first to identify your prospective customer using buyer persona sheets. You should also know their key performance indicators (KPIs) and pain points.

With these insights, you’ll be in a position to curate a more impactful message that’ll be of significance to your client.

3. Prepare A Compelling Opening Statement

Your opening statement matters a lot in determining whether your client will want to proceed with the call or not. Therefore, you need to make the most from the first few seconds by starting with a powerful opening remark.

In this statement, you need to share something about the receiver you discovered after doing exhaustive research to help you personalize the call.

4. Always Mention Your Name And Business

When holding in-person meetings with potential clients, you usually start by introducing yourself and the business you represent.

While this might look obvious, it’s a mistake many sales professionals usually make, affecting their ability to convert potential clients. Therefore, you shouldn’t forget to do this every time you’re making a call.

By introducing yourself first, the receiver would perceive you to be trustworthy. Because of this, they’re more willing to do business with the company you’re representing.

In addition, it helps you look more authoritative right from the start, enabling you to steer the conversation in the direction you want. Your honesty on who you are and why you’re calling is an integral part of making an excellent sales pitch possibly leading to a purchase.

5. Use A Professional Cold Calling Script

When making a cold call, it’s normal to want a guide helping you steer the conversation toward a desired direction. This is recommended even though some agents discourage using scripts and just opt to go with the conversation’s flow.

With a script, you’ll no longer guess what to tell your clients and you’d have them engaged for the entire conversation. You also end up saving valuable time instead of spending it by trying to find out what works and what doesn’t.

6. Practice

It’s often said practice makes perfect, and while this might sound like a cliché, it’s very relevant if you want your cold calls to be a success. There are several things you can do to perfect your calling skills like:

Preparing yourself for the best and the worst.
Making test calls to your workmates.
Recording your calls for review by your colleagues.

Doing all of these will help you refine your calling skills as you know how to improve important aspects such as word choice, pace, call strategy, and tone. After all, you should always aim to improve your cold calling skills, and there’s no better way of achieving this than through practice.

After learning how to make your cold calling skills better, you’d become more confident when making calls, increasing the chances of sales success.

7. Avoid Distractions

It’d be best if you remain focused the whole time you’re making cold calls. This is essential despite the work environment being noisy due to other representatives calling or persons moving around.

Because of the distractions, you may end up not finishing your daily goals. This usually happens because you take more time making cold calls when you’re not entirely focused on your duties.

There are a couple of ideas you can put in place to power through despite distractions, including:

Dedicating your entire attention to your potential client’s voice.
Wearing headphones to cut out the noise.
Have a notepad with you to take note of relevant information being conveyed.

With such measures in place, you’ll not only remain focused the entire day but also become a lot more productive by making more sales. Gradually build these habits as you go through your work.

8. Practice Active Listening

What your prospect says is more vital than whatever you’re saying to them. After all, your objective is to learn about your client’s needs, and only then you’d know the best response.

This strategy is often employed during in-person meetings but is even more significant when making cold calls.

By practicing active listening, your potential client would feel acknowledged and respected. This makes them more willing to engage with you during the call. As a result, you get to learn vital information about them, and they’ll also be more inclined to hear whatever you’ve got to say.

What you learn from prospects will also help you understand the needs of others who you might call in the future.

Some of the ways of practicing active listening include:

Asking questions related to the conversation.
Clarifying unclear details.
Giving your prospect verbal cues to show you’re listening.

9. Learn To Embrace Rejection

Cold calling may be frustrating during the times you end up being rejected. After all, you shouldn’t expect all your prospects to say yes to your calls.

With this in mind, you shouldn’t let yourself get demotivated. Instead, learn to accept it as part of your job in being a cold calling agent. You should use such experiences to refine your sales skills better.

When rejection happens, you shouldn’t be rude toward the client. You need to remain polite as this gives your listener a better impression of you than if you decided to be persistent.

By doing this, you’ll be able to turn a ‘no’ from your prospect to a ‘yes’ in the future when you make another call.

10. Have A Schedule

It’d be best if you always make your cold calls during the hours you’re most productive. After all, your goal is to use the least effort possible to make higher sales possible. But to achieve this, you need to create a schedule of the time when you’re at your peak performance.

You also need to have a clear order of how you plan to make your cold calls to make sure you call the agents at a suitable moment and not when they’re having their meals or doing their work. Calling your prospect at the wrong time might lead you to ruin the likelihood of landing the client.

Knowing this, you should divide your call timetable into negative and positive times. After doing this, have a look at your prospects, which will help you gauge the most suitable time of the day to call them.

Closely examine these and proceed to plan your calls accordingly to ensure maximum impact. It’s even more important you do this when you’re contacting prospects in different time zones.

11. Always Follow-Up

After your cold calling, you must always contact your prospect through a follow-up email or text message regardless of whether the call achieved the desired goal or not.

You need to do this immediately after hanging up, using the opportunity to give them gratitude for making themselves available. Follow-ups also help your prospects remember you.

For your part, you’d be able to verify the details of the conversation you’ve had and plan when to make your next call. Doing follow-ups leaves a positive picture of you and the business you’re representing.

12. Sit In An Upright Position

Your physical position determines your tone when speaking since it affects your mental state. Knowing this, you should sit in a great posture as this helps boost your mood. This will be evident to your prospect who’ll be more than willing to hear what you’ve got to say.

Some ideas to implement while sitting upright include:

Taking a five-minute walk before making a cold call to have your blood pumping.
Sitting in a straight position on the chair’s edge.
Smiling while talking to your prospect

13. Be Short And Precise

Prospects love it when you don’t force unnecessary rambling during your call to convince them to make a purchase.

And by doing this, they become more interested in holding a conversation with you and understanding whatever you’re selling. But if you talk too much and go right ahead in making your sales pitch, they’ll consider the conversation a waste of time.

With this in mind, here are some clues on how to be short and precise when conversing with your prospect:

Try your best to be succinct in your first few sentences.
Write a short and sweet script.
Only dive deeper into the product or service after the prospect shows interest in what you’re offering.

Being precise is important because, at the end of the day, your goal is to hear what they’ve got to say. But if you keep on talking without allowing them to tell their thoughts, they’ll stop listening to what you’re saying.

14. Don’t Look To Sell Straightaway

As you make cold calls, you need to remember you’re interfering with the potential client’s schedule.

Therefore, you shouldn’t try and sell them your product or service right away as they might find this to be overwhelming. It’d be better if you provide your prospect with small details at first and slowly, over time, get to share more information with them.

You must do this because your prospect doesn’t know you, even though you have a clear idea of them after your exhaustive research.

The mistake of trying to sell a product quickly is made by many cold-calling agents, and this only scares away the prospects.

They end up losing sight of cold calling as a marathon and not a sprint, so there’s a need to remain patient no matter what.

Takeaway

Cold calling can be overwhelming, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise since you’re reaching out to a potential client who you don’t know personally. Also, they might end up being unfriendly as they don’t know who they’re talking to as well.

If you’re a cold-calling agent and want to know how to increases your sales success, consider the ideas mentioned here and apply the tips to make your chances of selling higher.