If you ever find yourself with no leads and no ideas how to get your next clients, you may find yourself in the position of having to cold call or cold email prospects for business.
I’ve been in this situation. We all have. Even if we are not in desperate straights, cold prospecting is an invaluable tool to master. If you can drum up business through cold contact, you will never be short of business. period.
Here is what I know of how to get the ball rolling with cold prospects.
1st thing. Warm it Up!
Rather than turn to bulk mailing or bulk calling, take some time to look into each lead. If you found them on the web, read their websites. Learn about each person. You may even be tempted to write individual emails to each lead.
Take personalization beyond loading their name into a spreadsheet and populating fields.
Consider writing copy that speaks directly to the person and what they do.
Don’t take too long on this as they are a cold lead and you could be doing it for nothing, BUT! the few leads that pick up on this tactic will instantly become new relationships that have a good bond with you based on this initial research.
Segment
The great thing about researching leads even in bulk is you might find some natural groupings you can put leads into that will lead you to write separate campaigns for each group. If the people already have a website, don’t sell them website creation. If the people already have social media, sell them ways of increasing engagement and conversion.
Personalize the Subject Line
This one tactic has shown to increase open rates by 2%. In a world where open rates are below 10% this is a great advantage.
Include Your Contact Information
Not every lead will reply to your cold emails by clicking the “reply” button. Some people might favor calling over other forms of communication. You’ll get little reaction to cold emails unless you give your contact details. Include your name, job title, email address, and phone number at the bottom of every cold email you send. To make this text stand out, you can even make it bold. Your B2B company’s sales approach will be bolstered by a greater response rate that results from putting your contact information in cold emails.
Talk About Other Things Besides Price
Your purpose here is to start a relationship and make the person want to call you.
If they truly want to work with you, You will get to the subject of price very quickly in your conversation. I am not even saying NOT to mention prices here. But be general and vague. Also couch the discussion of price inside of many discussions of benefit to the customer. Remember to talk directly to the pain points that customer experiences every day in their business.
