Cold Calling 101: How To Prioritize Your Outbound Sales Leads (Automatically)

Sales reps juggle numerous responsibilities daily in the dynamic realm of outbound sales. From cold calling new leads to booking demos to prospecting for new customers, tasks can easily fall through the cracks. This is why many sales teams rely on automation to help them update the CRM, leave voicemails, and analyze their conversations (to name a few). 

Another tedious task that can be automated with the right tools is prioritizing leads for outreach. If you have a large number of prospects in your database, chances are some are cold, others are warm, and a handful are hot and need immediate action. 

Reaching out to your highest priority leads first in order to qualify those leads is crucial for sales success. Let’s take a look at how you can automate that process with Kixie’s PowerDialer and the Prioritized PowerList function.

Understanding the Sales Funnel

The sales lead funnel is more than just a list of potential customers; it’s a roadmap of opportunities. Properly managing this funnel is a herculean task, especially when dealing with many leads that may or may not be interested in your product. This is where the prioritization of inbound leads, especially hot leads, becomes vital. Hot leads, or those most likely to be potential buyers, should always be at the forefront of any calling strategy.

By dialing interested or “hot” leads first, you can enhance efficiency and ensure that sales teams focus sales calls on the most promising leads, thereby maximizing the chances of conversion.


Kixie’s Prioritized PowerLists: A Game-Changer

Kixie’s Prioritized PowerList feature enables sales teams to categorize leads into five priority levels: Highest, High, Medium, Low, and Lowest. This feature is crucial, particularly when dealing with hot leads. For example, a lead that just filled out a contact form on your website and entered your sales pipeline can be tagged as ‘Highest’ priority, ensuring immediate attention. 

Kixie’s system is designed to queue up calls in the dialer based on these priority levels, starting from the highest. This ensures that your sales team is always working on the most urgent and potentially rewarding leads first, significantly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales efforts.

Combined with Kixie’s Next Action automation, which allows you to automatically forward your contacts from higher-priority PowerLists to lower-priority PowerLists after completing a certain number of dial attempts, you can be sure your team never misses an opportunity to call an interested lead.

Implementing Kixie into Your Sales Strategy

Incorporating automatic lead prioritization on outbound calls into your sales strategy is a strategic move. By setting up priority levels, you ensure that your team focuses on hot leads first. For example, you might prioritize new leads from a web form as ‘Highest’ or ‘High,’ ensuring they are contacted immediately, while leads from a week-old email campaign might be set as ‘Medium’ or ‘Low.’

Plus, you can move leads to a lower-priority PowerList after a specified amount of time or outreach attempts have elapsed. This allows for more customization in your outbound sales process and a higher chance that you will reach an interested prospect over the phone.

For example, let’s say you called a high-priority lead 3 times in 1 week and didn’t get an answer. You can then automatically move that contact to a low-priority PowerList. That lead will then only be contacted after your higher-priority contacts. (Or as determined by your other sales workflow automation.)

Prioritized PowerLists for Blended Sales Teams

In addition to outbound sales teams, Prioritized PowerLists can also be helpful for inbound sales or customer success teams. For example, outbound calls to customers awaiting customer service callbacks can be sorted by priority, time received, or by department. 

For contact center teams, Kixie also offers deeper customization and features. This includes the integration of Kixie with other sales and CRM tools, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Intercom. This allows for an even more tailored approach to lead and customer prioritization. 

Get Started Prioritizing Your Best Opportunities

Prioritizing leads is not just about efficiency; it’s about making smart, strategic decisions that drive sales. Kixie’s Prioritized PowerLists offer a sophisticated, user-friendly solution to streamline this process, ensuring your team always has its sights set on the most promising opportunities. Grab your free trial of Kixie’s Prioritized PowerLists, with unlimited feature access and the use of your own business phone number, here.