New leads are the lifeblood of a healthy and growing company. Whether you have a small, young company still aggressively finding new business or a well-established company looking to sustain itself and grow, the art of nurturing cold leads into happy customers (who hopefully refer even more business!) is absolutely essential.
While every business is different, there are some business practices that will maximize your opportunities to turn cold calls into loyal customers. Here are a few examples:
Target the right potential customers
One of the most fundamental ways to improve your success rate with cold calls is to make sure you are targeting the right type of potential customer. If your product or service simply doesn’t have enough clear value to the prospects being targeted, you will waste valuable time and resources, while also wasting the prospect’s time as well.
Instead, before you commit significant resources to developing or expanding your lead funnel, spend some time researching which types of customers are the best fit for your business and building a quality list before spending significant time and energy cold calling them. While this will delay the process a bit, it will pay for itself many times over.
Find out what their needs and pain points are
One of the most common reasons that cold calls don’t go well is that the company doing the cold calling doesn’t actually understand what the lead truly needs. If you’re going on and on about the benefits of your product or service, but those benefits are not significant solutions for the lead you’re talking to, the conversation will probably not end with a sale.
Instead, make sure you and your sales team are conducting proper discovery on the lead, probing them for specific pain points that your company can solve. By doing more listening than talking, you can figure out, specifically, how your company can solve the problems affecting the lead.
Learn what their expectations are, then exceed them
When speaking with leads, it’s important to get a sense of what they expect from your company. This is done by setting expectations, getting their reaction, and coming to a clear and explicit understanding of how things will go moving forward.
Once you’ve established those expectations, do everything in your power to exceed those expectations. By going above and beyond for a potential client, you will stand out from your competitors and generate loyalty that will pay off both with the long-term business you get from that lead, as well as the warm referral leads you hopefully get from them down the line.
Be available
One of the best ways to stand out and exceed expectations is to be available when others are not. Even if you and your employees work a regular 9 to 5 schedule, it is still possible to provide customer service outside those hours. A call answering service can provide as much as 24/7 support for your clients. Phone answering services can even identify which problems are of critical importance and escalate the call or message to you or one of your employees.
MAP Communications is highly experienced in providing premium-quality call answering service. If you want to close more deals and exceed the expectations of your leads and customers, let MAP Communications work with you to provide world-class customer service.
Here’s some related articles you might be interested in:
Tips for Preparing for Your Sales Call
The Anatomy of a Sales Pitch – Create the Perfect Presentation
