The Role of Cold Calling in B2B Outbound Marketing

Business growth is the common concern of every business owner. Marketing is the crucial way to grow a business and make more profits. Outbound marketing is ideal if you’re looking for a quicker marketing solution.

B2B (business-to-business) outbound marketing is a marketing strategy by which a business reaches out to other companies to promote its products or services. With B2B outbound marketing, a company can communicate with other businesses to generate leads.

But how exactly is cold calling related to B2B outbound marketing? Cold calling opens the way to engage in direct communication with a business’s top-level executive. It is a popular and proven outbound marketing strategy for B2B. With the right cold-calling approach, one can develop key business relationships and turn them into sales.

How Cold Calling Resonates with Outbound Marketing

Cold calling is an outreach method to offer business to unknown prospective customers. It aims to start business conversations with decision-makers over the phone. Cold calls create awareness and lead to setting up appointments with potential buyers. 

Cold calling is an excellent outreaching effort that lets you reach out to potential clients directly and get feedback. Using it, you can pitch your products and services to unknown prospects and try to secure sales. 

You don’t have to wait for prospects to come to you like other outbound marketing approaches. You will directly communicate with them, introduce your products or services, set appointments, and secure sales.

The marketplace is very crowded nowadays. But cold calling in B2B outbound marketing can capture attention in a crowded market. As cold calling lets you communicate directly, you can skip the hassle of waiting for prospects to come to you and capture their attention quickly.

Historical Perspective of Cold Calling

Many marketers think cold calling is dead. Is it dead? “No,” it’s not. It lost popularity due to the rise of practical alternatives, but cold calling still stands out in sales.

27% of sellers suggest that cold calling is highly effective.

Cold calling is one of the most effective outreach marketing strategies if done correctly. It allows the sales team to reach potential buyers and build lasting relationships proactively.

B2B companies mainly use cold calling outreach to generate more sales. Although its success rate is 2% on average, most B2B companies utilize cold calling as one of their main outbound marketing strategies.

It’s a simple process to start a relationship with potential B2B buyers. Most B2B buyers prefer to talk about business over the phone. According to a statistics report by Finances Online, 57% of C-level executives want to engage in business conversation via phone. 

Cold calls provide an opportunity to understand customer needs and challenges. Thus, you can generate value for potential customers and increase your brand awareness. 

Therefore, cold calling will improve your outreach effort in B2B or B2C outbound marketing.

Integrating Cold Calling with Other B2B Outbound Strategies

Marketers use B2B outbound marketing strategies to reach potential clients quickly and effectively. Outbound marketing is quite impactful in growing your business. 

Let’s look at some of the top-notch B2B outbound strategies apart from cold calling:

• Social Media Advertising 
• Website Marketing
• Targeted Video Ads
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
• Direct Mail Marketing 

Utilizing any of these strategies will make your B2B outbound campaign more effective. But how exactly cold calling integrates with these B2B outbound strategies? 

Social media is the biggest platform of current times. Effective social media marketing plans allow you to reach many people and advertise your products or services. You can collect the data of those showing interest by liking or commenting on your social media posts or ads. Then, add their contact information to your calling list.

When you run ads on a PPC platform and someone clicks on your ads, you’ll get all the information about that visitor. Through that information, you will find their contact information and add them to the CRM tool.

Also, when someone visits your website, they will go through your blogs, services, and products. If they like any of your services, they might leave their email on your website. With that email, you can find their number and add it to your cold calling list.

As those visitors showed interest in your ads and website, they must be thinking about your products or services. They just need guidance or assurance to take the next step and become a buyer. It gives you an advantage as they already liked or considered your services.

Cold calling is a vital B2B lead generation strategy. By integrating cold calling with other B2B outbound strategies, you can generate more high-quality leads and convert them into buyers. Different outbound marketing strategies will provide you with information about interested visitors and cold calling will help you to convince them and generate sales.

The Strengths of Cold Calling in B2B Marketing

Cold calling may seem ineffective or outdated in the world of advanced automated tools. However, it is still a powerful B2B marketing strategy. Despite the opposing opinions, cold calling continues to be effective in B2B. 

Let’s explore the strengths of cold calling in B2B outbound marketing.

Immediate Feedback

One of the main benefits of cold calling is the ability to receive immediate feedback from prospects. This instant feedback helps to understand the prospect’s interests and concerns. You can quickly adapt your sales pitches, address prospect objections, and overcome them. 

Moreover, you can build trust with your prospects by engaging in direct conversations and addressing their concerns. Immediate feedback helps sellers build strong relationships and increases the chances of conversion.

