Every sales professional has dealt with a warm prospect that has suddenly gone cold without any explanation. One day, your conversations and follow-ups are going well, and then the next day, they’re giving you radio silence.
Leads suddenly going cold are especially challenging for sales professionals because it means that the prospect could have any number of reasons for not pursuing the sale. They may be dealing with more urgent issues in their company, or maybe a competing supplier has caused them to reconsider your offers. Perhaps, they’re just not ready to sign a deal with your business.
No matter how much effort you’ve put into engaging your prospects, they do become unresponsive from time to time. Here are five actionable tips on how to re-engage old sales leads and prospects that have gone cold:
Be Helpful
Whatever your prospect’s reasons are for growing cold, it all boils down to this: They are not ready to buy. Your role now with this newly-cold lead is to be helpful and available. One way to do it is to fire up a lead-nurturing email campaign.
Because of your previous conversations with your leads, they already know who you are. But for some reason or another, they are not ready to buy. A lead-nurturing email campaign allows you to stay at the forefront of their considerations. So when their condition changes, your company is always on the top of their mind.
Keep the Message Relevant
Keep track of the latest news about your prospect’s company to get a better picture of why they’ve gone cold. Following their company updates on social media will also give you an idea about how to engage them better. After that, be conscious of how your emails will appear in the prospect’s inbox. Understanding your prospects is only half the battle. You also need to communicate to them that you understand their needs. Personalize your content to your prospects.
By re-engaging a cold prospect with interesting and specialized content, you allow your emails and your brand to be rise above the spammy outreach emails they usually automatically delete.
Test Your Timing
Whether you send your prospects emails manually or through a marketing automation software, testing the timing of your email is always crucial, according to Carly Stec of Impact.
Monday morning emails are least likely to get opened because they have to compete with the pile of messages that your prospect has received over the weekend. Thursday morning tends to be optimal, since, by this time, the rush of the workweek has begun to slow down, and so has their emails.
Change Your Channel
If you’re having problems reaching a prospect through email, you may have better chances of re-engaging them through a different channel. You can leverage your social media channels to retarget your old leads on their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Facebook, for example, has an excellent tool for creating custom audiences for targeted ads. Since you already have a list of your cold leads’ email addresses, you can easily compile them on Facebook and advertise specifically to your lapsed prospects.
Even when leads do not click on your sponsored post, targeted ads help re-expose your offers to old prospects. This exposure helps you keep your company at the top of their mind should they require your services in the future.
Try the Nine-Word Email
As the name suggests, the nine-word email is an email that doesn’t have anything on it aside from a nine-word question designed to engage your prospect into dialogue. According to entrepreneur and marketer Dean Jackson, a subject line with just the recipient’s name and a body with a one-line question is all you need to engage an old prospect.
This engagement strategy is straightforward. Your one-line question should address a customer pain point. Examples of this question could be:
- Are you still interested in improving account security?
- Are you still considering buying a new car?
- Have you made progress with your kitchen renovation?
- Are you still interested in growing website traffic?
Remember that the purpose of your email is to warm up the cold lead, and not to make a sale. Be more conversational, so you don’t seem pushy.
There are always potential customers still hiding among your cold leads. Once you’ve piqued their interest with these tips, it will be easier for you to reignite your old relationship and push them closer to conversion.
If you need further help, you can contact us Callbox to assist you in securing and nurturing more leads with our experienced and expert marketing teams.
