Before you contact a cold lead again, decide whether you're building for later or asking for an answer

By Liv Saville, Head of Growth at Worthington

Nurturing·October 2, 2026·7 min read

A 2018 study in Industrial Marketing Management found that salespeople persist with resistant prospects in two ways, one aimed at building for a future deal and one aimed at finding out what the prospect truly intends. My view is that every message you send a cold lead should be a deliberate choice between the two, made for that one person.

Persistence took two forms in the study, and each had costs

In More Than One Way to Persist, published in Industrial Marketing Management in 2018, Nawar Chaker, Alex Zablah and Charles Noble set out to understand what salesperson persistence looks like in practice and how it affects a salesperson's job performance. They start from a tension most agents will recognise. The importance of persistence to sales success is seemingly unquestioned, and yet anecdotal evidence suggests the extra business it brings may be tempered by its costs, such as time spent pursuing prospects who won't commit.

The authors used a grounded theory approach to explore the question. They found that persistence shows up as a combination of influence tactics that salespeople use to shape the responses of resistant prospects. They also found that the mix of tactics can be nurture-focused, aimed at building the foundation for future exchange, or closure-focused, aimed at uncovering the prospect's true intent, and that a salesperson can use either approach or both. Each approach had desirable and undesirable consequences for performance.

Their data also pointed to political skill as an important boundary condition. In the authors' account, political skill is what lets a salesperson identify the tactics most likely to work in a given situation, and it determines whether a persistence attempt is effective. They conclude that the effect of persistence on performance may not be universally positive, and that it depends on the type of tactics a salesperson uses and on their level of political skill.

Each approach asks something different of a cold lead

The abstract defines the two approaches by what they aim to do, and in my reading that's what makes the study useful to an agent. A nurture-focused message asks nothing of the lead today. Its job is to keep a future conversation possible, so the lead still thinks of you when the move becomes real. A closure-focused message asks the lead to tell you where they stand, which costs them a small decision and gives you information you can plan around.

That explains, at least to me, why neither approach comes out of the study as the safe default. Keep nurturing a lead who has already decided against moving and you spend months on someone who will never commit, which is the cost the authors name at the start. Press a lead for an answer before they're ready and you may get a "no" that was really a "not yet."

The authors' point about political skill fits here. They describe it as the ability to pick the tactic that suits the situation. For an agent, I read that as knowing a lead well enough to judge which kind of message they would welcome, and that judgment depends on what you remember about them.

I've only read the published abstract, since the full paper is paywalled, so I can't tell you which specific tactics the authors placed under each approach or which consequences they found for each one. The study wasn't about real estate, and applying it to the cold leads in an agent's database is my own reading.

Choose the aim for each cold lead before you write to them

Agents I've spoken to have said cold leads are usually the first contacts to go quiet on their side, once live deals take over the week. My view is that when you come back to them, the first decision is which kind of persistence each lead needs, and it's worth making that decision on paper.

Sort by what the lead told you. A lead who said their move is a year or more away is a candidate for nurture-focused contact. A lead whose stated timeline has come and gone without a word from them is a candidate for a closure-focused question, because the plan they described may have changed.

Write nurture messages that stand on their own. Send something tied to what the lead told you, such as a sale on the street they liked or a home that matches what they described, and don't ask for a call. The message should be worth reading even if they never reply. A study of names in email subject lines suggests a personal touch earns the rest of the message a closer read, which is one more reason to put something specific in the body.

Make an honest answer easy in a closure message. Ask one question, for example whether they're still planning to move this spring or whether that's changed, and say plainly that either answer is fine. A lead who can reply "not this year" in one line is more likely to reply at all, in my view, and their answer tells you which approach to use next.

Set a limit on direct asks. The authors flag the time spent on prospects who won't commit as a real cost. Decide in advance how many closure-focused messages a lead gets before you move them to a slower nurture rhythm, and note the date you made the switch.

Give each message one aim. The study found salespeople can combine the two approaches. Across a sequence of messages I'd use both, and within a single email I'd pick one, so the lead can tell what you're asking of them.

Remembering each lead is what makes the choice possible

The choice between nurturing and asking only works if you know what each lead said and when you last heard from them, and that's the part that slips across a large database. Worthington keeps a record of every contact, with notes on durable facts and interaction history, and runs structured re-engagement of cold leads. He knows when to follow up and when to say nothing, and he drafts each message in your own voice for you to review and send. You can also talk through a lead with Worthington, who draws on industry best practice and relationship-marketing research. If you want the broader picture of how cold leads are kept warm, this guide to lead nurturing covers it.

A cold lead going quiet leaves you with a decision about what your next message is for, and this study gives you a reason to make it on purpose, one person at a time.

Worthington draws on research like this to shape a nurturing strategy for each of your clients. Join the waitlist