Having a healthy flow of new business is vital to the success of any business. Closing the business needed to achieve your revenue goals requires a steady flow of new leads. When inbound leads are few and far between, marketing and sales teams must resort to prospecting cold leads that fit your target personas. The challenge lies in capturing the interest of these leads and moving them through your sales funnel. In this blog, we’ll explore how to effectively turn cold leads into warm prospects.
Inbound Sales Methodology
Inbound sales methodology is a modern approach that focuses on understanding and meeting the needs of potential customers. Inbound sales teams attract, engage, and delight customers by providing valuable content and personalized experiences. This approach is particularly effective for converting cold leads into warm prospects as it directly addresses the pain points a potential customer may have and positions your company as its solution. The inbound sales process can be broken down into four key actions:
- Identify: Determine who your ideal leads are based on data and research, focusing on those who fit your buyer personas and are most likely to benefit from your product or service.
- Connect: Reach out to these identified leads with personalized messages that address their specific needs and pain points, aiming to establish a meaningful connection.
- Explore: Engage with leads to understand their challenges and goals, asking open-ended questions to uncover deeper insights into their needs.
- Advise: Provide tailored solutions and recommendations that directly address the leads’ identified problems, positioning your product or service as the ideal solution.
Buyer’s Journey (Awareness/Consideration/Decision)
Understanding the buyer’s journey is crucial for effectively engaging cold leads. The buyer’s journey relates to all actions and decisions a lead makes before becoming a customer. This journey consists of three stages:
- Awareness: The lead realizes they have a problem or need.
- Consideration: The lead defines their problem and researches potential solutions.
- Decision: The lead evaluates and decides on the best solution.
Tailoring your approach to each stage of the buyer’s journey ensures you provide the right information and support at the right time.
Defining Your Personas
Creating detailed buyer personas helps you better understand your target audience. These personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Include information such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Defining your personas allows you to tailor your outreach and messaging to resonate with your target audience and their specific pain points.
Defining Your Sales Process
Having a clearly defined sales process ensures consistency and efficiency in how you handle leads. Outline each step from initial contact to closing the sale, including specific actions, tools, and criteria for moving leads through the funnel. A well-structured process helps your sales team stay organized and focused on converting cold leads into warm prospects. Having clear documentation of your sales process also helps increase alignment between your marketing and sales teams. Having a tool to keep track of in-process deals like Hubspot Sales Hub or Salesforce adds additional infrastructure for your sales team and makes it easier to report of the effectiveness of sales efforts.
Creating an Outreach Strategy
Once your target audience is outlined, there are several strategies that can be effective for finding and engaging with cold prospects. Two of these outreach strategies are leveraging LinkedIn outreach and cold email outreach.
LinkedIn Outreach
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B marketing & sales. LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it possible to pull together lists of LinkedIn users that fit your target audience criteria. These lists can then be used in conjunction with automation tools to allow connection requests and inbox messages to be sent to these leads at scale. Personalize your connection requests and messages to build relationships, establish trust and book a discovery meeting.
Cold Email Outreach
Cold email outreach can be highly effective when done correctly. While there are several companies out there that offer the ability to purchase email lists, its important to vet each provider to ensure that you are receiving lists that include data that is high quality and accurate. After purchasing a list, it’s important to run it through an email validation service to identify any contacts that are invalid or risky.
When writing your messaging, be sure personalize your emails to focus on the needs and pain points of your target audience. A/B test different subject lines and messaging to determine what resonates best with your audience. Before launching, consider sending cold outreach messages using a separate platform from your regular email marketing.
By nature, when you are messaging contacts who are learning about your brand from the friend time, performance will typically be lower than your existing customer list. Sending via a different platform will ensure that lower performance will not effect the send health of any existing campaigns. It is also recommended to deploy cold email outreach campaigns in batches to prevent your account from getting flagged due to high bounce rates.
Crafting Effective Messaging
Learn About the Lead
Effective messaging starts with understanding your lead. Research their business, industry, and challenges. Personalize your messages to show that you’ve done your homework and are genuinely interested in helping them. It is often helpful to start off an initial message by asking about the lead rather than talking about yourself. Showing an effort to be helpful and learn more about the needs of each individual is more likely to prompt a response.
Provide Value
Offer valuable content or insights that address the lead’s pain points. This could be in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, or webinars. Providing value builds trust and positions you as a helpful resource. Providing something of value to a lead also helps to prevent sales emails from being transactional.
Establish Authority
Showcase your expertise and experience in the industry. Share case studies, testimonials, and relevant credentials to establish credibility and authority. A proven track record will make a lead more likely to consider buying from you.
Nurturing Leads
Depending on where a lead is in their buyer’s journey, it can sometimes take up to eight or more touchpoints to convert them. Nurturing leads involves maintaining engagement and building relationships over time across multiple different outreach methods. If leads are not converting after several outreach attempts, don’t panic! Using a combination of tactics such as retargeting ads, gated content, and re-engagement workflows will help to keep your leads interested and move them closer to a purchase decision.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads keep your brand top-of-mind for leads who have interacted with your website or content. These ads can remind them of your offerings and encourage them to take the next step. Typical platforms for retargeting ads include Google Display and Facebook. Add a retargeting pixel to your website to start building a retargeting audience prior to any campaigns going live.
Gated Content
Offer valuable content in exchange for contact information. Gated content such as eBooks, webinars, and guides can help you capture leads and provide them with the information they need to move forward in their buyer’s journey. This also can be used as a trigger in your marketing automation software to enroll them in future nurturing campaigns.
Re-engagement Workflows
Use automated email workflows to re-engage leads who have gone cold. These workflows can include a series of personalized emails designed to reignite interest and move leads back into the active sales process.
Lead Scoring
Implement a lead scoring system to prioritize leads based on their level of engagement and likelihood to convert. Assign points for actions such as website visits, content downloads, and email interactions. This helps your sales team focus on the most promising leads.
Turning cold leads into warm prospects requires a strategic and personalized approach. By understanding the buyer’s journey, implementing an inbound sales methodology, and creating effective outreach and nurturing strategies, you can successfully engage and convert cold leads. For additional support in developing a tailored approach to lead conversion, contact the marketing experts at Alaniz Marketing. Let us help you turn your cold leads into warm prospects and drive your business growth.