Across all the different types of businesses that call phone numbers, what do you think is the most effective way to contact potential customers? Is it a robo-call, a ringless voicemail, a text, a phone call, or something else?
If you picked the good, old-fashioned cold call, you are right. In fact cold calling still has a higher response rate than any of those other contact methods.
What’s Your Contact Goal?
According to Salesforce, telephone calls to a prospect list deliver an 8.21% return. Email and direct mail, by comparison, deliver a measly .003–.001% return. But, it’s more than just the numbers that count. What really matters why you’re contacting someone. What is the outcome you want? What’s your goal?
Lot’s of people cringe at the thought of making cold calls. It brings up images of hard-selling characters like the Wolf of Wall Street. Nobody wants to be that guy. But if your business wants to contact people in order to introduce yourself and your service, build a relationship with a potential customer, or explain something complex, then cold calling is going to be your most successful sales tactic.
Cold Calling Works
While emailing, sending a text, dropping a voicemail, sending direct mail, or placing an ad might be more comfortable for you, they are not sales tactics that will start a conversation with a potential customer. But, cold calling will.
Don’t get me wrong, all those other sales and marketing methods can be successful and can have a place in your overall marketing mix. But they are add-ons, intros, and follow-ups to most effective method, phone calls.
How to Do Cold Calling Right
There are plenty of resources and advice available on how to do cold calling. In today’s climate an aggressive, spammy approach is clearly a bad idea. Instead, you should consider an approach that prioritizes positivity and relationship-building versus trying to sell people over the phone.
Here’s an blog post from the Copper CMS blog that offers some good dos and don’ts. Such as:
- Don’t: Freestyle your calls. Use a call script.
- Do: Let your personality shine through the phone.
- Don’t: Keep prospects on the phone for too long.
- Do: Track your time and call results.
How to Cold Call People Search Phone Numbers
Using BellesLink, you have two ways to call the phone numbers you get from your people searches, Place a Call or the Contact Dialer. Since we’re talking about cold calling a list of numbers, the Contact Dialer is the best tool for the job.
The Contact Dialer
The BellesLink Contact Dialer is a single-line preview dialer that is included free with a Pro or Business subscription and it’s made for cold calling a list of customers.
Being a preview dialer means you can see your complete calling list during the session and you control the pace of calls. You can skip any number and you can pause between calls to make notes. You can also save your progress and come back to the session later.
Being a single-line means that only one call is active at a time. The next call begins when you hang up the current call. The dialer is fully-compliant with Federal Communication Commission, FCC, regulations.
Multi-line, power dialers, and predictive dialers such as Mojo are being scrutinized by the FCC for their similarities to non-compliant robo calls because they dial numbers in the background. That might sound good, but it’s not. It’s a bad experience for the person called. We believe making good contacts is more important than making lots of calls.
Best Practice Features
The Contact Dialer has all the features for the cold calling best practices mention in the dos and don’t list above. Best of all, when you use BellesLink’s Batch Search, you can send a new calling list, with all your phone numbers, straight to the Contact Dialer with just a click.
- Drop Messages
- When a call goes to voicemail you can drop a pre-recorded message.
- Call Scripts
- Add your own call script to keep your message on point.
- Import Call Lists
- Upload a spreadsheet of names and numbers to create a new call list.
- Call Recording
- Call recording is free and a valuable way to assure call quality.
- Calling Stats
- Get valuable statistics on the performance of your call session.
- Export to a Spreadsheet
- Export all your call results and notes to a .CSV spreadsheet.
- Call Quality
- Our Real-Time Web Communication system delivers clear conversations.
Getting Started with Cold Calling
After looking at when and why cold calls are the best choice to contact customers, you might still be wondering if it will work for you.
Maybe it’s time to see for yourself.
The Contact Dialer is a great tool for calling people search phone numbers. It’s free with every BellesLink Pro Plan and Business Plan subscription. The dialer uses the phone minutes that are included with the subscriptions. If you need more minutes, you can buy them anytime.
If you already have a BellesLink Basic Plan you can upgrade easily. Just click the upgrade button on your BellesLink dashboard.
The nature of cold calling has changed and we see that as a huge positive. Businesses are still investing time on the phone and there’s definitely a reason for that.
With the help of the tips above and a dialer like BellesLink, you can get started on your cold calling efforts knowing the best practices that will deliver more conversations with more customers.