Cold calling isn’t dead. In fact, many companies still heavily rely on it as a sales strategy. Success nowadays isn’t all about pitching - the tech you’re using also makes a big impact on how many calls turn into leads.
Just what types of tech tools should you be adopting in your sales strategy? This post explores a few popular solutions that could help turn more cold calls into warm handshakes.
Predictive dialing
Only a small percentage of recipients actually pick up cold calls. This means that if you’re dialing recipients one by one, you’re likely wasting a lot of time trying and failing to get through to people.
Predictive dialing tools eliminate this wasted time by ringing multiple numbers at once. Busy lines and invalid numbers are immediately filtered out. As soon as someone picks up, you are connected through to that line. Connect rates can be increased by 300% by doing this.
This technology can also save time manually dialing numbers. It is best suited to companies targeting large databases of recipients.
Popular predictive dialing tools: Five9, Dialpad, Talkdesk
Dynamic caller ID
Cold calls from unknown numbers are the most likely to be ignored. Dynamic caller ID is a technology that can fix this by displaying a local or familiar number instead.
IDs are automatically rotated based on the recipient’s location or past interactions. For example, if a customer previously talked to a support agent from a certain number, dynamic caller ID can select the same number when making a sales call to encourage the recipient that it is someone they know and trust. This technology can increase answer rates by 20 to 30%.
Popular dynamic caller ID tools: RingCentral, Nextiva, AVOXI
Ringless voicemails
Voicemail messages can be a way to potentially generate extra leads by encouraging prospects to ring back, but this means waiting for calls to ring out first.
Ringless voicemails are a solution to this that allow you to go straight to voicemail. No ringing is necessary - you can record a voice message and put it immediately in their inbox. Such technology can increase callback rates by as much as 20%.
Not only are ringless voicemails effective for getting through to numbers that don’t answer, but they can also be a good way to get around recipients who immediately hang up before you get to finish your pitch. They can also be a way of ‘warming up’ follow-up cold calls, allowing you to introduce yourself so that your follow-up isn’t entirely unexpected.
Popular ringless voicemail tools: Drop Cowboy, SlyBroadcast, VoiceDrop
AI-powered call analytics
Call analytics are useful for training your sales agents and for also identifying recipients who are more likely to be leads. Various data ranging from call times to sales can be recorded and used to spot trends.
AI can help take this further by analysing information such as call recordings in greater detail. Keywords, sentiments and objections can be identified to help improve scripts. Some studies suggest that this may boost close rates by as much as 15 to 25%.
Popular AI-powered call analytics tools: Gong, Chorus.ai, CallMiner
Which tech tools will you use?
The best tech tools for you are likely to depend on the amount of data you have available, the amount of recipients you aim to call per day and the type of product/service you are trying to promote. Think about which types of tech align with your goals and take your time to compare different providers on the market.
It’s worth noting that there are plenty of other types of phone technology that you can adopt to help you maximize inbound calls or improve customer support such as AI phone answering services and automatic call distribution. Make sure to explore this tech too if your company uses phones for more than cold calling.