When some of our clients hear about so-called cold leads, which are the result of outbound activities, or in our case cold-mailing, they immediately seek reassurance that in case of possible cooperation with them, the leads will be exclusively hot (Hot), that is, basically at the stage of choosing between them and their competitors. At most, they may be heated (Warm), i.e. those who manifest a clearly defined need for the product. We understand this aversion to cold leads, on the part of salespeople, because we know that they are held accountable for sales results and period. The colder the leads, the harder it is to close the deal. A large portion, of the business developers and sales executives I know, have little idea why they need cold leads in the sales funnel. This happens when they lack an idea of how to use such leads, and the pressure for a result is high, so there is also no time to create a long-term strategy. The more they work with an inbound lead, the harder it is for them to understand the point of working with those leads that are not ready to buy right now, but at the latest within the average length of the sales cycle. We then hear from them that “We only deal with serious leads, ones that have a specific need and are ready to buy from us.”

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Such a conversation usually ends with the statement that the only legitimate lead is one who has made a purchase here and now. And everything would agree, except that the definition of a lead boils down to the notion that it is a potential customer. After a purchase is made, after all, we are talking about a customer. If you ever come across a store with customers, let me know immediately, I’d love to buy everyone. Why the sarcastic tone on my part? If sales boiled down to simply buying customers, then no business owner would suffer from ulcers, depression, neurosis and a host of other illnesses caused by the stress of building a business. And here the question must be asked: why do hundreds of thousands of companies around the world generate cold leads? Why are the companies providing cold lead generation tools, or if you prefer MQLs, valued at billions of dollars?***.

 

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/martech-startups  

 

The b2b buying process.

To answer this, we need to dig into the characteristics of the B2B buying process. How does a business buy? According to various studies**, including Gartner’s,* if you sell in a B2B model, before any company contacts you, as much as 67% of the time they intend to buy will be spent scouring the Internet for information about products and services similar to yours. In addition to this, there is a five-step process for B2B purchases (figure below).

So, as you can easily guess, these five stages can take, depending on the specific purchasing issue, anywhere from 1 week to as long as 24 months. Therefore, it is easy for me to understand the irritation of sales departments when they hear about cold leads, However, the following information is key: “81% of companies, buy from the first company they engage in discussions with “**. And that’s why it’s worth it, showing up in a potential customer’s email inbox before they realize there’s a problem at their company that you’re addressing. Why this is so crucial:

• Who among us is in a position to guess when a potential customer will, of their own accord, realize the need to purchase our service/product?
• What if this potential customer, realizes the existence of the problem you are solving, but has a different vision of its solution than your product/service assumes?
• What if, when searching for phrases on the Internet, our potential customer does not come across our advertising article or website?
• What if our competitors reach the potential customer first?

The answer is brutally simple – such a potential customer, will cease to be a lead for you, and will start to be a customer of your competition. *https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey **https://www.themarketingblender.com/statistics-boost-sales/  

How to work with a cold lead.

To be well prepared to work with our cold lead, it is necessary to prepare the process by which this lead will mature. Those of you who have already had the opportunity to speak with a so-called outband lead, know that such a lead must be properly qualified during the conversation, so that you know how to deal with it in the future. During the conversation, questions must be asked about the current situation of the subject, the characteristics of their activities in the context of your offer, the potential of being able to buy your services/products at a specific time, and in a suitable budget, etc.. This will help you determine whether it is worth continuing communication in the long term, and when it is worth resuming contact. The guiding principle we apply to such people is: ” we keep contacting the lead until he turns into a customer, or tells us to stop further correspondence”. If we have a planned contact path (We recommend not doing this more than once a quarter), then we can begin to observe the effectiveness of our action in hard numbers. For this purpose, it will be useful to record and monitor activity in the CRM system to study the effectiveness and conversion rate on a quarterly basis. A side effect of long-term and planned contact, as part of lead nurturing, will be the return of some of these leads on their own initiative. Conversion from a new cold lead to a deal is between 1 and 5%. However, if we make room in the process for re-contacting a once-opened lead from a so-called back-list, we can first, we will see an increase in quarterly conversion to above 5% second, the effectiveness of our offers will increase thirdly, the longer we contact our leads, the closer their conversion approaches that which we know from leads coming from referrals Below is an excerpt from our CRM for the last three quarters, describing the effectiveness of sales, only among our outbound leads. Note that in the last quarter of last year we had more deals than offers in this segment. In other words, cold leads, regularly heated up spoke up and asked for an invoice without playing around with negotiations and offers.  

 

Backlist Q4 2023	504	Backlist Q1 2024	585	Backlist Q2 2024	670
Lead	171	Lead	111	Lead	102
Deal	9	Deal	8	Deal	10
Offers	5	Offers	27	Offers	11
Conversion Offer Deal	180,00%	Conversion Offer Deal	29,63%	Conversion Offer Deal	90,91%
Conversion Lead Deal	5,26%	Conversion Lead Deal	7,21%	Conversion Lead Deal	9,80%

 

Also, take a look at the following charts from our HubSpot, and then return to the table above. As you can easily see if the acquisition of cold leads is based on a specific plan, the number of customers acquired ceases to depend directly, on the number of new leads acquired, and begins to depend directly on the sum of leads we are constantly operating on for that specific funnel. In this way, our sales funnel becomes immune to market fluctuations, and to the possibility of running out of new leads.

Ultimately, a properly targeted cold lead acquisition process yields results similar to those of heated inbound leads.

Can such results be replicated in your company as well? Feel free to contact me.  

 

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