You warm up before a race. A good movie gives you the warm fuzzies. You host a house warming party to fill your new home with friends and family. The word warm is constantly associated with positive feelings — so why would you continue to cold call?
A cold call isn’t just uncomfortable over the phone. A cold email can be just as brutal, to both you and the prospect, because there’s no rapport built up to establish trust on either side. And with the sales tools available at the fingertips of any modern sales professional, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take a few steps on the front-end to warm up that cold call.
Kenny Traber, one of our veteran Sales Development Reps and current team lead, knows exactly how to put that warm up into action. In the video below, learn how Kenny takes a normal cold call or cold email, and turns it into a warm interaction with his prospects:
Here’s How Kenny Warms Up a Cold Call:
Hey y’all, Kenny Traber here at Salesloft. I’m an SDR team lead and I’m here to talk to you today about creative communication with your prospects.
Sales leaders are getting a ton of emails and phone calls, and everyone’s trying to sell them something. So rather than flooding someone’s email inbox or calling them multiple times, I try to get creative with how I’m communicating with them to stand out from the crowd.
As you can tell, this is a creative approach that I’ve used recently: I’m on your computer screen, and I’ve actually used Twitter recently to connect with my prospects. Just yesterday I got a call back from someone, who a few minutes earlier, I had been on their Twitter feed looking to do some research on them.
I favorited one of their tweets, so when they called me back, instead of me saying, “Hey, this is Kenny, we haven’t spoken before,” I was able to say, “Hey, this is Kenny, you might recognize my name because I just favorited one of your tweets.” That automatically turns what would have been a cold call, into a little bit more of a warm dialogue. We were able to have a good discussion around the reason for my call.
As you can tell, I’m on a LinkedIn page here. This is another creative way that I try to communicate with my prospects.
I do a lot of research before I make a phone call, and I’m not just talking about roles and responsibilities, I’m talking about where the person is located, maybe where they went to school. That way I can communicate with someone — have a little bit of connection — make it more personalized.
Just this morning, I connected with a prospect of mine from Chattanooga, Tennessee. I know that we don’t have that many prospects in our industry that are in Chattanooga, so that really stuck out to me. I was able to chat with them about the fact that I was just in Chattanooga, and reference a restaurant that I had stopped at. He’d been there (goes there all the time!) so instead of it being a cold call, we were able to have kind of a warm intro and have some positive dialogue from that call.
Another way that I’ve communicated creatively with my prospects recently is Slack.
What I have done is I’ve joined a couple different Slack channels that are around sales communication, sales process, things of that nature, and then when someone asks, “what does account planning look like for your organization?”
Rather than just answering the question, I send them a direct message — ask them why they’re interested in that, give them some advice about what we do here at Salesloft, what we see is working for us. Then, I’m able to engage in some open dialogue around their sales process and ask them things that are more specific, and show them that I really care because I’ve already added value to the conversation.
So we talked about using creative communication to engage with your prospects. We talked about Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack. If you’re using something else to communicate with your prospects, I’d love to hear about it, as those three have worked for me, I’m always looking to improve and would love to hear about some more!
Speaking of social media, if you’re following Salesloft, you’ve probably seen our newest e-book, Houston We Have a Sales Problem. Check it out, we’d love to hear your thoughts:
