There are two types of leads out there—warm leads, who regularly engage with your brand and are actively interested in your product, and cold leads, who have either never engaged with your brand or have stopped doing so at some point in time.
Compared to warm leads, cold leads require a little more persuasion before they’re ready to close: a process that’s known as lead nurturing. Lead nurturing involves engaging or re-engaging cold leads with relevant, personalized content and offers before getting them to come to the negotiation table.
So, how do you re-engage and follow up with cold leads in a way that doesn’t turn them off?
In this article, we provide some essential sales tips for cold outreach and a simple framework for turning cold leads into warm leads through powerful lead nurturing.
Heating Up Sales Leads: How to Warm Up Cold Leads in 8 Steps
Step 1: Do Your Research
Before you can re-engage leads with cold calls or email marketing, do your research to make sure you understand their unique requirements and use cases.
Researching leads before conducting outreach ensures that you can send them more targeted content as you prepare them for closing. It also helps you understand why they stopped engaging in the first place.
Start by building a separate database for cold leads along with their contact details and professional information. Try to gather as much data on your lead list as possible before you initiate contact. You can use a lead generation tool like Datanyze to collect detailed information such as job status, employment position, and company details through LinkedIn.
Step 2: Generate Campaign Ideas
Next, it’s time to generate ideas for your re-engagement campaign.
Based on the research you conducted earlier, try to figure out the best way to reach out and reinitiate contact with your previous leads. But whatever you do, don’t just jump straight into your sales pitch!
The focus of your re-engagement campaign should be offering value. For example, you might invite cold leads to an event, introduce them to a candidate or connection, provide valuable business advice, or even just link them to an interesting and relevant piece of content.
Step 3: (Re-)Initiate Contact
Now it’s time to start reaching out to cold leads on an individual basis and hitting them up with relevant content. Make sure you engage with them on their own terms, on the platform they’re most comfortable with. You want to go where your leads are most active and approach them there, be it over email, social media, or something else.
Set the tone for your re-engagement campaign from the outset. Make sure your prospects know that this isn’t just about pushing for a sale. Instead, focus on relationship-building and providing real value.
For formerly warm leads who have gone cold, you can also use this opportunity to gather feedback on what made them stop wanting to engage with your brand.
Step 4: Engage Through Content
It’s not enough to just re-initiate contact. To keep their attention, you need to provide cold leads with useful and relevant content on a consistent basis. In many cases, the first step is to incentivize them to sign up for your email list.
Once you’ve got cold leads back in the loop, use a personalized and targeted email campaign to send them a variety of useful content. As your email list gets longer, you can use marketing automation and list segmentation to automatically send relevant content that still drives engagement at scale.
For more information, check out our detailed guide on email list management.
Step 5: Follow Up Regularly
Automated emails and content offers are a great way to re-engage lots of cold leads at the same time, but they aren’t as effective as personalized communication such as individually-written cold emails.
The trick is to find the right combination of automated and manual emails to maximize engagement. You should check in with potential customers at least once every few months to reassess their position, learn about their pain points, and make sure they’re receiving the value they signed up for.
Step 6: Provide Indicative Pricing
Often, the reason why cold leads stopped engaging with you is as simple as being fearful of your pricing. If you can’t give them a hard quote without specific scope requirements, try to offer some kind of indicative estimate to help leads understand how much your services are going to cost them.
This also helps separate the grain from the chaff by ruling out clients that may not be a good fit. After all, you want to spend your marketing resources on qualified leads who can actually afford to pay for your products and services.
Step 7: Get a Soft Close
You can create little opportunities throughout your follow-up campaign for cold leads to re-initiate contact with your business. Encourage them to subscribe to your email list, sign up for a webinar, or get on a phone call with you to discuss business goals, challenges, and (potentially) how your solution can help them.
These little wins may not mean much to you, but they’ll keep your leads warm and engaged as you proceed to make the final close. It’ll also make them feel more involved with your brand and encourage them to participate more actively.
Step 8: Demonstrate Urgency
Look around for chances to create a sense of urgency in your sales strategy. Leads that have gone cold for one reason or another often tend to be indecisive, which is why they might need a little nudge to get them through to closing.
However, you don’t want to corner your prospects or give them an ultimatum, as that may have an entirely opposite effect. Instead, simply make them aware of the situational changes (like new features, special promotions, and limited-time offers), highlight how they could benefit from acting ASAP, and then push for a close.
Warming Up Cold Leads Means Fewer Missed Opportunities
More often than not, tracking down cold leads and breathing new life into those relationships can be quite challenging for your sales team.
Previously warm leads who have gone cold may have switched jobs, changed careers, or been promoted since you last engaged them. They may have also changed their email address or phone number, which leaves your sales reps chasing ghosts for days before realizing they don’t have the right contact information.
That’s why it’s so important to have reliable access to up-to-date B2B contact data, regardless of what type of outreach you’re doing. Whether you’re trying to re-engage cold leads or generate new sales opportunities, accurate contact details can make or break your next deal.
Luckily, Datanyze is a lead management tool that enables you to learn how to find anyone’s phone numbers, email addresses and other up-to-date information. Available as a sales prospecting addon for LinkedIn, Datanyze helps you find up-to-date contact details and professional information on B2B sales leads without breaking a sweat.
Need help finding new leads or turning cold leads warm? Sign up for a free account with Datanyze today and see how easy lead generation can be!
