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49% of buyers still prefer the cold call as the first point of contact. Out of which, 57% of C-level prospects still prefer to be contacted via the phone. The cold call is not dead.
Yet, I’m sure by now you would have heard about all the horror stories from your cold-call-making sales reps. The long hours they need to spend dialing phone numbers, the lack of structure in the process, and the rude remarks.
All these do not mean that cold calling is ineffective. It just means that it is not easy to get it right. Creating an efficient and effective outbound calling process requires you to take into account many factors.
With that said, let’s take a look at how you can improve the efficiency of your outbound center’s efficiency.
Contents
Automate the contact verification process
Before we talk about improving the efficiency of the actual dialing process, let’s first talk about the contact list.
Marketing teams typically hand a list of contacts over to the sales teams. And these contacts belong to marketing qualified leads (MQL) that were captured by your marketing team’s inbound strategy.
Once sales teams have obtained these contacts, they begin dialing on their phones to conduct their cold outreach.
However, sales reps need to manually scan through long lists of contacts to identify duplicate numbers. To make matters worse, some invalid numbers, like those caused by typing errors can only be identified during calls. This makes the number verification process very difficult and inefficient.
Novocall’s outbound call software helps you to automatically identify all invalid numbers. This eliminates the need for sales teams to manually filter through long list of contacts just to find those that are contactable.
Use auto dialers instead of manual dialers
Many companies out there rely on manual dialing to reach out to prospects and this is simply too slow.
Outbound call software like Novocall’s autodialer allows sales reps to upload long lists of contacts into the software. Novocall will then automatically dial every single contact on the list.
The automation of the entire process helps sales teams save a lot of time that could have been wasted on mundane and tedious tasks.
Give yourself some time before the next call
While there are many outbound call center software out there, not all of them allow users to customize their dialing experience. This is important as it gives users the ability to customize things such as the amount of time between calls.
Giving yourself sufficient time between calls helps with 2 things:
- Tidy up the notes you took during the previous call
- Mentally prepare yourself for the next one
These will help sales rep get everything they need ready for the next call and help ensure that it will be more productive and efficient.
Differentiate between cold, warm and hot leads
Not all leads are made equal. Warm and hot leads are more receptive to sales calls as they know more about your company, while cold leads are less receptive.
With that in mind, your sales outreach calls must be tailored to the specific type of leads you are reaching out to. You need to be very clear on who you are going to talk to on the phone. Based on the type of lead you want to reach out to, you need to choose the relevant type of call — cold, warm, or hot calls.
Each type of call comes with its own method to conduct a sales pitch that is most suited for a particular type of lead. When there is a lead-call type fit, your sales calls will go more smoothly.
Prepare a script before starting a call
As the good’ol saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
One of the most important things about outbound calling is to be prepared. Sales reps should prepare scripts before entering each call. That’s not to say that they need to memorize the text word-for-word.
It just means that they need to come up with a solid skeleton of how the conversation will go for each scenario.
It will help even more if your sales reps could come prepared with industry-specific scripts such as those for insurance agents and real estate agents.
Conclusion
That’s all folks! I hope you found this short list helpful.
As I’ve mentioned before, cold calling can be a long and tedious process. But it doesn’t have to be.
By automating steps wherever possible and entering each conversation with a clear idea of who you are talking to, you can definitely improve the efficiency of your outbound call centers.
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Nigel Seah
Nigel is a Digital Marketing Executive at Novocall where he specializes in SEO. Prior to this, he had written for several SaaS companies including Workstream and the now defunct Hatchme. In his free time, he engages in strength training and is a lover of languages.
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