Best Cold Emailing and Calling Outreach Practices for 2021

There are various approaches when it comes to sales strategy. In terms of B2B marketing, businesses try to gain new customers using both outbound and inbound outreach methods.

Nowadays, marketers focus a lot of effort on inbound content marketing strategies like building and maintaining blogs, being active on social media, or hosting webinars. However, there are some underestimated, and yet effective, outbound methods to approach a lead via phone calls or emails that can have a significant impact on your company growth strategy.

Reaching out to customers to introduce your product is called outbound sales outreach, or cold outreach. It can be done in various ways but there are two methods in particular that have proven themselves as effective.

In this article, we are going to cover the cold calling and cold emailing specifics and give you some tips to boost your sales outreach in 2021.

Which One Is Better: Cold Calling or Cold Emailing?

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages and choosing which one works best for you could sometimes come after a lot of trial and error. However, using one of them doesn’t prohibit you from using the other. Cold calling and emailing work best when used in combination. To maximize results, analyze which method would be most effective for you and invest more on it.

Cold Calling – The Classic Sales Outreach Technique

Cold calling is the predecessor of the modern cold outreach approaches but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant. Some sales professionals state that this technique is outdated and cannot be effective in modern times. However the statistics prove otherwise – companies that don’t believe in the effectiveness of cold calling techniques experience 42 percent less growth than those who believe in it.

Calls give you more control than any other way of cold outreach because you benefit from the direct interaction with your prospect.

Especially in a time when work-from-home has become the norm, salespeople have seen tremendous success using cold calling. Of course, in order to reap success through this approach, you must adapt it to fit the modern customer. We have prepared a set of best practices to help you achieve that goal.

The Rapid Fire Power of Cold Emailing

Email usage is on a steady year-to-year rise trajectory and it is the preferred way of communication for B2B decision makers. Businesses use cold emails in order to start a conversation with new leads.

Even though phone calls give you more control over the conversation, they are more time-consuming and more dependent on the client’s availability. The true power of cold emails, however, is their ability to scale. Your sales team can send a large amount of emails in a short period of time.

Emails and less time-consuming way to interact. Despite that, targeted customers may treat them as spam. To avoid that, tailor your emails to be captivating and showcase the value of your product.

Maximize Your Cold Calling Efficiency

Because of how popular email and social media marketing campaigns are, many salespeople have lost their trust in the cold outreach practice. But many of them execute it with outdated tactics and that is the main reason they fail.

Even in 2021, cold calling can be very successful if adapted accordingly. In fact, with working from home being on the rise, sales teams that have a strong cold calling strategy have seen their revenue rise.

To adapt a strong cold calling tactic, you can use several practices that have been proven to work. Let’s dive deeper into some of them.

Research Your Prospects

Before you initiate a call, it is strongly recommended to do a thorough research on the person you are going to contact. You should investigate whether the lead is an executive or an employee. The best case scenario is to reach out directly to decision makers which will greatly increase the probability of closing a deal.

Having more information about the prospect helps you tailor the conversation in a specific and relatable way.

Usually, some companies have a pre-made list of leads to contact. However, if you still don’t have such a list, have a look at your buyer personas first. Buyer personas are your great clients and a useful way to get a clear idea of who your target customers are. You should understand their needs and pain points, as well as what solutions you can offer to your prospects to convert them into customers.

Be careful to not sound overly familiar with your client. Thorough research can lead you to feeling like you know your target leads very well, making you forget that quite often they don’t know who you are. That can be a big turnoff so let the person you are talking to set the tone of familiarity.

Know Your Product Inside Out

Access to information is easier than ever before and prospects have become quite informed themselves. That means that you need to be up to date not only with the specifics of your product – but with the specifics of the market as well.

Having deep knowledge of your product helps you react quickly to unexpected questions and showcases confidence and expertise. That is a great way to build trust with the person on the other side of the line, and without trust there can be no sale.

Captivate the Client’s Attention

Your odds of closing a sale become better the more time your client spends with you on the phone. That can be achieved through several techniques. Highlight the core points that you want to pitch to your prospects and focus on them. To avoid distrust in the person you are calling, don’t try to oversell your product.

