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Avoid Sales Burnout: Lessons Learned from Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller's 1949 play ‘“Death of a Salesman” is about what happens when a salesman, Willy Loman, fails to accept...
By: Joe Cronin on Oct 11, 2022 10:30:00 AM
I once worked for a boss (he’s a common type) who required that the company inside sales team should each make a weekly quota of cold calls, but rolled his eyes when they asked for training.
To him, cold calling seemed like a simple proposition: get a list of leads from marketing, call them one-by-one, and when someone answers give them a scripted pitch. Right?
Um, wrong.
There was a reason his sales team hated making those cold calls. They didn’t work. They turned off the very prospects that should have been carefully contacted and nurtured afterwards. The boss asked for a box to be checked: cold calls. How many meetings, and how many sales happened this way? You can guess.
All inside sales representatives need cold calling skills in their repertoire.
Whether your sales team is a large one with designated SDRs, BDRs, Account Executives, and specialists – or a small one of only one or two people doing full cycle sales – cold calling can be an effective outbound selling strategy. So, how to do it the right way?
Multi-Channel to Maximize Your Cold Calling – A calling-only approach doesn’t work anymore. An email-only approach won’t work for long. Same for social media outreach. Combine all channels to systematically use phone calls, emails, and social touches so that they complement each other. Otherwise, you risk not reaching a decision maker simply because you chose the wrong channel.
How to do this strategically? Incorporate a Cadence, which allows you to plan your outbound communications sales strategy so that once the dialing starts, your team will always know what to do next. After the first call, an email – already drafted and ready to personalize – comes next. Include a video. Another call. Build the relationship.
Limit Your Pre-Call Research - In our B2B world, it typically takes 24+ cold call dials to get one live person to pick up and speak to you. If you spend 5 minutes doing immediate pre-call research on every call, that’s potentially 110 minutes of research time for a single prospect conversation. If you have a large addressable market, you just can’t afford to waste time researching one prospect when you could be talking to another.
Upload your prospect list into your Dialing software, such as Koncert’s powerful AI Parallel Dialer. Don’t waste time making manual dials on a phone that doesn’t sync with your CRM. In a single dialing session, reach out to more than 150 prospects, which will average 12 answered calls. Your time is spent selling, not dialing.
But wait – doesn’t that mean that the one person who picks up will be confronted with a salesperson fumbling around, not prepared? No. We’ll get to this in a moment.
There are a lot of competitors in the Dialing technology space now. Here are a few key functionalities and elements to consider before committing your sales team to one:
Success in cold calling often comes down to attitude. People know when you’re reading from a script. Enter a dialing session with enthusiasm for what you’re going to learn once a person answers your call. That’s right. Expect to learn. Of course, your goal is to get a meeting to demo your product.
When you and that prospect first encounter each other on the phone call, don’t try to wow them with how deep you’ve already gone into their LinkedIn profile, even though the profile, or your CRM info, will pop up on your screen the instant they answer (if you are using Koncert). Ask them if it’s an OK time to chat and then ask them about their job, their needs, and their pain points.
In spite of bosses who imagine it’s simple, cold calling is a hard-won skill. The more you speak to prospects, the better you will become. So, use a dialing platform to have more conversations.
Whatever your sales workflow, Koncert offers a variety of dialers to improve efficiency. And, Koncert dialers all come bundled with Cadence software built in. Koncert is the only dialer software that is endorsed by both Salesforce and Hubspot and included on their app exchanges; salespeople do not need to leave their CRM to start or work within a dialing session.
Koncert has been in the Dialing and Sales Engagement business for more than 10 years and our platforms are stable and proven. Try a demo today and see how your cold calling program can start showing outstanding ROI.
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