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Cold calling is one of the most challenging parts of running a business. This article compiles 18 statistics on successful cold calls to use as an indicator for how you can prepare yourself before picking up that phone and making those important connections.
Cold calling is a sales tactic that entails making phone calls to people you’ve never met before. One of the most difficult aspects of a sales rep’s work is making a connection with a relative stranger who may not be ready to make a purchase decision. The technique, on the other hand, is clearly superior to email-only marketing.
We’ve put up 18 call statistics and practical ideas to help you conduct more productive cold calls and expand your company.
1. 82 percent of buyers agree to meet with vendors who phone them out of the blue.
According to Rain Group data, after being cold phoned, 82 percent of customers agree to set up meetings. Cold calling is far from becoming extinct as a sales technique. It’s worth noting that this figure does not imply that customers agree to meet following the initial cold call. According to the report, 82 percent of customers agree to meet with a salesperson after being cold contacted. To arrange a meeting with a prospective consumer, it takes more work than just contacting them once.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Cold calling is effective, as shown by statistics. While there are many methods to communicate with customers and prospects, including email campaigns, text messages, and videos, cold calling should still be a component of your sales plan.
2. It takes 6 calls on average to connect.
Cold calling may be effective if done often enough. You are more likely to have a meeting and the opportunity to adequately present your product if you can get someone on the phone. In fact, after six phone calls, 93 percent of your leads will convert. Getting someone to pick up the phone, on the other hand, requires perseverance and persistence.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Cold calling strategies should include the number of contacts to make, how they intend to follow up, and how they expect to convert prospects into customers. Before ending their efforts to reach the prospect, sales professionals should regularly conduct six cold calls.
3. Call leads immediately for 60x results & 50% more sales
You’re 60 times more likely to qualify a lead if you contact them within the first hour after they submit an inquiry. This allows you to determine if the consumer is a good match for your product or service and whether it is worthwhile to continue to contact them and create a connection with them.
Furthermore, the seller that approaches the buyer first is 35 percent to 50 percent more likely to close the transaction. Considering all of the other elements that a client considers before making a purchase, moving into the 35 percent to 50 percent chance of success bracket is a significant statistical leap.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Be proactive—speaking with a consumer before your competition raises your chances of earning a transaction by up to 50%. This implies that contacting prospects immediately should be a top priority in your sales plan.
4. 41% of vendors believe phoning is the most successful method.
You may expect sellers and marketers to declare Facebook or LinkedIn are their best-selling tools, given the development of social media as a significant marketing tool. That is, however, not the case. The phone is still the most efficient sales tool, according to 41% of salespeople.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Picking up the phone and calling leads and clients is still important in the era of digital communication. Make cold calling a component of your outreach plan for both new and existing consumers.
5. Only 58 percent of clients who make an online inquiry get a callback.
If you have an online inquiry form where clients can enter their phone numbers, you should contact those leads using those numbers. Surprisingly, a large number of salespeople do not. Forty-two percent of clients who provide their phone numbers to businesses never get a callback. That’s a lot of leads that haven’t been followed up on. Plus, they’re no longer cold calls; they’re warm calls, which is all the more incentive to pay attention to them.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Websites may gather a lot of data, and keeping track of everything that comes in from your site can be difficult. To prevent losing prospective clients who were interested enough in your product to offer you their phone number, make “calling website leads” a priority in your sales plan.
6. 84 percent of customers are turned off by pushy sales practices.
According to research, purchasers who have had a bad cold caller encounter claim the salesperson did not:
- Avoid being obnoxious.
- Pay attention to the requirements of the prospect.
- Before making a call, do some research about the possibility.
Only when it came to establishing product usefulness did disgruntled consumers believe salespeople were more helpful. When it comes to being pushy, salespeople’s perceptions of their performance differ by 34% from consumers’ perceptions. The largest disconnect is in listening to customers’ demands, with 83% of salespeople believing they do so effectively but just 38% of consumers agreeing.
What does this imply for small company owners?
During a call, avoid being excessively pushy or abrupt, and concentrate on listening attentively to the prospect for the best chance of thoroughly understanding their requirements and making a transaction. Consider doing customer surveys to understand how your consumers feel about your performance, rather than how well you believe you’re doing.
