This ONE Thing Is What Makes Cold Calling Successful

Everyone thinks that cold calling and outbound dialing is all about your opener or like what you say, when to call, but it's not, okay? There's something that nobody talks about, the one key factor that will ultimately dictate the success of your outbounding and cold calling. And that's if somebody actually picks up the phone today. What I'm going to do in this video is going to break down exactly why or why not those people are picking up or not picking up, how you can tell what you can do and the exact steps that you can take as someone who is calling leads, whether they be opt in or cold to actually get people to pick up the phone. So why do people not pick up the phone? One, there's a number of reasons, okay? The first can be that some people, a percentage of them never pick up unknown numbers. Okay? So there's things that you can do like getting 1, 800 numbers and branded caller IDs and rotating through them. And so that gives you an opportunity to speak to more people. But also there's like time of day. So peak times a day are 9 to 11, 1 to 3 and then 6 to 8. Okay? Those are the peak pickup times. And then there's a number of other different, just overall lead factors that you have to take into account. The biggest killer in cold calling is your call never reaching a human. So carriers like AT&T T Mobile, they're using machine learning and they're using businesses like Haya, tns, First, Orion, stuff like that to decide if your call looks spammy. They will then mark your number and they will either deliver it with a spam flag or not deliver it. Okay? I don't think you guys realize but you can be calling people and it's ringing for you and not for them. That happens a lot of the time. But I don't care how good you are at outbound or cold calling, if you can't get people to pick up the phone, you're not going to have much success. So here are the things that you might be doing that you should not be doing. One, when a number is flagged, you bin it straight away, get a new one. That's a stupid way of doing it and I'm going to explain why. Two, multi line or like progressive dialing, those really aggressive. If you're cold calling, you can't even do any, any auto dialing conventions at all. They're all against the law. To do anything, even power dialing, you have to initiate dial yourself leaving short voicemails, okay? Is going to be really detrimental to you. Using your personal phone is just kind of a bad idea. Also, once you get your personal phone spam flagged, it's an absolute fucking nightmare. And, and then you've got like double and triple dialing. These are really, really bad conventions. So first when a number is flagged, bin it, okay? That's a terrible way of doing it. What they're looking for is overall number behavior, but also they're looking for the history of that number. If your number has no history because it's always like a new number that hasn't been used much and then all of a sudden just gets used straight away, they're going to flag it anyway. If you're using a VoIP system, which you probably are, which is anything on a computer, that number is pre flagged and then through good behavior and a fuckwit you're going to get it deflagged. But a lot of that is because you're using the number regularly. And then the people that do pick up, you actually speak to, etc. Etc. And so you need a number history. You will never get a new number. That's not going to happen, okay? They're just going to be recycled numbers. People are like, I want a new number. No, you don't have the money to get a new number, trust me. So when a number is flagged, it can be unflagged. It's not a forever, but if you stop using that number, it is flagged forever. Until then like somebody that it starts being used the right way. The next thing is using like really aggressive dialing strategies like multi line progressive power. These do a tremendous disservice to most people. One, because they're usually not allowed to do it given the type of marketing that they do. Cold calling is not allowed to use any of these conventions. Cold calling has to be like a human initiated dial. Those are the rules. But also like pattern recognition, high volume, lack of rotation if you're not tracking abandoned rates, stuff like that. These are all things that will dramatically decrease the overall health of the number to the point where it will lower you to a status of where it won't even go through. And then you're just hitting straight to voicemail. Which is why people go from single line dialing to power dialing to multi dialing to progressive dialing to 10 line dialing. And it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And in reality it's just because like it's that that level of aggression and is what is causing the need to go to the next level. And dialers love that because the most profitable thing you can do is multi land dial and have no one pick up the fucking phone. That is their bread and butter. The next thing is leaving short voicemails. So one of the things that's tracked when it comes to spam flagging and attestation scores is the history of that number. But it's the average conversation length. If it's really short, okay, it's going to kill the number because they're assuming that people are picking up and hanging up on you, right? Or if you. That's why multi line dialing can be so bad because you might be, if you're doing 10 lines at once, you might be hanging up on somebody every single time, right? And so that's a short conversation. So if you're going to leave a voicemail script out, a one minute long voicemail, okay. And that, that way it's not going to affect you, okay? Using your personal phone. Using your personal phone is usually illegal because the number has to be provisioned for your business. So if it's not a business number or whatever, but also like it's just bad practice, I think in general it's not really like it can be done, it can be