In this age of social media and automation, many would easily dismiss cold calling as a dead sales practice. But actual data shows otherwise, telling us that naysayers may be missing out on a lot of benefits of cold calling. 

Cold calling, one of the oldest and most common forms of marketing, is a practice of making an unsolicited call to a new customer by a salesperson to sell products or services. The method is considered “old school,” leading many to think it is obsolete. 

However, research by a sales training firm in January 2020 showed that 69 percent of buyers accepted a call from new salespeople just the year before, while 82 percent of buyers agree to meet sellers who reached out to them.  

And that is just one aspect of cold calling. Aside from lead generation and sales conversion, many businesses are leveraging cold calls to learn something new from their market and build relationships with their clients. 

Industries that continue to reap the benefits of cold calling today include insurance, legal services, banking, travel, e-commerce, telecommunications, and more. Cold calls are also used in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.  

Here are 5 other benefits of cold calling that businesses can leverage.

1. Insights and instant feedback

With the right set of questions, cold calls can provide relevant information that will help you narrow down your targets for future calls or sales pitches. You can also launch cold call campaigns to identify points of improvement for your product or services.  

The best thing about cold calling is that it guarantees instant feedback from an actual person. Sure, some calls might turn out unsuccessful, but when you get a hold of someone, it always adds value to your business. 

2. Relationships and genuine connections

The advantage cold calling has over newer forms of communication is the genuine human connection it builds. Emails and social media can be fun, but an actual conversation with a human salesperson makes people more inclined to trust your brand. 

In fact, given the right approach, cold calling can give your business a human face that is something very hard to achieve in digital and automated platforms. Successfully connecting with a person is also a good foundation for building long-term relationships.  

3. Increase in lead conversions

There is one reason why many businesses still practice cold calling – it delivers results. The reason why some businesses think cold calling is doomed to fail is that their agents may not have proper training and research. 

Cold calling depends heavily on the skills and knowledge of an outsourced sales agent. Moreover, they also need to know the importance of what they do to the overall business operations. If your agent has these, there will certainly be increases in lead conversions. 

4. A good training ground

Speaking of agents, cold calling is a good avenue for your people to learn about your products, services, and business. If you want to develop salespeople who know your business by heart, then putting them on cold calls is a good way of training them. 

For one, doing cold calls involves learning the core of business and sharing this to a new customer. What better way to hone a confident and effective salesperson than by training them in cold calling? 

5. An inexpensive yet effective solution

Businesses do not need anything that much to build a competent team of agents to do cold calls. You only need skilled people, a good office, and some necessary software to run your team of agents. 

Moreover, cold calling is something you can do even outside the office. It means that even during this pandemic, your team can still make calls from their homes no matter where they are. 

Perhaps, the only challenge in building a team of agents is finding the right people that will fit your company’s goals and culture. But even that has a solution that can be found in outsourcing. 

Cold calling outsourcing is an outbound call center service where a sales outsourcing company handles your company’s cold calling operations, from hiring talent to managing them in their office. 

Offshore outsourcing providers, in particular, have access to top talent in countries where the cost of living is way lower, like the Philippines, making it inexpensive compared to building a team on your own.  

With outsourcing, you get a team that fits your business at a much lower price – a truly cost-efficient solution if you are looking to leverage cold calling to boost your sales and build relationships with your clients.