Does cold calling work for B2B businesses in 2023 – B2B cold calling is still a hot topic in 2023. It’s still very useful to reach out to prospects and get some leads for your company.
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Does Cold Calling Work for B2B Businesses in 2023?
But it’s not just to send out a couple of emails every day and call the day. B2B cold calling is more evolved than that, and it needs the right skills and knowledge to do the job. Let’s look at what cold calling is and how you can make it work in 2023.
What is cold calling?
Cold calling is defined as the process of selling a product to a prospect who hasn’t made any purchases from your company before or to whom the sales team hasn’t reached out before. And chances are prospects are not familiar with your product or have shown no interest even before you reached out to them.
Cold calling is completely different from warm selling, where leads may have subscribed to your newsletter, downloaded a white paper, signed up for a free trial, or filled in a lead capture form.
In the early stages, cold calling songs is a difficult task. With not much information available for the prospects in the B2B sales funnel, it’s hard to open the sales pitch; salespeople have to quickly find a way to connect with the prospects and initiate further conversation.
But it doesn’t mean cold calling is not valid, and it still works. 82% of leads have agreed to meet with the sales reps who reached out to them from cold calling.
Why does cold calling show more results in B2B than B2C?
Lately, 40% of US B2B sales teams have moved to contactless sales. This means that businesses focus more on selling their products online than going door-to-door, knocking on the door, and selling stuff.
By implementing this new method, 57% of B2B sales teams are thinking of doing more sales phone calls, with 39% looking to use more cold outreach in the process.
Now, the question arises: why does B2B cold calling shows more success than B2C cold calling?
In B2C, most sales are made based on emotions, while that’s not the case in B2B. The important difference between B2B and B2C selling is the feelings of decision-makers.
While selling products in the B2C market, the sales reps don’t know anything about the customers, so they make guesses based on the emotions the customers are feeling. Here, the sales team focuses on impulse buying behavior, and their results often vary.
Moreover, there’s never a right time to contact the customers, for some or the other reasons they are busy which makes it more difficult to pitch anything to them.
In the case of B2B, it all depends upon the logic. Here, people ask different questions — what benefits will the product provide us or how much it costs and then decide.
While cold calling in the B2B sector, sales reps have a fair chance of creating a personalized pitch, and they can research the company and figure out how their product can solve the prospect’s issue.
Doing your research beforehand and creating a personalized pitch makes it easier to reach out to prospects and educate them that their problems can be solved within budget.
How to improve B2B cold calling?
Now, B2B cold calling is on a roll; let’s take a look at some of the tips on how you can improve your cold calling skills.
Research your prospects
Research is one of the primary elements in calling a leads database that makes it easier to conduct than B2C cold calling.
Though you may not find any major problems, you would be able to determine whether your product is a good fit or not. This is one of the reasons where 74% of B2B sales reps use LinkedIn to build rapport and research their prospects before reaching out to them.
Sales reps can use primary research to study the company and understand its needs and wants. It can also help to determine what kind of problems your product can solve.
You can also use this time to decide who will be the ideal leader to reach out to.
It’s the number game: make more number of phone calls
It’s the hard truth that during cold calling, you will face more no and yeses. However, to increase the chance of success, to increase software sales if you are in SaaS business you will have to increase the number of cold calls.
It has been seen that to get a successful sales rep needs to make at least 60 calls every day. Yet, an average sales rep manages to do 35 calls every day, which halves their chances of success.
Cold call at right times
Sending cold emails at the right timing is also an important part of achieving success. About 76% of the salespeople know that engaging with the prospect at the right time is another skill that needs to be mastered to increase the conversation’s chance.
It becomes more important in the case of B2B cold calling. B2B professionals remain busy at specific times of the day and are not available to talk at those times. Like, you can’t be able to reach out to them during the holidays or lunchtime. Hence, it’s important to figure out the right time for cold calling.
Usually, the best time to contact leads is between 10, and 11:30 am and after 1:30 pm. This means it’s good to contact them after the morning rush and after people get back from lunch.
Figure out the prospect’s needs
As mentioned above, doing primary research about your prospects makes it easy to understand them and break the ice. You can also study from the wider global perspective to put your lead into consideration.
About 88% of salespeople mention that it’s important to figure out the customer’s needs in the current business situation. This is why top sales performers are more likely to check out the national and local news.
The other way to figure out prospects’ needs is to study warm leads. And study about the leads who reached out to the company in one way or the other.
Again, top sales performers are more likely to study the customer’s past conversations with the company.
But it doesn’t mean that you should start looking for companies that reached out to you. Otherwise, you should try using Google Analytics or any other paid tool, for example, Leadfeeder, to find out who is visiting your website.
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You will find that someone from your cold emailing list might have visited your website in the past. This makes it easy to prioritize these leads first and find out what B2B content they were looking for to anticipate their needs.
Before cold calling, do cold emailing first.
Cold calling a prospect doesn’t always sound like a good idea, and there are chances that you call them at a bad time. You can try cold email outreach to avoid these situations, which is less risky than cold calling.
With a strategically designed cold email campaign, you can reach out to the leads and invite them to a meeting at a suitable time.
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It also makes it easier to grow your email list than to find correct phone numbers. Plenty of Chrome extensions, like reply.io and Hunter.io, can pull out email addresses from LinkedIn profiles.
But also keep in mind that, In B2B, most emails are being opened at 3 pm. Hence, avoid the morning and night times.
Keep your cold emails short and to the point.
Your first B2B sales call may or may not be successful with the prospect.
The goal of the first sales call is not to sell the product but to gauge interest and see if the prospect is interested in buying your product. If the answer is yes, you can take a step towards scheduling the demo or conducting more calls with the decision-makers.
Whatever the case is, try to keep the initial call brief. Studies have shown that the initial call should be less than 15 minutes, and calls that last longer than this tend to be less successful.
Learn the art of speaking
The top performers’ sales reps know when they should talk and when they remain silent. Often, sales reps know how to use silence to their benefit, but they never let it overpower the conversation.
Studies have shown that the best cold calls have a silent period for no more than 8-10% during the call.
But this is not it. Silence shouldn’t be the only thing you need to learn, and you should also know exactly when you should let the prospects talk without interrupting them.
It has been seen that salespeople should not speak longer than 12 seconds before letting the prospects interrupt.
Conclusion
B2B cold calling is still working, and it’s more popular now because of the remote work culture. By learning some essential cold calling tips, you can power your cold calling technique, and you would be able to get success without much problem and scale your business consistently.