We Used Our Own Cold Call Service… What Can I Say, It Worked
2 months ago, we rolled out one of our strategies for our 2017 marketing plan — cold calling. A little late right? We’ve been offering cold calling since 2014, but didn’t actually employ cold calling as a way to generate business for ourselves until April 2017. When we devised our plan, we had a whiteboard meeting about the different segments to target. We developed a list of about 50 names, and reached out to each one 3 times to try and reach the decision maker to set up a webinar to learn more.
It should have performed impeccably right? After all, we are the best in our field.
Wrong, it failed miserably.
We didn’t get one appointment from nearly 150 dials, getting rejected and denied time after time.
We fired a bullet. It missed. If you read our last blog, you learned that making small investments before making bigger ones is a key strategy to winning in the marketplace. Successful companies fire small investments, or bullets, learning what worked and didn’t work before investing in another bullet or sinking in with a cannonball.
We shifted our plan. We wanted to continue calling, as we believe heavily in our offering and its need for businesses right now. But we understood the process. Calling once without any prior metrics, analytics, or results to analyze can’t be expected to turn optimal results. So many factors are involved.
- Not only do we need to be excellent salespeople on the phone,
- we also have to have a 95% or better accuracy in the marketing list contact information we have.
- We also have to understand our market well enough so we know exactly the industry, person or persons we need to speak with that can move the process along
- Lastly, your product/service has to matter, or, be pitched right. If it doesn’t, sorry. As we always say at RPMC, “you can’t sell a black and white tv to Best Buy.”
With this being said, no matter where you are in this spectrum, all of our weaknesses can be tweaked. Even your product. Well, not your product, but the way you pitch it. You can always change your pitch so it’s benefits are more salient in the ears and eyes of your prospect.
At the end of the day, tuning the dials, righting your wrongs, and calibrating your bullets is the path to success.
Back to our story. After this loss, we went back to the drawing board and identified a different segment. This segment was one that was similar to that of a company we’ve had a lot of success appointment setting for.
We built our second list and began calling again. BOOOM. Success. We compiled a list of approximately 60 contacts, setting appointments with 4 of them. Just last week, one of those appointments closed, and two others are in the works.
Wow. What a difference. Even more, we decided this list worked so well, that we’ve begun executing 4 more campaigns just like. Why? Immediate results. In the book, The Lean Startup, Eric Reis calls this “Validated Learning.”
We learned from our test, saw positive results from our second, and began investing more.
This is how we recommend looking at cold call campaigns, especially if you have no prior metrics or analysis of the conversion rates as to how successful any given campaign should be.
At RPMC, we thrive on successful campaigns, but understand the groundwork that needs to be laid before moving towards success. Some campaigns take more time than others, but at the end of the day, each campaign gets us one step closer to the end goal – an appointment that leads to sale.
Any questions or comments, please respond to human@pereusmarketing.com.
In leads and appointments,
Ryan P