When marketing teams leverage Account-Based Marketing (ABM), effective sales outreach is crucial for converting leads into customers. However, not all leads are created equal, and noticing the differences between hot, warm, and cold leads is essential for tailoring your outreach strategies. Dividing your accounts into personas, and creating tailored outreach sequences that address their interests and pain points ensures you’re sending the right messaging to the right audience at the right time, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversion.

In this guide, we'll break down the distinctions between hot and cold leads, discuss where warm leads fit in, and explore why having separate sequences for each is vital for success.

Additionally, we'll delve into the importance of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and how it works in tandem with ABM platforms like Propensity.

But before we even begin with message sequencing, it’s critical to define and quantify each persona. That way, you’ll be in the position to answer this important question: how many sequences do I actually need for my ABM campaign?

Building Your Personas

A persona helps you visualize your ideal customer or target account. It is based on research, data, and insights about your target audience's characteristics, behaviors, needs, and challenges.

Creating personas is essential to ABM as they help you understand your target accounts. Understanding your key personas is the first step in building out effective messaging that will grab the attention of an account and address its specific needs and preferences throughout your marketing efforts.

Since each persona will need its own unique sequences, you'll need to build them before you develop your marketing cadence.

Here's how to create a persona:

Research and Analyze Data. Gather data from various sources, including CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, customer surveys, and market research reports. Analyze this data to identify common characteristics, pain points, goals, and buying behaviors among your target accounts.
Segment Target Accounts. Group your target accounts into segments based on shared characteristics and behaviors. These segments may include factors such as industry, company size, geographic location, job title, or purchasing authority.
Develop Your Persona. Create detailed personas for each segment, representing the key decision-makers, influencers, and stakeholders within the target accounts. Each persona should include demographics, job roles, responsibilities, goals, challenges, and communication preferences.
Map The Buyer’s Journey. Map out the buyer's journey for each persona, identifying the specific touchpoints, interactions, and content preferences at each stage of the decision-making process. That way, you can ensure your marketing dovetails with the needs and concerns of each persona at every stage of the buyer's journey.
Personalize Content. Develop targeted content and messaging that resonates with each persona's unique needs and preferences. This may include case studies, whitepapers, webinars, blog posts, and other resources that address their pain points and solve their challenges.
Develop an Account Engagement Strategy. Use personas to guide your account engagement strategy, ensuring your marketing and sales efforts align with each target account's needs and preferences.

Once you have your list of personas and have a full understanding of their interests and buyer’s journey, you'll be ready to begin creating sequences for sales outreach.

Building Sequences for Sales Outreach Based on Your Personas

To be effective in your messaging, you must build out sequences for each persona. However, there will be different types of leads under each, including hot, warm, and cold. Understanding the difference between each type is essential as you will want to address each lead differently when you are building your sequence.

Understanding Contact Warmth

While there are three different types of leads to consider, the most important to distinguish between are Hot and Cold.

Hot Leads

These are prospects who have shown significant interest and engagement with your brand. They may have interacted with your content, visited your website multiple times, liked, shared, or commented on your social media channels, or engaged with your sales team directly. Hot leads are primed for personalized outreach and are more likely to convert quickly.

Cold Leads

Cold leads have shown minimal or no engagement with your brand. They may be unfamiliar with your offerings or have shown little interest in your content. Cold leads require more nurturing and often start at the top of the sales funnel.

You may have cold leads on your radar because:

You know (via first-hand research) the company uses or is in the market for your product or service.
You've acquired a lead list from a third party.
You've been able to deanonymize visitors to your website and, based on research, have found them to be potential in-market leads that deserve a follow-up.

Warm Leads

Warm leads fall somewhere in between hot and cold. They may have shown some interest in your brand but haven't reached the level of engagement associated with hot leads. The treatment of warm leads can vary depending on their quantity and the resources your company has available for personalized outreach. For example, if you have limited resources and have numerous warm leads, it may make sense to group them with cold leads until they've had a chance to warm up. On the other hand, if you only have a few warm leads, it may make more sense to group them with hot leads to quickly build a more personalized connection.

The Importance of Designing Sequences for Hot and Cold Leads

Hot and cold leads are not equal and should not be placed in the same sequence. Having two types of sequences is crucial for maximizing conversion rates. The sequence for hot leads should focus on highly personalized touches such as LinkedIn messages and emails. These leads are already engaged and are more likely to respond positively to customized outreach.

The sequence for cold leads should involve fully automated outreach. While these leads may not have shown much interest initially, automated sequences can help nurture them over time and convert them into warm or hot leads that can be handed to sales for more precise messaging.

