What’s the Difference Between Warm and Cold Leads?

Do you have questions about leads as a professional speaker? Rick Clemons joined Maryalice Goldsmith on the podcast this week to break down everything you need to know — how to work leads, the difference between warm and cold leads, how to think like a business owner vs. a hobby speaker, why consistency matters, the importance of relationships in this line of work, and much more.

Rick is our Lead Coach here at The Speaker Lab. He’s also a longtime professional speaker, author, wine enthusiast, and more. If you’re looking for someone who has been around the block and knows the speaking world like the back of his hand, Rick is your man! 

Ready to grow your speaking business? Check out the whole episode here! 

If you’re tight on time and looking for a takeaway you can start implementing today, here’s what you should know about warm and cold leads and how to treat them accordingly. 

“So warm is an interesting one because you don’t want to be like, oh, let’s go after everybody I know and say, hey, do you know somebody who’s hiring speakers? That’s just one piece of the puzzle. But if somebody has said, oh, my gosh, I work at this company and we’re struggling with this, or, oh, my gosh, this is one of the events that we’re going to. Those are those things to be listening to…

Here’s the thing. Those people are really good, warm leads, so to speak, because they may know somebody. Once I’ve talked to people, they may say, oh, I work for this company, or my son in law, or whomever in their circle is such and such. And so then that’s when I’m like, how could I help them? Or how could I get put in touch with them without going, well, can I meet them? You kind of have to figure that out because we all have warm networks, we just sometimes don’t realize that.

One of the things I’ve said over and over and over again is the simplest way is to announce on some of your social media, hey, this is something new that I’m doing. You’re not asking for everybody to sign you up, which is completely different than, okay, here’s 400 leads that The Speaker Lab just handed me, and I don’t know anybody on that list… These are going to be leads you have to go work and create the relationships with.

But even then, Maryalice, what I see a lot of our amazing students in this group do is they get the list and they just, okay, let’s just start blasting. Don’t do that — take the list and really look at it. Do you know this company? Do you know through your own network anybody that might work for that company? Or maybe they have in the past? What does this company do? Is it a true alignment with you?

There were people on my list that I’m like, no, I don’t have any interest in reaching out to them. But I took the time to figure out the priority of these things because the cold is going to take more time than somewhere where you have a connection. So that’s what we mean by the warm leads rule. And the cold ones take time.”

Want to learn more about managing leads from Rick? Listen here.