As a sales professional, you’re constantly looking to chase the right leads and make the most out of your efforts. Warm leads present an enticing opportunity — all geared up to buy, they’re not just observing your product or service, they want it, they believe in it, they’re actively looking for it, and they would at least listen to your sales pitch.
In this guide, we’ll give a straightforward definition of warm leads with some examples, cover tips to generate them, and show you how you can use monday sales CRM to optimize the process.
What are warm leads, and why are they worth pursuing?
Typically, a warm lead is a sales prospect who has shown interest in your offering by providing their contact details. Compared to cold leads, they are more aware of your business and have the means to buy from you — but not qualified enough for sales.
Some marketers and sales professionals believe that every lead starts out as a cold lead and eventually warms up through marketing efforts, moving down the sales funnel. However, this is not always the case.
Why you should pursue warm leads
Warm leads are interested in your brand and what you offer. So, it’s much more productive to pursue them than following cold leads that may stand no chance of becoming clients. Your sales reps will have greater chances of closing them.
With warm leads, you’re not starting from scratch. Qualifying them is much easier because they already have trust in your brand.
5 ways to generate warm leads + examples
Here are five lead generation techniques that brands classicly follow to bring in warm leads:
- Lead magnets
- Live chat and contact forms
- Social media
- Referrals
- Industry events and trade shows
Here are five lead generation techniques that brands follow to bring in warm leads
Lead magnets
A lead magnet is a useful resource that prospects can access by providing their contact information.
The most common examples of lead magnets are gated content like ebooks and industry reports. They are based on the pain points of your ideal customer and are closely related to your offer. So, those who sign up for them are considered warm leads.
Take BetterUp, for example, an HR company that helps enterprises retain employees. They have short customer case study videos on their website that visitors can watch after entering their email addresses:
This way, they capture warm leads — people who are interested in their service and want to know how other companies benefitted from it.
Live chat and contact forms
Live chat, also known as chatbots, are widgets on web pages used to communicate with prospects who visit your website.
Though mostly used for customer service purposes, live chat can also be used to generate leads. When prospects move from consideration to decision (AKA a warm lead), you want to make sure you’re easily reachable. In fact, according to a report, 68% of customers say that bot-driven messaging is the most convenient way to contact a business.
Here’s an example from Sprout Social website where a chatbot is programmed to collect contact details from interested visitors:
Pro tip: If you use a LiveChat tool on your website, you can sync leads into monday sales CRM automatically using Zapier.
Another way to capture warm leads from your website is with a contact form. Visitors who want to contact the team fill in the forms. Here’s a great example of a contact form from Grizzle, a content marketing agency. Their minimum rates are mentioned on the lead generation form to ensure they only get good-quality leads:
With monday.com forms, an intuitive form creator, you can create no-code forms and embed them on your website. Prospects who fill in the form will be automatically entered into the leads board on your monday sales CRM.
Social media
The social platforms your audience is most active on are a great place to find interested prospects. In fact, in a report by Social Media Examiner, a whopping 66% of marketers claim that they use social media for lead generation.
However, searching for your target audience on social media and reaching out to them would only generate cold leads. The effective way is to search for leads among followers. Starting a conversation with them would be easier because they’re already interested in your content and have probably already read about your offer.
Another way to attract warm leads on social media is by putting out customer case studies and testimonials.
Referrals
Sometimes, you don’t have to look far to get a new lead. Your existing customers who are satisfied with your service can bring in potential customers. Referred customers have more chances to convert and bring in a 25% higher profit margin.
Referrals can be a great source of warm leads considering they already trust your brand as it was referred by someone they know. Once they learn more about your service, they can be qualified leads.
Create a referral marketing strategy where customers get incentives for referring friends and/or colleagues. Consider this example of referral marketing by an eCommerce brand, Italic:
Source: Reallygoodemails
Industry events and trade shows
Attending industry events and trade shows is a great way to get your foot in the door. And no, it’s not just about handing out business cards.
The goal is to book a meeting or product demo after interacting with potential leads. Before going to the event, check out who will be attending and try to identify potential prospects. You may find that some of your cold leads are in the guest list.
Actively introduce your brand to people, connect with them and get business cards from interested prospects. Post-event, arrange all your new prospects into a spreadsheet or get them into your CRM software.
Keep track of warm leads and convert them with monday.com
With monday sales CRM, you can centralize and qualify all your leads in one place — even if they come from multiple sources. Sync leads from the tools you use such as Jotform, Facebook, and Live Chat via integrations. Capture quality leads with monday.com forms that you can easily embed on landing pages.
Identify warm leads and prioritize them based on source, company size, budget, or other custom scores. You can also indicate when the leads have transitioned from warm to hot by using brightly colored status bars:
monday CRM makes it easy to reach out to warm leads via email and get notified automatically when a lead opens or replies to an email.
More terms from our CRM glossary: Hot leads, Raw leads, Sales Qualified Leads, Marketing Qualified Leads
Frequently asked questions
How to warm up cold leads?
To warm up cold leads, understand what their specific pain points are. Based on this, send them free resources and gradually build trust. You can also try using other methods of communication to reach them.
How do you close warm leads?
To close warm leads, you’ll need to make them hot leads — get them more interested in your product and bring them to the decision-making stage. Offer a product demo and find out if they have any doubts that are stopping them from making the purchase. Send them testimonials and case studies for social proof.
How to call warm leads?
Before calling up warm leads, research the company and executives well. Open the call positively and make sure you sound confident. It’s best to keep the call short (under five minutes), so decide on talking points ahead of time.
Start generating warm leads and nurture them.
Warm leads often require more work than cold leads, but they pay off big time in the long run.
So, to hit your sales quotas, optimize your lead generation strategy and make pursuing warm leads the main part of your agenda. Once you generate warm leads, you don’t want them to go cold. Start nurturing and convert them into hot leads.
Try monday sales CRM to keep track of all your leads from different sources and get started.
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