New Discovery went live on 8/20.
MONDAY UNFILTERED
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📚 – How the best AEs start demos [1 min]
CONTENT OF THE WEEK
📝 – 5 ‘unsexy’ discovery questions to ask [1 min]
💸 – How to do discovery BEFORE the meeting [1 min]
Top 3 Data-Backed Cold Calling Insights
Hey folks, Armand here from 30 Minutes to President’s Club.
We run the #1 podcast in sales and just released our first book ever: Cold Calling Sucks (And That’s Why It Works).
In celebration, we’re going to breakdown my top 3 data-backed cold calling insights from the book, which will answer the following questions:
- What are average connect rates, set rates, and show rates?
- Which cold call openers are the best?
- How do voicemails impact your email reply rates?
This data comes from 300M+ cold calls we analyzed in partnership with Gong to back all the cold calling tactics in data – let’s roll!
What are average connect rates, set rates, and show rates?
I’ve coached over 100 SDRs in my career and found that the #1 rep is never #1 on the activity board.
On the same number of dials, here’s the difference between the average and top reps:
13x the meetings. Wild.
That’s because top-tier reps break the sales math by optimizing their connect rate, set rate, and show rate… while still making a ton of cold calls.
How do you do that? Here’s an example on how to boost your connect rates.
Marking your tracks and color code your phone numbers as you dial:
- Blank = Unconfirmed: It rings 4+ times, but it’s a generic voice- mail, so you’re not sure it’s them yet.
- 🟢 = Confirmed: You’re 100% sure it’s the right person. Rings multiple times and their VM greet- ing confirms it’s them.These are the num- bers to call!
- 🟡 = Not Sure: Smells fishy. Ex: Busy lines or one-ring- straight-to-voicemail. If it happens again on the next dial, move it to Bad.
- 🛑 = Bad: Repeated busy lines, fax lines, wrong numbers. Once you’ve marked a number as red, never waste a dial on it again.
From there, leave yourself notes for any obstacles you encounter as well such as phone tree paths (“Press 2, 6, 1”), gatekeepers, or dead ends. Your sales engagement tool may even let you tag the numbers so you can skip the bad ones in bulk.
Which cold call openers are the best?
The moment you lead with openers that are filled with platitudes like “How’s your day going?” or “Did I catch you at a bad time?” → your prospects lump you in with every other telemarketer.
The key to a good opener is to lead with context about them, which can’t be canned. That could be that you work with a customer who shares an investor, an industry peer, or an exec you work with in their city – which shows’ your not a complete rando and you’re in their space.
We’ve got two openers that accomplish that: The Tailored Permission Opener and The Heard The Name Tossed Around Opener, both of which massively outperform the others:
Here’s how they sound:
How do voicemails impact your email reply rates?
Few topics spark more debate on a sales floor than the subject of voicemails. Prospects never call back, they take way too much time, and they hurt your future connect rate. All facts.
But we recommend leaving voicemails for one reason: they double your email reply rate:
Voicemails draw attention to your emails and give them a “voice.” You’ll get to an answer more quickly and you can still preserve your connect rate by rotating future your numbers as you dial.
Here are the two voicemails we leave, both of which exclude the pitch (because prospects will instantly delete pitches) and direct to email (because prospects never call back).
*** That’s a wrap, folks. We’ve got over 15+ more data backed insights and broke down every single step of the cold call in our book: Cold Calling Sucks (And That’s Why It Works).
And we’re setting a horrible example by giving a bunch of sellers a massive discount.
The book is only $1 on Amazon this week, so get it here.
Win the week!!!
