Today, marketing, sales, and lead generation are challenging and difficult to handle. Hence, cold calling has turned into a practical method to enhance marketing and sales efforts. This page investigates the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success, helping digital marketing teams and sales persons to take full advantage of time and resources.
First, we briefly explain what cold calling is. Then, we highlight the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success.
So start scrolling!
What Is Cold Calling?
“Cold Calling” is the practice of making unsolicited phone calls to companies or persons who may have little or no prior knowledge of our products or services.
One decade ago, I worked as a telemarketer in an international trading company that was the exporter of chemicals. At that time, I applied various methods to generate leads, increase brand awareness, and nurture prospects. One of the constant methods that I used almost every day was cold calling.
Frankly, my efforts were not beneficial at that time and I believed that cold calling is a very boring and puzzling strategy for prospecting that is no more meaningful when there are some economic lead generation strategies like email. ☹️
Today, social media marketing has even been added. Hence, many sales reps are not interested in cold calling anymore. Or it’s better to say that many of them are afraid of cold calling! 😱
But frankly, that’s NOT TRUE at all! 😊
After many years of working as a digital marketer, I have changed my mind.
Read the next parts, in which I will elaborate in detail the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success. At the end of the article, I’m sure sales marketers who ignored cold calling will revise their decision like me!
Reasons Why Cold Calling Is Important for Sales Success – From the Minor Benefits to Majors!
In this section, I will share ten reasons why cold calling is important for sales success.
After reading them carefully, it will be hard for any sales person to avoid cold calling and all marketers who are afraid of cold calling will search for solutions to learn B2B and B2C cold calling efficiently and make the most of it!
1. Achieving Various Goals
Through cold calling, sales reps can achieve different business objectives at various stages of the sales funnel, including:
- Awareness (Top of Funnel): Cold calls can be used to introduce your company and brand to new leads to make them aware of your presence in the market.
- Interest (Middle of Funnel): Cold calls can be used to build interest in prospects by introducing your products/services, answering questions, inviting them to events, and more.
- Decision (Middle of Funnel): Cold calls can be used to encourage potential customers to purchase from your company, converting leads to paying clients.
- Retention (Bottom of Funnel): Cold calls can be used to check in with existing clients to ensure satisfaction and promote repeat business.
Whether you want to just make people aware of your company, offer new products to make them enthusiastic, convert them from leads to paying customers, or encourage them to repeat their purchases, cold calling can be helpful.
In other words, various needs of both B2B and B2C sales specialists can be met by cold calling. A B2B sales expert can find interested companies for trade and a B2C marketer can discover retail buyers easily through cold calling.
2. Collecting Sales Data
One of the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success is because it helps sales people gather essential data on leads. Through cold calls, sales specialists can engage potential customers directly and collect valuable insights about their preferences, pain points, interests, concerns, and buying behaviors.
It’s recommended that telemarketers record any data they find about leads during cold calls in their CRMs and customer lists for future reference. Next time that they want to connect these leads, this data can be really helpful.
For example, if a telemarketer notes during a cold call that a prospect expressed interest in a specific product feature, they can refer back to that information in future conversations. When reaching out again, the telemarketer can mention that feature and ask if the prospect has had any further thoughts about it.
3. Identifying Decision-Makers Quickly
Marketers can directly ask if the person they are speaking to has the authority to make purchasing decisions or not during phone conversations.
If that person is a decision-maker, they will focus more on them compared with when they talk to the people who are not in the position to decide.
This avoids wasting time on individuals who may not have the power to approve purchases. It allows them to concentrate on prospects who can actually influence the buying process.
4. Getting Immediate Feedback
Through cold calling, you have the opportunity to find out leads’ opinions and feedback about your offer, products, services, or company. It helps you in lead qualification. Then, you can address their needs and concerns and adjust your approach based on the leads’ responses.
Immediate feedback helps categorize leads as warm, cold, or hot, allowing for better prioritization in follow-up efforts.
5. Customizing Sales Pitches
One of the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success is that telemarketers can customize sales pitches based on the responses they get. It enhances the chances of a successful outcome by making the conversation more relevant to each lead.
If a prospect shows interest in a particular feature or benefit, the sales rep can highlight that aspect more prominently in the conversation. It’s better to take notes from these insights for future reference too.
