Too many people debate whether cold calling actually works.
I am not one of them.
You see, cold calling is what got me to fall in love with sales in the first place. As a 20 year old intern, I cold called over 1200 people over the course of 3 months to build a ~$7M pipeline.
And while it may not always work out on all days – I believe if you put enough reps in, you will start moving the needle.
That’s what I’m focused on this week.
But first- a recap of what happened last week:
- Booking new meetings- target was 4. I achieved 0.
- Progression of opportunities- wanted to have at least 2 conversations with buyers tagged in existing opportunities- achieved that.
Let’s deep dive:
#1 New meetings
This is my north star for this quarter. Top of funnel is where we need the most help right now, and so, I’m holding myself accountable to do anything and everything to build a scalable process of booking these many meetings/wk.
Levers I’m pulling to get there are:
- More activity this week:
- This means daily outreach via email, socials and cold calling.
- This has been tough to stick to because I’m pulled into a lot of additional stuff (early stage startup life)
- But that’s on me- I need to be better at prioritising revenue generating activity.
- Targeted lists:
- I’m focused on outreach to people in our CRM from deals we either won or lost previously. Looking at integrating Sales Nav and our CRM to make that easier- right now it’s very manual and a LOT of data to go through.
- ‘Lookalikes’ of our current clients (have a list of about 100)
- Follow ups from events we’ve attended last month.
#2 Opportunity Progression
I’ve been reading Nate Nasrallah’s stuff on how to accelerate deal cycles and he’s crystallised something I intuitively understand – in mid-market/enterprise level deals- writing a good business case is the sales process.
I’ve incorporated a template for business case building in our sales process, and now, post a discovery call, I take the extra 20 mins to write a basic first draft and send it over to the prospect along with the usual slides and case studies.
I do think this will help add some discipline in how we evaluate, qualify and progress deals.
Win for the week- cold calling
I made 28 dials last week and got two conversations with prospective buyers.
That’s a 7% conversion rate- this is huge considering cold emailing gets responses to the tune of 2-5% on average.
For the others that I don’t connect to, I just leave voicemails giving context of my email to them and leaving my phone number.
The rationale here is everybody will check voicemail and if they they might be interested in my message, they probably will check out my email post that.
Will track progress here.
Intention for the upcoming week
I’ve recently started setting an intention for the upcoming week and deciding what ‘levers’ to pull to get to where I want to. For this week, it is:
No meeting/internal work is important enough to distract me from revenue generating activities
Be back with an update next week.