How to make cold calling successful for your business

Cold calling has a hugely negative reputation in the UK and has even become something that a lot of businesses actively avoid when trying to gain new customers. Despite its frosty exterior and claims that social media marketing has surpassed the method, cold calling is still the most effective way to communicate and connect with potential customers in terms of hitting targets quicker.

Making cold calling successful for your business is a lot of trial and error, and only experiencing the general response to cold calling your potential customers can ultimately determine if it’s the right route for your business. However, we have some great ways that you can optimise your cold calling campaigns to get you on the right path to making it work for your business.

STRATEGY

Planning your cold calling campaign to precision is so important to ensure that you are not wasting your crucial first thirty seconds of the call. Focusing on being clear about your objectives, what you can offer and how you can benefit your potential customers are the key elements to building a successful cold call. Building the call will also be imperative to strategise – cross-selling, overturning objections and knowing you can offer something that your competitors cannot are all important elements to making your campaign work.

There are many questions to ask yourself when building a cold calling campaign, the most important being…

• Who is your target market?
• What do you want to achieve from this campaign?
• What would you class as realistic targets for this campaign?
• What is the potential outcome? Sales? Data capture? Appointment setting?

DATA

When buying data to cold call with it is so important to know you’re getting your money’s worth. Investing in your data will save you precious time and honestly, the cheaper you go, the more likely the data is going to be a waste of time calling. Knowing your demographic and doing some well-needed market research will ensure you don’t waste a penny on your data. Carrying out market research can also allow you to be able to create your own database of potential customers using social media platforms like LinkedIn.

ASSIGN WORK TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Not everyone has it in them to be a great cold caller, and that is okay, but if you need to get your cold calling campaign right, you need to assign the job to the right people. The ability to seamlessly sell whilst building rapport and earning the customers trust when cold calling is difficult, which again, is why cold calling jobs really undesirable to many, however, if you can find the right group of people who are open, friendly, focused and empathetic, you are onto something really special.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Making sure you call at the right time of day is crucial to your ability to talk to decision makers and consequently getting to the end goal of your campaign. The best times to call your potential customers are early morning and late afternoon, both are said to be the most likely times to catch your decision maker and aren’t unsociable times of day to be making unsolicited calls.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

There is no one size fits all with cold calling and as we said above, there is a lot of trial and error in using cold calling as a method of marketing. Practice makes perfect and making tweaks, changes or completely overhauling your focuses can be the making of any failing campaign. Trying different scripts and opening statements can really give you a better idea of what is working and what is not. Don’t be disheartened and thrown off if you don’t hit your desired targets straight away, the beauty of cold calling is that there are so many ways to adapt and change your approach and once you’ve cracked it, you could be in for some serious success.