The Warm Contact Advantage

The Warm Contact Advantage

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 121 of the Business Development Podcast. And today we're chatting all about warm versus cold contact. Which one is better? What are the probabilities? Should I even bother with warm contact? Stick with us. You're going to love this episode.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said business happens over years and years.

Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. And we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world. You'll get expert business development, advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs.

And business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by capital business development, capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the business development podcast, and now your expert host.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 121 of the business development podcast. My gosh, what a cool episode to make it to.

I have a bit of a story to tell y'all about episode 21 of the business development podcast. You guys have probably heard of Colin Harms. His name comes up quite a bit on this show. Colin is a friend of me and a friend of the podcast. He's been with us. from the very, very beginning, the inception of the business development podcast.

And I didn't know much about podcasting when I kind of first got into this mix. And I remember waking up the day that I released episode 21, which was way, way, way back on May 9th of 2023. And I had a lovely, lovely message from Mr. Colin Harms. And he goes, Kelly, guess what? 90 percent of podcasts don't make it past episode 3, and of the 10 percent that do, 90 percent don't make it past episode 20.

So episode 21 puts you in the top 1 percent of podcasts all time, and Colin, Dude, you didn't know it at that time, but I really needed that message, and honestly, I really still need that message. It still keeps me going, it still keeps me motivated, and it keeps me driven to just want to keep achieving with this show.

To put out better episodes for our listeners, to help you guys achieve more, do more, grow more, and think positively about your futures and the world. And Colin, I just wanted to give you a very special shout out. That came to my mind the moment that we were releasing episode 121. I knew that I wanted to put this out here and have a conversation with you again.

And just say thank you so much. Thank you for always supporting us. You know, Colin has not only been a supporter of this show you know, just as a friend and through messages, but Colin's company, Hypervac Technologies has been a sponsor of this show ever since we started sponsorship. And Colin couldn't appreciate you more.

I couldn't appreciate all the help that you've given me and motivation and determination, sir. You are definitely the king of blue sky thinking. And I just wanted to say, thanks. I'm not sure that this show could have gone on at the rate that it has. Without that early support and with that motivational message all those episodes ago, so big shout out to Colin Harms.

We're on episode 121. I'm not sure what that means for the grand scheme of podcasts worldwide, but it sounds pretty freaking awesome. And You know, it really is listeners. Colin is not alone in this. We have amazing listeners on this show. I've had plenty of fan messages that were just as kind, just as motivating, and really do keep this show going.

Keep Kelly Kennedy motivated to keep delivering week over week, month over month, and year over year for my amazing rock star listenership. Just one more thing before we get into today's episode. Early next week, April 8th, 2024, the Quill Podcast Awards opens again for nominations. And I would be ever so grateful to each and every one of you.

There will be lots of information out about this. I'll definitely have places on the LinkedIn where we can drop the link. These messages where we can leave a nomination for the business development podcast, or any or all of your favorite podcasts, there's plenty of categories that you can nominate your favorite shows in, and we sure hope that we make it into your motivational, your business categories and heck, if you really feel like it'd be pretty cool to win podcast of the year.

So would love your nominations would appreciate your nominations. You'll be able to find that April 8th, Quill Podcast Awards. I believe that's on quill. com. But I will find out the correct place for you and we can go from there. I wanted to spend some time chatting today. On a topic that's super, super important to me.

That's incredibly, incredibly valuable. And that is the value of warm contact versus cold contact and how to utilize warm contact effectively. This is one that I actually get a lot of questions about because you guys know, I chat about brochures. I chat about your website. I say, I say, create a 20 story skyscraper website and always have physical and digital brochures on hand.

And this really does fall into my passion for warm contact for being able to either give somebody a physical product or send somebody a digital product along with a personal introduction. And so we utilize warm contact at Capital Business Development as part of our overall BD strategy. We use it with pretty much everything.

We don't really cold contact anything, even though we're super big advocates of direct contact, utilizing direct phone, direct email, but our step one is always a warm touch or a warm contact, and we're going to chat all about that today, and we're going to chat all about the power of warm contact, but.

You've all likely heard of cold contact and this word probably makes most of you cringe. If you guys have been in sales any length of time, you've been in either pushy consumer sales, you've been in any type of like high level sales where you have to reach out and make contact, cold contact has very likely been part of your management's criteria or your criteria for quite some time.

