With the rise of sales enablement technology and the variety of available communication methods, one might expect phone calls to become a thing of the past. Yet, cold calling is still a key component of B2B sales.
In fact, 78% of decision-makers polled have taken an appointment or attended an event that came from a cold call (source).
The Problem with B2B Cold Calling
But the reality is—whether you’re a seasoned veteran or it’s your first day on the job—you probably don’t enjoy making cold calls. The reason for this is simple: if you’re not armed with the right resources, cold calling is uncomfortable and ineffective.
- 63% of salespeople say cold calling is what they dislike most about their jobs (source)
- Cold calling is ineffective 90.9% of the time (source)
- Less than 2% of cold calls actually result in a meeting (source)
- Less than 1% of cold calls lead to a sale (source)
- In 2007 it took an average of 3.68 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Today it takes 8 attempts (source).
The Problem with your Data
Low-quality data can impact every aspect of a business—particularly sales and marketing. If your team’s performance is lagging and your sales database is a mess, it’s time to conduct an audit of your data. Quality data is the fuel of any successful sales team. Without it, your cold calls will fall flat and your prospects will remain unreachable.
Cold Calling Statistics
- 62% of organizations rely on marketing or prospect data that is 20%-40% incomplete or inaccurate (source).
- 80% of the time, cold calls go to voicemail. (source).
- Inaccurate B2B contact data wastes 27.3% of sales reps’ time. That’s 546 hours a year per full-time inside sales rep (source)
- Inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88% of businesses, with the average company losing 12% of its revenue as a result (source).
- Bad data costs U.S. businesses more than $611 billion each year (source)
- Bad data might be an issue if you can’t reach your buyers, you’re dialing the wrong people, or if you feel unprepared for your calls.
- 90% of C-suite executive say they never respond to cold calls or email blasts (source)
- 88% of buyers will have nothing to do with cold callers (source)
- Only 52% of sales professionals feel they are effective at accessing key players (source)
- Only 13% of customers believe a salesperson understands their needs (source)
- 42% of sales reps feel they do not have the right information before making a sales call (source)
- 82% of B2B decision makers think sales reps are unprepared (source)
Improve Your Data
The only way to improve your sales performance is to improve your B2B prospect data. Here’s how:
- Perform a data audit. Partner with a market intelligence solution to analyze your existing database and highlight inaccurate and incomplete prospect data.
- Append your data. Work with the same market intelligence solution or an alternate vendor to fix any holes or inconsistencies in your sales database.
- Assess your existing data collection methods. Take a look at your web forms. Do you require certain fields but not others? Do you ask unnecessary questions? Are the labels confusing? Try to see your forms from your customers’ perspective and fix any issues that could be impacting data quality.
- Invest in better data. Research and select a B2B data provider that allows you to search for prospects based on criteria that match your best buyers. Stop calling prospects that don’t care about your products and services.
- Audit again. On average, data decays about 2% per month, which means more than 20% of your data will become unusable in a year. The only way to prevent this is to audit and append your data regularly (source).
See Results
- A strong organization can generate up to 70% more revenue than an average organization purely based on the quality of its data (source).
- Firms estimate that they could increase sales by almost a third (29%) if their customer data was entirely accurate (source)
- Companies that employ consistent data hygiene create 700% the number of inquiries and 400% the number of leads than those who do not (source).
For more information about improving your data quality and increasing sales productivity, contact ZoomInfo today.