The other day I was chatting with Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point, a great friend of Entrepreneur Country and one of the UK’s foremost thought leaders on B2B Sales Strategy. Whilst my role is editorial-based I wanted to get Bob’s views on the very real issue of how to manage your hottest leads and what to do when they start playing hard to get. We all know that converting leads is critical to the success of any SME- this month, I felt empathy as I experienced the frustration of a feature interviewee who had gone cold and then done a vanishing act.

Bob Crow of the RMT has a reputation for straight talking and later I found out disappearing. Calls and emails were repeatedly ignored or cancelled. I pursued until such time as I got some usable content but when attempting to clarify a series of comments the correspondence ended with the single line ‘bollox to the tory squires’. Now to set the record straight we are not politically affiliated in any way and in fact this interview is intended to present an objective light on the complicated character which is Bob Crow.

Chatting later on with Bob Apollo, I asked for his take on managing leads that go cold. He reinforced four key fundamental points for managing your leads pipeline:
1.    Work out what’s in it for them
2.    Don’t be over persistent and too heavy in the pursuit
3.    Ensure you follow up quickly when a lead is warm and set up follow-ups
4.    If you sense things are going cold then share information that you think will hold value for them as a way of rengaging

There’s a crucial lesson to remember here about the need to sell not only your own proposition but also to sell the value you bring to your sales prospect, potential partners or even interviewee’s.