Supercharge your B2B sales success with these expert cold calling hacks!
Cold calling is one of those things that’s easy to do but hard to master. On one hand, there’s nothing complicated about picking up the phone and calling leads. On the other hand, creating consistent success with your cold calling is an art form that can take years to master.
Unfortunately, you need to make sales now – not in five years. You need tools and strategies that you can start using immediately to boost your cold calling success. If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place!
In this blog, we’ll give you three cold calling hacks that you can use to supercharge your cold calling today! Let’s get started.
Cold Calling Hack 1: Call More People!
The world of outbound sales is a cruel one. No matter how skilled you are on the phone, cold calling can still be a very low-percentage game. Even the best outbound salespeople only get a success rate of around 5-10%.
When it comes to cold calling, the odds are stacked against you. On any given dial, there are countless variables that can go wrong and lead to a failed call. The lead might not answer the phone at all, or the timing might be wrong, or they might be busy, or they’re grumpy, or perhaps it’s all of these factors combined. What we’re trying to say is that you shouldn’t get discouraged when your calls don’t go to plan – that’s just the nature of the beast!
Does this mean that cold calling is dead and you should give up? Absolutely not. Even in today’s internet and social media world, phone outbound sales are still an incredibly effective way to approach prospects and close deals. But if you want to succeed, you need to start hustling and getting more people on the phone – cold calling is a numbers game!
The first and best cold calling hack we can offer is also the simplest: If you want to close more deals, you need to make more calls. Pick up the phone and start dialing. Then, when you think you’ve dialed enough for the day, pick the phone up again and dial some more! Cold calling is about having conversations with people; and the more people you reach daily, the more success you’ll have.
Cold Calling Hack 2: Have a Safety Net
When a basketball player shoots a free throw, they don’t just toss the ball at the hoop and pray for the best. Instead, they have a routine that they’ve practiced and perfected so that their shot is identical each time. Why do they do this? Because minimizing surprises is the first step to creating consistent success. The same is true for cold calling.
Unfortunately, talking to someone on the phone and trying to close a deal is much more chaotic than shooting a free throw. Since every call is different, you can’t develop an identical routine for your cold calls. But what you can do is create backup plans or “safety nets” in your script for when something goes wrong. That way, when the prospect inevitably brings up an objection, you won’t get jammed up and lose the call. The more variables you can eliminate, the calmer, more confident, and thus more successful you’ll become!
The first step to creating script safety nets is understanding the most common objections that a lead might introduce. When you ask for a meeting, few prospects will be enthusiastic about giving you their time right away. After all, you’re a random person who called and interrupted them during their already busy workday – they want to get rid of you as quickly as possible!
When they say that they don’t have time, or that they’re not sure, or any other objection, you should already have a strategy of what you’re going to say and do to get the call back on track.
There are many ways to do this, but one of the easiest and most effective methods is to simply change the topic of the conversation:
For example, if the lead gives you the classic “Now’s not a good time” comment, don’t lose all hope! You can still get it back on track by 1) acknowledging their feelings and 2) asking a question that changes the topic:
“Absolutely, it sounds like you’re very busy. Quick question, how many
salespeople do you currently have on your team?”
People can rarely resist the urge to talk about their business. Using this cold calling hack can buy you a few extra minutes on the phone to build rapport and bring the sales call back from the dead!
Cold Calling Hack 3: Get Their Info
Some famous cold calling coaches and influencers have an “All-or-Nothing” mindset when it comes to sales. They insist that every successful call must result in a booked meeting. Anything less is considered a failure. Unfortunately, this mindset can result in you missing out on sales opportunities and losing confidence in your skills!
While it’s true that you always want to try and book a meeting, that’s not always possible. Sometimes, leads are stuck in long contracts with your competitors and can’t change services. At other times, the prospect might genuinely not have time in their schedule to sit down for a formal call. If you follow the “All or Nothing” mindset we mentioned earlier, you might write off these prospects as dead leads, not considering that they could become excellent clients in the future. This is where our third cold calling hack comes in:
If a prospect you called has made it explicitly clear that they’re not interested in a conference, you can still salvage the call!
Even a lead who isn’t interested in a meeting will almost always let you send them some more information via email.
While this isn’t as good as setting a meeting, getting the prospect’s email contact gives you a direct line to a person who: A) You know is real, B) You know is interested, and C) You know is already familiar with you and your product!
You can then use this email contact to stay in touch, give updates, improve your brand familiarity, and take another shot at the prospect when the time is right!
There you have it! Our top three cold calling hacks to help you supercharge your sales success. If you want to learn more about cold calling and see these strategies in action, make sure you tune into our daily cold calling show, The Daily Toad with The Phone Ready Leads® Guys, live on LinkedIn here at 8am PT/11am ET. And check out our past episode replays available here.
