If you’re selling into the B2B space, you’re going to have a tough time. Here’s why.
Cold calling is tougher than ever and it’s largely due to some depressing numbers.
Let’s start with the percentage of buyers that are ready to buy your stuff today. How many people are ready to buy today? Typically 3% of customers are currently in the market for most products at any given time.Even worse, according to most stats I’ve come across it takes about 7 calls before you reach a decision maker who’s likely going to tell you that they’re not in the market right now.
That means that if you have a target of 100 accounts, you’re going to have to make 700 calls and of those only 3 of them will be a qualified buyer and if you’re lucky maybe 1 of them will close. Keep in mind, salespeople are also some of the highest paid employees in an organization so the total cost of outbound prospecting is extremely high.
Before giving up on it entirely, it’s also the most effective way of getting into large enterprise clients.
Luckily these problems can be solved in a couple of ways:
- Identifying and contacting only clients that are ready to buy.
- Increasing the contact rate per hour.
- Increasing your close rate.
- Automating as much of the above as possible.
None of these tasks are easy, and none of them can be done in isolation; it usually requires an overhaul of your sales process and an investment in technology.
What’s always astounding to me is, and it’s something I come across frequently, are companies that are perfectly willing to pay their salespeople $5000 a month, but don’t want to spend $50 a month for a software tool that will help them do their job more effectively.