What is the Cold Approach in B2B Sales?

At first, a cold approach to sales might not sound like a very lucrative strategy. The term “cold approach” may make you think of impersonal or indifferent communications. However, the reality is cold approach sales techniques are one of the most common ways for companies to find leads.

The “cold approach” method involves carefully choosing the right strategy for connecting with your prospects, based on previous research and other details. Here’s what you need to know.

Cold Approach Meaning: What is Cold Approach?

The term “cold approach” when used in the context of B2B sales, refers to the process of reaching out to a prospect without any prior relationships in place. You connect with targets you don’t know to generate interest in your business, and improve your chances of a sale in the long-term.

A cold approach often requires more work than a “warm approach”, where you’re building on an existing rapport between a prospect and your company. With cold approaches to sales, business professionals need to work hard to capture audience attention and demonstrate value.

There are a few ways to take the cold approach to selling, such as:

• An all-out approach: In an all-out cold approach strategy, you send as many messages as possible to all the relevant people who might be interested in your company, product or service. This is a numbers-focused strategy, where the aim is on connecting with as many people as possible in a short space of time.
• The Periodic approach: Another form of cold lead generation, the periodic approach involves gradually embedding yourself into a company’s network, by sending a cold message to different decision makers throughout the team at different points in a schedule. This can be a good way to improve your chances of getting a response from a specific lead.
• Department focus approach: In this approach, you reach out to all the decision makers in one department, before moving to another to boost your chances of sales. This could improve your chances of a response, but it could also harm your reputation if you’re overly aggressive.

Cold Approach Outreach: How to Plan a Strategy

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for developing a “cold approach” to sales. When deciding how to cold approach customers, the head of sales often needs to think about the current marketplace, the preferences of your target audience, and any previous successes the business might have had.

You can begin by assessing the marketplace. Find out how many decision makers are usually present in the sorts of businesses you want to connect with. This should help you to determine whether it’s a good idea to reach out to everyone at once.

It’s also worth looking at how you’ve attracted and converted previous customers. Experimenting with different styles of cold approach should give you an overview into how each effort improves or damages your relationship. The aim should be to increase your chances of gathering as many leads as possible, without scaring customers away.

How to Cold Approach a Lead: Top Tips

The research and tests you do as a business leader in a B2B sales team will help to determine exactly which cold approach methods you should be using. However, there are some strategies which can significantly boost your chances of success. For instance:

1. Make it relevant: Whenever you’re reaching out to a prospect with a cold approach strategy, it’s important to ensure you’re delivering a pitch relevant to that company. Doing a little research into the prospects you’re trying to connect with before you begin your outreach can help with the creation of more personalized and effective campaigns. Find out what kind of goals the company is trying to achieve, what their pain points are, and where they might have had issues with companies similar to yours in the past.

2. Focus on value: One of the main reasons business buyers lament cold approach contact, is they feel like it doesn’t deliver direct value to them. This is why it’s so important to think about how you can deliver value from the moment you get in touch with a prospect. Offer insights which are relevant to the company’s goals, or share information from your case studies and past experiences. Focus on asking questions so the next time you contact the lead, you’ll be able to deliver a more personalized pitch.

3. Try multiple forms of outreach: While cold calling is the most commonly referenced form of cold-approach in sales, it’s far from the only option. Today, companies are increasingly interacting with partners and vendors through social media, email, and other messaging solutions. It’s worth testing different platforms to see which your customers respond best to.