7. 49% of consumers still prefer to be contacted via phone.
For salespeople, cold phoning is still a common and profitable strategy. Cold calls are preferred by 49% of purchasers as the initial point of contact. Email, on the other hand, takes the lead as the preferred first-contact mode, with 80 percent of consumers preferring to be contacted by email and 78 percent of vendors doing so.
What does this imply for small company owners?
There is a disconnect between how consumers like to be reached and how they react to various ways of engagement. Customers may declare they would like to get an email rather than a cold call when you cold phone them. You should, however, maintain cold phoning prospective consumers for the greatest outcomes.
Hybrid sales are used by 8.57 percent of businesses.
The emergence of the hybrid sales model is one of the ways the pandemic has transformed the face of marketing. Cold calling and video conferencing are integrated with email marketing in this strategy to create a sales model that sellers and buyers may access from anywhere.
HubSpot posed the question, “What will your sales model look like in 2021?” to businesses. Only 20% stated they would utilize an outside-only field model, compared to 57 percent who said they would employ a mixed form. A distant, inside method would be used by 11% of respondents.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Many previously regarded excellent sales tactics became impossible as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, and consumers and salespeople adjusted to the “new normal’s” needs. Small firms must remain adaptable in the future and adopt a sales approach that maximizes outcomes while being safe.
9. A 55:45 talk-to-listen ratio is ideal.
Customers must understand the benefits of your product and why they will benefit from it. They also want to know that you’re paying attention to them and that you’re aware of their requirements. According to the most recent research, the best talk-to-listen ratio for sales calls is 55:45. This indicates that you should be talking 55 percent of the time and listening to your consumer 45 percent of the time while cold calling.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Salespeople can’t set a stopwatch to guarantee that every discussion lasts precisely 55 percent of the time. Instead, the most efficient approach to use this information is to go back over previous conversations and look at the talk-to-listen ratio to see what improvements can be done to guarantee you’re getting your message over to your customers.
Pro tip: Software with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as Gong.io, may be used to assess your call-to-listen ratio and offer a variety of insights on sales conversation trends.
10. Salespeople sell for 34% of the time they work.
On average, salespeople spend just one-third of their day selling, which includes making calls and speaking with consumers over the phone or in person. Administrative responsibilities, research, and professional development take up the remainder of the day.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Make certain that the time you set out for selling is concentrated. Sales automation software lets salespeople spend more time doing what they do best: interacting with customers by automating administrative and non-sales chores. While salespeople won’t be able to devote their whole day to sales, they will be able to save time by using solutions that assist with administrative work.
11. On average, sales professionals make 45 calls every day.
Salespeople make 45 cold calls each day on average, according to The Bridge Group, with 5.1 quality talks per day. Some sectors demand sales calls that require more or less time with consumers, involve varying degrees of preparation, and take into account a variety of considerations.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Establishing contact and generating leads are two frequent objectives of cold calling. Because it takes six to eight contacts to convert a prospect into a lead, multiply your desired number of leads by six to eight to get an idea of how many calls you’ll need to make every day to meet your targets. In order to fine-tune your job objectives, it’s also crucial to keep track of your own personal conversion rate.
12. It takes approximately 6 minutes to make a successful call.
The contrast between successful and failed cold calls is striking—successful calls take much longer. According to Gong.io, failed calls last three minutes and 14 seconds on average, whereas successful calls last five minutes and 50 seconds on average. The longer you can keep a prospective consumer on the phone, the more probable it is that your call will be successful.
What does this imply for small company owners?
This cold calling data might assist you in determining your call objectives. Given that only 34% of the typical workday is spent selling, this call time estimate might assist you in determining how many calls you should make each day depending on your own conversion rate.
13. For 23% of professionals, prospecting is the most difficult task.
Since sales have become mostly virtual, prospecting has evolved. Prospecting in a virtual context is the largest problem for sales professionals in 2021, according to a Yesware poll, with 23 percent of respondents citing this as their top worry. The most common concerns among respondents were acquiring access to the proper stakeholder (18%), designing a focused prospective survey (11%), and prospect qualification (11%).
What does this imply for entrepreneurs?
