In sales, phone calls still matter—what’s changing is how and when you make them. For many sales organizations, the concept of cold calling has, over time, evolved into what’s now known as smart calling.
The strategy behind smart calling is pretty simple. Instead of calling people that you’ve never interacted with before and hoping to drum up potential interest or sales, you incorporate calling into a more intelligent and intentional engagement sequence. You send an email, then you call. You meet at an event, then you call. You watch for email opens or link clicks, then you call. You view a profile or connect on LinkedIn, then you call. You pre-qualify ahead of time, then you call.
With smart calling, you warm up leads in other ways before making the call, you segment leads and make prioritized calls based on interest and engagement activity, and you leverage prospect data ahead of time to pre-qualify, prepare for calls, and have better conversations. You invest in sales tools that help you personalize, automate, segment, capture data, and learn.
What do you think? Are you set up to make smarter calls? How has it been working for you? What tools and processes do you have in place? Reply to this email and send me your thoughts on cold calling vs smart calling.
Are your email signatures optimized for conversions? If you’re only including the same standard information in your signature that everyone uses (name, title, phone, company, MAYBE website URL), you’re missing out on a unique way to capture attention and nurture leads.
This month, take your email signature to the next level by adding a relevant or timely call-to-action that your email recipients can interact with. For example, your CTA message could link people to:
Need help building a conversion-driven email signature? Check out these tools from HubSpot, Drift, or Wisestamp.
SALES GLOSSARY: Discovery Call
A discovery call, also known as a qualifying call, is one of the first calls you have with a potential customer. The purpose of a discovery call is to learn more about their challenges and pain points, build rapport and trust, and determine whether they would be a good fit for the product or service you're selling.
Planet Money is a podcast series about work and the economy from NPR.
In episode 740 of the series, hosts Noel King and Stacey Vanek Smith dig into a problem that a lot of companies these days have to deal with: employee burnout.
The hosts explain early in their podcast that the concept of burnout was originally coined by a man named Herbert Freudenberger. Freudenberger was one of the first people to describe the symptoms of exhaustion professionally and conduct a comprehensive study on burnout. Eventually, he wrote a book on his findings and the concept caught on. Today, it’s a problem that can exist in workplaces everywhere.
The hosts also talk with Leah Potkin, Director of People at SpotHero, about how she helped battle burnout with her team of call center representatives. Here are some examples of things she did:
It’s a good episode to listen to if you’re feeling like your team is in a bit of a slump, or if you simply know that burnout exists and you’d like to be more proactive about preventing it.
LISTEN TIME: 20 MIN
Want to read the transcript instead? Click here.
Want to make the weekly meetings you have with your sales team more efficient and effective? Keep the following 6 tips in mind:
To learn more about how to run successful sales meetings with your reps, check out these resources:
The 23 Most Highly-Rated Sales Books of All Time
Looking to level up your sales skills? This resource from HubSpot offers a list of 23 books every sales rep or sales leader should read. It includes classics like Think and Grow Rich and The Little Red Book of Selling, and newer books like The Challenger Sale and To Sell is Human.
Looking to Scale Your Sales? Seven Bullets to Dodge
Looking to ramp things up at your startup? In this article from First Round Review, entrepreneur and investor Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski fills readers in on the seven bullets your team needs to dodge in order to be successful in your efforts to scale.
We hope you enjoyed the seventh issue of Hacking the Sale.
If you have any feedback on this edition or want to send article or topics ideas our way, just reply to this email. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
// Rob Wormley and the team at Rambl
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