5 Quick Tips for Warm Calling

Building customer relationships is like morning coffee, the warmer the better. And the same applies when you are trying to connect with decision-makers. For generations, cold calling was considered a powerful sales tool, but with the evolution in technology customers already have all the information they need about the product or services they want to invest in. This made cold calling interruptive and unwelcomed. The death of cold calling made sales representatives change the way they approached prospects and that’s what leads to warm calling.

When you cold call, you are talking to an unknown person, asking them to give you an uncertain amount of their valuable time and listen to a conversation they have no reason to listen to. Does this sound like something you would welcome? We don’t think so.

With warm calling integrated into your inbound marketing strategy, you can build deeper relationships with your customer on a foundation of respect. In these articles, we’re going to help you understand What is warm calling and give you a few quick tips to implement warm calling successfully

What is warm calling?

Warm calling is an outbound sales strategy that involves

1. Having a sales conversation with warm leads
2. A prospect that has previously interacted with your company in some way
3. Has shown interest by filling up a form on your website
4. Has engaged with your company in a meaningful way.

Warm leads are usually individuals from events, ad campaigns, your website, referrals, and more and are familiar with your company or product.

Warm calling involves doing background research on your prospect and then picking the call to have a conversation.

Before we get into tips for warm calling, you need first work on your inbound leads. You can do this by putting your marketing team to work at the top of the funnel. In warm calling, you don’t need to call all leads looking for information you can nurture those leads through your marketing team and turn them into warm leads.

Now once you have a bucket of warm leads here are a few tips you can use.

Warm Calling Tips

1. Create a list of warm leads

Before you start warm calling, you will need to identify your warm prospects. Make sure your warm leads fit these 2 criteria before you start calling them.

1. Ensure they meet or exceed your minimum buying requirements and are a close fit to your ideal customer profile.
2. Make sure your lead has previously engaged with your company before. For example, your lead has performed certain actions on your site, requested further information, filled up a form to contact you, etc.

2. Research:

What makes warm calling powerful is the fact that you do research about your lead and know who they are, making it easier to build a connection. This will also help you determine if your lead is familiar with your company and therefore accepting of the conversation.

3. Start your call right:

The first 15 seconds of your call is incredibly important and therefore you need to have the perfect call opening. Start by introducing your self and your company and how you got to call them. Remind them of who you are and make your talking points ahead of time.

Eg “ I saw the blog you posted last week and loved the part about …….. I thought I’d call you to see if it was successful and what you plan on writing about next.” This is a hyper-tailored opening that compliments the prospect, engages them right away, and makes way for follow-up questions.

4. Listen for pain points:

An important aspect of warm calling should be to ask open-ended questions and guide the conversation towards understanding pain points or trigger events. It’s important to understand what keeps your leads awake at night because these are the things that your product/service is going to solve.

Once you’ve got them to talk about their pain points, you would have got them to understand that your company can solve those issues. Additionally, you can craft your follow-up call or email around that.

5. Call Tracking:

You’re making warm calls to leads, but you need to remember this is a part of your outbound sales strategy and not all these leads are going to convert on the first go. They need to be nurtured through the sales funnel in order to make that purchase.

• An effective tactic you should use to follow up on your warm calls is a call tracking. With call tracking, you can
• Record calls
• Listen in on calls
• Use the call tracking data to improve your call quality
• Understand your customer better
• Understand where your lead came from
• Create a great follow up strategy that will help your lead move closer to conversion.

If you need help starting your warm calling process, you can check out the Callspree website to understand how call widgets and form widgets can play an important role in warm calling.