Cold-calling isn’t fun for anyone. It isn’t fun for the sales rep who is trying to engage with hundreds of new prospects a day, and it’s not fun for the recipient who is being asked to buy something they have not expressed an interest in.
With 91% of new business calls not answered, cold-calling is becoming a less effective means of engaging new prospects.
Selling to cold leads doesn’t just occur when cold-calling, it also happens when marketers try to push for conversions on the first touchpoint a user has with a brand.
How often do you find yourself requesting a demo or setting up a meeting from the first interaction you’ve had with a company? I would hazard a guess that it’s not very often.
B2B organisations have long sales cycles, and prospects need to be nurtured. Your B2B marketing won’t work until you take a more holistic approach.
What are Warm Leads?
Quite simply, warm leads are the people who have expressed an interest in your business, products or services in the past. This could include signing up to a newsletter, following your company on social media, or attending a webinar hosted by you. This engagement means they are more aware of your brand, potentially making it easier to convert them to a sale.
Cold leads by contrast are those who are not yet aware of your business and have no, or very little, understanding of your brand.
3 Ways to Fill Your Funnel with Warm Leads
Let’s take a look at how you can fill your marketing funnel with warm prospects.
Offer Solutions to Problems
Build a content marketing strategy that offers your target audience answers to their problems. This will allow your business to build trust and portray thought leadership.
Top tips, how-to guides and informative videos will enable you to engage with your target audience whilst they look for answers to the problems that your company can help them solve.
Rather than trying to sell your product or service to your prospects straight away, build brand awareness first in order to highlight problems they may not even know they have and educate them about how your business can help.
Capture Contact Details
Once you’ve initially engaged your target audience and built up a level of brand awareness, capture their contact details to allow you to re-engage with them.
How to capture contact details:
- Gated content for downloadable resources such as useful guides, templates and checklists
- Reverse IP Lookup Tools
- Chatbots
- Contact Forms
- Call-back appointment forms
Re-Engage
Populate remarketing audiences so that you can continue to get in front of your warm leads and drive them further down the marketing funnel.
Remember to tailor your remarketing strategy to each stage of the conversion funnel. For example, if a user has only downloaded one of your resources, they are still at the top of your marketing funnel and it’s highly likely that they’re not yet ready to buy. They may not have even viewed the resource just yet. Re-engaging them with further content will nurture them further.
Leads who have filled out a contact form or requested a demo will be further down the funnel and therefore likely to be more receptive to organising a follow-up meeting.
The Key Ingredient for Nurturing Warm Leads
Don’t push for a sale straight away. Utilise social selling techniques, provide people with useful content and help them solve their key pain points.
Want to engage with more warm leads?
Reach out to me on LinkedIn or get in touch with the team to find out more about how we can help your business achieve marketing goals efficiently.