Let's just chat a little bit about what cold contact is, okay? Cold contact means that you have had zero, and I mean none, no prior engagement whatsoever with your target. Now, this can be like in the case of commercials. If someone releases a commercial and they're getting it in front of you for the very first time, That might be a cold contact.

Or if you're making a phone call to somebody, sending an email where they have no idea that this is coming. They've never heard of you before. They have no idea what's coming at them. This is also cold contact. It indicates no previous interaction. The customer or target likely knows little to no things about you.

And they're typically phone calls, emails, or very poor direct messages on LinkedIn or your social media of choice, right? Heck, even text sometimes, right? Guys, cold contact sucks. And I'm going to be the first to say it. Cold contact sucks as a sales option. It is probably one of the worst options available to you.

And I know I can see some of you now being like, but Kelly, you advocate for direct phone call and direct contact all the time. Yes. Yes, I do. However, I always like to throw in. a certain touch before I do this, because direct cold can go very, very poorly. The statistics for direct cold contact are super, super low.

Don't quote me on this, but I believe they're somewhere around 2%. I think around 2 percent of cold contacts are successful, which means that if you are lucky, 2 out of 100 phone calls will lead to an interaction that could potentially close the deal. That is a horrible, horrible statistic. If that was the statistic, we would fail epically pretty much all the time because nobody would have that much time to dedicate.

I suppose, unless you're part of a call agency from a different country or something, but most of us could not dedicate. like a hundred phone calls every day to have maybe to go to something successful. So the problem with cold contact is it's really, really inefficient. I guess there are some upsides.

The upsides might be you may get somebody when they need you. But in my mind, this is slim to none. This is very, very low. It can be enticing. I guess we've had the, we've had the phone calls from like our phone companies offering us offers that maybe at some point we're enticing, but rarely, like I said, slim to none.

They're still utilized by many direct to consumer product services. So we've got the calls, right? We've got the calls from our cell phone companies, our internet providers, our furnace cleaning, those drop by door to door people selling God knows what lawn services in the summertime, right? These are all cold contacts.

These are all cold contacts. And most of them. end in a no, okay? They're just not that effective. Why? We're not looking for them. We're not anticipating them. It's usually our first interaction. There's no trust built. My gosh, guys, there's a slew of reasons why cold contact is just not effective. And we could go down that list.

And I know there's some of you out there right now saying, Kelly, but you know, we use it and we've had, we've had great success. Maybe you have. I guess it's not all the technique. Sometimes it's the person, right? Some people are just better at handling cold calls than others. And I may say cold calls on this show quite a bit.

But I'm not necessarily saying cold calls. Remember, as part of the capital process, we always utilize a warm or a soft touch first. I've talked to you guys in like all of our CRM episodes. I've talked to you guys about step one of your CRM being digital introduction, right? Digital introduction means warm contact, soft contact.

And we're going to get into some of the ways that we utilize warm contact later, or how you can utilize it to get a greater effect and why you're going to want to do it. But mark my words, you are 100 percent going to want to start incorporating warm contact before we are done this episode. There are some upsides to cold contact.

The negatives, people aren't expecting it, no previous experience with the product or service. So no trust in you or the product. No information or little information, and it only averages normally somewhere around a 2 percent success rate, which for us, for business development guys, is just too low.

It's way, way, way too low. We don't want to be playing in these 2 percent numbers. We want to be playing in a sandbox where we have high probability. We're getting to the right people. We we have the right people, right? That's where business development's all about. It's about doing these digital introductions, but then also making sure that we're screening to getting to the right people so that when we do make direct contact, we are warm, they know who we are, and our odds of success in booking that meeting are significantly, significantly higher.

Warm contact is engaging with someone who has had some exposure to your product or service, okay? This can be a number of ways. They've either been digitally marketed to, and you know, you know they've seen your ad somehow, right? The whole premises is that they have had exposure. So somehow you need to know that they've had exposure, okay?

So you can do this through maybe a digital marketing campaign. The way that we like to do it is through a LinkedIn, right? So we like to always send personal messages to the people that we've contacted on LinkedIn that we're going to be doing, you know, direct contact to. And we just introduce ourselves, you know, hi, I'm Kelly with capital.

We do X, Y, Z. It's an absolute pleasure to be part of your network. We always want to do something to give them just some type of personal exposure, right? You always want to keep messages short. Sweet to the point, brief, and then let your brochures do the talking for you, right? So the secret really is to be able to create a brochure, make a personal introduction on LinkedIn about who you are, and that it's great to connect with them.