effective. Especially like if it's your, your business with your phone, yada yada yada, you can overdo it. And your phone, although it has higher thresholds of things, it's, it's, it's going to end up blurring the line between business and personal. But also like it's very difficult to record things and stuff like that. And so, and technically every single call that you do as a business must be record. Using a personal phone is not great. And once you get your personal phone spam flagged, it's an absolute fucking chip show. Then we've got double and triple dialing. Double and triple dialing are super prevalent to break through things like iPhone, focus time, stuff like that. Now the reason why this is really bad is one, because those things are what's called a consumer protection. So if you put your phone on do not disturb. And I actually had this happen once I put my phone on do not disturb and I was speaking at an event about this exact subject and somebody triple dialed me and I picked up and I said what the fuck do you want? Right? And the only reason why I picked up is because I thought it might be a sales rep and it was really good timing. But like also you don't know, it could be an actual emergency. And do you really want the initial interaction with a potential customer to be that they think that you're an emergency just gonna be pissed off? How many people have you triple dialed that picked up were not pissed off at you? I mean like would you be happy with it? No. Exactly. Also, triple dialing is an expressly and double down. They are expressly forboden in the TCPA because you are trying to intentionally bypass a consumer protection. These are not helpful things to do. And they, they ultimately destroy the ability for that phone number to go through. Because every single time you do that, it's all logged and tracked. Now what actually works? That's all the no nos. What actually works? Single line, human initiated dialing. Okay. Bing, bing, bing. And this is for outbound and also cold calling as well. The way that dialer does it is we do like a lead pop and stuff like that that you can still do a very large number of calls. You've got people doing hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day. You want to keep each number to like under 50 to $75 per day. Okay. Again, dialer automatically rotates through that, whatever you need to do, whether it's a stop drop and then rotate, whatever. But if you're using like one number per rep and they're doing like full time outbound, you're going to scorched earth those numbers almost immediately. You need to have a few because you know you want to build up that numbers, those numbers reputation over time. And then if someone's got three or four numbers attached to them, then maybe what you do is you then add a new number and then take two of those numbers and give them to one of the newbies. Right. So you've always got a nice healthy farm of numbers that are being used. They're going to be spam flagged on some and not others. It's going to be periodic. You don't just stop using them. Okay. Because people can call those numbers back. Okay. The way that dialer does it is it monitors all the spam flag statuses. We do remediation as well, which is something I'll talk about. But remediation can be very difficult to get for certain types of businesses. But we actually change the way that numbers are dialed, but we never stop using them. Make sure that you're on a system that has a level attestation scoring. Okay. If you're on a really shitty dollar or you're using like a local presence pooled number system, you're kind of fucked to begin with because those destroy the quality of the phone number because legally the outward number has to match the outgoing and the caller ID have to match. So as soon as you use one of those pooled systems that automatically stops. So like that just destroys the deliverability of that doing the right thing. Not over dialing people, not double dialing people, not triple dialing people. You're using like single human initiated dialing. You're keeping each number to below 50 to 75 calls per day. You're rotating through your numbers intentionally, right? You're hitting people up at the right times. You're not going at like 9, 10pm at night, okay, outside of TCPA. And you use a monitoring service to monitor the health of your numbers, like number verifier or something like that. The real thing is that like you need to speak to people in order to close them. And a lot of the systems these days do not allow you to do that because they're built on cheap infrastructure. Like Twilio is a fantastic infrastructure for texting and doing development work, but it's not great for high volume calling and I don't believe it was meant for that in the beginning. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But it gets super congested. And because it is so developer friendly, there's so many dialers on it that most dialers are built on Twilio infrastructure, which is why it gets so congested. And like there a lot of the dialers which are the signers for the call have not developed their own infrastructure comprehensively enough to send enough information through to get you level A attestation scoring which then lowers your overall deliverability. So the thing is like be on a really good dialer, spend the extra money, spend the extra 30, 40, 50, $100 a month or whatever it is to to get a higher level dialer. And if it's not dialer, maybe it's something else like a phone burner or something like that, right? Which is a decent product so that you can actually have a chance of people connecting. You know, because you're spending money on lead just doing this stuff. It's like why? Why cheap out? And why do something that is going to ruin your opportunities hands down and you won't even know. However, I hope this was helpful and I hope this helps you get through to more people so you can stop breaking the law and start having people pick up the phone.