This article presents cold calling tips from top sales champions like JC Pollard, Nick Cegelski, and Jed Mahrle, who shared their learnings and tactics in LinkedIn posts.
For the past 8 months, we have been publishing “Future of Prospecting” weekly and have covered a variety of topics that are important to sales professionals and leaders.
Some of these include:
1/ Account Research using AI
2/ Cold Calling 2.0
3/ Account Prioritization using AI
4/ Hyper-Personalization with AI
5/ Email Frameworks
6/ Sales Workflows
7/ Signal-Led Prospecting
8/ LinkedIn Outreach
9/ Multi-Channel Outreach
10/ And more…
Recently, we’ve heard from many sales leaders asking about “Cold Calling 2.0,” so we've decided to focus on this topic over the next few weeks.
We've been following cold calling champions on LinkedIn who have become an inspiration to sales professionals.
We’ve curated their most liked and successful LinkedIn posts from the last 3 years and brought them to you.
Here are the top sales champions we have studied:
1/ JC Pollard
2/ Nick Cegelski
3/ Jed Mahrle
4/ Anthony Natoli
5/ Jason Bay
6/ Tom Alaimo
7/ Tom Slocum
8/ Vin Matano
9/ Belal Batrawi
In this post, we are going to share the best “Cold Calling” learning nuggets by JC Pollard, Nick Cegelski, Jed Mahrle, Anthony Natoli, Jason Bay.
During my time as an SDR at Gong, I booked over 35% of my meetings via Friday Cold Calls.
Calling on Fridays is a massive opportunity to build a pipeline... here is why it works so well:
1. Fridays are light meeting days
-> Higher connect rates
2. People tend to be in fantastic moods
-> Longer call duration
3. Prospects are wrapping up the week and planning for the week ahead
-> More likely to be open to scheduling a meeting for next week
If you are looking to book a boatload of meetings today try the following Cold Call Opener I used to build a pipeline.
"Hey name, This is Name Calling with XYZ, I know there is NEVER a good time for a cold call, ESPECIALLY on a Friday, but... could I BRIEFLY explain why I am reaching out?"
When they say yes, and they will say yes... execute with a crisp, confident, and well researched reason for your call.
I cold-called a CRO over 73 times in the course of a year.
He was a Top Tier Prospect and I was determined to find a way to get a conversation started.
So I called.
and called.
and called.
And then finally... one day... he picked up.
Me: "Hey Jimmy, this is Jc calling with Gong, how ya been?"
Prospect: "I've been good, what can I do for you?"
Me: Delivered a crisp well researched 3YU "Hey the reason I'm reaching out is I saw you just rolled out a new sales methodology, also noticed you are spearheading the launch of XYZ new product, based on that are you familiar with Gong?
Prospect: "I have no idea what you are talking about."
Me: "Wait is this not Jimmy with XYZ company?"
Prospect: "Nope, wrong number."
70+ calls wasted on the wrong person.
Brutal.
To try and avoid situations like this I am going to be testing out a product called FullEnrich soon.
The goal is to have the cleanest most complete contact data, I will keep everyone posted on how it goes/how my experience with it is.
Fingers crossed.
PS: To the people who will say its messed up to call someone 70 times in a year, I understand your point, but we all have a job to do :)
I still make cold calls prospecting for 30 Minutes to President's Club sponsors. Here's one from last week.
Self-coaching I gave myself:
🟢 Tailored permission opener. The three steps to this opener: lead with context, own that it’s a cold call, get permission to pitch.
This opener works better than a generic permission based opener. By including context upfront, you get them to sit up and show that it's a targeted call that is intended for them and that you're not just dialing through the phone book.
The key here is to make the context you lead with something you can relate to the problem you solve, not just any random or unrelated piece of information (Ex "Saw you went to USC!")
___
🟢 Pacing:
Felt like I did a solid job of slowing it down and not talking too fast. It helped that I had a script I was working from. That helped me to focus on my delivery, not WHAT I was going to say.
___
🟡 Objection Handling
I did a good job of agreeing with the objection and saying "that's exactly why I called". It's sort of like the Improv skill of always saying "Yes, and...."
