3 Ways To Scale Your Cold Calling Efforts

If you’ve been in sales long enough, you know there are plenty of ways to cold call smarter, but what about faster?

Connecting with as many quality leads as possible can help you convert more prospects into clients. However, increasing call volume can be a challenge. If you put too much pressure on your sales team to make more calls, they’re likely to burn out quickly or make avoidable errors, resulting in more time and money spent than earned.

Fortunately, you can scale your cold calling efforts without sacrificing your sales quota or the well-being of employees. Here are three approaches you should consider.

1. Rethink your onboarding process and offer ongoing training to boost productivity

New employees need time to understand a company’s culture and their role. This onboarding process is a crucial part of their — and your — success. For salespeople, make sure you look beyond the simple new-hire checklist and provide ample support. Clearly, this will include a comprehensive introductory training program for your sales team.

But you might also work with your administrative staff or HR department to create thorough sales-specific plans and documentation. These should explain your company’s mission, establish time-based goals, and demonstrate expectations.

Ongoing sales training is another way to keep the calls rolling. Marketing and sales professionals need updated on- and off-site training (depending on their area of operation) to stay relevant. We’re all now working in a fast-paced world in which sales and marketing methods are increasingly complex (although savvy operators are turning to time-saving software tools to ease the process—see point 3). Ongoing training helps employees feel like they’re a valued part of a company, which boosts morale and increases productivity.

2. Take advantage of predictive dialers to reduce downtime

Think about how much time it takes someone on your sales team to dial the phone number of a business lead. Those valuable minutes add up — time that could be spent on more profitable efforts, such as developing communication skills or converting a lead. By automating tedious tasks, you’re freeing up this precious time.

Predictive dialers estimate how many sales agents will be available to take a call once connected to a business lead. The software typically has an algorithm that predicts when an agent will be free and then dials the number for them. It’s an intuitive product that can increase the number of people an agent speaks to during the day. By minimizing the time between active calls, your sales team connects with more leads, and, if your call list is well-curated (see below), has a higher chance of closing more deals.

3. Use a lead prospecting tool to fill your call list with high-quality leads

Ultimately, scaling your outbound call volume comes down to having well-trained staff and eliminating their time-draining, low-value tasks. For example, manually putting together a call list with names and numbers of potential clients can be an intensive process. Not only is it time-consuming, but many decision-makers aren’t willing to share their direct numbers.

This presents two challenges for your sales team. The first is making sure they’re dialing the business prospects most likely to find your product relevant and want to hear about it. The second is getting the right contact information for the people who have purchasing decision power within those companies.

With BizLeads — a cutting-edge and affordable B2B prospecting tool recently launched by American City Business Journals — you can free your salespeople from sifting through names and numbers and redirect their energy to honing communication skills, building relationships, and closing deals.

BizLeads’ database of information on more than 30 million companies and 80 million business professionals is already supercharging the cold calling process for sales departments across the country. It lets you carry out wide-ranging searches for prospects and their contact details using categories relevant to your desired industry, job title, and location. BizLeads also contains up to 63 million validated direct emails for decision-makers.

Empower your sales team to scale their outreach by using this information to ensure their efforts are precise and efficient.

Schedule a BizLeads demo to discover how you can equip your sales team with the data and information needed to maximize results.