Cold calling is still widely used by businesses to find new clients.
Its main advantage is that it allows for direct telephone contact with the prospect.
However, decision-makers are becoming increasingly difficult to reach.
How to optimize the performance of your telephone prospecting campaigns?
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Telephone prospecting refers to all commercial actions carried out by telephone with the aim of finding new customers for one's business.
In general, these telephone actions consist of contacting a potential buyer in order to obtain a business appointment.
Telemarketing is often disliked by buyers who find it intrusive. Salespeople, for their part, consider it thankless and difficult due to recipients' reluctance.
Nevertheless, it has certain advantages which justify the continuation of the practice despite the reservations.
Cold calling is a delicate exercise that doesn't always inspire overwhelming enthusiasm among salespeople. Yet, prospecting by phone remains essential to a company's customer acquisition strategy, even in the digital age.
While companies are certainly investing in inbound marketing and digital prospecting techniques, there's still a great deal of mistrust among salespeople regarding inbound leads. Many believe that inbound marketing generates leads but complain about lead-to-customer conversion rates.
Indeed, without direct contact, it is not always easy to accurately assess the prospect's level of maturity.
That's precisely the great advantage of phone calls.
Because the salesperson has the prospect directly online, they have access to their reactions. They can respond live to their objections and influence their decision.
Thus, telemarketing makes it possible to better qualify the prospect and obtain information at that precise moment about their problems, obstacles, needs, projects, etc
However, to achieve this level of precision in qualification, it is necessary to have a perfect mastery of telemarketing techniques and to have prepared one's calls well.
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Before taking action, you must first establish a telephone prospecting file: containing the contacts to call.
This step is essential to the success of telephone prospecting efforts for several reasons.
First, if you call contacts from an outdated database, the campaign's ROI will be lower. By trying to reach contacts who no longer exist, are no longer employed, or are not the decision-maker, sales teams waste time and energy. This generates frustration and hurts performance. It's also essential to clean the database, particularly by merging duplicates.
Next, you need to ensure that the contacts you call correspond to your company's business targets. When building your telephone prospecting list, you should carefully select contacts based on company type, industry sector, revenue, target geographic area, and also job title.
However, selecting prospects to contact isn't enough. You need to go further and investigate to gather as much useful information as possible before making contact by phone. To do this, you can use data collected by your marketing team and/or cross-reference the information in your contact list with your contacts' LinkedIn profiles.
The success of a sales call depends on the quality of the telephone conversation you have with your contact.
If you've segmented your contact database beforehand, you already know some general characteristics and issues about your target audience. The goal is clear: to get a meeting. These are your starting point and your end point.
Now, the success of your cold calling sales approach depends on the path you take to get from one point to the next. A phone script allows you to structure your calls and prepare your sales pitch. It's a written document in which you establish the standard structure of a call.
A good sales script consists of the following elements:
Depending on the information you have about a prospect, the key arguments will vary. Similarly, each person will have different objections. Therefore, the script is neither a linear framework nor a mantra to be recited systematically.
On the contrary, a good script anticipates different scenarios. It's similar to a decision tree with various branches. Depending on the prospect's reactions, the conversation will take a different turn. Therefore, rigid scripts should be avoided to maintain agility.
The lists of prospects to contact are ready. The sales teams have prepared a detailed call script. It's almost time to get started.
Now is the time to finalize the practical details. Preparation is key in telemarketing. Nothing should be left to chance. Planning your actions maximizes performance.
First and foremost, it's important to decide whether to handle the phone outreach internally or outsource it. In B2B, targeting decision-makers, it's often preferable to entrust telephone prospecting to your own sales team, who are well-versed in the sales pitch and have a good understanding of the target buyers.
Next, based on the segmentation, each prospector should be assigned the segment they know best, the one in which they perform best.
Finally, the sales manager sets performance targets for telemarketing campaigns. The number of appointments booked, the appointment-to-call ratio, and the number of calls handled are common targets for a phone campaign.
From this perspective, it's about finding the right balance between ambition and realism. Indeed, if cold calling is not well-received by salespeople, it's partly because they consider the assigned targets to be often unattainable.