COVID has revolutionized the way we locate prospects and leads. In 2021, the main obstacle for salespeople was prospecting in a virtual context, but problems are also chances for progress. Small companies may utilize this problem to their advantage if they can get ahead of the competition with unique lead-generating tactics for internet clients.
14. Employers misinterpret 12% of key sales rep characteristics.
Customers and management value various characteristics in salespeople, which might imply that the incorrect individuals are conducting cold calls. Customers place the most importance on active listening, but just 26% of managers do. Other skills, such as problem-solving and relationship-building, are pretty comparable, but sector knowledge and years of experience are vastly different.
Customers placed high importance on industry knowledge (23%), as well as years of experience (25%). They did not, however, appear high enough on the managers’ value lists. Meanwhile, managers placed a 22 percent value on persuasiveness and a 23 percent value on coachability, but consumers did not mention these traits at all. Customers, understandably, aren’t seeking a persuasion salesman. They speak with an expert and believe the sales representative is looking out for their best interests.
What does this imply for small company owners?
This information is critical for increasing your cold calling success rate because it allows you to recruit for the attributes that matter most to consumers. When individuals are well-suited for their work tasks, it also helps to ensure a good match for your sales jobs and decreases turnover.
15. On Wednesdays, cold calls are 69 percent more effective.
The best day to contact prospects is Wednesday, followed by Thursday, Tuesday, and Monday. According to CallHippo’s cold calling data, the worst day to call is Friday since the conversation rate decreases by approximately 70% when compared to Wednesdays.
What does this imply for small company owners?
To increase your chances of success, make your prospecting calls in the middle of the week and leave your follow-ups for the end of the week. Even if your consumer answers the phone, don’t attempt to develop a new business connection while they are counting down the hours till the weekend.
16. Unknown callers are sent to voicemail 94% of the time.
94 percent of calls from unknown numbers go to voicemail, according to a Hiya survey from 2021. That figure is rising: In 2014, 80% of cold calls were sent to voicemail. People are apprehensive about picking up the phone since fraudsters often call using what seem to be local numbers.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Voicemails may still be left. Customers usually don’t answer the phone if they don’t recognize the caller, but if you leave a message and tell them who you are, they could pick up the phone the following time. In your voicemail, persuade them that you are a legitimate business and that you are giving them something worthwhile to pick up the phone for.
17. In the consideration stage, 60 percent of clients request a call.
According to HubSpot’s cold calling data, there are three phases of buying:
- When clients are just becoming aware of a product, it is called the awareness stage.
- When they’ve narrowed down the options they’re interested in, they’re in the consideration stage.
- When the lead has made up their mind on what they want to purchase.
During the contemplation stage, they discovered that the majority of clients desire to speak with a sales representative (60 percent ). That’s when they’re most likely to have inquiries that a real person might answer faster than an online search, such as particular features of a product or service that influence whether they buy one brand or another.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Take down your consumers’ information while they’re comparing items on your website and contact them right away. Offering a discount on their first purchase if they register and agree to receive phone calls is one technique to obtain client information during the contemplation stage.
18. Half of all prospects aren’t a suitable match.
According to this cold calling data, the majority of salespeople (32.8 percent) feel that 50% of their prospects are a suitable match for what they have to offer. That implies that half of the individuals they cold phone aren’t a good match for the product and won’t benefit from it.
It’s not simply about persuading people to purchase something. It’s also important to ensure that the thing you’re selling is in demand. You may be able to make one sale to someone who subsequently realizes that your product isn’t suitable for their requirements. However, they will almost certainly be a disappointed customer who will harm your reputation.
What does this imply for small company owners?
Recognizing that your product isn’t right for everyone isn’t simply reasonable; it’s also a solid sales tactic. Have your sales reps evaluate consumers to see whether they are a suitable match, and don’t try to persuade them if they aren’t. You’ll persuade your consumers that your company values them as people and is concerned about their requirements.
Conclusion
Buyers still prefer to interact with a live person, even in the age of digital sales methods like email marketing, social media, and text messaging. This is particularly true for service concerns and bigger price transactions. Cold calling is a powerful outreach tool for both new and seasoned salesmen when done correctly.