Thanks for connecting with me. I work for XYZ company, and I thought that you might find this interesting. Once again, great to connect, and I look forward to chatting in the future. Really something very short, sweet, personal, true. Then attach a brochure. And let your brochure do the talking for you. That is a warm contact, right?

They are very likely going to open your brochure. I would say that the success rate of having people open brochures on LinkedIn is probably somewhere in the neighborhood between 70 and 90 percent on average. 7 out of 10, very likely. Read your brochure, even if they don't respond to your message. Right?

And so think about that from that standpoint, they now know who you are. They've likely opened your brochure. They've read your value pitch. They know about your products and services. Now, when you reach out to them directly, you now have a warm contact. They actually know who you are. They likely will recognize the name of either you or your company, and they're familiar with your products and services.

So. It gives you just that ever so slight edge. And we're going to get into what percentage that edge is, but it is significant, significant compared to cold contact alone. So let's get into it. Warm contact is always about engaging with someone who has had exposure to your product or service. The upsides of warm contact are as follows, easy to facilitate in person or digitally, right?

Making a warm contact is only one extra step guys. It's one extra step. It's not a big deal. I know some people complain about it because they're like, well, Now I have to reach out to them digitally or I have to do something else. Yes, you have to do something else, but it's only one extra step. And it's very easy to facilitate if you do it in person or digitally, right?

You can either drop a brochure for the person that you know is the right person at their location, right? You can mail it to them if you want, but you can send it directly to them so that they get it. You can send it digitally via any type of social media platform you use, whether you market on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever it is, you can send DMs, right?

A DM is a quick and easy thing to do, although we never want to sell on DMs. That's like the important thing to say is whenever we're sending messages, Stop selling. You're not selling over the computer. You're not selling over the phone. You sell in person through a meeting, right? So what we really want to do is facilitate the ability to create interest so that when you ask for that meeting, eventually you are going to get it right.

Absolutely critical. We need to make sure that we are going to get the meetings that we're going after. Right? So ultimately what we want to do is we want us to create that soft touch, that digital introduction to start to create interest. Which will then lead to an easier to close meeting, which is the end goal of all business development.

Right? So don't worry about it. I know it's one extra step. I know I'm asking you guys to do one more thing. If you aren't already doing this, but trust me, you are going to want to do it. It takes your 2 percent cold call success rate and instantly improves it to 20 to 30 percent or better success rate immediately.

Immediately, guys, that's huge. That is huge. That's like a massive, massive increase in success rate to jump from 2 percent to 20 to 30 or better immediately. That is huge. That is the area of the playground that we want to start moving towards. Ideally, we would like to get to somewhere that's probably a 50 50 success rate or better.

But, let's get real. For one extra step to improve to something maybe close to that is gigantic. And so, as you can see, One extra step improves your ability to have a successful meeting request or something like that almost happen immediately. Right? So we really do want to add in this extra step. It creates a pre existing interest for direct contact success.

Right? So what it does, guys, is it primes them. It primes your target. They've now heard about you. You've either sent them a message or something, some type of way of contacting them with marketing materials that you guys have, whether that be maybe just forwarding them to your website or not, right?

There's lots of ways to do digital contact, lots of ways to create interest, but sending a direct message on LinkedIn, really keeping it personal, short, just introducing yourself. Like I said, at this point, probably a paragraph, like you do not want a very long message. I would say maybe a paragraph or less.

With regards to your introduction messages, but then attach a brochure, attach marketing material, send them to your website, do something that will create some interest in what your company is doing. So they click it and get familiar with your product or service, right? Commercials, right? Think about why commercials are successful.

They have primed you once, twice, three times, five times, 18 times, right? Like some commercials, we have them memorized. We've seen them so many times as kids, right? Especially in the nineties. By God, they just bombarded us kids with messages, right? But you knew it, you knew the toy, you knew what it was.

Cause you'd been exposed to it over and over and over again, on some level. Doing a warm contact with a digital introduction does something very, very similar. It primes them for when you reach out directly to make that real proposition, whether that be a phone call, an email, whatever it is that you're going to ask them hey, can we book a team's meeting?

