If you’re new to telemarketing or if you’ve recently switched from conducting business sales campaigns to campaigns geared toward consumers, or vice versa, you’re probably curious about the difference between cold calling businesses and consumers. To develop a full understanding of the differences between contacting members of each audience, it’s helpful to know the things you’ll need before you start calling businesses or consumers with the hope of generating sales.
Common Tools You’ll Need to Cold Call Businesses & Consumers
Regardless of whether you plan to call companies or individual consumers, the primary tool you’ll need for success is a high-quality list of sales leads like the ones you can find at TelephoneLists.Biz. Our lists are updated regularly to ensure the contact information they provide is as current and accurate as possible. Our lists come in CSV format, which makes them compatible with the majority of dialer systems, CRMs and Excel. You can either download the lists you buy or we can send them to you on a CD for a modest fee.
We have several different kinds of high-quality leads lists available for purchase, including unlimited, classic, targeted and custom lists. Whether you’re targeting businesses or consumers, you can order our lists by state or province or for the entire United States or Canada. Our state lists are presorted by zip and area codes. Our unlimited and targeted lists are easy to filter further using key demographics that will help you identify your top prospects. You can see the different kinds of lists we have available on our website now.
Another tool that calling businesses and consumers requires is a well-thought-out script. A script will help you stay focused, and it will also help you avoid leaving out critical information. Your sales script should include a compelling, polite opening. It should include a list of the benefits your product or service provides as well. Your script should include some answers you can refer to if a prospect mentions a specific objection to what you’re selling, too.
Different Tactics for Cold Calling Businesses & Consumers
One of the biggest differences between cold calling businesses and consumers is the ease with which you’ll succeed in getting a decision maker on the phone. When you’re calling a consumer, you may succeed with getting the person on the phone on the first try. You may also ask another individual to put your contact on the phone, or you might have the chance to leave a voicemail. What you won’t do, however, is talk to someone who’s paid to screen your prospect’s calls.
When you call a business, there’s a very good chance you’re going to talk to a gatekeeper, or someone who is compensated for screening calls, before you even have the opportunity to talk to the person you’re trying to reach. When you consider a typical company with 100-500 employees has an average of just seven individuals who are responsible for its buying decisions, there are a lot of potential gatekeepers between you and your prospect. That’s why you have to be prepared to win over gatekeepers when you’re contacting businesses. One effective way to get gatekeepers to warm up to you is to simply ask them for their help.
Another significant difference between cold calling businesses and consumers is when you’ll be making phone calls. In general, you have the length of a business day when you’re cold calling businesses to contact the individuals you’re trying to reach. If a typical business day is 9am until 5pm in your area, that gives you eight hours a day to call your business contacts.
While professionals are a captive audience of sorts when they’re in the office, consumers aren’t. While consumers can also be professionals, they, like a lot of people who work, have many responsibilities that take up their valuable time. Parenting, volunteering and coaching are just a few of the things a given consumer might be involved with. Because many consumers work and are often pulled in a lot of different directions during the day, the best times to call them are early in the morning or late in the afternoon. This means the windows of time you have to call consumers are often smaller than the one you have to contact businesses.
Contact TelephoneLists.Biz
Even though cold calling businesses and consumers is similar while being different at the same time, a high-quality list from TelephoneLists.Biz can help you be successful with businesses and consumers. If you’re unsure which of our lists is the right choice for you, give us a call or chat with us online so we can help you make the right decision. Contact TelephoneLists.Biz today.