TMCnews Featured Article

We all know that cold calling can be hard sometimes. I’ve been there. Many times.

There are tricks that can make cold calling easier, however, and help on those days when it is hard just to say that next hello.

While many sales professionals will talk about routines and motivation and little rewards, one trick that helps almost every person who has to make cold calls is automation technology. Let the computer work for you to make your life easier, and it can both speed things along and propel you to greater success.

Most people cold calling will be using some form of customer relations management system. Yet most people rarely use the full power of their system. Most systems have the potential to automate workflows and increase the number of connections that can be made daily, but this functionality is often overlooked.

By automating a cold call workflow, it is possible to create tasks and follow up. Fields can be populated at the click of a button, and callbacks can be triggered and timed perfectly based on dates entered into calendars. This can help propel you along.

With automation, a lot of the note taking can even be eliminated. Templates for emails can be delivered based on particular call disposition or response, and the whole process of making cold calls can be improved and sped up.

Particularly useful is a good predictive dialer.

Some salesmen still use a hand-dialed line and then take notes on the CRM system after each call. But with this method, it only is possible to make between six and eight calls per hour on average. And it is easy to lose drive.

With a predictive dialer, however, such as the SpitFire X Auto Dialer, there is not only manual mode but also several other modes that can auto-dial and help raise that hourly call rate to up to 25 calls per hour. A predictive dialer will dial multiple lines at once and feed callers only the calls that get answered by a live person. This keeps the pace up and makes cold calls much easier. Not always. But most of the time it makes it easier.