Warm up Cold Leads Instantly With These Valuable Outreach Tips

In today’s modern selling — warm outreach has boundless opportunities to turn your leads into sales. It’s time to bring some warmth into your cold outreach.

The principle of warming up cold leads is to provide them value. This is where the concept of reciprocity can come into play.

Your friend pays the bill at lunch, you feel obligated to pay the bill the next time you’re at lunch together, right?

This is The Power of Reciprocity.

In psychology, reciprocity is a universally accepted social rule – reciprocity is ‘the practice of exchanging things for mutual benefit’. This social norm is instinctively engraved in us. And this can actually play a huge role in your sales outreach.

How can you provide value to cold leads? We created the steps to follow and a list of ideas below that will immediately warm up any cold lead.

How to Use the Power of Reciprocity in Sales

It’s an instinctual human condition to feel that you owe something to someone who has provided you helpful insight and value.

The first step in providing your lead with this value is to research their company and role.

Decide what piece of information will be most valuable to them. Your role is to focus on helping them, and the return will come naturally.

Then, reach out and create a campaign to manage your follow-ups to make the outreach valuable for you as well.

Listed below are 5 powerful ways to provide your leads immediate value.

Remember, tailor these ideas to the specific person and their business.

1. Invite Them to a Conference or Event 

Do you have any events or conferences that are coming up?

Offer your recipient an invitation.

They have a great time, make valuable connections, and grow their network.

You reach out to them at a later date asking to hop on a quick call, they will most likely give you that time since you gave them a valuable experience.

Then the ball is in your court.

Have a conversation with them and see if they’re a good fit. If you find that your product or service will benefit them – sell away (tip: here are 5 essential elements of a sales pitch).

Here’s a great example of an invitation to an exclusive event. Who wouldn’t say yes to networking with local executives and live sushi rolling?

2. Introduce a Business Connection or a Possible Candidate

Introducing someone is valuable and can benefit both parties.

There are various ways you can use your industry expertise and network to help build connections with leads.

Look at their LinkedIn, find connections, check out their website, are they hiring?

If their business is hiring – use your network to match any potential candidates with this role. If you have worked with someone in the past who would be a perfect fit for the role – reach out to them.

This is an easy way to immediately build a relationship and provide your recipient with value that they will undoubtedly want to return.

10 Cold Email Formulas That Just Plain WorkSee how B2B sales professionals are using these cold email templates to engage more prospects, fill the top of their funnel and build more sales pipeline faster.

EmailDownload PDF

3. Provide a Research Brief or Business Advice

You receive an email that a company did an analysis on your website and found some helpful advice that will benefit you and your business – do you respond?

Research takes time. Your recipient will feel compelled to give you their time in return for yours.

Here’s an example of an outreach that gives insight on tips and advice to increase trial starts.

Provide information or attach a research brief – see how they engage with your information and if they find your insights valuable, they’ll respond.

Give the recipient a new perspective. Use your own data and knowledge to provide the insight and this will spark a conversation – they’ll want to learn more.

From there, you can discuss the ideas further and build a relationship.

4. Provide a Valuable and Relevant Article

Find an article that might be right up their alley?

Another piece of helpful information you can deliver to your recipient is a relevant article that fits their business or industry.

Demonstrate your industry expertise by offering descriptions along with each article as to why you think they’re beneficial to the recipient and their business.

By showing your recipient that you’ve done your research and took time to find helpful content – they will instinctively feel the need to return the favor.

Here’s an email template for doing so:

Hi {!FirstName},

{Introduction}.

I’ve done some research into your company and I thought you would appreciate these articles. I thought they did a great job at addressing {!pain point}:

1. {!Link to content 1} – {!description of content 1}

2. {!Link to content 2} – {!description of content 2}

3. {!Link to content 3} – {!description of content 3}

If these resonate with you, let’s grab 15 minutes to see if {!Your Company} can help by {!proposed solution for solving pain point}.

Is there a day or time that generally works best for you?

{!Name} 

Save top-performing emails as templatesNever write the same email twice with YeswareTry Yesware Free

5. Engage on LinkedIn

In sales, social media has become a sweet spot for connecting and building relationships with prospects.

Deliver tangible value to your audiences such as industry-related articles and thought-provoking studies. This will help establish yourself as a thought leader, which builds up your credibility.

Once your credibility is built, engage with others on industry-related posts, social groups, or trending topics.

This will help you spark conversations with various people.

Get involved in conversations and establish yourself as a thought leader and you will find yourself turning cold leads into warm leads smoothly.

Final Tip: Focus on Helping First

Be kind to the recipient, and most of the time you can expect them to be kind back.

Change it up and provide different pieces of value every time tailored around the person you’re reaching out to. And make sure to monitor the results.

Try it out yourself – see if the concept of reciprocity warms up your cold leads and what the outcomes are.

In the end, sales is about building relationships. If you focus on helping first, before the sell, these relationships will be built naturally.