Cold to sold: how trust turns strangers into clients

I’ll be honest with you. I hate the phrase “cold to sold”. I find it really dehumanising. So much of marketing talks about sales and clients as if they’re numbers, and they’re not. They’re real people you’re trying to connect with.

But everybody knows what it means, and the idea underneath it is exactly right. So I built a slider to show it, because I was fed up of pointing at the same slide.

What “cold” actually means

If someone is cold, this is what’s going on in their head:

I don’t know you. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you. I might know I’ve got a problem, but not necessarily. And I definitely don’t know you’re the answer to it.

Which is fair enough, isn’t it? You don’t like and trust people you don’t know. It’s basic stranger danger.

Why selling to cold people is so much work

Pitch to someone at that point and you could easily be converting at 0.4%. That’s the rate for cold calling. Sitting in a call centre, ringing people over and over.

Ring 100 people and you get no sales, because you can’t sell to 0.4 of a person. You can’t cut a person up. Ring 1,000 and you get four.

That’s a hell of a lot of work for very little, and even those four will be sceptical.

How people actually warm up

Here’s the journey the slider follows, with the rough numbers I use at each point.

They find you, then follow you

Maybe they saw one of your posts on Instagram. They liked it and hit follow. They’re interested, but they’re still cold. Sell to them now and you’re at about 0.6%. You might land one client from 100, and honestly that’s a lucky strike.

They watch you

Next they have a nosy at your profile or your YouTube channel and binge a few videos. Just watching you and hearing what you think starts to build trust.

Some won’t like you. They’ll go, “Nah, she’s not my kind of girl,” and click off. And that’s fine. We’re not trying to please everyone. The ones you click with start to warm up.

They join your list

You offer a freebie and they sign up. Now you’re in their inbox, they see you on social media, and maybe they come to your lives. At the lower end of warm, you’re around 2.5%. Three clients from 100.

“You get me”

Then something you say names the exact thing they’ve been struggling with. You understand their problem, and maybe you’re the one who can get them out of it. That’s a really good moment to get them on a sales call.

At that point, send an email to 100 people on your list and you might get four sales calls booked. You could convert a quarter of those calls into clients, maybe even half.

They’re hot

Sell to someone once they’re hot, or properly hot, and your conversion rate can reach 10%. Ten clients from 100 people. Same offer. Same you.

What that difference is worth

That is an insane difference. And it’s exactly why you don’t want to be selling to people who don’t know you, don’t like you and don’t trust you yet.

It’s also how I made my first half a million pounds in sales from fewer than 2,000 people on my email list. I’m telling you that because 2,000 is a small list. The list size was never what made the money.

Why it’s harder on social media now

Social media isn’t really social media any more. It’s interest media. The algorithm pushes most of what you post in front of people who have never come across you before.

So the people seeing your posts are colder than they used to be, back when you built a following and your posts mostly reached people who already knew you. That makes selling straight from a post harder than ever. If it feels like it used to work better, you’re not imagining it.

So how do you warm people up?

You need something whose only job is building a relationship: showing your personality, your expertise, and giving people a chance to connect with you. I call it a relationship building engine.

Here’s the funny thing. A lot of marketing tools were built to automate what converts best of all, which is simply talking to someone. And plenty of us go straight to building the email sequences and the webinars before we’ve learned to sell in the simplest way there is, which is a conversation.

So start there. For me, the easiest way to have that conversation with lots of people at once is a weekly live show. It warms people up while they watch.