Many sales pitches fail at the first “Hello” because some sellers are too eager to dish out all the information they have prepared. Keep in mind that the person you are calling doesn’t have the same information as you and can get overwhelmed even at the beginning of the conversation.

A good way to start a conversation is with short chunks of information. For example, when you introduce yourself, try to make it simple and friendly like “Hello, this is Jennifer”. The real trick of the trade comes afterwards. After you present yourself in a similar form of a greeting – pause. This pause lets the person on the other side of the call think about whether they know you or not and this is the first step of attaining their attention.

Before you start talking about the important topics, try to use a phrase that will ensure the other side’s readiness to listen. You can explain that the next part you are going to talk about is highly important and is crucial to solving their problem. This approach will further captivate your listener and indulge them in the topic.

Use a Script

A great practice is to use premade call scripts for common questions that may startle you if you are not prepared. Yet be careful not to sound too generic because this can be a great turn off.

For example, potential customers can tell you that they don’t have time to talk to you right now. That can sound discouraging if you aren’t prepared to hear it.

However, if you have an answer ready right away, this level of confidence will probably captivate your caller’s attention.

Another thing you can do is leave voicemails prior to the actual call. That would give your targeted prospect a sense of familiarity and will raise their trust in you. It will also prepare the target lead what to expect from the conversation and will ensure a smooth encounter.

Focus on Your Voicetone

Confidence is key when you want to establish trustworthiness and show authority and expertise. Going too low with your voice can show insecurity and that could push the other person away. Sounding too loud is not the best approach either since it could irritate the other person and push them away.

The sweet spot of your voice tonality is somewhere in between quiet and loud. Try to sound moderately energetic with a little bit of a more high pitched voice than your regular tonality. Keep the tempo of your voice steady at above average speeds. When you talk very slowly, it may sound like you are confused about what you want to say.

Optimize Your Cold Emailing Approach

Reaching clients through cold emails has become the most popular cold outreach practice. It is the preferred way for 59% of the B2B marketers to generate revenue. Emails give the reader more time to understand and evaluate your offer. In order to get the most out of your email outreach campaign, you should adapt the right strategy.

Make a Good First Impression

The first step in any email interaction is to make the recipient curious enough to actually open your letter. Since subject lines are the first thing your prospects see when receiving your message, they are one of the most important aspects of an email.

You may have written the best possible offer, but it will go to waste if nobody opens it. Keep in mind that in the present-day, businesses receive a huge bulk of emails on a daily basis. If your subject line doesn’t stand out, then the chances of leads skipping your emails become very high.

In order to write the best possible subject line, try to focus on what your client needs and how you can help him achieve his goals. Customize the line for each lead specifically in order to make them curious.

Achieve that and the click-through rate of your email will soar. Whenever you use a generic subject line, chances are that the receiver will just dismiss your email as clickbait or an annoying ad and never open it.

Keep Your Message Short

Overwhelming the reader with huge amounts of information could repel them from reading it further. Emails with text length between 50 and 125 words have 50% higher response rates than those which are longer. The short email format does not only raise curiosity with the reader but also is less time consuming to read.

After the subject line, the first thing that the recipient examines is the introducing sentence.
The introduction should sound personal and relevant to the person that has received the email. Keep it short so the reader can scan it quickly and understand that your message is related to him.

Briefly explain that you understand what problem your target customers are facing. Follow up with them to the point summary of how your product will help them resolve their issues.

If you would prefer to send long emails, be sure to tailor your story in an engaging and informative way so that you engage the reader. This approach is usually preferred by businesses that are new on the market and don’t have much background to fall back on.

Always Add a Call-to-Action at the End

All of the information in the email should lead to one call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the text. It can be about scheduling a phone call or a meeting with the prospect to further develop relationships. Limit your CTA to only one as more can seem annoying and without a purpose.

Give the reader an opt-out option to unsubscribe from your email campaign if they wish to. After all, if you keep on sending messages to someone that doesn’t want to receive them you might get a spam report and this may have a negative impact on our brand. If you want to check your email’s spam score, you can do it through a mail-tester tool.

Breakdown

Both phone calling and emailing are high performing cold outreach practices that can convert leads. It is up to you to experiment with both of them to determine which one best works for you. Using both in combination is a great way to ensure the success of cold sales outreach methods which can reward your efforts with more paying customers.