Article Lead Gen Telemarketing
Cold calling has its detractors, but it remains an important part of the B2B marketing toolkit. There are various reasons why highly profiled cold calling can still bring home the goods, enabling businesses to forge strong relationships with new clients.
In particular, targeted cold calling gives you the chance to present your offering directly to prospective customers, while presenting an opportunity to start building relationships with them. It also compares favourably to other types of B2B marketing in terms of cost-effectiveness, which is always an important consideration.
Nevertheless, to get the most out of highly profiled cold calling, you have to take a strategic approach. Your potential clients are busy people – so if you’re going to cold call them, you need to know how to make the most efficient use of the time you have while you’ve got them on the line.
To make cold calling really work well for your business, you must take a carefully targeted approach. This means that you need proper research and segmentation, so that you know who you’re targeting and who’s most likely to respond positively when you reach out to them.
Your messaging must be crafted with prospective customers in mind. Creating buyer personas can help you understand your target audience – what it’s looking for and its key pain points – much better. Industry insights in the form of detailed market research can also help you tailor your messaging more effectively.
As we’ve already noted, when you call a prospective client, you might not have that much time on the phone with them. This is why you need to ensure that your opening statement is an impactful one, so that it gives the person on the other end of the phone a good reason to stay on the line.
Not only does your opening pitch need to be compelling and attention-grabbing, it also needs to establish credibility and build rapport with your potential client. Your market research should have given you a clear understanding of clients’ key pain points, so you should also address these and make it clear to prospective customers how your product or service can resolve them.
Calling a potential customer gives you the opportunity to ask questions of them and obtain a fuller picture of what they’re looking for. Strategic questioning can help you uncover more information about the needs and challenges facing your prospective clients.
This can also enable you glean valuable insights which you can then use to optimise future pitches. So, be prepared to ask about how recent industry developments have affected your potential client’s business, their key problems and challenges, and their short and long-term objectives.
Another important consideration when undertaking a highly profiled cold calling campaign is your value proposition, and how you articulate it clearly and concisely. Again, it is vital to remember that potential clients don’t have time to sit around and chat – so you need to get to the point.
You therefore need to communicate the benefits of your products and services, and how they address specific client needs. In addition, you should think about how to customise your value propositions for different industries or segments of the market, to target your pitch as precisely as possible.
When you call a potential client, you should be prepared for a back-and-forth exchange. Even if a prospective customer is interested in what you have to offer, they’re bound to have their own questions – and you need to be ready to answer them as best you can.
Before you launch your targeted cold calling campaign, then, you must anticipate some common objections and think about how you’d respond to them. Objections can be turned into opportunities for further discussion – though it’s important to be able to ascertain when a lead is actually going nowhere – but objections should be handled confidently, politely and with a real willingness to listen.
So, your sales pitch has hit the target and your potential client wants to take their interest in your product or service to the next stage. What then? Before you start calling prospective customers, you should have clearly defined the next steps in the sales process.
If a potential client shows a genuine interest, make sure you’ve secured their commitment to follow-up actions – such as an in-person appointment or product demonstration – before concluding the call. Where a call has gone well, it’s important to strike while the iron is still hot.
However, in order for highly profiled cold calling to be effective, it has to be handled in a patient, tactful and empathetic way. Your team must have strong knowledge of the products and services it’s pitching to potential clients, and it must be equipped to handle objections adroitly.
At Bollin Green, we specialise in delivering high-quality leads and driving sales through services including lead generation and telemarketing. Get in touch with our friendly and helpful team today to learn more about what we can do to boost your business.
