5 hacks for successful cold calling!

Everyone knows about cold calling. Day in and day out, we get calls from call centers trying to sell so one or the other products. In the majority of the cases, we will not pick the call if True Caller shows the call as SPAM or we just cut the calling within seconds. Cold calling is an irritating job for both the caller as well as to the receiver. Mainly because we do not know the context of the customer, we do not know the role of the customer we call and we do not know whether the customer at the receiving end is interested in our product or not. I like the quote by Aron Ross on cold calling.

“It’s like going for coffee with someone on your first date, and you are leaning in for the kiss before you have said hello.” by Aron oss in the book 'Predictable Revenue'.

For a subscription business, the cold calls can not be aiming in the dark. When the customer can access and experience your product, then calling can be an act of Inbound Sales activity ( yes you heard it correct, it is Inbound) wherein calling will be done only to the prospective, interested customers and not to everyone. in SaaS business, referrals, and word of mouth marketing ( in social media) can bring wonder than cold calling. These days, customers check online before buying any product. SaaS companies should focus on content and inbound activities than the blind cold calling. In the era of social media, blind cold calling is a waste of time and energy.

The following steps can be followed to win customers.

1) Defining Customer Persona

Identify your broad target market segment and define the market parameters carefully. Further, you can dig down deep and identify your target customers in the defined market segment. Think from a customer's angle and define how your solution is going to solve his problem. Define the buyer persona with respect to age, sex, demography, profession, Income, and behavior, etc.

2) Use social media to reach out to the potential customers

Check which social media your target customers use most. Is it TikTok? Linkedin or Facebook? or YouTube? Based on your target audience, communicate about your solution, and start the campaigning.

3) Outbound Efforts

Make a list of potential customers and send them tailor-made emails. It is better to have a monitoring mechanism for your sent mails. Check how many prospects responded to your mails.

4) Provide educational and entertaining content to the customers.

Provide ebooks and useful content to the customers, write blogs on the topics related to your industry, and conduct regular webinars. It is better to build useful content on the broad topics related to your industry so that you can create a content pool on the related subtopics. For example, if we take the example of Grammarly, Grammarly content is more related to 'writing better'. Grammarly has created a pillar page which contains blogs and ebooks on writing.

Interested customers may want to give their mail id, contact details, company name, etc voluntarily.

5) Make a list of interested buyers.

Now, it is time to build a list of customers who have responded to your outbound activities. These are the interested customers and by calling them you are saving time and money. Chances of conversion of calling the interested customers are also high as compared to blind cold calling.

5) Call interested customers.

Try to sell the dream, not the product features. Try to sell the benefits not the features of the product. Now calling can be more effective and contextual. You can focus on value creation for the customers.

SaaS companies have to focus more on Customer Success so that happy customers will write a better opinion about your products on social media. Happy customers can be your best marketing people and generate referrals as well.