Knowing the proper techniques for cold calling can give you those important clients crucial to climbing up the corporate ladder. The right tactics are simple to learn. You need to excel in both the endeavour of choosing your prospects cleverly and captivating them with what they want to listen.
Effectively, cold calling refers to making an unsolicited phone call to an individual or company in an effort of marketing or selling your product. The rate of success depends on several factors ranging from the background research to filter out your prospects to approaching them efficiently on call. Even though the entire process may seem tiresome, you can make it seamless and rewarding by using AtemisCloud solution and following this guideline.
Pre-Call Channeling
The primary filtering of leads is usually done by the marketing team. If you happen to be an outbound team, you will can do it yourself. Our combined CRM and Marketing solution will help you here. There are few questions you need to ask while looking at a potential list of clients to cold call.
- What value does your product hold for the client in question?
- If your product is directed at a large group, does the potential client have the requisite back up to rally his/her colleagues/employees?
- What is the job titles of the client? Is he the right guy to be approached or is there someone better in the establishment with whom you can make first contact?
- What is your client responsible for in the establishment? Does he have a strong employer support?
With regards to all of these questions, the role played by your marketing team is indispensable. With appropriate channeling of personal data and public portfolio, marketing teams are usually well equipped with tackling the lead generating challenges. After the generation of leads, the most important work is filtration. In addition to the above-mentioned questions, the marketing team must also identify the relevance of the industry that the client influences. All of this can be done automatically or with the use of Artificial Intelligence features.
You should work closely with the marketing features such as the target audience during the entire process. Data collected can help you put a potential lead into the right audience and the application will then follow a qualified sales process.
Generating Prospects on Call
After deciding on your target audience for cold calling, you must address a few of the questions that can help you shorten the discussion with your clients while keeping them interested in your product.
- What are the problems facing the company or the client that can be addressed by the implementation of your product?
Being able to discuss some of these problems improves the prospect of winning over the client, as he/she now assumes a common ground of understanding of relevant problems. Instead of plainly marketing your product, consider being a friend to the client and give him useful advice towards how he can solve his problems, with a understanding voice.
- In addition to the description on the sales qualified list, have you done your own research?
Conducting your own research before approaching the client helps you better understand the needs of the client and thereby helps you in better phrasing your lines.
Methods of Cold Calling
Through years of research, several cold calling teams in top-notch companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google have come up with methods that have repeatedly been proven to be effective in terms of persuading clients. Some of the best known ones are listed below.
BANT refers to Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline. The order of the words suggests the order of the nature of the target questions. As a cold calling representative, in accordance to this methodology, you are supposed to inquire upon the budget of the client towards acquiring your product. The next set of questions and deliberations are directed towards knowing the client’s authority and influence in his/her workplace. You are then supposed to understand the client’s needs and where your product fits in the scheme of things. And finally, you need to inquire and understand how the timeline for sales for that establishment would be.
This method has been prevalent over a long time. However, its effectiveness is highly debated today as the prospect of questions directed on budget at the initial phase has high chances of off-putting the client.
CHAMP refers to Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization. The process involves sympathizing with the client in an effort to understanding his problems and concerns. The next step is to inquire about the authority over corporate decision making that your lead has. It is fruitful to proceed only if the client has good authority or is highly influential. Next comes, the important consideration of budget with regards to the consideration as to whether the company or the client can rally for the amount needed to purchase the product. Finally, it is also important to understand as to what priority does your lead associate to the implementation of your product in his/her establishment. This approach is more understanding and supportive towards client concerns and has therefore been more popular among cold calling representatives.
GPCTBA refers to Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget and Authority. In this approach, you are supposed to discuss the clients’ goals and plans up first more like an adviser than a sales person. It inherently assumes that the client has done a good amount of research in products of the kind you are delivering, and therefore needs advice concerning it rather than any descriptive salesman talk. You are then supposed to follow up with inquiries regarding priorities, budget and the potential client’s influence in the organization. This approach has been highly successful in selling specialized products to companies that are looking to implement advanced features, or simply update existing ones. All these techniques are present in AtemisCloud solution through the opportunities qualification process in the call center and the sales force automation.
A Few Additional Tips
- Try to focus your questions on the client’s needs and how your product can fullfil them, instead of bantering on the virtues of your product exclusively.
- Approach your potential clients in a calm and relaxed manner. It is useful to avoid overwhelming the client before he/she can calmly consider what you have put on the table.
- Plan a rough sketch of your questions beforehand and improvise in accordance to the clients’ interests.
After having followed the mentioned tricks and techniques, you will have substantially improved your chances of signing prospective clients. For a defined target audience, you might get 30% of interest (asked for documentation or quotation). On these 30% interested, you might convert over time 1/3 of these prospects. With a qualitative process, you will sign 10% of the filtered audience. Results will naturally improve with your growing level of experience and your adaptation to the customers needs. Confidence, Quality, Responsibility are the 3 values that you might follow in your cold calls to increase your sales, the 3 values of AtemisCloud.
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