The biggest challenge when cold calling is getting prospects to answer the phone. Having the best product and pitch means nothing if you can’t talk to someone.

If you feel like a lot of your calls go straight to voicemail, watch this webinar recording on “How to Get Prospect to Answer the Phone When Cold Calling” where we will outline small things that you can do to improve your ability to get into new accounts.

 

Why is this so difficult?
The first thing to keep in mind when you are working in B2B sales and your contact is not answering the phone is that they are most likely not avoiding you. People are just busy.

Especially if you are calling at a decision-maker level and calling their office, a decision-maker may rarely be in their office during the work day as they may be tied up in meeting after meeting.

Decision makers also receive a lot of calls from other salespeople, so there is a lot of competition and noise that your call can get mixed in with. Everybody is trying to get to the decision-maker. And it is not just salespeople; there are usually a lot of internal calls and requests that can drown out your call attempts as well.

What can you do to deal with this?
This B2B sales challenge is what it is. You can’t force someone to answer the phone. You can be aware of the challenge and modify your game with tactics to minimize how this challenge impacts you.

There are two groups of tactics that you can employ – multi-touch and persistence.

Multi-Touch
If the target prospect is not going to answer your call, the best thing you can do is use many different communication methods to connect. This will create a multi-touch effect and will not guarantee that you will get a hold of the prospect, but it is reasonable to assume that it will improve your odds.

We have already talked about making B2B sales calls. You can also add to your mix of email, voicemail messages, physical mail, social media, etc.

Persistence
At this point, we are reaching out to the prospect and communicating through different means. The next thing that we can add to our approach is a level of persistence.

When working in B2B sales, it can be easy to make one or two calls and move on. However, you need to operate with higher persistence, and this involves a process that includes more attempts before you move on.

You can implement a call cadence, which will give you logic about when to call, when to leave a voicemail message, when to email, how many messages and attempts, etc.

Again, a higher level of persistence does not guarantee that you will connect, but if you have a structured process that you use and it has repeated passes, you should improve your overall connect rate when working in B2B sales.