How To Go From Cold Calls To Closed Deals: A Guide For Outbound Phone Sales Reps

Srinath, Product Marketer at Zoho CRM

We all receive cold calls from various businesses. Some of them are captivating, while others are straight up boring and annoying. But cold calls continue to be a part of a business' outreach. They allow direct engagement with customers, often with a personal touch, and help the business target their outreach efforts.

But what about the sales representative who has to make a lot of cold calls in a day? Without a proper strategy in place, they can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calls they have to make.

To help, this guide shares tips on overcoming some of the most common cold calling challenges. Learn more about cold calling below so you can close more deals and engage your prospects in better, more productive phone conversations.

Disclaimer: When we talk about “cold calling”, we’re not advocating that you pick up the phone and dial people who haven’t opted in to receive communications about your business. You’ll get the best results—and avoid compliance or regulatory issues—when you focus your phone outreach on prospects who have already indicated an interest in receiving information about the products or services you’re selling.

Why Are Cold Calls Challenging?

Sales reps spend 64.8% of their time on administrative tasks. These tasks include preparing for cold calls, logging in call details, note taking, and the like. Manually entering the contact information of every lead can get tiresome quickly. This only leads to wasted time and effort.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. Even if the rep is successful in establishing contact with the lead, they need a proper follow-up strategy in place. Without one, the lead will soon lose interest and turn cold.

So, to the unprepared sales rep, cold calling can prove to be extremely challenging and overwhelming. But when they embrace a power dialer, life becomes easier.

What Can a Power Dialer Do?

A power dialer promises a lot of good. There is very little time wasted manually entering contact information, as the power dialer takes care of the dialing, allowing your sales rep to make more calls in a day.

The best modern power dialers come with built-in features like call recording, call logging, monitoring, and workflow automation. It’s also important to use a power dialer that can integrate with a CRM—you’ll see why in the next section.

Your Crm + a Power Dialer is a Powerful Combo

Integrating a cloud-based power dialer like PhoneBurner with an AI-powered CRM system like Zoho CRM can do wonders for your business. PhoneBurner comes with a wide array of features that are beneficial to a business.

Most businesses already use a CRM to store every bit of information about their customers. The more you know about your customers, the more personalized your outreach is. Being able to pull all the relevant data about a lead from your CRM lets you craft a personalized outreach experience that makes the prospect more likely to trust you. This often leads to shorter sales cycles and more closed deals.

But integrating a power dialer with your CRM makes your outreach substantially more efficient. Your reps can now make calls directly from your CRM’s interface, without having to switch applications. This has several major advantages:

• Reduces potential errors during calls that can lead to burning leads.
• Allows your rep to make more calls in a day—resulting in enhanced productivity.
• Automatically logs call details in your CRM, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

As a result, your phone outreach process becomes more efficient, the data you collect becomes more accurate—and the deals you close become more frequent.

Enhance Lead Management

Effective lead management always means more revenue. Ensuring high-quality leads reach the right rep improves the possibility of conversion drastically. You can prioritize your leads based on criteria such as engagement history or potential value.

By automatically distributing and scoring your leads, it is now easy for your reps to start engaging right away. This approach also has room for personalization, which is always welcome.

Automate The Follow-Up Process

The most crucial part of your sales cycle begins after the first contact is established. It is now imperative to make sure the lead does not lose interest and the deal is closed.

You can set up workflows within your power dialer that will take care of the tedious tasks for you. For example, after you end a call with a lead, you want to change their status to "Contacted," log their call, and send them a welcome email. Once you automate these processes, they'll happen without manual intervention; your sales reps are left with time for more calls.

Better Pipeline Management

With a clear pipeline, closing deals becomes easier. When every stage of your sales cycle is well-organized and optimized, it is easy to increase the volume of leads moving through them. For businesses looking to grow, this gives them a much needed scalability boost.

With a power dialer in place, the possibility of leads leaking reduces drastically. They are moved through stages automatically based on the call outcome. Representing these outcomes with features like disposition buttons makes engagement smooth and easy throughout all stages of your sales process.

Learn more: Go "next level" with disposition buttons

Powerful Insights And Powerful Actions

To help you make decisions that benefit your business, top power dialers come with intuitive reporting and analytics dashboards. Answer Success Rate (ASR), Average Handle Time (AHT), and calls per agent are among some of the metrics that give you rich insights into your agent productivity, call quality, and the performance of a campaign. You can refine your sales strategies better with these metrics in mind.

Before We Hang Up – Move Cold Calls Forward

Cold calls are here to stay, so it is important to understand their effectiveness. To improve your success rate with them, embrace power dialers. Elevate your cold-calling strategies by combining a power dialer, such as PhoneBurner, with a powerful CRM platform like Zoho CRM.

Try Zoho CRM today and close more deals!