When It Comes to Sales Prospecting, Warm is the New Cold

When It Comes to Sales Prospecting, Warm is the New Cold:

Cold Calling or Warm Calling, Your Sales Team Needs Both Skills

We routinely see companies with B2B sales organizations that don’t (or won’t) make cold sales calls. When a web or phone lead comes in they are quick to respond but when no leads are available their sales people sit idle, do non-sales related tasks, or worse go home early.

Many of these companies consistently fail to attain their sales targets and in most cases only 15-20% of their reps make plan. Their sales teams are uncomfortable cold calling so they do as little of it as possible and their results show it. As a sales leader or senior executive how do you change the situation; different people, more training, better processes, the answer is probably yes.

Sales reps will continually complain to senior management that they need more or better leads – but the question is if they had those leads what would they do with them?

One skill exhibited by strong cold callers is the ability to establish a rapport quickly with a prospect. If a sales person has trouble cold calling will they actually be able to engage effectively with a prospect when supplied with a warm lead? While a warm lead exhibits some of the behaviors of a qualified lead, the sales person still needs to engage with the prospect to further validate the level of qualification. If that sales person is incapable of successfully engaging with the bulk of the prospects they interact with you have a problem.

Today’s reality is that every company should be considering ways to improve qualified lead flow to their selling teams. Inbound marketing and marketing automation are two well-documented ways to put more warm leads in the hands of your sales team. Handing your sale people a warm lead can help them establish a meaningful conversation with a prospect faster than by cold calling. Warm leads help eliminate the “fishing expedition” portion of the cold call, allowing your sales person to quickly zero in on client needs and hopefully reducing sales cycle time. But Sales Reps still must be able to establish rapport!

If you believe that investing in a lead generation program will give you the highest probability for success you are right. High performing sales teams need a steady stream of qualified prospect’s to help them achieve quota on a consistent basis.

What lead generation programs won’t do however is to force lazy or undisciplined sale reps to engage with a prospect!