It’s a fairly common scenario: A promising lead funnels in, your sales team puts in the legwork to engage and communicate, and all appears hopeful—your agents prepare to delve further into your product offerings, learn more about their needs, and possibly set up some in-person meetings—in a nutshell, the next steps. Yet, all of a sudden, the other party ceases communication and the once-hot lead grows instantly cold.
While it’s difficult to not take such situations personal, it’s often just the nature of doing business, and speaks nothing to the excellent service provided by your employees. The good news is that, much like a detective whose trail has gone cold, your teams are just a few short steps away from finding the clues and taking the steps needed to heat the opportunity right back up. One hint? They all require powerful CRM.
Trigger Their Memory
Your customers are busy, and are most likely fielding calls and taking information from myriad other companies similar to yours. Standing out requires communication that will trigger their memory of who exactly you are. The best way to do this? Store all customer communications in a central CRM portal, where they can be easily tracked and referenced for situations just like these.
Keep it Personal
Tailoring conversations to the unique history and business requirements of each lead makes that first call after a few weeks, months, or even years away exorbitantly less painful, helping agents avoid that awkward silence on the other end of the line and instead engage the listener with personal recounts and catch-ups (drawn from CRM) that say one thing: you’re important to us, and we remember you, triggering the sort of brand recognizance absolutely necessary for brand identity and customer trust. In fact, recent research by McKinsley & Company reveals that relevant content can up the ROI of cold leads to $44 for every $1 spent.
Drive Omnichannel Engagement
Reheating cold leads often requires leveraging up to three different types of engagement, which today means reaching out through phone, e-mail, and social media Yet, it can be easy to inundate with information, and unfortunately few things make a cold lead colder than being flooded with an influx of unsought sales and marketing data. So keep the message brief, no matter the platform, and maximize personalization. One way to make sure you grab their attention? Use their first and last name in the greeting. One way to capture this sort of valuable data? You guessed it—a powerful CRM system.
In the business world, opinions shift routinely, and even the presumably coldest leads are not off the table entirely, especially with the CRM technology today that gets us closer to them than ever before. Successful companies will be those who leverage these tools to keep current leads hot, and finally move others off the back burner.
Source:
Yonatan, Reuban, “5 Effective Ways to Reheat Cold Leads,” Salesforce Blog, July 15, 2015.
NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT
