Warming Up Your Cold Outreach
It’s hard to close a perfect stranger; prospects are far more likely to buy when they’ve heard of you or your brand before. Therefore, salespeople should view any cold contact list for what it is—a list of opportunities to create prospects, not a list of prospects itself.
Warming up your cold outreach means using a variety of outreach channels to get on your contacts’ radars before you start dialing. It can be a long, complex process, so I put together this campaign document to keep you on track.
Undoubtedly, there will be nuances and different variables when you put together your campaign, but the principles are sound across all audiences and industries. The following strategy is a great starting place for any coordinated, layered cold outbound strategy.
Key Points:
There is some color coding below to help differentiate the status of each tactic at different places in the campaign.
Black = Ongoing tactic started in the previous week but still running.
Green = New tactic starting that week
Red = Existing tactic ending that week
Prep Work
We won’t put a timeframe on this one because you don’t work for me. 😉However, I wanted to include a quick note about what you’ll need to start.
Defined target audience: You probably have some options, but pick your most valuable audience for your pilot or test campaign. The tighter your target, the easier it will be to build an authentic and tailored outreach effort.
Budget: Treat this like any other campaign, and create and set a healthy budget. If this is your first attempt at cold outreach, it will help to have skin in the game.
The List: There are a ton of data companies that provide good lists. My recommendation is a simple one. The rest of your campaign will be relatively inexpensive if you treat yourself to something; make it good data. Your list should have at least the following data points: no matter which provider you choose.
- Full Name
- Phone Number
- Job Title
- Business Email Address
- Company Name
Campaign Strategy Document: Finally, you should create a document like this one that lays out your strategy in detail. Creating a strategy doc will help keep you focused and accountable.
Campaign Creative: You’ll have to work with your marketing team (or create it yourself) to build all the assets for your campaign. Get everything organized, from social ads to landing pages and emails, before pulling the trigger.
The Campaign
Below you will find a sample campaign that doesn’t include every tactic but the critical ones. Remember, this is just a starting place for you and your team; there are no rules. Just remember it probably takes longer to get someone’s attention than you think it should, and you’re on the right track.
Month 1 | Awareness Building
The first phase of this campaign has a simple objective—get your brand in front of your target audience as much as possible with as much value as possible.
Week 1
- Launch IP-targeted display advertising campaign: Take the list of companies you’re targeting and work with your marketing team to kick off a display campaign that targets their company’s office.
Week 2
- Continue IP-targeted display campaign.
Week 3
- Launch exclusive content offer on a social channel of your choice: This will leverage your existing list and the emails on it to create a custom audience on LinkedIn (most likely) or Facebook; this tactic is most effective when you have matched personal email addresses.
- Continue IP-targeted display campaign.
Week 4
- Continue social network content promotion
- Continue IP-targeted display campaign
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone: Like any demand generation campaign, you should get some initial takers.
Follow up with those leads by phone or email; your cold outreach campaign just became a small inbound operation.
Month 2 | Awareness Building and Light Outreach
The second phase of the campaign continues to build on the awareness density the first month has begun to create and kicks things up a notch.
Week 5
- Continue social network content promotion.
- Continue IP-targeted display campaign.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Kick-off LinkedIn in-mail or cold email effort: Hopefully, your prospects have been exposed to your brand enough times that either a social selling gesture to connect or a cold email directly to them will be better received. I would try both of these approaches (LinkedIn and cold email) to see what gets a better response.
Be prepared to follow up with the hand-raisers who respond to this part of the campaign.
Week 6
- Continue IP targeted display campaign: This campaign’s creative has started to stale by now; time to swap it out or end it for this particular outreach effort.
- Continue social network content promotion: While you don’t have to stop this campaign now, you should assess its engagement rate. If things look good, keep running. If they’re trailing off, consider offering up another piece of content or refreshing the creative with your marketing team.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts: If you’re running cold email, you should email once a week or set up a drip campaign.
Week 7
- Kick-off new content offer on social: While you don’t have to shut off this campaign now, you should assess its engagement rate. If things look good, keep running. If they’re trailing off, consider offering up another piece of content or refreshing the creative with your marketing team.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts: If you’re running cold email, you should email once a week or set up a drip campaign.
Week 8
- Continue new content offers on social.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts: If you’re running cold email, you should email once a week or set up a drip campaign.
Month 3 | Time to Start Dialing
In the final phase, it’s time to start hitting those phones. How many calls you make in your outreach effort is entirely up to you, the size of your list, and of course, your available resources. For this sample strategy, we’ll assume you have enough phone numbers and people to dial them to get through the list over the next month.
Week 9
- Kick off your cold calling.
- Continue new content offers on social.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts.
Week 10
- Continue phone calling
- Continue new content offers on social.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts.
Week 11
- Continue phone calling
- Continue new content offers on social.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts.
Week 12
- Continue phone calling
- Continue new content offers on social.
- Respond to content downloads immediately by email or phone.
- Continue and respond to LinkedIn in-mail or cold email efforts.
Analysis and Optimization
With one campaign in the books, it’s time to review all your results. How many SQLs did you generate, how many sales, how many MQLs, etc.? Break down the numbers and learn what you can for next time!
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