Change Your Sales Technique With Warm Calling

You’ve heard of cold calling but have you ever heard of or thought about employing warm calling in your sales strategies.

This type of call is exactly the opposite of what cold calling is. When you complete a cold call, you’re calling a person who has never had contact with your business, but a warm call can be much more effective. These prospects have shown some interest in your company, and a call might be all it takes to convert their previous interest into sales.

How Can You Effectively Employ a Warm Calling Strategy?

You want to turn calls into leads and leads into customers through your calling process. Thankfully, when you employ a warm call strategy, you’re not going to have to introduce or explain your company as much as you would with a cold call. Let’s go over some tips to build an effective strategy.

Identify Good Targets for Your Calls

Because the customers you’re going to call have had previous contact with your business, it should be relatively simple to build a customer list and contact them. Your database can help you understand the needs of the customers you’re going to call, which can help you create the call script that will work best for that person. Identifying the right targets will help you turn your calls into leads.

Create a Trigger Event

Whether you know of a recent change to the customer’s situation or you’re offering products and services that will make a difference to them in the next few months, you can create a trigger event. You do this by offering the customer something that can meet their most recent needs. When you have what a customer needs to ensure they can improve their life or situation, they are more likely to close the sale for you.

Call at the Right Times of Day

One tip that is the same for both cold calling and warm calling is the timing of your call. If you know your customer and have a general idea of their schedule, you know that you should only call either first thing in the morning or later at night. If you call at a bad time and they are willing to talk to you, ask when a better time to call would be.

Start With a Simple Opening

Unlike cold calling, when you make these warm calls, the customer is already familiar with your company and what you have to offer. This means you can use a simple opening to introduce yourself and your business to them. You don’t have to spend a long time telling them what you have to offer; simply introduce yourself and where you work and then allow the conversation to move forward naturally.

Create a Common Connection with Your Customer

Find something that you can share that’s common between you and your customer. It could be as simple as letting them know you noticed their interest in your products in which you can offer to explain some of the features with them and tell them how that product has worked for you, or you can talk about potentially shared experiences that you can use to create a common connection.

Humanize Your Interaction

Another one of the differences between cold and warm calling can be the humanization of your experience. When cold calling, you have nothing to go on except a phone number and basic demographic information. When you make a warm call, you have an advantage with some information and previous interest from the potential customer that you’re calling.

Ask Open-Ended Questions to Illicit Answers

You want to have the person you’re calling engage with you and have a real conversation when you contact them. You can do this more easily when you ask open-ended questions that require more than simple one-word answers. Of course, you also need to be ready to listen actively and engage with them during the call. Turn the call into a conversation between two old friends and not just a sales call.

Try to Work Your Business Into the Conversation

The purpose of your call is to create a lead and potentially a sale. When you’re warm calling, the conversation could be one-sided, with the prospect talking up to 75 percent of the time. This is another difference from cold calling. Let them talk, understand what they are telling you, and figure out how you can offer solutions to the pain points they bring up so that you can turn the call into a sale.