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How Data and Automation Eliminates Repetitive Cold Calling Tasks
Though effective, cold calling has a repetitive and demanding nature. Find out how you can eliminate time-consuming tasks using data and automation.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Cold calling remains one of the more effective sales techniques for some industries. By developing a foolproof method and constantly finding ways to improve the results of your efforts, you can successfully convert high-ticket leads into customers.
But the problem with cold calling is its repetitive and demanding nature. Sales reps have to make multiple calls in a day to connect with a potential buyer. Even then, there’s a good chance that the relatively cold prospect will pass on your offer.
Now, imagine you and your reps doing this day in and out. Even if you observe the best cold calling practices, the effort your team puts into making calls may not be worth the risk.
However, there is a way for you to pursue cold calling for your business and minimize the time and resources spent on it.
This post discusses how you can improve the productivity of your cold calling efforts with the help of automation and data analysis. This way, you can benefit from the advantages that cold calling brings to the table and do away with its disadvantages.
Contents
1. Identify Issues in your cold calling workflow
Just like any other tactic out there, automation is not a band-aid that you can slap on your sales and marketing strategies and make the pain go away.
To successfully implement it in your organization, you must first know how to do it, and it all begins with understanding the bottlenecks in your cold calling process.
A typical cold calling workflow looks like this:
- Organically build and qualify your list of prospects to reach out via phone call.
- Conduct thorough research on each prospect and learn more about their demographics, psychographics, and firmographics.
- Use gathered information on each prospect and draft a custom cold call script targeting their pain points.
- Secure an appointment with decision-makers in the organization to pitch your business ideas to them.
In this case, the goal of cold calling is to set up an appointment with prospects to close the deal. Refer to past data and determine what is causing your cold calls to stagnate. From here, you will know how to implement data and sales automation properly in your efforts.
For instance, if you can’t secure meetings with your prospect, there might be a problem with your sales pitch approach or data analysis. Or, if you can’t find the proper cold leads to call, you probably don’t have the right lead generation strategy in place.
By stepping back and looking at everything holistically, you should be able to pinpoint specific problems in your cold calls.
2. Use marketing automation tools
If you’re having problems collecting and segregating cold leads, consider changing your tools — and this advice applies whether you’re working at a massive corporate or a bootstrapped non-profit: find marketing automation tools to assist with cold calling and all your challenging tasks.
Even organizations with a strong do-it-yourself ethic have to realize that you can’t do everything manually.
Using marketing automation software can greatly help to reduce time-consuming and repetitive tasks and free up more time for your sales reps to focus on cold calling.
3. Make warmer calls with the help of your CRM
The secret with cold calling is they’re not really ‘cold calls‘ per se.
As mentioned, you must know the demographics and psychographics of the prospects you’ll reach out to. The information you have about them gives you an idea of how to talk to them, what to say, and why you should tell them.
If done correctly, you can successfully secure an appointment with them; if not convert them into customers out of the gate.
And to help you organize your leads, you need a CRM sales automation tool. It is designed to do all of the above and even warm them up before making the call. This way, you don’t pre-empt prospects with a call out of nowhere. By building relationships with them using a CRM tool, you can breed familiarity with them regarding your brand, thus making the process of closing them into customers much easier.
There are many ways you can use CRM as part of your cold calling campaign or marketing strategy as a whole. Tag prospects you wish to call as part of your campaign from your CRM dashboard. Now, if you’re running an ad campaign, you can show the tagged prospects your ads on social media that target one of their major pain points. With constant exposure to your ad, they may click on the link and book a call with one of your representatives.
You can also connect your CRM with your email campaign. Suppose you’re sending drip campaigns to your email list using your chosen email platform. In that case, you can set from your CRM who will receive the emails, what will happen if they click (or didn’t click) on the email, and follow-up emails they’ll receive for the corresponding actions they made in the initial email.
Concerning cold calling, you can create a campaign goal to remind prospects that one of your sales reps will reach out to them if your leads opened and clicked on the link in your email.
4. Use progressive dialers
The majority of the issues with your cold calling process are with the dialing process.
When making calls manually, expect to encounter busy lines, voice machines, and disconnected numbers. You want to at least talk to a live person, if not the actual person you want to reach out with your call. And this won’t happen unless you get the right number of prospects and call them at the right time, which rarely happens.
As a result, you spend more time dealing with these inconveniences than talking to your leads on the phone.
A progressive dialer solves this problem by automatically dialing your prospects’ numbers. Once it connects with a live person on the other line, the dialer transfers the call to one of your sales representatives. This enables you and your team to focus on the actual calls that will make your business money.
Another great thing about a progressive dialer is setting the times to make calls to your prospects. By optimizing the best times to cold call, you can increase the chances of getting through to your leads.
For example, by using Novocall’s outbound dialer, you can dial several phone numbers at once and manage your cold leads as efficiently as possible.
And to help monitor your process, you can use its call recording feature to track the performance of your representatives and uncover insights from conversations that you can use on upcoming calls.
5. Automate customer service
With an outbound strategy in place, consider building an inbound marketing strategy as well.
For instance, when prospects visit your website, they must see the pertinent information about your services to help make an informed decision on whether to engage with your business or not. If so, they can reach out to you via your chatbot or your live chat widget that your sales reps should reply to.
Even better, you can use Novocall’s click-to-call feature on your site. It works similarly to live chat, but instead of exchanging messages with your leads, you can get them to schedule a call with you in the future.
Based on the data gathered from the widget, you can adequately route leads to the appropriate sales rep based on their availability, language, and other factors.
Also, prospects can browse through your knowledge base that answers the most common questions leads and even customers have about your organization.
Setting up these campaigns as part of your automated customer support campaign enables you to close prospects without calling them.
Since consumers take time to research brands by searching for them online and visiting their websites, you want to immediately make an impact with them through your customer support. Think of this as a complement to your outbound efforts—it allows you to cover both bases and generate as many conversions and sales as possible.
Conclusion
As with most marketing tactics, cold calling can get cumbersome, especially if you spend more time with menial tasks than tasks that impact your business.
But by optimizing your process by gathering information efficiently and putting the boring tasks on autopilot, you and your team can focus on the things that matter; mainly, sweet-talking your prospects into becoming customers.
Hopefully, the tips above shed light on how you can utilize automation and data gathering and analysis properly in your cold calling campaigns moving forward.
Get started with Novocall’s outbound dialer to automate your cold calling campaigns today!
Christopher Jan Benitez
Christopher is a freelance writer for hire who specializes in the digital marketing field. His work has been published on SEO and affiliate marketing-specific niches.
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