Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Greg Klingshirn, Content Marketing Manager at SalesLoft. 

Cold calls are the bread and butter of successful sales development reps. But what about the times you call and don’t get an answer? Leaving a message is a hard starting point to a demo or qualified appointment.

Instead of being dejected when you don’t get an answer, use it to your advantage. When you’re confident in voicemail, prospects that don’t answer can be your silver bullet.

Leave a voicemail to remember with these five tips:

If you’re in sales, a lot of your time is spent on the phone -- outbound prospecting, inbound qualifying, cold calling, you name it. You may have a list of questions you want to ask your prospect, and you may have a roadmap for the direction you want your conversation to go. However, what happens when your prospect doesn’t answer the phone?

You’ll need to leave a voicemail that doesn’t get ignored or deleted immediately. If the average voicemail response rate is 4.8% according to InsideSales, how can you generate enough interest in prospects that they call you back?

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Sean Jones of SalesFusion, business writer with a primary focus on the marketing sector.

In the age of the tweeting refrigerator, salespeople are transitioning. The process of a sale no longer unfolds over just one platform; however in many cases it does involve multiple buyers. Bar the anomaly that is the Girl Scout Cookie, the face of the company is no longer the salesperson. As a result, marketing analytics have taken the front seat in driving sales, opening up a whole new industry of firms offering to find niches for their customer’s product or service, to build and develop online content, and to manage existing consumer bases.

The other day, I encountered one of the rudest and pushiest sales people I’ve ever come across. No, it wasn’t a used car salesman, and no, it wasn’t one of those ladies at the perfume counter who sprays before asking.

Surprisingly, it was someone from a very reputable technology company looking to sell us additional services.

Here’s how the conversation went:

What if I told you the secret to getting cold prospects to always open and even act on your sales emails? 

Here it is: There is no secret. 

The truth is, every prospect is different, so there's no guaranteeing that one best practice will work above all others. What you can do to build trust with cold prospects is be honest and provide real value in every email interaction you have with them. 

That's why this cold sales email template works so well: