Expensive CRMs, AI, and sales enablement tools are great if your company can afford them. But what if you can’t? Too often, we see small businesses and entrepreneurs struggle to properly allocate the resources required for successful campaigns.
While these tools are definitely helpful in managing your sales processes, that’s not always the route you need to take. Below are some simple tips you and your sales team can take to increase their conversion rates and set more qualified appointments – without the expensive tech stack.
Reevaluate Your Ideal Customer Profile
If you are looking to maximize your cold call results, the first thing you need to do is reevaluate your ideal client profile (ICP). When times are a little dysfunctional (like they have been for the past few years) we need to be extra aware of the market and the purpose of our offering so we can craft messaging that resonates with them the most.
Your ideal client profile or ICP can change over time based on the specific challenges they face in their role, market competition, and new industry titles. Reevaluating your ICP can help you create a solid foundation for the rest of your lead-generation processes. Be sure to constantly measure for best improvement.
As a reminder, ICPs should include information about the company’s location, size, budget, or annual revenue, along with more contextual information that can be used to create a better buyer persona profile.
- Make a list of your best current and past customers:
- Look at the return on investment
- Conduct a survey to learn more
- Look for patterns
- Look at their company size, niche, and industry:
- What makes them different?
- What do they have in common?
- Are they high-ticket or low-ticket?
- What are the root causes of their challenges?
- What other tools, products, or services are they currently using?
- How long have they been in business?
- Note their growth rates
- Note their growth rates
- What are some challenges they face?
- Mark these as areas of opportunity – prioritize the challenges by which ones would help your business the most
- What offerings may help these challenges specifically?
Detailing these challenges is important so you can focus on how your potential prospects can benefit from your offering. Using information from your current clients will help you build, compare, and determine whether they are the best fit.
Once that’s done, you can hone in on the stakeholders and decision-makers you want to contact. You will need this information later when building your cold calling lists and preparing your scripts.
Build a Better Cold Calling List
Are you spending a lot of time wondering whether you have the right contact information for your prospects? Especially with harder-to-source contacts or niche markets, it is important to not waste time calling incorrect numbers.
One of the biggest issues with cold calling is having bad or outdated contact info. It is extremely important to remain compliant with the General Data Protect Regulation law when cold calling. If you are using a CRM or managing your own spreadsheets, take the time to ensure all lead information is up-to-date when building your prospecting lists.
Make sure your prospecting list contains all of the basic information needed to make contact, plus any information that is relevant to understanding their needs and challenges better. We’ve found that the strongest lists contain these data points of personal and company information.
When it comes to company information, we often prefer to collect multiple contacts for the same account, depending on who is the decision-maker and who else has influence in the purchase decision. If this is needed, be sure to fill out the information for all contacts.
Developing a solid prospecting list has the potential to help you attract more customers and increase revenue. But collecting contact information individually can get tedious. So, now that you know what information is needed, how do you find it?
If you are having issues researching your contact lists, an outsourcing company can help you create one for you. It will be cheaper than having them cold call for you, but you have the best data possible moving forward.
Linkedin Sales Navigator is a great place to start, especially if you are already using the platform. There you can create specific lead lists, send connection requests, and search posts from ICPs, industry influencers, and your overall market. When you use the platform to build trust and create meaningful connections, you tend to be more successful than those who connect and pitch right away.
You can also research companies like Crunchbase– a tool for sales prospecting for B2B. Features include detailed filters to find the right companies, contact information, and email templates to make outreach easier. There is Crunchbase Free, the basic version, which provides firmographic information about companies. The paid subscription, which monitors companies and gives you more detailed information, currently starts at $29/mon billed annually.
Another option for building your prospecting list is to use email, re-targeting, social media pages, or chatbots on your website to help you cross-check your contact information. We talk more about these methods and our favorite prospecting tools for lead generation here.
Utilize Cold and Warm Email Strategies
Cold and warm emailing can act as a great (cheap) complement to your cold calling campaigns, giving you the opportunity to increase response rates and build trust through a series of different touchpoints.
Try sending an email before, after, or even during a B2B cold call to solidify that connection, share your message, and create a stronger relationship with your prospect. This also allows you to test the outbound method channel that works the best within your target market. (Just be sure you aren’t bombarding them with messages.)
Email tools can help you:
- segment your messaging
- build brand awareness
- nurture prospects
- connect on the prospects’ time
- and easily scale at low costs
When looking for a lower-cost email tool, think about the features and goals of your emails. The ability to segment and personalize emails at scale is essential. Look for email tools that include bulk email personalization, email scheduling, and auto follow-ups.
And while it’s impossible to accurately predict how your email will perform, A/B testing and dashboard metric options let you easily test and compare the details that can help maximize success rates.
Along with the functions above, it’s important to watch your bounce rates. GMass and Snovi.io are two highly-rated email platforms with free versions of their software available online. They also include a free trial in their paid plans. Their easy-to-use dashboards can help you better manage your email processes.
Look for Free (or Cheap) Chrome Browser Extensions
You don’t need expensive technology to improve your cold call conversations. There are plenty of free or low-cost browser extensions you can use to help you prepare your lead generation and cold calling strategies.
From social media to email, prospecting lists, and more… Here are some of our top free chrome extensions. (In no particular order.)
Buffer helps you better engage with your industry news on your social media platforms. It allows you to automatically post articles you find while browsing – directly to social media or to your social media queue for future scheduling.
HubSpot CRM connects to Gmail to help you uncover more leads in less time, connect with those leads, and close deals faster while managing all your contacts in one central database. And it’s free to get started.
RightInbox has all you need: email reminders, tracking, notes, and more to maximize your Gmail and spend less time in your inbox. RightInbox allows you to send emails later, email tracking, recurring emails, email notes, email reminders, follow-up emails, templates, and merge your mail. Plus, it can integrate with most CRMs.
