At one point in time, the cold call was exactly that: cold.
When you made the cold call, you knew nothing about the person on the other end of the line. If you’ve never had to do this before, I can’t begin to explain how difficult it could be to close a sale.
But everything’s changed.
With all of the information that’s available online, you never have to go into a truly “cold” pitch again.
This article reviews how cold outreach and cold calling has changed over the years, what you can do to increase your odds of closing a lead, and where the space is headed in the not-so-distant future.
Resources Available to You
We live in a time where you have more access to information than you ever had before.
It’s a marketer’s dream.
In the past, you had to flip through your index of phone numbers and sell to people that you had never met and knew nothing about.
Needless to say, conversion rates on straight cold calls were not great.
But now, you have several weapons on hand.
While it can still be a bit uncomfortable to call someone you don’t know, before cold pitching to leads, you can learn a lot more about them you than ever could before.
Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Google analytics, or any other type of social media / analytics, you can find out where your leads have lived, who they have worked for, their type of employment/income, what they like to do in their free time, and many other things that might help you generate conversation.
How to Use These Tools
The most important thing to understand about researching people and companies via social media is that these accounts are all about building relationships first.
If you focus too much on sales in your cold outreach, people see right through you.
That’s why I recommend that, no matter what information that you find, it’s important to not come across as intrusive or creepy. By this, I mean that you shouldn’t get on the phone with someone and make specific comments about what they post on social media.
Yikes.
With that said, you can still come up with a ton of useful information without scaring off your cold outreach prospects.
Businesses and organizations are using social media at every single level, and here are a few ways that you can leverage these accounts to your advantage:
-By reading a company’s blog, you can learn a lot about their culture and perspective on their niche.
-When you visit a company’s Facebook page, there are a lot of telling signs about their personality and brand voice.
-Checking out their Twitter, you can find out what kind of charities and organizations they are working with.
-If your lead has a video channel, you can even gain insight into what the company’s physical environment is like.
-Depending on what the company or lead is tweeting about, you may even be able to gain insight into their preferred brands and buying signals.
The Future of Cold Outreach
The future of cold prospecting is that it will essentially cease to be cold in the traditional sense.
Customers will be looking for more personalization than ever before, and marketers will be targeting leads with much more precision.
In 2016 alone, 79% of marketers polled said that they are currently using sales analytics technology or are planning to use it in the near future.
Sales software helps marketers and sales reps recognize patterns that ultimately improve their performance.
Between sales analytics software, more targeted outreach, and more personalized call/emails, businesses can increase their conversion rates significantly.
There is a seemingly endless amount of lead prospecting tools available to marketers right now, and traditional cold outreach just doesn’t have the conversion rate that more informed outreach has today.
If you liked this article, learn how one Sapper client gave up cold calling altogether and managed to generate $1 million+ in pipeline.
