Friends! Who has a cold sales department? I need your advice
We want to fasten to our service of automatic notifications a new function intended for automation of cold sales. And they are not quite sure whether this functionality will be really useful, or we will spend a month of development to make a “stillborn” child.
I started selling myself not so early - from the first year of university. Since the name of my specialty sounded "commerce in metallurgy," I was eager to "fight" with great enthusiasm.
Well, of course, I immediately ran into the “cold”.
')
What I just did not sell during my student days was business training, subscriptions to a business newspaper in a respectable publishing house, Canadian rubber for waterproofing roofs ...
The most interesting thing that I noticed was that the cold sales process was approximately the same : there was a sign with contacts of potential customers, where there were several columns: company name, phone, email, name of the decision maker (usually this column was empty), the result of communication, the next step.
I called, voiced the essence of the question. If the client was interested and said “let's consider your offer in more detail,” I wrote down his email, then manually sent a previously prepared commercial offer, substituting his full name. The next day he called, clarified receipt and tried to "close" the deal.
Pretty dull work, frankly. What infuriated me most of all is to constantly redo the KP template, do a “copy-past” in the mail program and send the same to each new client. It was especially stupid. So I left it at the end of the work day.
The last hour, when I didn’t really want to work, and it was a problem to get through to the decision makers (decision makers) - I was poisoning these letters. It took me an entire hour . If I did this during the day, it took even more time — and the number of calls dropped.
There were companies that had a CPM system implemented, and working out of the box very quickly (which is very expensive, as I now know). Still, I sent the letters manually !
A few years later, when we already had our own company, we turned to a call center for cold calling, I came across this again. We were offered beautiful graphics, detailed statistics of calls, call records, a personal project manager - everything was very cool ... And they offered to send commercial offers by email for 3 rubles / pcs . And I, for some reason, suggested that for such a price they also do it manually .
The amount, of course, is small. We had no more than 50 KP per day per operator, which in terms of a month is 50 * 20 = 1000 rubles. But compared to the tariffs of other means of email marketing, the same mailchimp, it was much more expensive.
And what if you don’t have a call center operator, but your own managers, and they, like me as a student, spend 1 hour on the day of their time on such a stupid and routine operation . How much do you, as a manager, lose money because of this?
How?
To the standard table (excel or docs.google), we connect our program. It "parsits" this tablet every five minutes and finds all the lines in which the result is indicated: "KP".
After that, it automatically inserts the data of this company (the name of the recipient, the email address) in a pre-prepared template and sends it to the client .
That is, any client receives a commercial offer within 5 minutes after the conversation. Naturally, this has a positive effect on work efficiency.
After the letter is sent, the system tracks the receipt of the letter by the client and its opening. That is, if you see that your commercial client has not opened, it will be logical at the beginning of the next conversation to ask: “Did you manage to get acquainted with our commercial one?”.
Another nice “bonus”: before sending, the system will check if you have written the email correctly and will let you know if you made a mistake (well, you were simply told a non-existent address so that you can get rid of it.
This is the concept of the new functionality that we are going to introduce.
I would like to hear if you thought about this problem when you organized your cold sales department or applied to a call center?
Or, maybe, we invented this problem ourselves (start-ups often like to stew in their own juice)
Thanks in advance for your comments and constructive criticism!
PS If you are just starting to engage in cold sales, and you still do not have such "plates" - write - we will be happy to share.
Actually, what is at stake
I started selling myself not so early - from the first year of university. Since the name of my specialty sounded "commerce in metallurgy," I was eager to "fight" with great enthusiasm.
Well, of course, I immediately ran into the “cold”.
')
What I just did not sell during my student days was business training, subscriptions to a business newspaper in a respectable publishing house, Canadian rubber for waterproofing roofs ...
The most interesting thing that I noticed was that the cold sales process was approximately the same : there was a sign with contacts of potential customers, where there were several columns: company name, phone, email, name of the decision maker (usually this column was empty), the result of communication, the next step.
I called, voiced the essence of the question. If the client was interested and said “let's consider your offer in more detail,” I wrote down his email, then manually sent a previously prepared commercial offer, substituting his full name. The next day he called, clarified receipt and tried to "close" the deal.
Pretty dull work, frankly. What infuriated me most of all is to constantly redo the KP template, do a “copy-past” in the mail program and send the same to each new client. It was especially stupid. So I left it at the end of the work day.
The last hour, when I didn’t really want to work, and it was a problem to get through to the decision makers (decision makers) - I was poisoning these letters. It took me an entire hour . If I did this during the day, it took even more time — and the number of calls dropped.
There were companies that had a CPM system implemented, and working out of the box very quickly (which is very expensive, as I now know). Still, I sent the letters manually !
A few years later, when we already had our own company, we turned to a call center for cold calling, I came across this again. We were offered beautiful graphics, detailed statistics of calls, call records, a personal project manager - everything was very cool ... And they offered to send commercial offers by email for 3 rubles / pcs . And I, for some reason, suggested that for such a price they also do it manually .
The amount, of course, is small. We had no more than 50 KP per day per operator, which in terms of a month is 50 * 20 = 1000 rubles. But compared to the tariffs of other means of email marketing, the same mailchimp, it was much more expensive.
And what if you don’t have a call center operator, but your own managers, and they, like me as a student, spend 1 hour on the day of their time on such a stupid and routine operation . How much do you, as a manager, lose money because of this?
Therefore, we solved this problem
How?
To the standard table (excel or docs.google), we connect our program. It "parsits" this tablet every five minutes and finds all the lines in which the result is indicated: "KP".
After that, it automatically inserts the data of this company (the name of the recipient, the email address) in a pre-prepared template and sends it to the client .
That is, any client receives a commercial offer within 5 minutes after the conversation. Naturally, this has a positive effect on work efficiency.
After the letter is sent, the system tracks the receipt of the letter by the client and its opening. That is, if you see that your commercial client has not opened, it will be logical at the beginning of the next conversation to ask: “Did you manage to get acquainted with our commercial one?”.
Another nice “bonus”: before sending, the system will check if you have written the email correctly and will let you know if you made a mistake (well, you were simply told a non-existent address so that you can get rid of it.
This is the concept of the new functionality that we are going to introduce.
I would like to hear if you thought about this problem when you organized your cold sales department or applied to a call center?
Or, maybe, we invented this problem ourselves (start-ups often like to stew in their own juice)
Thanks in advance for your comments and constructive criticism!
PS If you are just starting to engage in cold sales, and you still do not have such "plates" - write - we will be happy to share.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292194/
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