Measuring the Success of Cold Outreach

By

Iffah Aina

December 18, 2023

There is a saying that goes “if you do what’s easy, your life will be hard. However, if you do what’s hard, your life will be easy.”, and cold calling isn’t easy. Just the mere mention of it can have the most seasoned sales representatives on edge. The practice certainly requires a special discipline and process but above all the courage to keep going when the going gets tough.  

It’s not a secret that the sales world keeps getting more challenging and having a breakthrough hardly ever is achieved overnight. With that said, there is no such thing as failure in doing cold calls. There are only lessons to be learned and improved upon. That is why measuring your success is important because anything that can be measured, can be managed and maintained.  

What is a cold call outreach? It’s basically sales professionals reaching out to customers that have no prior connection or showed interest in the company. Some easy examples of cold reach are LinkedIn, social media, email, phone, etc.

To effectively manage your cold call outreach, you need to know which sales campaigns and operations need to be tracked. Monitoring is crucial in understanding the sales process and the success rate of the cold call. With the key drivers such as phone campaigns or emails set in place, you can then measure the success and conversion rate. From that, you are able to identify which method proves to be more effective. This can save you a lot of time and trouble as long as you keep measuring.  

The next thing you should do is to set targets, more specifically, target ROAS. ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) is the average conversion value you’d like to get for each dollar you spend on ads. So the higher the target, the more limited the amount of traffic your ads may receive. This is also important to be monitored as it will indicate which campaign works the best and which should be scaled to maximise the results.  

It can be hard to monitor with so many channels involved, therefore, it is crucial to document your sales process. It’s good to consistently document the sales process from beginning to end to learn and improve on. More often than not, people blame the cold outreach instead of the sales process. As an example, when you are faced with an objection regarding pricing. This doesn’t mean you need to change the pricing, it just means that you need to figure out an effective way to showcase the quality of the products hence the pricing.  

In cold calling, there is a very heavy emphasis on the methods and campaigns but don’t get lost in the data. However important that may be, you need to remember that cold calls are about trust and building relationships that bring quality to the table. Therefore, connecting and focusing on helping solve their problems are the main goal. The best thing you can do is by listening intently and responding to have quality interactions and successful leads.