Personal Touch

Personalized communication is crucial for salespeople to make a sale. Cold calling’s one of the most valuable aspects is it allows one to add a personal touch. Cold calling enables sellers to modify their message to each prospect’s specific needs and pain points. 

Sellers can showcase the value of their products convincingly while addressing the prospect’s objections. The ability to listen and respond in real-time and deliver personalized pitches makes cold calling a valuable tool for B2B marketing.

Precision Outreach

Cold calling allows sellers to interact directly with clients to determine their interests in services. It also helps to establish contact with the decision-makers of a business and provide them with valuable information about your product or services. 

Cold calling gives you a direct idea of what the client requires. It is difficult to pretend their interest while being on a phone call. Also, you don’t have to wait for any replies or responses to start business talks. Cold calling in B2B outbound marketing ensures precision in outreach by enabling you to communicate with the decision-makers.

Challenges in the Modern Age

Cold calling might seem easy, but it’s the most frustrating and challenging outbound marketing strategy. Most people will reject what cold callers are offering in the first call. Prospects can even cut the call before sellers start their pitch. 

Besides that, cold calling has some challenges in the modern age. Let’s take a look at them:

Buyer Preferences

One challenge that almost every cold caller face is each prospect has unique preferences. Cold callers spend most of their time listening and talking to potential buyers. Sometimes callers can face difficulties in identifying the requirements of the buyer. So, they fail to pitch according to the buyer’s preferences. If this happens, sellers won’t be able to convince buyers to think about their products and will miss out on building a relationship with the buyer.

Regulations

Cold calling is a legal marketing strategy for bringing new businesses. However, sales managers must maintain some regulations to avoid getting in trouble. A consumer registered in the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry won’t receive cold calls. 

Furthermore, callers have to be mindful of legal cold calling hours. You will require written consent to call outside calling hours. Also, you can never ask for money from customers on a call.

Competition

Most of the high-growing B2B companies are utilizing cold calling as one of their major outbound marketing. They are trying to reach every possible prospect to secure more sales. As a cold caller, you may face challenges convincing buyers because your competitors already did that. With so many competitors fighting for the same prospects, getting positive feedback is difficult. 

Measuring Cold Calling Effectiveness On B2B Outbound Marketing

One can measure the effectiveness of cold calling in B2B outbound marketing using key performance indicators (KPIs). With KPIs such as response rate, conversion rate, cost per lead, and return on investment, you can determine whether your cold calling strategy is effective. 

Suppose you made 1000 calls. From those, you got 100 replies. So, your response rate is 10%. Now from that 100 responses, 25 of them book a meeting. Then your conversion rate is 25%. If you spend $1000 on your cold calling campaign and generate 25 leads, your cost per lead is $40. You can also use Google Analytics to track the cost per lead.

You can measure the return on investment (ROI) by dividing the revenue by the cost and multiplying it by 100. If your company earns $2500 from your 25 leads while spending $1000, your ROI is 150%.

Compared to other outbound methods, cold calling ROI is lower than outbound strategies like social media ads, email marketing, and PPC ads. Does it mean cold calling is not effective? 

Cold calling can lead to a high conversion rate by executing correctly. An experienced and specialized team can take your cold-calling campaign to success. You can make cold calling effective for B2B outbound marketing with proper training and developing different approaches toward rejection and objections. 

Let’s explore some statistics to understand the effectiveness of cold calling properly.

Statistic Highlights

According to the studies and surveys of Selling Signals, we’ve come up with some interesting statistics for measuring cold-calling effectiveness.

• Sellers attempt an average of 8 calls to reach a general prospect and 18 calls to connect with a technology buyer
• An average of 93% of sales professionals reach C-level executives on their third attempt
• 65.2% of leads find value in discussing their situations with sellers
• 92% of lead interaction happens via phone call
• 45.6% of B2B buyers prefer to hear new ideas at the start of a sales conversation

Final Words

Cold calling as a B2B outbound marketing strategy can sometimes surpass other methods. It is an effective process if you want direct conversion and selling instantly. 

Though cold calling has some challenges, it allows you to communicate directly with prospective B2B customers who have never interacted with your brand. You can convince them with your offerings and build a relationship. 

Using cold calling in B2B outbound marketing, you can increase the conversion rate and generate more sales. It allows you to reach out to more decision-makers and make them interested in your offer by having a conversation. You can also keep track of them and turn them into real customers.

Reading this article, you now know about the strengths and challenges of cold calling. So, plan your cold-calling marketing campaign effectively and start securing sales.