Cold Calling Best Practices for your Sales Team

Most successful sales teams have a cold calling step or process as part of their sales strategy. In today’s business environment, the need for a multichannel sales cadence makes it all the more crucial for sales teams to ensure that cold calling is part of their overall outreach plans.

In an earlier research by the Rain Group, Sales professionals reported that calling existing customers turned out to be an effective prospecting strategy.

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Cold calling comes with its fair share of challenges but also boasts of endless benefits for sales teams,

A Few Key Benefits of Cold Calling

A strong cold calling cadence allows sales reps or sales managers to build a one to one engagement with a prospect.

When prospects show a positive response during a cold call, it can reduce the time taken to move them through the buying journey.

In today’s times, email/social media and other digital channels when complimented by cold calls can help boost prospecting ROI.

What Matters in Cold Calling Today?

Sales teams who do have a cold calling step built into their sales cadence or sales process can optimize their cold calling ROI with a key basic adjustments to their strategy. With the right research, alignment of objectives and implementation of sales tools, it is relatively easier today to build out an impactful cold calling process for your sales people.

A Few Cold Calling Best Practices To Keep in Mind

Identify Target Verticals and Have a List (or Multiple Lists) with Different Scripts

Before a sales team starts their cold call routine, identifying a list of verticals and prospects and aligning objectives to each can help sales leaders work with their teams to create more customized cold call templates that will resonate with the audience.

At a time when hyper-personalization has become a basic necessity in sales and marketing, cold call scripts also need to be revisited to ensure that every call or outreach shows prospects that the brand knows them, understands them and can cater to their need.

While building out cold call scripts, using different templates or versions based on specific roles will also help sales create an impactful start in the conversation. A cold call script for a CMO of a company should be different and speak to the marketing highpoints or benefits your product can give, for instance, a cold call script for a CEO would need to cover most of the all-round business benefits in a few seconds.

While creating cold scripts, using sales technologies and buying signals to breakdown prospect behavior and their content engagement trends will help to further understand your prospect, their need and what interests them. Sales leaders who use these parameters to drive personalized and to-the-point sales conversations via email or cold call will always have a higher chance of being able to book a next meeting.

What’s the Best Time to Call?

Marketers always look at best email send times to schedule their important campaigns, Sales leaders today have also understood the importance of planning email sends as per their audience’s preferred time.

The best time to call can depend on a lot of things, who the prospect is, where are they in the hierarchy of the organization, what time zone do they work in, etc. Every target list will have different preferences.

Plan your Sales Email Cadence to Align to your Cold Calls

While building out a sales plan and sales email cadence, retain messaging in the workflow to allow for a chain of emails that a) inform the prospect you will follow up with a call b) include room for a post cold call follow up and c) reference to points made in ‘’your call of (date) and (time)”.

If you’re Leaving a Voicemail, send the Voicemail as an Email!

A voicemail can serve to allow sales reps to stay on top of mind of their prospects, especially at a time when email inboxes are usually cluttered with marketing and sales emails. A voicemail can be used as a cold call followup asking for a next meeting, it can be sent as part of your email attachment informing the prospect that you’ve left a voicemail.

Edit your Cold Call Scripts as Per Cold Call Reviews and Analytics

With your sales automation software, if sales leaders are already recording their sales conversations and cold calls, they can also study their call metrics to further analyse where improvements are needed in cold call scripts, what kind of questions are prospects asking, how can the cold call script be optimized to convey more in a shorter call.

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It’s Not a One-Step, One-time Process

Cold calling is an art and to get it right, sales teams have to learn to make their conversations natural, they have to be adept at convincing prospects to stay on the line while optimizing their conversations to share meaningful inputs in a few minutes. Defining your list, understanding who you’re speaking to and why, have a clear goal and go-to script are just some of the starting factors that can help plan a more successful outcome.

Sales tools like ConnectAndSell, Outreach, DiscoverOrg and many others can support cold call initiatives to help sales teams and sales leaders plan a more enhanced and seamless cold calling experience.