Taco’s chrome extension can consolidate and streamline tasks from over 40 other productivity services, including Asana, Basecamp, GitHub, Gmail, OmniFocus, Trello, Zendesk, and more. It lists all of your tasks across these platforms on Chrome’s “new tab” page, allowing you to see them all in one place at the click of a button. This is great for salespeople looking to prioritize tasks and keep deadlines.
Voila Norbert has a simple but powerful email finder chrome extension with better accuracy and ease of use than any other tool on the market. Build lists of prospects automatically while surfing LinkedIn or other websites. Create integrations with 13 different apps including Zapier, MailShake, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and more.
There are a bunch of free browsers out there you can use to increase your productivity and lead generation results. Find all the categories here on the main Chrome dashboard.
Take a Sales or Business Course
One cheaper way to maximize your cold call results is by taking a cold call course from a trusted industry professional. A cold call training program can help you make adjustments to your cold call campaign that will increase your appointment setting results.
In today’s global business landscape, it is almost impossible to improve your organization’s sales capabilities without a consistent sales methodology. A sales methodology course introduces a system of principles and best practices that translate into seller actions. It explains the “how” and the “what” behind the process.
It can improve each phase of your sales process in a practical, repeatable, and scalable way. This provides you with a clear understanding of your customer’s needs and a roadmap for how to navigate through each stage.
Social media channels like Linkedin and YouTube house many free resources that can put you in the right mindset and get you better prepared for making your cold calls. Always consider your source before fully committing to one practice over another.
Here at Superhuman Prospecting, we follow the H2H Sales Methodology, or the Human-to-Human selling method, founded by our CEO, Ryan Pereus. The H2H Sales Scripts™ Course is designed to make you a better cold caller and salesperson by teaching you techniques that build trust with prospects, which leads to better results.
There are also plenty of other channels offering a variety of videos to increase your skills and business knowledge. Y Combinator, Talks at Google, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Big Think are some of the current trending channels for sales and business leaders.
Be sure to take advantage of any free academic resources – Open Library, Untools, Stanford eCorner, and Coursera are all popular websites for business courses and instruction.
Get a Professional Cold Call Script
If you are looking to maximize your cold call results, one of the easiest ways is to use a proven script used by cold calling teams. Cold calling is your chance to build a relationship through direct one-on-one interaction and your cold call script is like the playbook. They provide a consistent message that can be measured and improved.
Many salespeople get into difficulties when the person on the other end of the line begins to exert dominance over the conversation. Being prepared with the right language can turn your call around and lead your prospect to the desired next steps.
When your sales team is prepared and already has an idea of what they’re going to say, they open the door for stronger engagement with potential clients. This will give them more confidence on the call and the prospect, subconsciously or not, will feel it too. If your cold call script doesn’t use the right language or doesn’t correspond to your target market, you will diminish your results.
“We’re at a disadvantage because our role is to “sell,” and the customer knows it, says H2H Founder Ryan Pereus. “Our behaviors have to clearly show our openness and collaboration, without necessarily agreeing with the customer. To overcome all of these obstacles, you need to have the proper messaging to remain clear, consistent, and trustworthy.”
If you are looking for custom sales scripts, we would love to talk with you more about how we can help. H2H Sales Scripts™ has a consistent strategy in all channels whether it be a cold conversation over the phone, a gatekeeper conversation, an email copy, a sales presentation or demo, a sales closing, or a variety of other sales conversational scenarios.
H2H isn’t just about the first sale, it’s about always selling customer satisfaction. This allows you to push for high results while still maintaining a strong human-to-human connection.
Build Referral Programs & Partnerships
If you are looking to maximize your lead generation results, you might want to consider building a referral program or providing an incentive for sharing your business with other professionals.
People trust recommendations from their friends, family, and colleagues far more than any messaging that comes straight from your brand. When a customer hears about something from someone they already know, it’s much more likely that their recommendation will be taken seriously and lead to a conversion.
For individuals, referrals offer an opportunity to earn rewards, such as discounts or cash bonuses, for referring new customers. And for businesses, referral networks provide a cost-effective way to acquire new customers. Since referral networking requires little investment, it can drive higher ROI than other lead gen options.
You need to be active when it comes to referrals, meaning you can’t wait for them to come in – you need to take an active role in building your network. You must be sure that your business is worth sharing. You can easily harm your reputation and your sales pipeline if it’s not. Providing a quality offering and stellar customer service is critical to getting quality referrals.
It’s helpful to think about the different kinds of rewards that might appeal to your audience and how you will use them for motivation. What might be the most enticing reward – cashback? Credits? Gift cards? Building a bond with these top referral partners will result in quality referral networks that last longer and give you more valuable leads.
Find an Outsourcing Partner
Your cold calling challenges can be solved with a great outsourcing partner. They act as an extension of your sales team, providing you with a proven strategy and detailed campaign analysis – without the internal hiring, training, and technology costs. When you have more freedom in your business, you can focus on closing and higher ROI activities.
Sales outsourcing can help with any sales activity that moves your prospects down your sales funnel. That’s why it is critical for your business to consider which activities to perform or delegate to your partner. Most outsourced SDR companies offer a variety of packages to suit the needs of different budgets.
Know how you want to be represented in the marketplace and be sure to choose a partner that aligns with your company values and vision. Do a search for reviews and check out their content. Most times, you can get a good idea of their brand and the values they stand for by what they are publishing. Social media, like Linkedin profiles, can also help you assess whether they are the right fit for your company.
Every dial is an important conversation and a potential opportunity for your business. When performed poorly, it can do more harm than good.
