Why You're Not Succeeding With Cold Calls

As a sales professional, a significant part of your job is to create qualified sales leads from general contact lists. When your sales manager hands you a new list of unqualified leads, you are expected to have the cold-calling skills necessary to fill your lead management system with strong prospects.

The problem is that even your best sales lead generation efforts are falling flat. It may help you to know that anyone can develop strong cold-calling skills to energize their sales pipeline management system. The key is to analyze your cold-calling efforts and focus on ways to improve your approach.

Lack of Research

If you are not doing research on each prospect before you call, then you won't generate strong sales leads. At the minimum, you should be looking up your prospects on social media before calling to see what type of up-to-the-minute information you can use to create a robust pitch.

When research is done properly, it exposes pain points for your client that need attention. If you already know your prospect has a need before starting your cold call, then the rest of the call becomes much easier.

A Pitch That Is Not Evolving

From the moment you open your mouth on a cold call, you are starting the first stage of customer relationship management. A smooth introduction and strong pitch help to foster durable relationships. If you are constantly failing to create that smooth introduction, then your pitch is not evolving based on customer feedback.

Your pitch has to consist of the basics such as using your full name and asking for permission to present your pitch before you get started. This means you need a very quick but effective one-sentence introduction of your company that will get the prospect interested in hearing the rest of your pitch. You need to make notes on what things work and don't work, and then evolve your pitch based on your findings.

Not Staying Organized and Efficient

Myphoner has plenty of features that will help you to keep your cold calling efforts organized. Our Power Dialer will let you call through your best leads to call at a superior pace, and give you a flexible way to schedule follow-up calls.

Myphoner will let you search your leads to find the precise contact you are looking for, notify you when you need to take action on a contact, and it will also allow you to generate comprehensive reports based on previous calling campaigns and other call options. Being organized in your cold calling efforts enable you to follow up on hot leads and develop cold calling methods that get results.

Not Following Up

Even if you presented an effective pitch, it is easy for your prospects to forget all about you after they hang up the phone. In the days before the internet, cold callers would mail out brochures that often looked like standard junk mail when they arrived on the prospect's desk. Today, you have digital options that make your follow-up more effective.

A good email sent out immediately after your call is an excellent way to follow up. While the conversation is still fresh in your prospects' minds, you can elaborate on the topics that most interested them and try to push things to the next level. Remember to use Myphoner to schedule follow-up phone calls and let you know which leads are due for follow-up calls. If you are not following up with your cold calls, then you are not going to see much success.

The bad news about cold-calling failure is that it is seriously detrimental to your sales pipeline management system. The good news is that anyone can improve their cold-calling by following steps that improve the pitch, the presentation and the follow-up.