This week I’m going to talk about one of our ongoing calling campaigns (details have been changed to protect our clients’ privacy) to show some concrete examples of how creativity and persistence make our cold calling programs successful.
A Boston-based company needed help reaching senior-level decision makers (CEOs and CFOs) to promote their new high-ticket software for streamlining administrative and office support tasks like scheduling and payroll. The company’s internal sales team could not handle the volume of prospecting calls needed and did not have experience navigating corporate hierarchies to reach CEOs and CFOs, so they started a pilot program with VSA a few months ago. Even though we were still in the early stages, we could feel that we weren’t building up enough momentum in reaching prospects using our traditional methods. We wanted to explore more effective methods of reaching these elusive decision makers.
We know the value of reaching the prospect at the right time, so we brainstormed about ways to maximize our chances of reaching an influencer or decision maker when they were already considering purchasing a product like this software. We decided to use data on traffic to our client’s website to target when prospects on our lists are called—we now try to call all leads as close to the day they visit the website as possible. By doing this, we also ensure that our client’s name will be familiar to the prospect before they take the call, further increasing our chances of a successful phone call. We have just implemented this new strategy, but so far we have set three appointments! Could this just be beginner’s luck? Very possibly. As the pilot continues we’ll get a better sense of whether this appointment rate will be sustained, but for now we are excited. This process improvement is one example of how we continually seek to improve our performance to build productive long-term relationships with our clients.
Cold calling, unlike a mass-produced brochure or radio ad, is perfect for making small, incremental changes that have huge impacts. This case story is a perfect example of that!