Cold lead outreach doesn’t feel as exciting as connecting with a new, hot lead. But if you only did the exciting stuff in sales, not much would happen. Re-engaging cold leads provides too many opportunities for you to ignore it.
Make it a priority and part of your regular schedule to re-engage cold leads and you minimize acquisition costs, practice your relationship building skills, and create better customer experiences.
Use these strategies for contacting cold leads and starting conversations, cleaning up your CRM and making the most of every potential buying opportunity.
Organize Your Cold Leads
Dive into your database. You maybe remember a few of the people or deals that never went anywhere. But there’s even more people than you probably realize.
Create lists/groups of cold leads separated by factors like:
- last time contacted
- product/service interested in
- stage in pipeline
- size of company
- industry/vertical
Know the last time people were contacted, what happened in the conversation (if one even happened), and their preferred way to be contacted again.
Throughout this process, look for patterns in the types of prospects who went cold. Do people tend to drop off or do you quit following up at a certain point? These patterns give you clues for fixing your initial outreach to new leads. Use that info to keep leads from going cold in the first place.
Identify Leads Most Likely to Engage Again
Once you have a few groups created, choose the groups that you think will be most likely to engage again. Don’t try to reach all your cold leads at one time. That’s just overwhelming.
So, who to choose first?
That might be people you contacted in the last month who got to a second discovery call. Or it could be leads never contacted who seem to fit perfectly within your ICP. (You get the idea.)
By segmenting your cold leads, you make it easier to send clear, targeted messages to each of the selected groups. Better messaging equals more replies. Then you start building momentum with reviving those relationships.
Create Outreach Sequences Specific to Each Group
You save yourself a lot of time and energy when it comes to re-engaging cold leads when you spend the effort now to create a unique outreach plan for different scenarios.
What you say and when you say it should entirely depends on the reasons a lead went cold in the first place. Someone who no-showed or cancelled a demo will respond differently than someone who made it to the negotiation stages.
Regardless, the first message of your outreach should always include a question that encourages elaboration. Give people an easy way to provide more than a yes/no answer. And make it clear in what you say that you’re familiar with their specific circumstances.
Try to communicate on their terms as you reach out purposefully. Maintain contact through the ways your prospective buyers prefer — whether that’s email, text messaging, LinkedIn, or something else entirely.
No matter the reason you reach out, the fortune is in the follow-up. Don’t fall into your old ways that led to all these cold leads in the first place. Your follow-up may last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Again, it depends on how old the contacts are and their history with what you sell.
Design a Way to Continually Reach Cold Leads
Cold lead outreach is never one and done. You need to create a system that helps you continually reach leads who ghost, no-show, or simply never respond. Because there’s no way to keep everyone hot all the time. Through no one’s specific fault, leads get lost in the shuffle and fall through the cracks.
Design a process that automatically reaches out to leads who go cold. This needs to be a multi-pronged approach. Take advantage of emails, text messaging, and phone calls. (Focus your communication on how your leads and customers prefer to be contacted.)
Like all follow-up with prospects and customers, automation is key so you don’t get bogged down with manual work. Trigger outreach based on certain actions, or rather inactions.
For Krista Mashore Coaching, this meant creating an automated workflow of text messages to re-engage no-shows. When someone didn’t attend a call, that triggered their enrollment in a Skipio drip messaging campaign. The intent? Get them to reschedule.
In just 30 days of implementing this system, they rescheduled previous no-shows who then generated $49,000 in revenue. And their sales team wasn’t stuck with any manual outreach. Skipio did it for them.
Create Systems to Generate Revenue
The trick to all cold lead outreach strategies? Systematizing how and when you re-engage cold leads from your database. Nail down each of these processes and you improve every chance of converting old and cold prospects.
To simplify your automated outreach, include Skipio in your sales and marketing processes. Our platform allows you to engage hot and cold leads, new and old customers without getting sucked into lots of manual work.