Effective Messaging for Hot or Cold Sequences

Creating a sequence for hot and cold leads requires a targeted and personalized approach tailored to each account's needs and interests. Once you've segmented your accounts into "hot" or "cold," you can begin to build sequences specific to their needs or interests.

Here are some practical ways you can adjust your messaging for either type of lead:

Hot Leads:

Hot leads have already been “warmed up” and therefore, you should have a lot of visibility into who they are, what their pain points might be, and if they are in-market and ready to buy. A sequence will most likely be shorter with more selective topics. Personalization in messaging for hot leads is critical to a successful conversion. Make sure your sequence contains:

Account-specific Messaging. Craft personalized messages that speak directly to the target account's needs and pain points. Reference any previous interactions or engagements they've had with your company to demonstrate your understanding of their business.
Alignment with Account Goals. Tailor your messaging to align with the account's strategic objectives and challenges. Showcase how your product or service can help prospects achieve goals or overcome obstacles.
Leveraging of Account Insights. Use data and insights about the account to inform your messaging and content strategy. Understand their industry trends, competitive landscape, and specific pain points to deliver relevant and valuable information.
Multi-Channel Touches. Engage the account across multiple channels, including email, social media, direct mail, and personalized content. Coordinate your efforts to ensure a cohesive, integrated experience for the target account.

Cold Leads:

Remember that cold leads need to be "warmed up"; therefore, a cold sequence should be slightly longer than a hot sequence. That's because you can't rely on the account to know your brand or understand your offering. You'll have to do more work educating and building trust than you might otherwise have to if it were a hot lead. When approaching sequencing for cold leads, remember to prioritize:

Research and Segmentation. Conduct thorough research to identify high-potential accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) but may need to be more familiar with your company. Segment these accounts based on industry, company size, or other relevant criteria.
Value Proposition. Develop a compelling case that articulates the benefits of your product or service. Highlight how your offering can address pain points and deliver tangible value.
Engagement. Develop a strategic engagement plan that outlines the sequence of touchpoints and interactions with the target account. Incorporate a mix of outreach methods, such as email, phone calls, social media engagement, and personalized content delivery.
Persistent Follow-Up. Be persistent in your follow-up efforts, but avoid being overly aggressive. Follow up with the target account regularly to nurture the relationship over time.
Analysis of Results. Monitor the effectiveness of your sequence by tracking KPIs such as response rates, engagement, and conversion rates. Use this data to refine your approach and optimize your outreach efforts for better results.

By tailoring your sequence to each target account's specific needs and characteristics, you can effectively engage hot and cold leads to effectively increase your conversion rates.

Crafting Effective Sales Touches

When crafting sales touches, it's essential to have a structured approach that includes clear calls to action. However, it's best not to start by simply offering a demo. To increase the likelihood of conversion, show interest in your lead and allow them to consider or voice their pain points. That way, you can tailor the conversation to offer a more customized solution.

We recommend breaking down sales touches into three sets of asks:

The Upfront Ask: Request a conversation or meeting to discuss the prospect's needs and how your solution can help address them.
The Secondary Ask: If the prospect isn't ready for a meeting, offer a free trial or another action they can take to engage with your brand further.
The Referral Ask: Encourage the prospect to introduce you to someone else at their company who might benefit from your solution.

By structuring your outreach in this way (and incorporating it into a sequence of 7 to 12 sales touches), you increase the likelihood of eliciting a response or direct engagement from the prospect.

Leveraging CRM and ABM Platforms

Having a CRM system is essential for managing leads, tracking interactions, and automating workflows. Platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce offer powerful tools for segmenting leads, assigning them to sales reps, and orchestrating sequences based on various attributes and engagement levels.

ABM platforms like Propensity are often agnostic and also integrate with CRMs like HubSpot, and Salesforce to streamline lead management and ensure seamless communication between sales and marketing teams. Using CRMs, you’ll be able to choose how to pass leads off as well, including passing off according to geography, attributes, round robin, etc.

Perfecting Your Sales Outreach

Since ABM is designed to be personalized, you will likely witness 3X your average conversion rate (compared to 100% cold outreach). If you aren't seeing more conversions, it's time to reassess your sequences. There may be something going on that's holding you back from realizing results. For example:

Are emails getting caught in spam filters? (learn more about sending limits here)
Are CTAs unclear in the sequence design?
Is the sequence itself too short?
Etc.

With ABM, it's natural to iterate on your sales outreach continuously. With each new cohort, you'll gain new insights to refine your strategy—whether adding an extra few days to your sequence or honing the messaging to resonate more fully with your target audience.

Conclusion

Sequencing is an essential part of your overall ABM strategy. Remember to divide your ICP into personas and use those personas to develop twin sequences (one hot, one cold) so that you can communicate more effectively with your core audience.