Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Cold Calling 101: The Monthly Campaign

  

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A critical component to the success of any teleprospecting rep is a healthy regiment of cold calling.  While qualifying inbound activity is also essential to hitting your goals, it is the cold calling activity that maintains the deep qualifying skills and habits of highly effective reps.  For this reason, you should be running unique monthly cold calling campaigns with your reps. 
 
Here are the three steps we take when getting our monthly cold call campaigns started:
 
1.  Get Specific - Take some time with your rep to define a special target for their monthly cold calling.  Keep it to a single vertical if possible, organizations of a similar size, and contacts with similar titles.  Once you've defined that, create a custom message for that particular target audience.  Taking time to do this makes your rep more focused and in touch with the names that he/she is calling up on their screen all day.  They've taken some of their valuable time to think more deeply about their prospects which manifests itself in sharper focus once they get them live. 
 
2.  The perfect list - Understand that this monthly cold calling campaign isn't going to occupy all of your reps time, so you don't have to buy them 10,000 contacts to support it.  We recommend a list of contacts no bigger than 600 per rep.  That 600 should be spread across 200 unique companies with 3 contacts per company being called at one time.  Take special care to get the most accurate list possible.  A great cold calling campaign is fast and accurate.  Tripping over bad data only slows your momentum. 
 
3.  Schedule your calls - Have your rep(s) block out specific times in the morning and afternoon for their cold calling.  We've found that the optimal times for reaching cold prospects live are between 8:30am-10am and 4:30pm-5:30pm (in the prospect's time zone).  Scheduling the cold calling maximizes this fact as well as gives you the piece of mind that your cold calls are going out on time.  It also ensures that your team is making its calls within the same time period thus creating that great buzz in the office that always increases productivity.
 
This is a proactive we use within our organization.  How do you manage your cold calling campaigns?