Cold Calling in 2021: Does It Still Work? How to Make It Better?

Cold Calling is one of the oldest and most frustrating marketing tactics. Picking a phone and calling leads in the hope of turning them into paying clients — annoys 62% of sales reps.

But, there’s another side to the story. Around 69% of buyers accept calls from sales reps. Moreover, 82% of buyers accept a meeting with a salesperson after the first call.

It doesn’t matter how annoying you find cold calling — it has some powerful benefits. Many marketers even consider cold calling better than cold emailing as they can receive prompt responses with it.

However, the benefits of cold calling can’t be derived by randomly calling people from phone directories. Cold calling in 2021, needs CRM software support to provide desired results.

So, to know what cold calling is and how CRM helps your cold calling tactics, let’s start reading!

What is Cold Calling?

Cold Calling terminology is mostly miss understood. Many sales reps find it wrong and unethical. They consider the cold calling time-wasting marketing method.

To be honest, cold calling is the best marketing method for B2B and B2C business models. But, there’s a condition, it should be strategically planned. When businesses don’t plan, monitor, and analyze cold calls, they can’t derive desired results out of it.

At TrackOlap, when we asked different business organizations what cold calling is and does calling still works in 2021, we received missed reactions. Many businesses don't know the correct meaning of cold calling, so they don’t believe that it is still good in 2021. And, some that know what cold calling is— don’t follow the right method to practice it. In short, no one exactly knows what cold calling is?

So, let us help you understand what is cold calling by breaking the concept into two parts:

No Prior Contact Cold Calling

When you make a call to no intent person, it is called no prior contact cold calling. No intent person is who hasn’t ever visited your site, subscribe to your newsletters, or expressed interest in your product.

It’s called a “cold” call because they don’t know you’re calling. They aren’t prepared to receive a call from you. Therefore, these calls can go in any direction — good or bad.

The main purpose of these calls is to introduce yourself and know whether you have potential leads on the other side or not. You don’t have to aggressively sell your product in these calls. You just need to plant a seed in their mind.

Prior Contact Cold Calling

People who have before used your services are likely to use it again in the future as well. With this intent, sales reps make calls to their previous or existing customers.

So, they aren’t exactly cold calls because people already know your brand. But they aren’t expecting your call either — so we can call it mild cold calling.

In these calls, you have to inquire about their experiences with your company and take their feedback. Alongside, you can introduce your other products and provide personalized deals to them. These calls have high success rates.

Overall, when your cold calling intent and plan are clear, you can take full leverage from it.

Does Cold Calling Still Work in 2021?

Now, the million dollars question — does cold calling still work in 2021?

YES, It does. When you have a strategic cold calling plan and tools, it offers the best outcome. Now, don’t trust mere words and check out a few benefits of cold calling:

Helps in Acquiring New Customers

If a person doesn’t know about your services, there’s likely any chance they ever visit your site. With a cold call, you can introduce your product and share its benefits with prospective customers. Once people know about your brand, it will spike their interest and encourage them to visit your website. And, you might end with a new customer.

Practice Sales Pitch

You can train your sales reps to refine their sales pitch with cold calling. When sales reps are put in real-situations, they can better sharpen their sales pitches rather than practicing in front of a mirror. Moreover, sales representatives can record their cold calls and evaluate ways to make their sales pitch better.

Make a Human Connection

Cold calling helps in establishing a human connection and gauging valuable information in real-time. In cold emails, you can’t receive quick responses from your potential clients. Moreover, many people check marketing emails, and they immediately delete them without reading the content. It can be prevented in calling as you can get a response in real-time. Additionally, you can answer their questions on the spot and get feedback in return.

Useful in Creating Personalised Marketing Campaigns

Cold calling is the best method to get feedback from customers on the spot. You don’t have to wait for people to open your email and then fill out a survey form to receive feedback. On-call, you can ask relevant questions from leads and record their response for later analysis.

Using the call data, marketing and sales teams can create personalized marketing deals to attract new customers. When you offer custom deals to your leads based on real-time data, you can effortlessly convert them into customers.

Improved Customer Care Services

With real-time feedback data, you can’t only create personalized marketing solutions but also improve your customer care service. Based on your previous customers' complaints, you can ensure that your customer service team always offers the best services.

Moreover, managers can cold call existing customers to get feedback on their staff's behavior. If customers are unsatisfied with your employees' services, you can assure customers on the call and take action on customers' complaints.

How to Make your Cold Calling Methods Better in 2021?

41% of sales representatives say the phone is their most valuable tool for work – along with CRM software, email, and social media prospecting. So, the best way to use cold calling marketing methods in 2021 is to align them with CRM software.

Yep, when you integrate calls with your CRM tool, you can derive maximum ROI. That’s why we have created a CRM solution with a call integration option so our clients can take full leverage from the cold calling.

Now, don’t trust our words and check how CRM can help your cold calling strategies:

Instantly Connect with Leads

If you have already populated your CRM platform with targeted leads, you can smartly make a cold call within your CRM. You can analyze your leads using multiple analytical reports and create an intelligent calling system.

You can categorize your targeted leads into hot, warm, and cold sections from the CRM tool. Hot leads can be converted into customers quickly, so you should call them first. With CRM call integration, you can target hot leads before they turn cold.

Never Miss Prospective Customers Call

Missing calls for a business is highly costly. You never know when your valuable cold calls are getting back to you. Imagine you called a potential customer, but he or she wasn’t able to pick your call at that time, so now they are calling back. If you miss that call, you might miss a customer alongside too.

With CRM software, missed calls will be directly logged into your system, and you can set reminders to call back. When you make cold calls at the right time, you are likely to have more chances to convert leads.

Replay Calls

CRM dashboard can automatically record all sales calls made by your team. Recorded calls are the best piece of data that you can use to target your leads better. Your sales and marketing teams can better understand the leads with real-time data and make specific strategies based on it.

On the other hand, managers can examine sales pitch quality and provide input to sales reps. Sales managers can mark flaws in sales scripts and provide tips to improve sales pitches quality. Moreover, call history can be stored at a centralized location for future use.

Monitor Productivity

If you have given a certain cold calling target to your employees, you can monitor it with the CRM platform. The CRM integrated calls can provide deep insights into the number of calls made, received, and missed.

Additionally, CRM can generate automatic productivity reports of your individual sales reps. For rewarding and warning sales reps, CRM is very useful.

CRM and Cold Calling Goes Together in 2021

Cold calling in 2021 will become more powerful and robust with CRM support. You won’t miss any leads, keep your sales reps productive and even capture real-time feedback with this integration system. So, if you want to grow your business in 2021, you need to combine CRM and cold calling together.

In TrackOlap CRM software, we have already added a calling option. So, just get our software and start Cold Calling right away.