Cold calling is not dead. Rather, the old strategy that required salespeople to make endless calls every day is dead. It was a common belief that more sales calls equaled more sales closed, which may have been true in a very general sense, but was certainly not the most efficient way to do things. In today’s sales world, wasting time on endless sales calls and blindly trusting the purchased prospect data, puts ROI at risk.
The cold truth is that cold calls are ineffective 90.9% of the time. If you aren’t armed with the right prospect data, cold calling is even more ineffective and uncomfortable.
A successful cold call is not as simple as it appears to be. In spite of persistent efforts, if your cold calling campaigns fail to provide an average success rate then you need to sit back and identify the cause of that failure.
Making sales calls without researching the prospect data simply won’t produce results – and that’s especially true when using purchased data that can contain risky contact quality. Poor quality data impacts every aspect of a business – especially sales and marketing.
Keeping this in mind, most inside sales teams spend about 60% of their time researching the prospects with only a little time left over to make sales calls – cold calls with a high possibility of rejection.
High-quality prospect data is the fuel for any successful sales team. Without it, cold calling will fall flat leaving your prospects unreachable.
Imagine you are able to come into contact with an appropriate decision-maker through a sales call. Closing a deal or being rejected depends solely on the conversion strategy you employ and a lack of a positive approach increases the possibility of failure.
The primary reason why a sales call fails is the low-level conversion rate of prospects, all tied to Irregular planning and poorly prioritized cold calls.
Sales calls never work without follow-up and negligence in the follow-up process after an initial call has been made can leave a bad impression on those prospects whereas regular follow-ups through both emails and calls project an air of reliability.
Strategy building using trends.
Bad data costs businesses in the U.S. more than $611 billion every year. Relying on bad data for sales and marketing initiatives costs organizations big time. Even with a CRM system in place, 75% of leads are not followed up with and are left to wither on the vine.
Thinking three moves ahead is important in any game. This skill doesn’t come without making trend analysis a vital part of the sales planning process. More than 45% of companies invest above 6% of their sales budgets on activities that support their sales goals, and organizations that have started using artificial intelligence tools to generate leads have seen much better results – AI can keep leads warm for months.
To capture value from big data, companies need to proactively mine for that sales growth. A key to getting this done is spending the time to think about how new technology, regulations, economic and demographics affect the opportunities for sales now and in the future.
Micro market strategies rely heavily on analytics, making it important that the sales team on the ground doesn’t get bogged down by detail, using the information in the most effective way possible.
Prospecting strategy management
The sales leaders that get things right make comparatively better decisions by uncovering insights into sales and dealing only with opportunities that increase sales growth – Salesforce has an incredible amount of data at their fingertips these days compared to previous years and they use analytics to decide not only the best opportunities to pursue but also the ones which help them minimize risk.
But even amongst fast-growing companies, only 53% claim to be extremely or moderately using analytics to make decisions.
Large organizations can use big data analytics to better understand target segments to identify leads. They use artificial intelligence and automation to market to different segments using different platforms.
Most of the successful business organizations have 40% of their tasks automated and lead generation is a prime example of that.
The only way to improve sales performance is to improve the B2B prospect data. Partnering with a market intelligence solution to audit and analyze the existing database and highlight incomplete and inaccurate prospect data, constantly working with them fixes any holes or inconsistencies constantly in your sales database and translating that data into something actionable for the sales team.
