Success Rate of Cold Outreach Approach

Businesses and individuals are constantly looking for new ways to reach their target audience. After all, we have never been more flooded with information, both good and bad.

This makes cold outreach harder than ever before for salespeople. What exactly is cold outreach and how to be successful at it as a salesperson?

In this article, we will explore this question and the success rate of different types of cold outreach approaches.

What is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach refers to the process of reaching out to potential clients or customers who have no prior relationship with your business.

They have never heard of you, your business, product, or service before, and so it functions as an introduction to you and your value proposition and offer. The ways to execute cold outreach in B2B SaaS can include sending cold emails, making cold calls, or using social media platforms to connect with prospects.

The goal of cold outreach is to generate interest and ultimately convert these prospects into paying customers.

What is the Success Rate of the Cold Approach?

For Cold Emailing

Cold emailing requires extensive research, personalized messages, and creativity to cut through the noise and catch potential customers' attention. Typically, a well-crafted cold email can get you a response rate of between 10% to 30%, which can ultimately result in a few leads and sales.

More concretely, the 2024 average response rate for cold emails is 8.5%, while the open rate is 23.9%. To ensure that you're in this percentage, you want to make sure you're prioritizing research and personalization in your approach. Pay attention to sales triggers and demonstrate your knowledge in the field - this will get you the answers you want.

To get you started, here are some suggestions for cold email subject lines.

For Cold Calling

Cold calling is one of the most popular outreach channels but is also the most challenging. Many people are not fond of phone calls from strangers. A typical, unprepared cold call has a success rate of 2%.

However, a cold call is what you make of it. The right script can take you up to 10%, a personal question can improve it further by 2%, and finding a point in common, such as a LinkedIn group, can take you up to 70%.

Getting cold calling down to science can be a lot of trial and error, but once you find the magic recipe, it's one of the easiest and smoothest ways to start a sale. After all, it can double as a discovery call, and it's a way to personalize your business by engaging your prospect in a human connection.

For Social Selling

Social selling involves using social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to reach out and engage with potential customers. It is a long-term strategy that requires patience and persistence.

Social selling is not about making a one-time sale, but rather building relationships with potential customers that can lead to future sales opportunities. For some illuminating numbers:

• 78% of salespeople engaged in social selling outsell their peers who don't use social selling.
• Social sellers on LinkedIn have a 51% higher conversion rate than non-social sellers.

As you can see, this is significantly higher than cold calling and cold emailing. You have to remember though that social selling is time-consuming as it requires creating a relationship with customers and engaging with them through conversation, consistently providing valuable insights about what your product or service can offer.

Successful social sellers understand the needs of their prospects, their pain points, and their challenges, as well as their interests and preferences. They can tailor their messaging, posts, comments, and more to resonate with them and showcase how their product or service can be a solution to prospects.

As a side benefit, it provides branding for the company and establishes that its employees are industry leaders.

For Multi-Channel Outreach

Multi-channel outreach strategy is a sales technique that involves using different communication channels to reach out to potential customers. You build a sales cadence that can include email, phone calls, social media platforms, and any other channels that businesses use to connect with their audience.

The main goal of multi-channel outreach is to increase the chances of reaching and engaging with potential customers by using various channels to deliver a consistent message. You try different sales channels to see which one is most likely to resonate with your audience at a particular time.

Using this strategy allows you to find the best way to connect, and to stay aware of when that might change. Sometimes social selling is great, other times it may decrease. It also varies depending on the industry. By utilizing a multi-channel approach, you can always know what's best and cover your bases.

Conclusion

The success rate of cold outreach varies between channels. Cold emailing and cold calling seem to have a low success rate, while social selling and multi-channel outreach have a higher success rate.

However, the success of a cold outreach strategy depends on several factors, including personalization, timing, and the quality of messaging. This is why multi-channel outreach, whoever covers as many bases as possible is your best.

But still, underlying all of these, understanding your audience and customizing your message is the key to success in cold outreach.

For SDRs that can help you research and craft the correct messaging, make sure to get in touch with us here at SalesPipe!