6. Building Relationships
Every cold call is an opportunity to start building relationships with your prospects. These relationships can grow over time, leading to increased trust and brand loyalty.
Think of cold calling as nurturing a friendship that blossoms into a strong connection. It helps you in the process of retention.
Remember that each call is not just a transaction; it’s an opportunity to establish a rapport with new prospects and deepen your relationship with old customers. Every word you say on a cold call matters. It can either build a lasting relationship or push the lead away!
7. Personal Touch
Text-based interactions with prospects lack the power of voice. Voice adds a personal element to communication. But cold calling benefits from this personal touch that establishes rapport and trust with prospects.
Voice inflection, tone, and enthusiasm can convey emotions and intentions more effectively than written words. This helps sales reps connect on a deeper level, making the conversation more engaging.
8. Improving Conversion Rate
The cold calling conversion rate is around 2% based on research. It means that if you call 100 persons, 2 of them will be converted on average.
But the telemarketer can use the latest strategies of cold calling to take the full advantage of all moments talking on the phone to enhance the conversion rate.
If the sales rep knows when to call, how to use personalization, how to present their offers, what words to use and avoid, and how to foster meaningful relationships during their calls, the lead to customer conversion rate increases significantly.
Moreover, these techniques improve the rate of converting first-time buyers or new customers to loyal or repeat buyers.
9. Saving Costs
It’s cheap to send emails or send messages on social networks, but they’re not real conversations. Face-to-face meetings are better but expensive and time-consuming. Also, you cannot have a meeting with prospects who are not in your city or country.
Cold calling gives you the best of both: meaningful conversations without high costs!
10. Enhancing Sales Skills
Cold calling improves your sales skills by providing consistent practice and real-time learning opportunities. The list below shows the skills in which telemarketers are usually more powerful:
- Active listening
- Verbal communication
- Negotiation
- Persuasion
- Handling objections
- Adaptability
- Building rapport
- Time management
These skills and capabilities can help telemarketers in other parts of their job like face-to-face meetings and negotiation. They learn how to respond to leads and how to handle objections when they are under pressure in meetings.
CUFinder – Your Gateway to All Cold Calling Benefits
In the previous part, the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success were explained in detail. In this section, we are going to introduce a professional tool helping you maximize the advantages of cold calling and fully realize its benefits.
This wonderful, easy-to-use service is CUFinder. CUFinder not only helps telemarketers find the landline phone numbers of companies and the cell phone numbers of individuals but also assists them in discovering leads’ insights and details.
Imagine you have a list of phone numbers for cold calls. Before starting, you should find insights about the prospects to personalize your message. CUFinder is ready to provide this information for you, including the leads’ job titles, seniority level, industry, department, salary, experiences, education, skills, and more.
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✔ Prospect Engine is the best tool to find targeted companies and individuals based on your needs with their details and insights.
✔ Enrichment Engine is the best tool to complete and update your CRMs and customer lists with leads’ phone numbers, emails, domains, and more data.
Can You Be Successful in Sales Without Cold Calling?
Although cold calling is an essential tool for digital marketers and sales representatives, their job is not limited to this strategy. Many other techniques and trends are available to help you become successful in marketing, sales, and prospecting.
Five of these methods are outlined below, each linked to a practical and up-to-date article that provides professional training on how to implement them effectively.👇
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Content marketing
Moreover, if you want to learn more about this concept, I recommend you read this article: “How to Generate Leads without Cold Calling?”
Final Words
In a nutshell, cold calling is akin to find customers over the phone. Initially, cold calling may seem daunting and challenging but by learning the latest cold calling techniques, trends, tools, and strategies, telemarketers can take the full advantage of time and resources.
Carefully read the reasons why cold calling is important for sales success, which are mentioned in this article several times, to find out what opportunities you will lose if you ignore cold calling and what you will achieve if you trust the power of cold calling!
FAQs
1. When did cold calling start?
It was started in the 1870s by John Patterson, who was the owner of the National Cash Register (NCR) Company.
2. How can I be a confident cold caller?
You can build confidence in cold calling by preparing thoroughly before the cold call, following personalized cold calling scripts, and focusing on genuine, solution-oriented conversations.
3. Why do cold calls fail?
Cold calls often fail because of insufficient preparation before the cold calling and not following a professional and personalized cold calling
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