How to get better at cold calls to convert more customers
You can increase conversions by almost 400% if you contact someone as soon as they’re identified as a lead. And the longer you wait, the less chance of conversion you have. At least, that’s what cold call data would have us believe. But has this proven to be the case for your company’s cold-calling campaigns?
The truth is that several factors influence cold-call conversion rates. So if you want to know how to improve cold-call conversion rates, read through our tips below. You’ll learn about the importance of understanding your audience, creating an effective script, and much more.
Are you tired of your cold call campaigns ending with disappointing conversion rates? Don’t despair. Just follow these 10 tips to improve your cold-call conversion rates.
A cold call is an unsolicited marketing or sales call. The intention is to market or sell a product or service to a prospective customer. This is often a newly launched product or service, but not always. It can also be an existing one that the prospect has heard of but has not yet tried.
A cold call is not always successful on the first try. More than one follow-up call may be necessary to close a deal. But the final result often rests on the success of that first call. It’s a challenging yet effective sales technique that can benefit both the company and the customers.
Cold calling offers several benefits for both the people selling and the people being sold to.
To sell to your audience, you need to understand them. This is the first step, and the most important one, in any cold-calling campaign. If you aren’t seeing the conversions you hoped for, chances are you got this step wrong. But it’s easily fixed, and these three tips will help you to do exactly that.
The first step in understanding your target market is to define and identify them. This requires careful research on your part to create a list of quality leads. Nothing spells disaster for cold-call conversions like poor-quality leads.
Many excellent online tools can help you identify leads. But they’ll only help you if you already know who you’re trying to target. This will allow you to feed the correct criteria into these lead-generating tools. Work through the results and find out all you can about them.
Have you done the necessary research on your prospects? This is crucial for understanding your audience better and boosting cold call conversion rates.
Where do they search for new products and services? Which companies have they interacted with recently? Have they ever purchased from a competitor?
Knowledge is power. Enter all this information into your integrated CRM so that agents not only know who they’re dealing with but also what they need. This will show you how to effectively sell to them.
You’re not just trying to sell a product or service to an unsuspecting prospective customer. You’re attempting to meet the prospect’s needs and address their pain points. Do you know what these needs and pain points are?
If you’ve correctly identified your target audience and identified good leads, you should already have an idea of what their needs are. This will give you what you need to craft an effective script for the cold-call campaign.
As the call progresses, the lead will give you further information that you can use to address their pain points.
The right script is key to improving your cold call conversion rate. But the right script for one campaign may not work for another. You may also need more than one for a campaign, depending on how diverse your target audience (and lead list) is.
Here are another three tips that will amp up your script prowess:
Once you understand what your audience wants and needs, you can promote your product or service as the object of their desires or the solution to their problems. But first, you need to understand what you’re selling, inside and out.
Before providing your team with the script and telling them to start calling, ensure that they understand what they’re promoting or selling. Invite them to ask questions about the product or service. This will enable them to answer any questions they get on the call.
A long-winded cold call can make prospects lose interest quickly. So get to the point quickly, but without rushing. This is a fine art, and with practice, you’ll find the right balance.
A pitch of about 30-60 seconds should pique enough interest to, at least, lead to a request for more time to think about it and a follow-up call. Avoid long scripts. A lengthy script can confuse both the agent and the call recipient.
While the features may be fantastic, there will be time to get to those once you’ve piqued their interest. Throw in a few of the top benefits of the product early in the conversation, focusing on those that meet their needs.
A feature of a smartphone, for example, would be a high-resolution camera. The benefit of this feature for the customer would be ‘crystal-clear photos every time’.
Every would-be customer wants to know how the product or service will benefit them. This may differ from one lead to the next. However, if you’ve done your research right, you'll already have an idea of what this entails.
Asking the right questions helps you narrow this down further, and we’ll be covering that in the next section.
The only true way to know how your campaign is doing is to check the various outbound call center performance metrics. But knowing them doesn’t help if you don’t have a plan for improving them.
Your cold call conversion rates may be suffering because your agents aren’t engaging leads effectively. Here are four further cold call conversion tips to help:
Be friendly, warm, and respectful from the start of every call.
Greet the prospective customer properly, using their title and last name. Keep this formal without being too stiff. And keep the tone light but confident.
These proven techniques will help you to initiate conversations that lead to conversions.
Establish a rapport with the prospective customer. Thank them for taking your call, and ask them how their day is going. Show an interest in their answer without becoming distracted or going too far off the script.
Ask open questions to initiate conversation. An open question requires more than a yes or no. This is how you get the information you need to tailor the script to that specific customer. Here’s an example of how to use it:
If they answered ‘yes’ to “Have you tried this type of (product/service) before?”, follow it up with, “What did you like about it?” or “What issues, if any, did you have with it?”
This prompts them to disclose what they are looking for in a product or service like yours, without them even realizing it.
Pause for a response after asking a question to allow time for an answer. If you don’t give the prospect a chance to respond, you’ll make them feel like you’re rushing through the call. This will create the impression that you are not interested in their needs or opinions.
These tips for cold call conversion will make a big difference, but for an even bigger impact, you need more than just the right techniques. You need the right attitude, a healthy dose of realism, and the best call center workforce management software to make every cold call a success.
When you and your team have the right attitude, you’re halfway to increased conversions already. A positive attitude will give your agents the confidence they need to engage leads, turn them into prospects, and close deals. The opposite will, unfortunately, have the opposite result.
Much of this relies on their training, so be sure to focus on attitude in your tutorials. Be patient with new call agents, and provide a mentorship program if possible. Get them to shadow your most experienced and successful team members for a while.
Cold calling can be daunting. Give them the support they need to find their rhythm.
The aim of any cold-calling campaign is to generate interest and make sales, but try to be realistic with your expectations. It’s unrealistic to expect a guaranteed sale on the first cold call every time.
Yes, it happens, and it’ll happen more often if you follow these cold call conversion tips above. But nobody has a 100% success rate with the first cold-call deal closing. To expect this means you’ll set unrealistic targets and place undue pressure on your call agents.
Rather:
Get the right hardware and software. This includes automated dialing software that gives your cold calls a competitive edge, like the latest predictive dialers. Smaller outbound call centers, especially, will benefit from the right small business call center software.
Predictive dialers are without a doubt the best call center software for cold-calling campaigns. They can place multiple calls at once and dynamically adjust the dialing rate based on data and AI algorithms.
No matter the size of your workforce, you’ll increase your call volumes and maximize agent availability with a predictive dialer. These call center softwares can also meet the needs of remote workers, as they are available in a virtual, cloud-based format.
Running multiple cold-calling campaigns at once? That’s not a problem when you have a parallel predictive dialer. It offers all the benefits of a predictive dialer, like screening out busy tones and calls that go to voicemail. It also creates even higher call volumes than a standard predictive dialer.
Best of all, with a parallel dialer, you can run separate cold calling campaigns simultaneously, in parallel, with their dedicated CRMs. It’s the ultimate solution to meeting your expectations for successful cold-call campaigns.
When you use the right tips and tricks, combined with an effective cold-call script, your conversion rate will improve. But to see truly amazing results, you need one more thing: the right dialing software. And that’s what you’ll find here at AutoReach.
The right dialer turns more conversations into conversions. Many leading companies have discovered this secret with our help, and you can be one of them.
Want to know firsthand how you can dial up your conversion rates? Start your free trial today!
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