The Seven Rules Of Cold Calling [INFOGRAPHIC]

Do you need cold calling tips to get more clients? When is the best time to cold call? Learn the cold calling rules for cold calling success here!

RELATED: Cold Calling the CEO – 7 Tips to Get Your Foot in the Founder’s Door

In this article:

1. Cold Calling Tips for Successful Lead Generation
2. Cold Calling Is Dead: Does Cold Calling Work Today?
3. Cold Calling Rules Today
4. Cold Calling Motivation for Sales Teams: What Sales Managers Can Do to Motivate Reps
5. Free eBook: The Art of Cold Calling and the Science of Contact Ratios

Seven Rules of Cold Calling and Responding to Leads

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Cold Calling Tips for Successful Lead Generation

When is the best time to cold call potential clients?

When it comes to cold calling a prospect, there are certain rules that should always be followed. Many of these rules came into existence due to the Lead Response Management Research Study, a breakthrough report that changed the industry.

Cold Calling Definition: The act of calling a potential customer whom you’ve never had contact with before.

The response time, or how quickly you call someone back, should be a no-brainer, but unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Later on, the same study was repeated, on a much larger scale, and similar results were found.

Below are the seven rules of cold calling and responding to leads.

1. Immediacy

The best thing you can do is contact a lead within five minutes of them submitting a web form to present your product or service. If a sales rep doesn’t respond fast enough within 30 minutes, then the chances of contact and qualifying the lead drop 100 times.

You want to make sure that you are there right when a prospect’s interest in your product or service is still fresh. That way, you will be able to lead them further along the sales funnel faster.

2. Persistency

Another one of the cold calling techniques sales managers and salespeople should follow is this strategy: don’t give up!

Sales reps need to make between six and nine phone calls before they stop. Sadly, the majority of sales reps out there are only making one to two calls per lead before calling it quits.

The contact ratio is between 10% and 11%, and with that in mind, the sales rep who is making only one or two calls is only going to reach 10% to 20% of the leads. A word of advice for cold callers to increase your chance of getting positive results — be patient and persistent!

3. Optimize

Sometimes, calling people back isn’t the best idea.

Depending on your company and your customers, some times are better than others to call at. Try to figure out when it’s a good time to start calling prospects, especially if you’re targeting business owners.

They usually have a very slim window of opportunity for cold calling. Finding out the best time to cold call can really help your sales process.

4. Time of Day

If there’s one thing that can hinder you, it’s calling at the wrong time.

Some of the best times to call are between 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., assuming you’re calling within your time zone (if not, then adjust for where you’re calling). Try to determine when it’s a bad time for your prospective customer and never call during that time!

This is why it’s important to do your research about a prospect before you even start to call them. That way, you don’t waste your time trying to connect with an unavailable prospect.

5. Day of Week

Want to know when the best day of the week is to call? Guess what, it’s not Tuesday (it’s actually the worst!).

Both Wednesday and Thursday are some of the best days to call people, believe it or not! However, it might be different for your own company, so you’ll just have to run some tests and find out which days of the week are the best and worst for you to be making calls.

You can simply collect data by running a trial yourself and seeing the days when you’re making more contact with prospects. After all, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cold calling.

RELATED: A Guide To Cold Calling Basics

6. Get Direct Dial Numbers

The best way to reach someone is if you have the phone number that is best to reach them at. By making sure your sales reps have mastered this technique, you’ll find that their ability to contact leads will go up!

Sometimes, the numbers you get aren’t for the decision maker of the organization. If this is the case, it might take a longer time to actually get somewhere with that company.

Knowing who you’re calling and the role they play in the organization is useful information that’ll help you qualify leads.

7. Local Presence

This is a technology tool rather than one of the other cold calling techniques.

Local presence is when you are calling leads from one side of the country to the other, and yet, on the lead’s phone, they see a local phone number. If you want your lead to pick up when you call, an area code that shares their area code will increase the chances of them answering.

XANT‘s tool, Playbooks, offers Global Local Presence to calls placed to the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Cold Calling Is Dead: Does Cold Calling Work Today?

Some articles these days have headlines such as “Cold Calling is Dead,” or the like. Among the reasons they include to justify this are:

• Some claim the younger generation don’t want to answer unsolicited calls, especially from a number they’re not familiar with. This makes it hard to cold call.
• Another reason cited for the “demise” of cold calling is because the caller doesn’t want to make what they’re scared might be viewed as “nuisance calls.”

If the reps themselves don’t want to do the cold sales calls and no one wants to receive calls unsolicited, then is cold calling really dead? Not quite.

Instead, it’s safer to say that cold calling has changed.

Cold Calling Rules Today

How has cold calling changed? Well, it’s simply moved one step down the sales process.

• Unwanted telemarketing calls are no longer your best bet for connecting with prospects. Sales professionals need to learn that sales prospecting won’t go any better for them if they continue going for cold calls as the first step in their sales process.
• Instead of an outright cold call, you should “warm” things up a bit first. So, the more modern take of a cold call is a warm call.
• Before you connect with a prospect through a call, you should establish an initial connection with them first. You can do this either through a cold email or even through a message on social media.

Cold Calling Motivation for Sales Teams: What Sales Managers Can Do to Motivate Reps

Aside from changing how you normally do your cold calling campaign by moving it a little further down the sales process, sales leaders should also motivate your sales team to make more of these calls.

Since a lot of newer sales reps might be more hesitant of making calls, you can encourage them to do so in many ways.

• You can do it yourself, then show them how to do it. Demonstrate how you’d do it, which will give them an idea of what they should be doing when it’s them on the line. Some reps just need a little bit of guidance to give their confidence a boost.
• Another way to motivate sales reps is to make more cold calls is by showing them the statistics that cold calling still works. Once you’ve provided them with evidence that cold calling still works, they’ll feel more inclined to do it, too.
• Sharing the value of research to them. Reps may feel demotivated to do cold calling since they’re scared of rejection or bad conversations. However, if they do their research on the lead or company first, it’ll be easier for them to develop a rapport with the person on the other end of the line.

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Check out the video below to learn more about 5 rules of cold calling and responding to leads:

So when is the best time to cold call? I’m sure there are other ways out there to increase the success with cold calling leads and prospects, and what I have shared with you are just some of them.

I hope this guide to cold calling helps you understand how to make the most of your cold calling efforts so that you can successfully generate leads and get more conversions.

Free eBook: The Art of Cold Calling and the Science of Contact Ratios

Gain access to cold calling best practices from industry experts Ken Krogue and Kraig Kleeman.

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What are some of the ways you have found that have increased your own success? Share your own cold calling tips with us in the comments section below!

Up Next:

• Cold Calling is NOT Dead: How We Built 1.1M in Pipeline Using the Phone
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 22, 2013, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.