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You have meticulously prepared your telephone prospecting campaign and your sales pitch. But, when you take action, a first obstacle stands in the way of your sales representatives: the secretary.
Decision-makers are in high demand and are reluctant to take calls from salespeople. Therefore, the secretary acts as a filter, sorting through calls to distinguish between "useful" calls and cold calling.
You probably know the drill? "It's not available, please call back later." And, later, it starts all over again…
How can you bypass this "secretary barrier" that wastes so much of your time, generates frustration, and harms the performance of your campaigns?
First method: the pushy approach. Introduce yourself in a firm and decisive tone: "Good morning, Madam, Pierre Durand, from MagiLeads. Could you put me through to John Doe, please?" This method aims to make the person think you know them personally and that your call is important.
Second method: the workaround. You find out the secretary's opening hours and make sure to call when the secretary is no longer there. Indeed, there's a good chance that the person you're speaking to will arrive earlier and/or leave later than their secretary.
In telemarketing, everything hinges on your voice. It must be firm, warm, and pleasant. Pay attention to your pace too. Speak calmly and clearly.
Throughout the interview, you must appear calm, motivated, and in control. Your interviewer will quickly sense if you are uncomfortable or lack confidence. They will exploit any weakness.
Even if the prospect raises objections, you must under no circumstances deviate from your professional attitude.
In the structure of your telephone interview, the first step is to introduce yourself and briefly explain the purpose of your call.
To help the person you're speaking with identify you, start with your first and last name, as well as the name of your company. Then, in a few quick and clear sentences, explain the reason for your call.
Since you've prepared the call, you've undoubtedly listed some arguments likely to resonate with the prospect's concerns. These are the elements you should emphasize in your initial pitch.
This is by no means about reciting your entire sales pitch. The idea here is to:
The movement therefore always flows from the prospect towards your proposal. If you launch into a long monologue about the merits of your offer, the prospect will not feel involved and will only want one thing: to hang up.
You have a specific goal in mind: to secure a business meeting or, more rarely, to make an online sale.
To achieve this, you need to maintain the prospect's attention throughout the entire phone call. This is one of the reasons why reciting your sales pitch is unproductive.
Telemarketing also serves another purpose: gathering additional information about the prospect. They may not have an immediate need requiring a quick appointment, but they could still be interested in your offer and/or have a related project in mind for the medium or long term.
In all cases, the purpose of a prospecting call is to qualify the prospect for future contact, whether near or far. This is why active listening and questioning are central to the success of sales calls.
Bad telemarketers think that what makes the difference is their ability to present a multitude of arguments. In this view, a good salesperson is one who speaks eloquently, a "talker.".
That's quite far removed from the reality on the ground. A good telemarketer knows how to maintain their prospect's attention and practice active listening.
Before you called, the prospect wasn't particularly interested in your offer. They might have been perfectly content in their relative ignorance. You've captured their attention. How do you maintain it and turn it into genuine interest?
The goal here is to find the points of contact between your offer and the needs of the person you're speaking with. But the prospect isn't going to elaborate at length on their problems. The only way to understand them is to get them talking.
To do this, you need to master the art of asking questions. To gather information, you must ask open-ended questions:
These types of questions open up the discussion and give you clues for how to structure your arguments. However, when you want to focus on a specific point, you can delve deeper by asking rhetorical questions that will require the prospect to answer affirmatively. For example, you can rephrase a point they raised and ask for confirmation.
This alternation of open and closed questions should allow you to lead the prospect to where you want them to be: your offer is the solution to the challenges they face.
What if listening was the primary quality of a good telemarketer?
The quality of a prospecting call depends on asking well-balanced questions of the person on the other end of the line. The goal is to discover, not to interrogate.
But asking questions is pointless if you don't know how to listen properly to the answers. Not just hear. Listen.
Active listening involves recording the prospect's responses and using this information to guide the conversation towards its objective. To do this effectively, the telemarketer must take notes during the call, ensure they have fully understood the prospect's message, rephrase as needed, and develop appropriate responses.
But truly listening goes even further. It also means hearing what the other person isn't necessarily saying. Interpreting silences. Realizing when the prospect is straying from the question and digressing. Refocusing the conversation on the issue that interests you to gather the desired information.