Where things went wrong was when I got hit with a variant of "call me in 3 months". This prospect told me they were in the middle of merging with another company (!) and she wasn't sure if she'd still be there in 3 months.
I hadn't heard that one before and so I got thrown off!
___
🛑 My pitch
My pitch was focused on gain (amplify you guys) instead of pain.
If I had a re-do I'd say something like:
"Usually when I talk to VPs of Marketing they tell me it can be really frustrating to put a ton of work into a product launch only to have it fall on deaf ears. I run an extremely popular sales podcast and webinar series and folks like Gong, Superhuman and Salesloft advertise with us as a way to make sure their launches get front and center with the Sales Leaders they want to sell to."
____
Sara Plowman inspired me to post a real cold calling clip. There is so much content from sales "influencers" who are not actually doing the job day in and day out.
It's so easy to project an idealized version of sales when in reality you're going to encounter stuff that throws you off when you're cold calling.
Say I call someone and they tell me “not interested” and hang up.
I'll mention that in my opener when I call the next person in that account.
“Hey [name], got off the phone with [colleague]; this is Jed with Mailshake. Does the name sound familiar?”
Then they might tell me, “We already use [competitor] not interested.” And hang up.
So I’ll call the 3rd person in that account and open with the following: "Hey [name], it’s Jed with Mailshake. Just talked to [colleague #1] and [colleague #2], and it sounds like y’all are using [competitor] right now. Does the name sound familiar?"
It's like a snowball effect.
The info you gather gets bigger and bigger.
Do the same with folks who respond to your email saying they are “not interested.” You may not have "talked to them" but you can say you were "in touch".
Keep all this info stored in a central location. Use it so your calls don't feel so cold.
It sounds simple, but most SDRs aren't using everything at their disposal to warm up their leads.
Outbound Sequences can do more harm than good for SDRs.
Here's the issue with them:
Often, SDRs are reactive to their sequences/cadences...
When in reality, you should be pro-active. Let me explain:
Imagine you send your first initial email and it gets opened 5+ times.
Or you send a LI connect request and they accept it + look at your profile.
Most SDRs will move onto their next task and ignore the intent signal.
Instead, use prospect engagement as a way to be more pro-active.
IE: do not wait 3 days from the day you sent your first email if there's a ton of engagement.
Try calling them same day, bumping your email the next day and throwing a connect request on LI.
You should try and switch your messaging up based on prospect engagement, too.
IE: your cold call opener should be different for someone who has accepted your LI request + looked at your profile / opened your email a bunch vs someone who hasn't engaged at all.
Be the quarterback of your sequences.. Don't let them control you!
If you liked this, I share 1 free outbound prospecting tip that 4200+ SDRs and AEs read every week. https://lnkd.in/e2cJkJqr
I know, ironic coming from me. We've built our entire business around helping organizations with their outbound motion.
But the data doesn't lie:
→ The avg. # of attempts per contact has nearly doubled from 7.3 in 2014 to 11.3 in 2022 (Bridge Group). And avg. # of quality conversations / day is down during that same period from 8 to 3.6.
→ Avg. cold email reply rate is ~1% (Clearbit). And those ain't all positive.
→ Avg. cold call pick-up rate is ~5% depending on the industry. Apple and Android will continue making ignoring and identifying unknown callers easier.
Cold calling has become a game only elite reps can succeed at.
❌ Pure cold outbound is dying a fast death
The mass blast approach. Sending thousands of unpersonalized cold emails. Making thousands of cold calls.
More emails are being sent to spam. And more calls are getting ignored and blocked.
Gone are the days of teams of SDRs making random cold calls into accounts who have no idea who your company is.
Outbound cannot be used to create demand. Let's not kid ourselves. SDR teams aren't going to be educating executives at scale
✅ "Inbound-ish" outreach is the present and the future
Adam Robinson brilliantly calls this "inbound-led outbound."
The concept is simple: create great thought leadership to attract prospective buyers into your ecosystem and create fans.
