Every company has them: dead and dying sales leads that no one talks about. But you can bring these leads back to the land of the living (and buying).

Zombies infected zone

There’s a crowd that you never see. Just waiting, waiting, in the darkest reaches of your CRM.

No, they’re not sci-fi monsters. They might become your very best customers.

What we’re talking about here are zombie leads, also known as dead or cold leads. They’re not pretty and they’re not something any salesperson is proud of, but they happen. Luckily, improved data analytics technology is making it easier to find and resurrect these leads.

How do leads go cold? It happens quite easily, even naturally. A lead doesn’t or can’t move forward in the buying journey. A salesperson switches jobs, and his or her middling leads fall through organizational cracks. Whatever the reason, formerly promising contacts have cooled off and your company hasn’t communicated with them in some time.

While it’s tempting to dump these leads and start again elsewhere, don’t give up on them. Remember, there was some interest there. It might just be dormant, and you can bring it back to life with the right sales technology and techniques.

So how do you resurrect a zombie lead, anyway?

Four Steps to Live Leads

To convert a zombie-like cold lead into a lively prospect, you need to adopt a four-pronged approach with a heavy dash of data analytics:

  1. Identify Your Zombie Leads

Your first step is to find your army of zombie leads. Look for accounts that haven’t been updated or contacted in a good bit. If your company uses lead scoring, a score that hasn’t changed in a few months is usually a sign of a lead gone cold.

The next part of this step happens inside your head: understand that warming up a cold lead will require work. Be prepared to fire off drip content campaigns, social media engagement strategies, and even direct approaches over email or phone to regenerate their interest.

  1. Launch Analytics at the Zombie Leads

Now’s the time to leverage predictive analytics. Run statistical modeling and advanced analytics on your database and assign a lead score to each one of the cold leads. This predictive score recognizes the buying patterns of these accounts and ensures each rep connects with the most promising ones.

  1. Get Them in the Game Plan 

So you know who to target among your zombie army. Your next step is getting them into the sales radar. Predictive analytics can help your sales team cut down on time spent planning by providing a highly-customized weekly game plan for each rep. This plan of prioritized leads predicts what each contact is likely to buy and what can drive their purchase. Your soon-to-be-reanimated leads will be included in this weekly lineup.

  1. Give Them Personalized Recommendations 

Personalized recommendations are hot right now, and there’s every reason to believe that this trend will continue. Of course, no rep — no matter how savvy — can crunch this amount of data for every contact. Once again, it’s predictive analytics to the rescue, finding the next best actions for your leads. This helps reduce the guesswork for each contact. And analytics will even tell you if it’s more productive to call, email, or meet in person. Intelligent predictions further specify which products or services individual contacts are likely to purchase next.

Dead and dying zombie leads are everywhere. They’re inside your CRM at this very minute. By using predictive analytics and some good old-fashioned sales skills, you can reanimate them into active leads that are engaged with your organization.

Authored by Richa Kapoor – Marketing Manager at Absolutdata