Search
Close this search box.

KNOWLEDGE BANK

Is Cold Calling is Right for Your Business?

struggle1 e1534779377991

Social media is all the rage. Inbound and engagement are buzz words and digital and content marketing are seen as essential. Would anyone marketer worth their salt disagree with those sentiments?

It goes without saying that every sales and marketing manager needs to look at the best routes to market to drive lead generation. There are so many options. In the old days, choices were limited. If you had the budget, advertising achieved the exposure you needed. Prospects used direct mail to learn about new service offerings. And cold calls met with much less resistance than they do nowadays. Prospects were happy to agree to a meeting in order to ‘see what’s around’.

How times have changed. With online marketing to the fore, it’s reasonable to question whether cold calling can still be a viable source of new business opportunities. The answer is ‘it depends’. The reality is that no marketing channel is guaranteed to work in every case. Is telemarketing right for your business? Our Top 5 questions below will help you decide if cold calling is right for your business.

1. Do you know the Job Title of the Person that Purchases your Products or Services?

No matter which route to market you use, wastage is a fact of life when it comes to marketing lists. That’s why database cleaning and validation are so important. The more you can sharpen your focus in terms of who buys, the less time will be lost on the phone trying to identify the decision-maker. And time equals money. The better the data quality, the quicker you will reach the buyer and the more opportunities you will deliver.

2. Does the Decision Maker have a Need?

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s often the case that buyers ‘need’ your types of products or services. The problem is that many propositions are commoditized. There are lots of suppliers of similar offerings. Hence, ideally, you’re looking for target prospects that have issues or challenges that can’t be solved by their current suppliers. Also, if you can identify the pain, you’re more likely to prick their interest on the phone. If you can’t, they will probably default to staying where they are. So, get your strategy right and define your proposition in terms of challenges you solve. That’s also compared to your competitors and not simply relating to the services you offer.

3. What’s the Value of Sale?

Cold calling isn’t necessarily a cheap option. Clearly, you can engage call centers that make high volumes of calls at low relative cost. You can go offshore and reduce the cost per call. However, if the calling campaign is targeted at large organizations where you have sophisticated buyers, they won’t respond to low-quality calls. Equally, the higher the value of sales, the more challenging and longer the sales process may be. Therefore, you need quality callers and possibly a large number of calls over a period of time. Thus, it may not end up being a low-cost option. In that case, the value of the sale is key. You need to assess whether the likely gestation period and time to market warrants the time and cost involved in senior-level cold calling. If it does, then a carefully planned and executed cold calling campaign, possibly backed up by other marketing tools, could well be a good option. After all, you don’t want to blow the margin you gain from a new client on the cost of winning the business.

4. Is the Campaign Integrated?

It’s tough to reach senior decision-makers. Therefore, any method you can use to increase hit rates will support effective cold calling. That could be exhibiting at an event, where calls are made to follow up leads from the show, or direct mail or an email campaign where the first calls are to those that make inquiries, click through and open the email. Telemarketing has the capability to amplify the effect of other marketing and the more you can reach prospects wherever they go, the better the chance of telemarketing being an effective part of your lead generation.

5. Are the Callers Competent?

This seems like a silly thing to suggest. Of course, they need to be competent. However, when I run telemarketing training for clients, I often hear cold callers that lack the basic skills to engage with buyers. Your telesales people represent your brand. They are often the first perspective that a buyer gains of your business. Hence, they must have appropriate skills and knowledge to ensure that you get the best results.

If you’d like to know how GSA Business Development can help generate growth for your business or book one of our new business development and marketing strategy workshops, contact us now on 0845 658 8192 or use the form on this site.

Share

NoW you’ve found a Great lead generation Partner

Speak to us about your B2B Lead Generation Requirements

Our appointment setting solutions can help generate growth for your business by delivering you with quality leads. Contact us today on 0330 335 1380 or by using the form below for your free lead generation consultation or visit our FAQ’s page for more information.

telemarketing sucess
Get your free essential guide

Improving telemarketing sucess

These Top 10 Telemarketing Tips are a small part of our comprehensive guide to telemarketing skills which has been developed to help tele-marketers and the companies that employ them. Simply fill in your details below to get instant access.

"*" indicates required fields

Subscription
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.