Cold calling is officially dead in the Covid-19 pandemic for small, medium, or big size business. The main problem with any type of business is that when you try to reach them via the office phone number, a lot of companies now have switched to a home office, so that person cannot be reached anymore via main company switchboard or they office number.
Sales and marketing channels are fragmented, putting customers in the driver’s seat when it comes to who they want to engage nowadays. For that reason before you pick up the phone, think through the following reasons why you should give cold calls the cold shoulder:
1. It Is Impossible To Reach A Person
The Covid-19 pandemic has put everyone under pressure they have likely never experienced before. Due to covid-19, it became almost impossible to reach a person via the main company switchboard, since the majority of people are working from home.
Sales people making their research trying to find the relevant company, their website, looking for the telephone number, trying to find an appropriate person within that company, and then calling and experiencing a redirect.
A redirect is when a representative passes the responsibility by saying “I cannot help you but maybe they can”, “Sorry, that person is working from home, please send an email or try in 3-4 month”. Redirects require sales people to wait and then explain their problem again, a seeming waste of time. Of course, you can ask for their personal phone number, but the operator is not allowed to share this information, so most likely you will end up with nothing.
2. It Is Past Age Strategy
People are more likely to screen phone calls and avoid unknown numbers nowadays. A lot of people refuse to give out direct lines and refer inquiries to email addresses instead. They give the numerous communication options available today.
Cold calling is in the deep freeze. It has become an ineffective, costly, and pointless exercise for nearly every business. So, why do so many businesses still stick to this old age and ineffective practice? Cold calling was working before, but now people have changed and got tired of this. That is why this strategy is a past age strategy and if people moved on, sales representatives should as well.
Businesses better utilize their limited resources to heat up their pipelines. It is not as difficult as you might think, but it does require a break from conventional wisdom and a new look at the relationship between sales and marketing.
3. It Is Annoying and Irritating
Cold calling is challenging for recipients as well as it is emotionally tough for assigned employees too. Everyone on the receiving end of a cold call can understand the annoyance. An employee feels the inconvenience being caused by every call made.
This can quickly turn into burnout and high turnover. Employees who are asked to call everyday feel a drop in productivity and suffer from mental fatigue. They feel that their emotional labor was spent on highly unproductive and boring tasks.
As the world is becoming overloaded by brands because of modern technology, customers are increasingly looking to reputation as a means to sort out their choices. Benevolence is essential in the business environment and cold calls are a great way to tarnish that benevolence. By their nature cold calls are irritating.
Cold calls take the recipient out of their busy day and set them in a temporary alarm. He then thinks, why is someone calling me? Is there a concern I should know? And how does this communication benefit me? Even if you call with something they would likely need, that does not change the first impression of alarm or irritation.
4. It Is A Waste Of Time
According to a wise saying, time is money. That is why small, medium or big sized businesses desperately need to save both. The average sales representative makes eight dials an hour and prospects for over 6 hours to set just one appointment.
Cold calling is a waste of time as an input and success output. The act itself forces the caller to sit through phones ringing, dial tones, voicemail recordings, directory messages, dropped calls and disconnects, and other technical concerns. The success rate of cold calls is an average of 2% which is hardly counted as sales success.
Cold Calls Are Officially Dead! What Is Next?
Marketing strategies in which the business initiates contact with the potential customer are considered as push or outbound strategies. Cold calling is a major example of push or outbound strategies.
The cold calls as a lead generation strategy is not working anymore, so the sales team needs to refocus on other channels such as emails, personal messages, content marketing, and social selling techniques.
If you have been convinced to hang up on your cold calling and ready to implement a new strategy for your business, you should consider Axellerato lead generation strategy next.
Axellerato Lead Generation Strategy
Axellerato lead generation strategy as another lead generation strategy for outbound marketing. Axellerato strategy is an omnichannel strategy where we reach out to the target audience via 3 channels (LinkedIn, Emails, and Social Media Posting) simultaneously and generating a stable flow of new hot leads on a monthly basis.
Most companies provide reach out activities only for a specific channel while Axellerato do it all and simultaneously. Axellerato Lead generation has been the most effective among other social selling techniques and showed tremendous results to clients from any industry, accelerating their marketing and sales results.
This is more than just lead generation. With this approach besides newly generated leads you will get additional benefits also:
- It improves your brand’s credibility
- It extends your professional network
- It promotes your blog post, webinar, and other useful content
- It also educates and nurtures 2nd priority leads i.e., Uninterested Prospects
- It sources and engages top talent
This lead generation strategy supercharge your sales pipeline with new leads. They do all the hard lifting of reaching out and starting a conversation with your ideal potential customer. Just continue the conversation, qualified the lead, and close new deals.