Can we book an in person face to face where we can chat about it and learn more about your challenges, how we can fix them, right? You really want to do everything to get you to that face to face where you can build trust, build a genuine relationship, build a genuine interaction with another person, which is what we're all craving, whether personally or in business.

What we are looking for Is real interaction with other humans. So it's really critical that all of the work that we're doing is leading us to that real interaction, giving us the best possible chance and all marketing, the whole goal with any marketing, whether it be your passive marketing strategies, your active marketing strategies, It's all to generate enough interest to get you in the room, to get you to where you can have that personal human interaction with your customer.

Remember, we're talking very much B2B, right? B2C is a little bit different, but in B2B relationships are critical. They really are. You need to be able to create relationships and trust that your product and service can meet that need, that you can meet that need. That's how we do it, guys. We do it through creating interest in our products and service.

You know, through passive marketing strategies, through warm contacts, through those initial phone calls where we ask for the meeting. The goal is to essentially get to a point where when you call them and ask for that meeting, they already know who you are. They know what the product and service is, and they're probably even interested to have that meeting.

That's where we want to get. We want to make this as easy as possible to get to our end goal, which is always a face to face interaction with our customers one way or another. Okay. Are there any downsides of warm contact? Well, you guys know I already said. It really is. It adds one more step. But is it worth it?

I think so, right? I think so. It's totally worth it. 2 percent to 20 percent to 30 percent plus instantly. Definitely worth it. Let's work to incorporate these warm contacts into our process, into our business development flow. My recommendation is it is the first step on your CRM, right? We do this every single week at Capital.

Every single week we do digital introductions on behalf of either Capital or our customers. Why? It just works. It's really, really effective. It's easy to do. And it doesn't take a whole lot of time and effort to craft that introduction message that's personal, that's about you, that introduces who you are to your new contact.

And then just say, Hey, if you want to know more about me and what we do, here's a brochure on the bottom. It's probably about 70 percent guys. It's huge. People read the brochures. They may not always message you back, but they almost always read the brochures. And so your job is done. Warm contact is done.

They know who you are. They know what your product and service is. And so when you now make direct contact, They're primed. They're primed. And your success rate just went up significantly. How can you use warm contact? Okay, we talked about this. My favorite way to use warm contact in the modern day is digitally through LinkedIn, right?

We like to connect with our ideal target customers. Remember, the step one, we always need to identify our target industries, target companies, and then ideal buyers of our product and service at those companies. We then connect with them on LinkedIn directly, right? Not in mails, guys. Connect with them.

Connect with your potential prospects. And then, when they do connect, maybe give it a few days or a week. And reach out to them with a brief personal introduction as to who you are. Why you connected with them. Why you think your product and service could potentially help them. And that you really look forward to meeting them in the future.

And, if they want to learn more, you've attached a brochure below. And this is why I rag on brochures, guys. Brochures are not dead. They are critical. They are absolutely important in your success, especially in this warm contact field because you have to have something to give them. You have to have something to build interest that isn't you trying to make this ridiculous pitch because nobody is reading them.

Nobody is reading your eight paragraph long pitch on LinkedIn. Hear me right now. We are not reading them at all. If you want to entice us on LinkedIn, and I'm talking business owners, successful people of any type, buyers of anything, they're bombarded with crap all day long. To stick out, let your material speak for you, and you speak for you as a person, okay?

When you connect with them, say thank you. It's great to connect with you. It was a pleasure, you know? I'm a human. You're a human. You know, try to build that human connection. Speak to them like you would speak to a friend, okay? Keep it short. Keep it brief. Keep it, you know, two topic. If it's about sales, if all you want to do is connect with them, just say, Hey, it's an absolute pleasure to connect with you.

I'm John at XYZ company. We do this and I connected with you because I thought you might find this valuable. I look forward to meeting you at some point. And I've attached a brochure for your convenience. Chat soon. Something really short and sweet like that. Really personal. That's caring. That's thoughtful.

It's not like. Blah, blah, blah. Our product is the best because we do this, this, this. We don't want to see that. We don't want to read that. We're not going to read that, okay? If you want them to read it, you have to give them something that they can digest on LinkedIn. We want something personal. You can attach a digital brochure and it is super, super effective.

And we use it all the time with everything we do at Capital. Okay. All right. We can do it physically. Now, old school still works, guys. It still works. I still love to have physical brochures. I bring physical brochures to every single meeting and on occasion, especially if the customer is local and I know who they are and I know who the right person is, I will sometimes just swing by the office and drop a physical brochure for the person that I want to receive it.

