What To Look For In A Cold Calling Tool

Using the right cold calling solution can make or break sales within your company. The right solution includes tools that help to optimize call times, target the right leads, follow up, track progress & support the sales workflow unique to your business.

There are dozens of cold calling solutions on the market that promise to fulfill all your needs and then some. Knowing where to start can often be frustrating, especially if you don’t have a ton of experience with cold calling solutions.

What Features You Need In A Cold Calling Tool

Which cold calling tool is going to be the best choice depends on your workflow and team’s unique needs and priorities. Many vendors offer cold calling solutions with all the bells and whistles. But, in reality, they contain pricey functionality that you may never need. This is why a one-size-fits-all solution will rarely be your best bet.

There are a few important aspects in a good cold calling solution to look for, if you keep these in mind when completing your research you'll be much more likely to find the right fit for your business.

Integrations

It’s vital your cold calling tool can integrate with your businesses current applications to improve not only your cold calling workflow but the entire sales process. For example, you may want to integrate Google and Microsoft apps and email marketing software, or send qualified leads to a CRM for further nurturing.

The cold calling solution should easily integrate with your current technology stack either through systems such as Zapier or have a robust API. This will enable better workflows and reduce time spent on administrative tasks.

Make a list of which apps your team uses and their integration options before buying a cold calling software to ensure easier integration and to save time.

Lead management

All sales teams need a system to effectively manage their leads through their sales process, from gathering and categorizing your leads, through to qualification, appropriate and timely follow-ups and so on.

You'll need to look for a solution that can easily gather leads from different sources - social media, a web page, email, etc. - and automatically transfer them to your cold calling software.

Once your leads are imported, you need a good way to organize them. These could be segmented into campaigns, pipeline steps, or other workflows. You’d also want to be able to move leads through your workflow as needed.

Running a number of marketing campaigns that span multiple sources at once? Then you’d need a tool that can segment lists by source based on multiple criteria. You’d also want the software to be able to delegate each segment to relevant agents.

Your lead tracking software should include tools that allow you to send follow-up emails. At the same time, it should help you to track the progress of each lead. Cold calling tools should allow you to schedule call-backs, and alert you when it’s time to follow up with a prospect. Essentially managing the administration of nurturing leads for agents enabling them to focus on calls.

You’ll want to distribute or route leads to agents, even teams abroad, based on priorities compared to prospects that need to be followed up with. Within a lead queue, owners can tweak settings and claims to ensure an agent receives the most relevant lead.

Dynamic lead distribution is vital when multiple agents work on the same campaigns, so look for features such as auto claiming leads and logic that ensures no two agents can work on the same lead at the same time.

Clean up your lists

Is your database a mess of duplications? This happens far too often and results in spamming leads by contacting them multiple times. It can also cause two agents to call the same prospect with the same pitch.

Look for a cold calling solution that auto-detects duplicates with criteria that are important to you.

Reporting

Choose cold calling software that can generate detailed reports on your campaigns with the metrics that are important to you. This could include agent performance that’s based on leads called, conversion rates, and average time spent per lead. This helps you identify top performers as well as those who need more training.

A simple sales campaign report will show you progress statistics, conversion rates, and trends based on previous periods. It should also compare a number of campaigns in a single view.

You’d also likely want to take a deep dive into more detailed metrics with flexible reporting. For instance, group calls by date, campaign, agent, and result of the call, and expand or sort these for any group.

Power dialer

Look out for a solution that has a robust power dialer that enables multiple different VoIP options as well as click2call, this is critical if your organisation already has a robust telephonic setup. Important tools to look for in the VoiP/Power dialer are:

• Autodial;
• Voicemail drop;
• Ability to change Caller ID’s;
• Inbound functionality for leads to callback.
• Live call monitoring

The most important aspect is ease of use - flashy features are worthless if nobody is using them.

Additional Considerations

There is more to consider than just features, you should take into consideration your growth trajectory, support offered & what clients say about the applications you are considering.

Scalability

Scalability is another important factor when choosing a cold calling tool. The software should offer from basic to near enterprise solutions to accommodate the size of your team and where you see your business in five years.

Its vendor should be transparent about costs and clearly explain the migrating process of any kind of software. You don’t want to find out too late that your chosen vendor’s enterprise plan isn’t suitable for your business when you’re ready to expand, only to find out that you also can't easily migrate your data.

Make sure that you can test all features on a free trial

There are dozens of cold calling tools, all offering different solutions, integrations, and functions. You may not know which is best suited to your business or team.

For that reason, ensure that the vendor offers a free trial option where you can test all the features. If a demo session and/or tutorials are available to guide you visually, so much the better!

Look at all your options before making a decision

Compare. Compare. And compare! Services such as Capterra honest reviews of software applications for businesses based on research and user reviews.

It also allows you to evaluate top software solutions side by side, including pros and cons, features, and pricing. This way, you can easily evaluate all your options.

Quality Support

A fantastic application with bad support is about as good as a bad application. Ensure there are good support articles & a robust faq section. See what support options are available in terms of email, chat and phone & what the response times are. These aspects are critical when things go wrong or when you have a time sensitive query.

Conclusion

Cold calling tools should never be so over-automated that you lose personal touch with your prospects. They should not be cumbersome, confusing, overloaded with features, and hard to operate.

The right cold calling technology is an investment that will empower your team and ultimately increase your bottom line. It will save your team time to spend on talking to and converting prospects while leaving tasks such as dialing, reporting, and managing leads to the software.