‘Cold on Warm’ - a massive 🚩🚩🚩 in outbound sales that results in MILLIONS in lost pipeline for GTM teams.
What is it? Your team did the hard work of breaking into an account, has had interactions (call connect, email response, Closed Lost, etc.) with a prospect there in the past, things fizzle out… and 6 months later, along comes a new SDR/AE who runs a cold sequence against that prospect.
This happens DAILY, and across our customers, we’ve seen it historically results in EVEN LOWER response rates than pure cold outbound, because it pisses prospects off.
Why does this happen so often?
It’s inevitable. New SDRs/AEs come into seats every month (promoted, fired, switched segments), account patches change. You add a bunch of folks into sequence to hit activity numbers and ensure ‘air coverage’ of accounts.
Plus, SDRs (or marketing) run ‘plays’ on accounts/prospects based on their industry, location, growth rates, etc.. and these warmer prospects get looped into those filters.
Ways to avoid it?
Create a Salesforce field that classifies warm vs cold prospects and continually updates. Train + enable all of your SDRs to be spend 15+ minutes on each account, reading any prior interactions / emails / calls / notes and crafting a POV from there.
Do what fast-growth unicorns like Verkada + Ramp + Gem do and invest in Actively AI — our agent mine those notes, call transcripts, emails, etc 24/7, identifies when to re-engage prospects and why, and delivers relevant and personalized email copy in your SEP tool every morning for your SDR.
Curious how bad it is? We have a free tool that can identify how frequently this happens and show you how to avoid it —> sign up here!
