How to have 10% connection rate - wholesale cold calling

Question

I am researching how to improve my cold call efficiency and one of the key KPI's that I would like to focus on is improving my connection rate with the correct person to 10% so I can reach more leads. What do I need to do with my data from government lists to achieve this number?

Cornelius Garland · Answer

Great post and question. Cold calling is my main marketing channel and it took a few years to optimize it to the point where I'm getting results consistently.

There isn't a magic bullet for getting the results you want. Firstly, I'd like to set the proper expectation for connection rates. If you are working with a freshly pulled and skip-traced list then your connection rate should be 20% for the first week of dialing. Using high-quality phone numbers is important. As of this post, if a skip tracing service is charging 8 cents to 15 cents per record then I'd say this is good data. Any price lower than this is a toss-up as far as how recently the data is updated.

Your dialer should have phone numbers/DIDs that are specific to the area code you are calling. If you're in North Carolina then try to use an NC area code. If you're not able to, a toll free number works.Choosing the right triple-line dialer is important as well. Not all of them are created equally. I've tried Xencall/ReadyMode, CallTools, Five9, and a slew of others. I've found that Batch Dialer is working well. Some of these dialers eat your phone numbers up very quickly. Xencall was really bad about this before I switched a few years back.There are so many tweaks you can do but each change will only optimize your campaign by 1% to 5%. It's important to make one change at a time. If you're using a different list-pulling provider, skip tracer, dialer, and type of list each month then it's hard to pinpoint what the issue is.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

Again, you are asking the wrong question.

You are basically asking, how can I improve my car engine to be able to fly to the moon?

Can't.

It doesn't matter what you do to make your cold calling more efficient when cold calling can not target the audience you are looking for. You are not targeting motivated sellers with cold calling, so what does it matter how efficient you make your cold calling?

Even if you were to manage to get 100% efficiency with cold calling. EVERY single person will pick up when you call.

The amount of deals you will make still is limited by the number of people that actually are willing to sell below market value, you reach with your 100% efficient cold calling strategy, right?

Do you get it?

If you have a list of 1000 people to call, but on your list, you have no one that is motivated, even if you get a 100% connection rate, meaning every single person you call will pick up, how many deals will you make? None! Your audience is wrong.

If you need to reach 1000 people to get one contract signed, it means that 999 of the 1000 were NOT motivated. These numbers are standard.

So again, you are not understanding lead generation if you ask how to make your cold calling more efficient.  Focus on targeting the right audience, not how to make cold calling more efficient.