by Ryan P – Owner of RPMC, Inc
Cold calling has a bad rap. I’ve come across some articles that just don’t seem to put cold calling in the most favorable light. Stats can be misleading, generalized, or otherwise not trustworthy when it comes to businesses throwing shade at telemarketing in 2017. I just read one that said “if you are emotionally attached to cold calls you might not want to read this,” going on to say that 1-3% of cold calls turn into a lead, and those leads you get are abusive to both parties anyway. Wow! That’s quite the hatred. And who can blame them? Cold calling is an easy target. If you don’t have thick skin, a good script, passion, and a quick wit, I would believe that with all my might too!
You probably guessed that we at RPMC, Inc. have some alternative facts. Now clearly, we have an agenda. We are cold callers through and through and believe fully in it as a marketing channel and lead source. However, we wanted to share some actual stats from an actual campaign of ours we did just recently for one of our clients.
If you take a look at this image, this is the performance scorecard we provide every one of our clients for every campaign. It is part of our transparency, education, and planning deliverable regardless of the result, good or bad. This here is a rather good campaign. One of our clients had us test a market of theirs via cold call appointment setting and we accepted the challenge. Our goal was to call a mere 50 contacts (up to 3x’s each to reach the decision maker) and attempt to set appointments for our client to meet face to face.
Well, it worked. In this specific campaign, as seen in the scorecard, we actually set appointments with 5 people from a list of 50. 5. Never called before, first time writing and delivering this specific script. Now when I check my math that is no 1-3%. That is 10%! 10% of those names accepted an appointment at some level with our client. Not only that (although not listed here), another 2 were interested in follows ups at a later date.
Needless to say, our client has been back for more and we have done other cold calling campaigns for them since. But if you look at these numbers again, they are quite staggering based on the results from our competition and naysayers. And this isn’t the only campaign! Although poor campaigns exist, we see high numbers consistently on a weekly basis, generating interested b2b leads for our clients with positive results.
This doesn’t mean it’s always gravy. When we went back to look at this successful campaign (as we do with all our campaigns), we found that one of the reasons this campaign of 50 was so successful was because of the quality of the list. Most of the numbers were working, and 36% of the total names we reached actually picked up the phone and had a conversation with us.
As we continue forward, we don’t revel in the 10% as the best it can ever be. We are always looking for ways to improve to convert those 50 contacts into 50 appointments. But in the meantime, we’ll settle for 3 to 10 times the success of our competitors and naysayers.