→ Webinars or lives
→ Articles or white papers (that don't suck)
→ Podcasts
→ Guides
→ Social content
→ In-person or virtual events
etc.
Use marketing to create demand. And outbound to proactively start conversations to capture it.
Gong has been using this playbook for the last 6+ years with tremendous success.
Pro tip: Partner up with non-competing heavy-hitters in your industry, create content together, share the leads.
✅ Intent/Signal-based outbound
This is where outbound sales teams should spend the majority of their time. Focus on a sliver of your TAM that's most likely to engage based on timing.
→ Previous customers who moved to another company
→ Newly hired or promoted execs
→ Following your company on LinkedIn
→ Tech stack
→ Mutual connections with board, c-suite, etc.
→ Previous champions in deals
etc.
~~~
Pure cold outbound is dying. Your revenue team needs to work much better together on the strategies above to compete in the next 2-3 years.
The avg. cold call pick-up rate is 4-5% (20-25 calls = 1 conversation).
Here are some practical tips to increase your cold call pick up rates:
✅ Call on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. Salespeople are told not to call at these times…so prospects are getting fewer calls during those blocks.
✅ Call outside of normal business hours. Try 7:45am - 8am and 5-6pm local time for the prospect.
✅ Call direct lines and cell phones.
✅ Call between 5 minutes before the top of the hour and 5 minutes after (e.g. 1:55pm - 2:05pm) to catch prospects between meetings. (thanks Mark Hunter)
✅ Call prospects right when they open your email or watch your video. Make sure your sales engagement tool automatically creates a task for you to call prospects immediately.
✅ Call during times where your pick-up rates are highest. Track this in your sales engagement tool. Xant’s data recommends calling prospects between 8-11am local time.
✅ Email and let prospects know that you’ll be calling them and from what number. (old trick from Predictable Revenue™ Inc.)
✅ Call executive assistants and ask for help in getting ahold of the prospect
✅ Call multiple times per day. You have to be careful with this one. I don’t advocate calling a prospect, hanging up, and then calling back right way. Try calling twice during a 1-hour call block. Once at the beginning, once at the end.
✅ Use a service like Phone Ready Leads™ to validate your prospect list and call on folks most likely to pick up the phone.
Reps in Outbound Squad™ are using tips like these to crush the phones in 2022.
Want help leveling up your phone game and landing more meetings?
I’m looking for 4 more reps to join us this month in Outbound Squad™.
Comment “squad” below and I’ll let you know how you can apply.
#Sales #Prospecting #Outbound
Thanks for reading Future of Prospecting! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Here are some of the best strategies for improving cold call success rates, according to these sales champions:
Target your calls at the right time. According to Jason Bay, the average cold call pick-up rate is only 4-5%, but you can increase your chances of success by calling on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. Salespeople are often advised not to call at these times, so prospects may be getting fewer calls then. You can also try calling outside of normal business hours, such as 7:45am - 8am and 5-6pm local time.
Use a permission-based opener. Nick Cegelski recommends using an opener that immediately addresses who you are, where you're calling from, and how much time the call will take. For example, you could say: "Armand, this is Nick Cegelski with XYZ. I know you didn't expect me to call you this morning. Do you mind if I take 46 seconds to tell you why I'm calling, and then you can let me know if it makes sense for us to speak?".
Don't be afraid to call multiple times. Jason Bay says that you can increase your chances of getting through by calling multiple times per day, but be careful not to call too many times in a row. You can also try calling twice during a 1-hour call block, once at the beginning and once at the end.
Use information from previous interactions. If you've already interacted with the prospect in some way, such as through email or LinkedIn, be sure to mention that in your call. This will help to warm up the call and show that you're not just cold calling them out of the blue.
Personalize your calls. One of the best ways to improve your cold call success rate is to personalize your calls. This means doing your research on the prospect and their company, and tailoring your pitch to their specific needs. For example, if you know that the prospect is interested in a particular product or service, you can focus your pitch on that.
By following these tips, you can increase your chances of having a successful cold call.
Cold Calling 2.0
Cold Calling is evolving…. Now with the help of AI, you can hyper-personalize your cold-calling at scale.