Other Alternative for B2B Sales
Some sales people hardly ever make cold calls. They have developed other prospecting activities that can produce the B2B sales they need without having to spend long hours on the phone. If that sounds good to you, you will need to put in the time developing alternative prospecting channels so that you are getting enough leads from those sources to make cold calling needless.
Previously we talked about Axellerato lead generation strategy. Here we will talk about inbound marketing as an alternative. When you come across the term inbound marketing, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
- Is it another selling tactic?
- Is it another marketing trick?
It is natural for you to feel so if you do. The reality is that inbound marketing is neither of the two.
- It is in fact what your customers expect
- It is actually what your business needs
It is a marketing paradigm for a crowded space where brands are pumping money in getting their message across the faces of as many people as possible while boasting about the copious amounts of reach they are getting using their paid campaigns.
Even though you see inbound marketing is different. It is not boastful but the opposite. It is modest and trustworthy. In a situation where inbound marketing is correctly implemented, your business generates leads using trust and relevance as the biggest factor.
In other words:
- Your customers will find you when they need you.
- You do not have to find your customers when you need them to spend.
You still leverage conversations to improve the sale with inbound marketing but in a different way. The calls come inbound to you contrasted with having to dial-up lists of uninterested people just to find the one that might be.
Inbound marketing pulls warm leads into your sales process through your blog, website, social media, or other channels. It gives you the chance to spend more of your time with people who are interested in your products and services. There are several reasons inbound marketing is an alternative method to outbound strategy:
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It Drives More Qualified Leads
Inbound leads are proven to be more qualified than leads obtained from cold calling. When you do a cold call to build your B2B sales pipeline, the sales representative is responsible for moving the prospect throughout the entire buying cycle on one call. From initial awareness to consideration and then finally to a decision. This highly inefficient tactic burnouts your list leaving your prospects more enthusiastic to get you off the phone than to switch to the meeting you just booked with them.
Inbound marketing attracts your potential buyer to your website and uses content to pull them into your sales and marketing process. By using marketing automation tools you can develop B2B leads with valuable, timely content until they are ready to buy. When small or medium-sized businesses use marketing automation to develop prospects they experience an increase in qualified leads.
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It Saves Time
There are many valuable selling hours in the day. You would have to make 50 calls a day just to set an appointment, much less a new customer based on 2% conversion, If you are like most small or medium-sized businesses you need to find more efficient ways to do more with less.
By using inbound methods to bring hot leads you will spend more time talking to prospects that are ready to buy. Let your inbound marketing process develop those leads that are not quite ready to have a personal conversation. You get valuable hours back in your day instead of chasing cold leads.
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It Saves Money
If you look at the costs to staff an outbound sales team, get the targeted call list, and mash those up with the conversion rates into a customer you are left with an inefficient way to grow sales in this digital world. It is easy to see why cold calling is dead by contrasting the cost of outbound sales to the budget you need to get found online and drive inbound marketing leads.
When you build out an effective inbound strategy there is some initial work upfront such as creating your customer personas, creating email marketing campaigns, building a website, and developing content that is associated with your buyer’s greatest challenges. Once you produce the assets for your inbound plan then it only becomes a matter of testing the right ways to discover which ones drive the most leads at the best cost per lead.
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It Creates Better Communication
Cold calling is a one-way street that focuses on what you want and how you can get the prospect on the other end of the phone to just say yes. When you leverage inbound marketing to engage with your prospects you create a two-way communication stream. You might even call it a conversation.
Your business delivers valuable content through professional networks such as LinkedIn, social media channels such as Twitter or Facebook, and even through your blog with inbound marketing. By doing this, you have a chance to build a relationship with your potential customers early in the sales process and in sales, relationships win.
To sum up…!!!
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Your customers find you when they need you with inbound marketing
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You do not have to find your customers when you need them to spend
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The pull strategies are better than push strategies
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Customers want content not ads
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Build trust by offering valuable content
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Create content for every single stage of the buyer’s journey
So, here is the bottom line: Sales have changed dramatically with the digital advances of the past decade. There are new ways to get in touch with a prospect before dialing their phone number. Take advantage of them.
So before you spend valuable sales time making ineffective cold calls, give inbound marketing a shot. But you need to take into consideration that it is a long run and to expect results within the first 3 months would be a delusion.
However, every sales method has its time and place. If you are still using cold calls as part of your sales strategy, do not panic. Instead, examine Axellerato Lead Generation to get quick results. It is the best option because it gives more than just new leads.