Meet our experts on cold calling culture:
Anastasia Chihia, Sr. Director of Sales Dev at Upland joined little over 1.5 years ago from Outreach. In her tenure at Upland she increased outbound pipe contribution from 20% to 65% and doubled pipeline creation from 2023 to 2024, primarily through a phone-first approach.
Will Falkenborg is an SDR Lead at Champify. He regularly sets 20+ meetings per month, over 90% start with a cold call.
Watch the full conversation or get our top takeaways.
How to get buy-in from your team
Your team needs to be bought in on the value of cold calls. There are two key levers here.
One, leveraging your A performers, especially if you’re new to a company and haven’t built your credibility. Work with your A players to coach them and get their buy in on cold calling. If it works for them other reps will follow.
Two, shifting the perspective of cold call as a task to a necessary skill for AEs. Being an effective cold caller makes you a better AE. To be effective at cold calling, ou have to be good at tying pain to value quickly, you have to be able to handle objections on the fly, you have to master your pitch and you have to build rapport quickly. Help your reps see that cold calls, and the skills are not a task that you can’t wait to be done with, but instead they are full of skills you need to develop and will use in the rest of your career.
How to enable your team at scale
The days of 2 hour enablement sessions are over. Enablement is a continuous process that is always on. You need to build systems around continuous learning. For example:
- Show your reps where they are at, and what good looks like - call with them, give them examples, explain where they are falling short (more to come below)
- Call together - Anastasia strongly recommends holding power hours as teams to get even reluctant callers dialing (by the way - get a dialer).
- Provide cheat sheets - arm reps with at a glance resources on top objections and permission based openers to help them in real time.
- Empower your team to lead - have senior reps help enable the team by having small group sessions where they walk through on micro skill.
- Do org wide role plays
Get more expert advice on enablement here.
How to evaluate your rep’s skills
Show your reps what good looks like and the skills they need to develop. Top skills for cold calling include:
- Ability to tailor your conversation and language to ATL (above-the-line) and BTL (below-the-line personas)
- Ability to name the ICP personas and their roles/jobs within the company
- Ability to understand the pain points to each ICP persona
- Ability to understand the value prop for each persona
- Ability to understand and identify good fit companies
- Ability to share concrete customer examples
- Ability to share concrete use cases tied to customer examples
How to use data to analyze your reps cold call success
There are two different sets of metrics you need to understand: your cold call funnel and call health metrics. Key metrics the team uses in addition to conversion rate are:
- Number of dials
- Number of connects
- Number of conversations
- Number of meetings booked
- Number of meetings held
- Talk time
The Cold Call Funnel
The cold call funnel is a great tool to help you figure out the right volume for each rep in your business. It also helps identify areas that need focus. Maybe you need a dialer or data provider to get more phone calls or help with connect rates, perhaps the problem is in converting a conversation to meetings booked. This is a great tool to identify where problems are and ensure reps are focusing on the right tasks.
This is a guide, not the law of the land. Don’t stick to benchmarks or activity numbers when your reps are hitting their goals with less or missing their goals with the “right” number of activities but aren’t delivering.
“I don’t believe in the benchmark is a 100 dials a day. If I have a rep that converts at 35% from call meeting book , why does he need to do a 100 dials ? I would rather have the extra time to be focused on his or her own personal development. But if you're not there and your conversion rate is 5% , I'm sorry , but you actually need to do more dials to get that practice in.”
Cold Call Health
This dashboard helps monitor the quality of conversations by showing metrics like talk time, number of conversations (call > 2 min), and how those progress to meetings.
This is a great tool to help drive focus on your enablement and tailor your conversation to help each rep deliver the biggest impact.
Keep your reps having a good time by gamifying cold calling
Turn cold calling into a high reward situation. Run spiffs for specific metrics like talk time, number of connects, number of calls. Gamify it with a lottery, or spinning the wheel for a prize or even reward teams with cash, experiences, or prizes for hitting specific goals.