And this gets, like I said, a physical product in their hands. It's now tangible. It sits on their desk for months, weeks, years, whatever it is. It sits on their desk, and it is super, super effective, right? Remember, there's some rules around creating brochures, and if you want to go back, I have previous shows on how to do this super effectively.

But in order to create a brochure in the modern day, we need to make sure that it is visually engaging, that we are engaging with it quickly. That it's not too busy. You don't have too much information going on with it, right? Too much information, once again, gets screened out. They're not going to read it.

So keep all of your messages short and sweet, to the point. Keep your cover beautiful, engaging, visually appealing, visually stunning, even, if you can. And just keep it short and sweet and make sure that it builds interest because that's what we have to do. Everything we do has to build interest. That is the most critical factor in everything that we do in business development.

And then make sure that we're following up to get that face to face meeting. Okay, but physically, physical brochures still incredibly effective and this works as a warm contact. And then remember guys, make sure that all of our contacts, whether they be digital or physical. That we're entering them into that first stage of that CRM, what I like to call digital introduction or brochure drop, depending on what you guys do, whether you like to do physical brochure drops or digital or mix both, have two if you'd mix both, right?

Have one for digital introduction, have one for physical brochure drop, but this is always your essential stage one or stage one and two of your CRMs, and what this will allow you to do is to prime a whole bunch of people in that warm contact stage Find the contact details and then start to reach out to them to ask for that, that meeting, that face to face introduction and start to build that relationship, which is going to lead to more opportunity for you and your organization.

Amazing, everybody! That takes us to the end of the show today. I hope that you're all going to start utilizing these warm contact techniques and watch your success rates soar. Cold contact is just not effective, everybody. But if you add that one extra step, it makes it considerably, considerably more effective.

Can be up to 30 percent plus. It can be considerably more effective for you guys over time. Remember, everyone, we have community questions. If you guys want to leave us a community question, we'll be answering it later on in April if we have enough questions. You can leave them on our website. Head on over to www.businessdevelopmentpodcast.ca or. com right hand side of the homepage. Leave us a voicemail, leave us a message, and we'll make sure that we get your question answered live. If you want to be kept anonymous, this is fine. We are now going to be defaulting to anonymous everybody. We did have a bit of an incident.

I did apologize greatly. But we will be moving community questions to an anonymous first name basis only, unless you specify that I'm allowed to use your whole name. I think that's just fair. I know we have lots of executive listening, lots to lose, lots to gain. I get it. So, just for, for reasons of I don't want to get anybody in hot water, We are going to be utilizing first name basis on all community questions moving forward, unless otherwise specified.

If you leave me an email, I will definitely let you guys know when your question is going to be answered, what show it is. But if you're just in the general public, they won't be able to identify you. And I think that that's fair. I think that that is how this has to go. I know there's a lot of you who have questions.

You may be reluctant because you just don't want to be named. So understand that I won't be naming you full name. I will be using your first names and I can shoot you guys emails if I have them to let you know when your question will be answered and that I appreciated it greatly, or if you give me permission to use your full name.

We will use your full name, but with permission only. Also, if you guys want to check out our April guest list, our April guest list is now live guys. We're recording like three to four months into the future at this point. I'm not doing that far of like the guest list, but we're releasing the guest list at the beginning of every month on our LinkedIn page.

So if you guys are not following us yet on the business development podcast, LinkedIn page, or me personally, Kelly Kennedy. Please do come give us a follow. Come give us a, like, come give us a rating or whatever, whatever you guys do on LinkedIn these days, and you'll be able to keep up to date with what's going on on the show.

That's where I do all the posts. Everyone, everything that has to do with like the BDP for the most part is on LinkedIn. So if you guys want to head on over to our LinkedIn page to figure out what's new, what's going on, who's coming on the show over the next month. You guys can do that simply by coming to our page and giving it a follow.

So we appreciate that greatly. Shout outs this week. Pam August, Zael Miransky, Jayson Chakkalakal, Luana Burns, Jan Bailey, Samantha Germain. Colin Harms, Jamie Westwood. Chris Taylor. Raphael Cervan. And Jenn Bieri. It's absolutely amazing. We appreciate you guys. Until next time, this has been the business development podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation.

And business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website@www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.