Use a 5 – 7 touch campaign to move your cold leads from suspects to prospects.
When developing a prospecting campaign to reach out to cold suspects, start with a strategy in mind. A strategy will help guide you along the way and help you make suspects into prospects.
Things to define before you get started
- Whom will you contact? Think about the targeted businesses and be sure they match your ideal client profile.
- How and where are you going to track your efforts? A CRM that includes notes and tasks is best.
- What are you going to say? (Are you promoting an event? Wanting them to read something? Want to set up a meeting?)
- What is your goal? e.g., "Out of this campaign, I’d like to set X number of first appointments, or get X number of people to register for the event."
- When is enough, enough? When do you give up on this prospect?
5-7 touches, or touchpoints, are a good number of persistent contact attempts before taking them off your list. However, connecting with a completely cold prospect could take up to 18 touches. You decide what works best for you.
What is a touch?
A touch, or touchpoint, is any type of contact attempt, such as:
- Snail mail
- The physical drop of something at the prospect’s business
- Phone call – contact
- Phone call – voice mail
- Social media connection
Example of what a 5-7 touch campaign could look like
- Touch 1 – Send an initial email
- Touch 2 – Follow up with a phone call
- Touch 3 – Set a few days to go to the prospects’ locations and drop something off. This could take a week or two to get all the drop-offs completed.
- Touch 4 – Follow up with an email within a day after making a drop.
- Touch 5 – Follow up with a phone call. Leave a voice mail and follow with the same info in an email.
- Touch 6 – Send a piece of snail mail (maybe send a book with it).
- Touch 7 – Follow up with a call or email or both.
If the prospect responds or ignores the touches, how do I proceed?
If they have not responded to any of the touches, it might be time to say goodbye to that prospect. If they engage, then move them into your warm prospect list.
The important thing about a campaign like this is ensuring you have an effective tracking system for activity and assigning follow-up tasks that do not rely solely on your brain, a notepad, whiteboard, or Excel. Having a CRM to help you keep up with this is better than using manual tracking methods.
Make sure you follow through and measure the success of your campaign to see how well it went.