While you may think simply raising the volume of your outbound calls can help you beat these odds, this just isn’t true. More calls means more wasted time, and the money you lose while your sales team is tied up can make the effort a net negative. With an average of 55% of cold calls not being picked up, updating your cold-calling strategy is essential to increasing your connection and conversion rate (source: Selling Signals). Instead of fighting a battle of electronic attrition, you can equip your team with exactly what they need to make more active, productive calls.
Here are 3 tools to integrate into your outbound sales strategy that can drastically increase your cold calling connection rate.
Tool #1: Local Presence
Local presence dialing can result in a massive boost for your connection rate while also helping ensure more sales per active call. By letting your outbound sales team utilize local area codes, local presence dialing makes each call far more likely to be answered. Call recipients will often ignore unknown or toll-free numbers; with a local area code, your reps can establish a connection with a customer before they even pick up the phone.
There are several benefits to using a local presence dialer, including:
- Avoiding Spam Caller Lists: Getting your company number placed on a spam caller list can be the death nail for effective outbound sales; with new spam blocking features flagging out-of-state numbers, you may get blocked before you even have a fair chance to speak with a potential customer. With local presence dialing, you can avoid these lists by using trusted local area codes.
- Decrease the Chance of Call-Avoidance: Consumers are far more likely to avoid numbers they don’t recognize, and with the rise in robo-calling and spam call centers, this trend has created a difficult situation for legitimate cold-calling. With local presence dialing, you won’t have to attempt to connect from an unknown area code, with call recipients almost 30 times more likely to pick up the phone from an area code they recognize.
- Boost Your Cold-Calling Effectiveness: If a call doesn’t connect successfully, your rep won’t have the chance to speak with a customer and read your well-crafted sales script. By increasing connection rates, local presence dialing can optimize your outbound sales strategy and make the entire process far more efficient.
Tool #2: Voicemail Drop
By allowing your team to record sales scripts and “drop” them into a potential customer’s inbox, voicemail drop software is a great way to ensure that every message is efficient and error-free. A large percentage of cold calling scripts can end up as a recorded message in an inbox, with an estimated 80% of calls going to voicemail. This means that a well-crafted recording may be your best chance at making a sale, and your reps usually won’t get a second chance.
There are several benefits to using voicemail drop software, including:
- Saving Time and Money: More calls means higher labor costs, and if a connection isn’t made, you’ll lose valuable time that could be spent on active conversations. With voicemail drop, your sales reps can move on to the next call while your sales script is still recording. This allows them to focus on raising their connection rate, while still having a significant chance of converting through a potential customer’s voicemail.
- Boosting the Morale of Your Team: Repeating the same script over and over can begin to wear down your sales team, and will likely result in mistakes being made on a number of the recordings. With voicemail drop, this process is taken care of at the click of a button, allowing them to reduce repetition and dedicate more energy to active calls.
- Ensuring Your Script is Perfectly Delivered: Every time a sales script is repeated is one more chance for a mistake to be made. Instead of risking a lost sale due to error, you can make sure that your script is 100% mistake-free. Voicemail drop even lets you record multiple messages, so your team can adjust their strategy for different demographics.
Tool #3: CRM Integration
Your customer relationship management tools, or CRMs, are essential for forming beneficial relationships between your company and current (or potential) consumers. For the same reason, CRM integration is important for optimizing your outbound sales strategy and keeping those customers happy. The right integration will allow you to seamlessly combine your dialer with many popular CRMs, including:
- Hubspot
- Pipedrive
- Salesforce
- Zoho
That way, the data you collect through business interactions and software utilization can give you a better picture of your strategic efficacy. This, combined with streamlined features like click-to-call, will reduce the amount of time wasted switching between tools. If you want to keep your sales team moving at a healthy pace, and keep the customers they connect with happy, proper CRM integration is a must-have.
Where Can I Find These Tools?
Getting all of these different programs individually can be prohibitively expensive, most likely requiring you to get multiple subscriptions that can start to hurt your bottom line. Your best option is to go with a service that offers all of them in one package deal, like Kixie.
Kixie offers everything that outbound sales teams need to improve cold calling, including local presence dialing, voicemail drop, and full CRM integration. You’ll have access to over 50,000 local area codes and unlimited script recordings, so you can ensure that your connection rate will rise exponentially in a short period of time. With dozens of other features all rolled together for a small monthly fee, Kixie is the key to fast profits and explosive customer growth.
Cold calling is a vital part of any good outbound sales strategy, but without the right tools, you will lose out on a huge percentage of profit. Let us help your company reach its full potential; start your free trial today!
