December 18, 2023
What was once a “dial and smile” telemarketing technique that carried a bad reputation for being overly scripted to having zero customer centricity, is now causing a debate for business owners that are eager to market their business in the most effective ways. Is cold calling even relevant in the era of ultraconnectivity and social media?
To be fair, if you’re having a busy day and get an unscheduled call with a 2-minute script on the other end of the line, then they’d better be seriously impressive to hypothetically sweep you off your feet.
Cold calling is a telemarketing technique in which a salesperson contacts potential individuals that has no prior information on the products or services offered. This is one of the oldest tools of a salesman, and when approached correctly, it can be highly effective as you can close the gap between the market and consumers.
It genuinely does sound medieval for these modern times, but look at this this way. When a small business is on the rise, they lack resources and market research. Oftentimes they would make the mistake of following marketing strategies meant for others and see little to no success in their business.
In this prevalence of social media marketing, cold calling holds its ground for it provides something social media lacks; human connection. It’s easy to schedule an online Instagram post or send out an email to a potential client but it’s even easier to get drowned in social media’s ever-changing algorithms and get ignored or thrown into the spam folder. So short answer, cold calling is highly effective. However, you would need to adapt your cold calling strategies to the current market situations. Always remember, modern problems require modern solutions!
But why do we say cold calling is effective? Simple, because it allows you to have two-way communication in real time. With the objective of keeping the listener to stay on the phone longer than 5 seconds, you have the chance to listen to their problems and identify their pain points. From there, you can evaluate if this is a worthy lead and if you are equipped to solve their problems. It also provides the opportunity to receive an instant response and feedback from your target market. This cost-effective method lets you evaluate the leads and future approaches. It also enables you to connect and tap into new markets that were probably harder to have gained through other ways.
You may argue that cold calling is exhaustive, daunting and even downright excruciating but it also gives you control over the situation. Rather than viewing it as a race just keep in mind that it is actually a marathon. The whole point is not about how many phone calls you make in a day but more so on capturing the buyer’s attention in less than 30 seconds.
A study by RAIN Group suggested that over half of senior -level buyers prefer to be contacted via the phone and that over 80% consumers set up meetings with salespersons that reach out to them first. It was also pointed out that cold calling was far more effective than email campaigns. With these positive numbers to boot, we hope that it soothes your doubts and motivates you to do what’s best for your business. Cold calling isn’t leaving the sales game just yet.
