How to Streamline Your B2B Sales Calls

How much time does your sales team spend calling prospective buyers in a typical workday? While calling prospective buyers or sales leads can often yield new sales opportunities, many sales reps don't have an efficient or effective calling strategy. In fact, one report found that B2B sales reps spend an average of 40% of their workday searching for prospective buyers to call. If this sounds familiar, you should consider the following tips for lead generation and  streamlining sales calling efforts.

Let's Start Out Fast, and Then Refine

As a Sales Manager, you want the bottom line end result. So here it is. Because of the services SalesLeads provide for your specific industry, you can arm your sales reps with sales leads that already have projects identified. That means that your sales reps can begin to make sales calls to set appointments and start the sales process. 

Project Reports give you information like the following example:

Statistics show that it takes an average of 18 calls for a B2B sales rep to reach a prospective buyer. Therefore, it's a good idea to send prospective buyers an email reminder of your scheduled call before attempting to call them. It only takes a few minutes to create and send a basic email reminder, but doing so will increase the chance of him or her answering your call.

Identify Decision-Makers

Before calling a prospective buyer, try to find out whether he or she is a decision-maker. If a prospective buyer doesn't have the authority to make purchases on behalf of his or her company, you should focus your calling efforts elsewhere. To generate a sale, you must reach a decision-maker. Otherwise, you'll be wasting your time.

If you don't have the decision makers name, or know who he/she is, we already got you covered. When you log into the system, you'll see a tab that says "Search Companies". This will take you to the Target Intelligence Database. Put in the company name, and you'll get all the valid contact names, titles, phone and email address you can want and need. 

Keep Calls Short

There's no reason you should spend a half-hour on the phone talking to a single prospective buyer. Conventional wisdom should lead you to believe that you'll generate more sales by calling more prospective buyers. Of course, you won't be able to call many prospective buyers if your calls are long and drawn out without a call to action. By keeping your calls short -- about six to 10 minutes for most sales calls -- you'll experience better results from your calling strategy.

Ask Questions and Listen

An effective B2B sales call requires more than just talking. You should also ask questions and listen to what prospective buyers have to say. If you spend 90% to 100% of the time talking, prospective buyers on the other end of the line may stop listening. Here are a few questions to ask:

Tell me about the project? Why are you doing the project now? What's going on in the business? Is this part of the company's overall strategy? What is the timing? These are just some of the basics to ask.

Mention Your Company's Name At Least Twice

Try to mention your B2B Company's name at least twice when calling the prospective buyer. With your target audience being other business owners and executives, it's safe to assume they are busy running their own busy. As a result, you need to ensure that prospective buyers remember that you called them. By mentioning your B2B company's name at least twice, preferably once during the first 10 seconds and another time during the last 10 seconds, you'll generate better results from your calling strategy.