Finally, active listening also allows you to detect signs of interest in the prospect. If they start asking you questions about your offer, specific features of your solution, or your pricing, it means their attention is turning into genuine interest. In short, you're close to your goal.
Over the phone, it's common for a prospect to raise a number of objections. There are two main categories:
Here are some common procedural objections and the countermeasures you can use against them:
Substantive objections arise in response to the arguments you present. This confirms that you have captured the prospect's attention. Otherwise, they would have already tried to end the call.
These objections shouldn't scare you, since you've prepared for them beforehand. And above all, they allow you to flesh out your arguments and provide the prospect with contextualized information.
Cold calling requires subtlety. To engage the prospect, it's best to start with their problems and show them the improvements that could be made.
This way, you'll help him envision a future where his difficulties fade away. And to achieve this, there's no need to immediately list the advantages of your offer. By letting him realize the value of your proposal on his own, you engage him gradually throughout the conversation.
Ideally, in this situation, he would be so enthusiastic that he would ask for the next contact. But, of course, if that's not the case, it's up to you to skillfully bring up the subject.
This can sometimes be a difficult turning point for salespeople. Because, ultimately, this is where everything hinges. Will you succeed in securing the appointment or not?
To trigger this pivot, you need to know how to analyze the prospect's signs of interest:
If the prospect seems ready, you can move to the next step and offer them the appointment.
At the end of the call, there are 3 possibilities:
In any case, it is advisable to recap with him the points you have raised and to take notes to document the call.
Even if your request is rejected, you should record the objections and reasons for the rejection to improve your argument. Perhaps you encountered an objection you hadn't anticipated.
If you need to follow up with the prospect, agree on a new time slot. See if they would like you to send them information by email in the meantime.
If he accepts the meeting, the details of the business meeting should be discussed and finalized together.
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You had your prospect on the phone. You just hung up. Now what?
It is essential to keep a record of each call. To do this, the telemarketer must absolutely prepare a call summary.
Ideally, you should use a CRM solution to record interview reports. However, in any case, you will need a prospecting file.
The prospecting file allows you to report:
This information will be valuable for preparing follow-ups or a subsequent prospecting campaign by providing a better understanding of the prospect.
Cold calling is time-consuming and often requires multiple follow-ups. To achieve the objectives set for a campaign, it is essential to implement a management process.
Campaign management consists of ensuring that telephone prospecting activities are carried out in accordance with the planned schedule and initial objectives.
Before the campaign begins, it is therefore necessary to define the KPIs that will allow us to measure the campaign's performance:
The campaign manager will need to collect and aggregate all the data to generate an activity dashboard or automatically generate a dashboard in their CRM solution.
Campaign monitoring is essential for:
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Cold calling remains an effective practice. However, 70% of decision-makers hate being harassed by sales calls. Furthermore, the number of calls required to reach a prospect continues to rise.
In these circumstances, one solution would be to focus on better training for sales representatives in telemarketing. If they are better able to avoid obstacles and hold the prospect's attention, the ROI of the telephone campaign will be significant.
The other solution is to abandon cold calling and instead run campaigns targeting leads generated through digital prospecting on the web. By working with inbound leads, salespeople contact prospects who are already familiar with the brand and have expressed interest.
In practice, however, a virtuous organization based on close collaboration between marketing and sales is essential. Together, the two departments must agree on what constitutes a business opportunity and when the handover between marketing and sales should take place.
The MagiLeads offers several features to optimize your prospecting campaigns.
Firstly, our B2B contact database allows you to identify prospects matching your targeting criteria.
You can then enter these prospects into automated email campaign scenarios.
Then, following these email campaigns on the web, prospects interested in your offers are automatically added to your CRM. This way, the CRM centralizes all the information you need to launch a telephone prospecting campaign.
This way, you can launch your telemarketing campaigns to interested contacts. You can even organize your campaigns more effectively by sorting prospects based on their progress, scoring, or follow-up date.
While telephone prospecting is sometimes criticized, it still delivers significant results provided that each step (database creation, campaign preparation, call execution, follow-up, and management) is perfectly optimized. Combining digital and telephone methods can further improve performance. In this case, fostering team collaboration and tool synchronization is essential.
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