10 Tips for a Successful Cold Call Campaign

1. Define the time frame for reaching the market with your product/service

Calculate how long the campaign needs to last based on your goals and available resources. Is this a one-time, time-limited campaign for your core product/service? Or are you planning to systematically reach the entire market?

In both cases, it's advisable to plan a pilot phase and a continuation phase where you can apply your findings.

2. Choose the sales channel that will reach companies. Make sure it has the right tool for processing leads.

Will you reach out through a call center or a sales representative?

By combining a call center and sales representatives, you leverage the benefits of both channels — call centers generally achieve better results in reachability and interest conversions, while salespeople have better conversion rates to closed deals with qualified leads.

Will you use an in-house or external call center?

Even an external call center requires management and onboarding. Outsourcing may not save you much. If you don't have your own people, it's unavoidable. With an in-house call center, expect higher recruitment costs, as call centers have high employee turnover.

3. Write a call script that captures attention.

What will you use to engage the customer? Prepare your offer, arguments, call scenarios, and a list of information you need to gather from the potential customer in the first round of contact.

The content of your call script will impact the quality of qualified leads. If the script is concise and catchy, but you want to leave further details for the meeting with a sales representative, you'll maximize the number of meetings and have a chance to convince even the undecided. However, expect more drop-offs from these leads. If you want to select only companies with genuine interest, you'll have a higher success rate at meetings, but you may lose undecided prospects.

4. Prepare a database of suitable leads for calling.

Apply basic elimination criteria to the entire addressable market (for example, companies with revenue up to CZK 30 million, companies with an existing operation, companies in a specific business sector, companies with a publicly available phone contact, etc.). The scope of elimination criteria should be adjusted to available resources (time frame, personnel capacity of the sales channel). The final number of leads you can reach depends on this.

The criteria should be precise, but if you're too restrictive, you won't have many companies left. Also consider what to do when a criterion value is missing for a company. For example, if you set revenue at CZK 1–30 million, what about companies where this data is unavailable? The fact that information isn't available doesn't mean the company has no revenue. A possible solution is to include these companies as well and add a criterion that helps filter the right ones (for example, having at least 5 employees — such a company probably has revenue).

5. Rank leads by success potential to maximize conversion.

Apply an advanced mathematical model to calculate customer potential (for example, a statistical regression model based on information about your current customers) or, especially when reaching the market with a new product/service, select criteria that increase the probability of your success, so-called "potential boosters." The more boosters a company has, and the more significant they are, the better its score.

Use criteria such as the company's growth trajectory, hiring new employees, the company being located in tourist-attractive areas...
Get advice from market intelligence specialists on the right criteria. They vary greatly depending on the product/service you offer.

This way, you score leads and create segments differentiated by the expected level of potential.

6. Establish progress statuses and reasons for non-interest.

There shouldn't be too many statuses, but they should cover all possible situations. The caller needs to process the database quickly and record results clearly.

Take a look at how the MECE principle can help you.

Get inspired or try, for example, this basic set of statuses:

a. Interested in discussing the offer
b. Open negotiation (unsuitable time or unsuitable person)
c. Not interested
d. Unavailable
e. Phone numbers don't work
f. Irrelevant lead

You may or may not include a Contract Signed status in the cold calling process. Exceptionally, there are products that can be sold directly during a call while also having confirmation of the sale. Track your secondary conversions, which reveal the ability to turn customer interest into a contract and the potential efficiency of individual sales links.

When marking Not Interested, collect feedback that you'll use at the end of the pilot phase. You can also have a predefined list of reasons for this, which will make your work easier later.

Determine which statuses mean the end of negotiations and which ones you'll continue to recycle (see the subsequent conversion calculation in point 9).

7. Define a database processing workflow that's easy to monitor.

Note that some statuses are not final. Determine how many times you should try calling a customer before the lead is closed with an Unavailable Contact status, or what to do if the customer wants to negotiate at another time. The tool you work with should be able to record this data.

8. Provide the sales channel with maximum information for successful outreach.

Don't force the caller to keep dialing the same phone number stored in your system over and over. Give them a space/tool where they can find multiple contact details in one place and verify the company they're calling.
Ideally, also provide information about which criteria the company met in the potential calculation. What significant changes occurred at the company in the last year. Is the company doing well? Who is currently the statutory representative, and who can make purchasing decisions? What other services does the company use? Did the caller reach a relevant person?

9. Work with calling results. Track activity, conversions, and new contracts.

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Activity

What portion of the database has been processed at least once? How many companies are in progress? How many times did the caller try the company before marking the unavailability status?

Activity leads to conversions, and conversions lead to contracts. Don't underestimate monitoring it from the very beginning.

Conversions

Database Relevance Conversion

(a+b+c+d)/(a+b+c+d+e+f)

Indicates the quality of prepared data. Results should not significantly differ between callers.

Reachability Conversion

(a.+b.+c.+f.)/(a.+b.+c.+d.+e.+f.)

Indicates how challenging it is to reach the given customer segment. Different segments may have different reachability levels — use this knowledge after completing the pilot phase. Results of this indicator should also not significantly differ between callers.

Interest Conversion

(a.+b.)/(a.+b.+c.+f.)

These are so-called qualified leads. Primarily indicates the efficiency and ability of the caller, so results may vary (assuming all leads are of similar quality). At the end of the pilot phase, this number will be lower than during the campaign, since all open negotiations should eventually be marked with a final status, and some open negotiations will end in non-interest.

Number of New Contracts

Contract Conversion

Number of new contracts/(a.+b.+c.+d.+e.+f.)

An overall economic indicator of the caller's/sales channel's success in the campaign. Represents the number of contracts relative to all outbound sales activities.

Alternatively, you can calculate contract conversion from qualified leads to separate the success rate of the call center and the sales representative.

10. Recalibrate Potential

Have you completed the first round/pilot outreach? What worked and what didn't? Bring these findings back to points 4 and 5 and improve your chances of success!

Adela Petreova
Head of Customer Success
BizMachine