From knowing your customer to developing the right skill sets for your cold calling team, you need to fill a few knowledge gaps in pre-calling tips before picking up the phone. Once you crack these hacks, you can see your conversion rate skyrocket through the roof. Here are five pre-calling tips to improve cold calling success.
Develop the Model Customer for Your Brand
The most critical thing in cold calling success is to know who is your ideal customer. Once you have the model customer, you can create a conversation blueprint based on their intrinsic needs. This can help you train your cold calling team or understand the possible conversation routes while talking to a client. You can also easily track real-life deviations if you know the model customer. The next step is to use the Model Customer to ask a shadow entity for cold call training sessions.
There are multiple ways to prepare for a smooth cold call conversation. You can create follow-up templates and ask common business sales questions to avoid thinking gaps in conversations. You can positively structure your questions. Avoid asking open-ended questions. You may practice with your sales colleagues, paste conversation maps on your call desk to easily predict replies, chart your product’s value proposition, and avoid negative or argumentative feedback. You can ask leading questions based on LinkedIn profiling. Here are some quick tips to remember-
- Listen More than You Talk
- Time Your Calls Well
- Research Your Customer
- Experiment and Analyze
- Have Multiple Use Cases for Your Products
- Prepare Conversation Charts
- Search for Sales Vulnerabilities
- Strategize Your Lead Picking
Active customer profiling
One of the most common mistakes in cold calling is not developing a customer profile before making a call. Most people start with a prescribed sales script and not with the actual customer demands. This results in marketing myopia where short-term goals over-cloud our long-term sales prospects.
Hence, the next natural to achieving high success in cold calling is profiling your customers based on certain features, characteristics, and expectations. It will help you convert more cold calls into sales and provide insightful feedback for your product/service development. You need to develop each category of profiling based on your business profile and circumstances.
You can start a conversation by asking relevant questions, taking active notes on the answers, and branding your products in between the customers’ vulnerabilities. For example, if you get to know through conversation that the person is not satisfied with the customer service quality of their existing client, you now notice a customer vulnerability. You can leverage this information by offering better customer service conditions. Some of the common features of an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) should be
- Basics include age, country, company size, position, and general information.
- How did they hear about you
- Their motivation to purchase
- What could hold them back
- Their expectations for a perfect product/service
Create a Strong Linkedin Profile
A cold calling script can’t be sufficient to close a sale. You need to give your customer more time and information to explore your brand freely. Sometimes, you may need a company website or a Linkedin profile to close a B2B sale. It can also act as lead touch points for your sales funnel, automatically generating high-conversion leads. If you do not have a company website, you can create an excellent LinkedIn profile to showcase your company’s capabilities in writing. Learn how to write great LinkedIn posts in your domain area. Here are some quick tips on gaining popularity on LinkedIn.
- Create a catchy intro
- Use visuals like charts and infographics to drive attention
- Create easy-to-understand, value-driven content on your domain expertise
- Only write on topics on which you have experience (you may use a professional content creator)
- Backlink your content to high-authority websites
- Connect with people through webinars
- Shout out to authors of high-authority posts
- Engage with readers and ask them to comment on your posts or include strong CTAs.
- Use relevant hashtags
Sales sequences and Cadences
Most sales leads are never used or used so late that they lose relevance. Even when using a reputable sales lead, most cold calling is done without a prior context. It reduces engagement and the probability of conversion. Developing robust sales sequences and cadences can break the ice and make your call more relevant to the receiver. You can automate your lead generation or seek the help of a sales development representative SDRs to increase the efficiency of cold calling and email campaigns.
Moreover, you need to subtly strike cold clients multiple times through different touch points before they finally respond. Be patient with your calls, and don’t be in a hurry to close a sale. Take time to introduce your brand and ask them politely if it is a good time for talking. You can make an appointment for a specific date. You can send them a product brochure and make sure to call them at the given time without fail. The following conversation will set the context and give you a comfort zone to ask for more information. You can develop a quick response dashboard by investing in better cold calling infrastructure or equip your sales with an easy-to-use note-taking app/software.
Conclusion
Pro sales callers often read between the lines to discover the customers’ challenges and decision-making behavior. You can nudge your customers to disclose more information as you go along in the conversation. You can use this information to your advantage by strategically positioning your products and value proposition.
Developing this insight can require a fair amount of product perspective and understanding of the customer mindset, which will come through practice over many repeated sales calls. You may initially fail to achieve the desired targets but your sales instinct gets better with each rejection, and that can be the greatest teacher of all.
