Cold calling is a natural part of most sales campaigns. It is done to persuade potential customers to buy the product of the company or avail its services. It is important to deliver an effective sales pitch to convince people through cold calling in the sales profession.
Read More: Brand Marketing Is Dead, Long Live Feature Marketing
Need and importance of cold calling
Cold calling is helpful in business development. It is one of the most cost-effective methods to understand the needs and expectations of the people in the market. Cold calling is utilised extensively today for delivering impactful sales messages and finding new businesses or just to explore new opportunities. An effective cold calling experience can deliver extremely encouraging results for the organisation. The sales pitch should be drafted carefully and conveyed in a persuasive manner. It requires proper training and consistent efforts by a salesperson to convert a potential customer to an actual customer (sales-lead) through cold calling.
Tools to help with cold calling efforts
Cold calling requires a lot of patience as it takes a huge number of calls to get the desired conversion. Let us now look at ten types of tools that can help the sales team with their cold calling efforts and to convert more calls and close those coveted sales numbers: –
-
Double-listening and whispering
When a new salesperson joins your team, it is extremely beneficial to monitor (in real-time) his or her cold calls to give the necessary inputs for improvement. With the double-listening and whispering tool, one can hear the conversation between the salesperson and the potential lead and through the whispering function, the salesperson can be given live inputs during the call in case he or she needs help, and this can happen without the correspondent hearing the whisperer’s voice.
-
Call recorders
Although simple, call recorders are impactful in the cold calling business, after every unsuccessful call, it is really important to sit back and analyse the areas which need improvement and changes. Feedback from the experts in this field about the calls also prove to be greatly beneficial to the salespersons to improve their next outcomes significantly.
-
Power Dialers
For a larger number of calls to be made, it downloads the numbers into the software, and places the calls automatically, as the call gets connected; it puts the respondent in touch with the available person.
Read More: Digital Advertising Tips In Times Of A Pandemic
-
Text message/email plugins for follow-ups
A text or an email follow up to a call is particularly important in order to keep the potential customer engaged. The follow up right after the call is what is more effective and a WhatsApp plugin or an SMS plugin can be integrated for this purpose.
-
CRM Integration
Cold calling is generally considered to be a tough process as the salesperson has limited knowledge about the prospect; he/she is calling. In this scenario, having some prior knowledge can increase the chances of the prospects being interested and help increase engagement. A CRM integration displays the prospect’s information on the interface with all the data available about the prospect from different databases. This tool is especially useful when calling past customers with the aim of re-engaging them.
-
Warm transfers
Most of the times before a sales employee closes a deal over a call, he or she is asked details and queries by the prospect regarding the company, pricing, product, etc. this is a natural way to make an informed decision and is an extremely important step to finalize a deal. Sometimes if the salesperson does not have the right information on some queries, it can lead to a lost prospect. To avoid this, warm transfers can be implemented on calls. Whenever a prospect is asking questions that cannot be handled by the caller, he or she can transfer the call to a domain expert who can answer all the queries and help close the deal much faster.
Read More: Top Email Tracking Software That Can Help Sales Teams Track Prospect Behavior Better
-
Voice bots
These are amongst the latest technologies available. Sales development representatives can use voice bots to interact with the prospects and gauge their availability. This way, they can optimize their time and switch to another prospect if one cannot be reached through voice bots. Today, with the advent of AI and Machine Learning voice bots can also be used for speech recognition and language processing. They can also be programmed to answer some common FAQs and take feedback in order to save time.
-
Analytics
In order to improve something, its performance needs to be measured and analysed. The average sales call durations, conversions, average talk times, prospect responses etc. can be analysed after a campaign to understand its impact and effectiveness in implementation. Its insights can be used for the next cold calling campaign and can also be used for training purposes.
-
Contact synchronization
By integrating cloud software and CRM into the system, one can feed in the contact details, and it will make sure all the sales development representatives while calling have a synchronised calling list, and any changes in it are reflected in every system interface. This measure makes sure everybody has the latest and most updated calling list at all times.
-
Predictive dialers
These are systems that help callers detect busy signals, voicemail, no – answers, and disconnected or unavailable numbers. They help to predict when the prospect will be available to take the call. This significantly decreases the waiting time and also makes the whole process more optimized. The dialer automatically calls the number after calculating the time by when he or she would have finished their ongoing call.
These are some tools that can be implemented by various sales and marketing agencies, companies, or teams who use the cold calling process to generate more leads and close the sales of their products and services. They can make the process more fast, efficient, and can lead to a high conversion rate if the tools are used intelligently and up to their full capacities.
