Strong Outreach vs Creepy Stalking - Let's Talk Outreach Personalization!

Joe Venuti, Vice President, Sales Development at UpKeep, says that personalization changes and evolves as we become more tech-enabled and the world around us changes, and there is a fine line between personalized and creepy

Joe Venuti, Vice President, Sales Development at UpKeep

The beginning of personalized outreach was the cold call. It started in the 1980s when company leadership began to have desk phones and were reachable directly, which has evolved into those spam calls that you can’t get rid of. Since the 80s, personalized outreach has gone through many evolutions, from phone calls to emails to LinkedIn In Mail, but one thing remains true, personalized outreach is far more successful at building relationships with clients than the spray and pray approach.

“Everybody's inundated with phone calls and emails. I run sales development teams, and I don't read 50% of the emails in my inbox. What I do read is the highly personalized stuff. I read stuff with a subject line that speaks to me - the human,” explains Venuti.

However, from a tactical sales standpoint, by the time you have reached out with that personalized email, you should know as much about the person you are addressing and their company as possible. As the sales rep, you must be speaking directly to the human at the other end of the line, not to a general sales prospect.

“Where are you from? What school did you go to? Are you part of a group or an association, or what's your favorite sports team? I think that's all the stuff that jumps out at me, and then the next level is execution - like a personalized direct mail campaign. It works, but it is time-consuming. Personalization is a lot harder than putting 600 people in a cadence and hoping somebody responds, but the ROI is there if you do it right,” noted Venuti.

Join us, Tenbound, Sales Leader Joe Venuti, and Sales Trainer to B2B Leaders Jeff Bajorek at our webinar that is ALLL about building client relationships.

The dark side of sales personalization

Sales personalization can go too far and rapidly escalate from the prospect feeling understood - to downright creepy. So, where is that line of personalized vs. creepy, and how do you, as sales reps, know what personal information on your prospect to gather and what to ignore?

Venuti says that it’s simple, personalization is sticking to what's readily available, for example, on LinkedIn - a business platform. 

“I think if it's on LinkedIn, it's fair game. It can get a little creepy when you dig deep into Facebook, Instagram, and others. I think referencing the fact that you know people have children and things like that is probably too far. Referencing someone's favorite sports team referencing the fact that, for instance, I'm a mentor for Girls Club. A lot of people ping me thanking me for my commitment to that. Okay, great. It's right on my LinkedIn. But I've had other people that have been like, ‘oh, I saw your daughter's birthday was last weekend’. How much digging did you have to do to figure that out?” explains Venuti.

So the rule of thumb is to stick to the surface stuff, avoid talking about people’s kids, and don't go deep diving into their personal lives!

“The easiest thing to do is talk to somebody about where they went to school. Where'd you go to college? That's not invasive. That's not creepy, and it is personalized,” he states.

Catch our Head of Customer Success, Nathan Steele on Personalization with the Revenue Generator Podcast: