Our marketing team at Cloudlead loves answering questions posted on Q&A platforms like Quora to help B2B marketers and salespeople succeed.
Here’s the answer to one of the most asked questions about sales on Quora by Moaaz, our in-house B2B marketing expert.
The answer as appeared on Quora:
‘I would have to incline towards outbound sales tactics here. Why?
If done right, outbound can yield quick results. After all, the big giants we hear of today have done it, so why should we exclude ourselves?
Nowadays, you should note that outbound has evolved towards targeted selling, personalized content and commitment towards engaging a lead. Many sales reps and marketers give up after 3–5 attempts, however, it is said that 80% of opportunistic revenue is gained after 8 followups.
For outbound I would say cold emailing and cold calling is the way to go about it. However, do make sure you follow basic rules to make sure you are:
Cold Calling
Cold calling strategy is really important if you want good results. My only advice is: Don’t rush this process
Many sales managers/ directors decide to overlook several key points when initiating a cold calling sales strategy. I know cold calling is results driven, direct and quick in terms of getting responses. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t follow some ground rules to ensure your process goes well for you and more importantly your prospects.
Before I begin I hope you know who your ICP(Ideal customer profile) is and in case you don’t, do check out this article on our own blog: How to identify your ideal customer profile.
The company I work for, Cloudlead, specializes in providing targeted ICP data, but following that you will need good cold calling tactics.
Your bound to get great results with cold if you:
1 – Research before calling: I can’t express this point enough. You need to know, a) Who you are calling b) What that company does and c) Any intelligence you can gather about their tactics
2 – Ask the prospect “How have you been?”: A company Gong(dot)io conducted a research where they analyzed 90,380 cold calls. The research was focused on understanding what drives conversations. Let’s be honest, most cold callers fail at this point. The study found that, “How have you been?”, topped various other opening lines that they tested. You need to read the article here, it’s one of my favorites. The image below basically summarizes what you could expect:
3 – Say “You” More and “We” Less: This is obvious and no study needs to prove this point. Before starting your cold calling campaign, you need to ask yourself what you would like to hear. Would you like a sales rep to call you, only to talk and boast about himself and/or his company most of the time? I doubt it. You may feel a connection between point 1 and this point and you are right. If you don’t know about your lead or what they do for that matter then how can you talk about them?
4 – Know when to talk and when to listen: When you are talking to a prospect, if they are in a talkative mood(which does happen), then simply hear them out. In fact, encourage it. A good cold caller always learns from what they hear and adapt their responses likewise. For this reason, if you learn to listen to your prospect more you will get a better chance of not only adding your point of view after he/she is done but you will also have that golden moment to convert the prospect into a warm lead/ trial user/ or even a customer
5 – Ask for another time to followup if the prospect is not interested: If the prospect feels the product is not a good fit, simply ask them if this is something they are willing to explore in the future. If not even that, they would most likely tell you why as well( so you’ll learn and get a takeaway from the call anyway). We all know that an over the head and tentative answer received by the prospect like for e.g. “yes, we could discuss about this in the next quarter”, seems generic. Trust me it’s not and don’t assume it to be. Most conversions are thanks to followups and not initial contacts
6 – Thank the prospect for their time: Another basic point here is to thank your prospect for giving you their valuable time. Last impression might be your prospects first consideration if they do decide to come back to you
7 – Bonus point: This is not about a good cold calling tactic but something that will affect your entire cold calling campaign. The data you’re using. Having the right and accurate B2B data will be the difference between you reaching 5,000 prospects to achieve your target or 10,000.
So, I would highly recommend to help yourself and sales representativess by saving their time in prospecting. It’s a common metric that only 37% of sales representatives spend their time on actual selling activities, according to (insidesales(dot)com). If you could lets say lift that to 50–60% then your revenue sheet will go to another level, especially when combined with the tactics mentioned above.
If this is something you feel you would need I would love to talk more on this subject, because the company I work for, Cloudlead, helps B2B companies build great sales pipelines by providing them the data they need, so they pay nothing extra!
Regardless of what your objectives were, I really hope this answer was what you were looking for! Best of luck on cold calling :)’
You can check out Moaaz’ Quora profile here and his Cloudlead profile here for more answers like this!
