Generic Sales Outreach is Dead
How does your sales team nail sales outreach the right way?
We are all inundated with generic outreach emails, most of which go straight into the trash, or spam.
We can all agree that the 'spray and pray' outreach strategy to reach your sales prospects is over. Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of work from home, we are all inundated by hundreds of generic sales emails that generally do not apply, are poorly thought out, or are addressing a completely different job title.
Whichever it may be, we roll our eyes and smash the delete button, or if this is your 1,000th sales email of the day… send it straight to spam. Sales prospecting methods are evolving, and those generic emails are best left in the 1990s, where they belong.
Let's start with the basics.
What is Sales Outreach?
Sales outreach is an initial phone call or email from your sales team that reaches out to potential customers to spark their interest in your business or service. Most commonly, it could be a cold call or email. In a poll we recently ran on our social media, 63% of respondents preferred a personalized email for customer outreach, followed by a cold call at 30%, and in last place, the generic email with 7%.
However, Joe Venuti, Vice President of Sales at UpKeep, says there is no perfect way to reach out; you have to use the tools at your disposal.
"There's no silver bullet. If there were, none of us would have jobs because prospecting and pipeline generation would be easy. The analogy that I used on my team is you can be the best carpenter in the world. I say, 'Hey, can you go and build a house?'. The answer is yes. Just like if you're a great salesperson - 'Can you get me a meeting?' The answer is yes. But, if I give that carpenter a screwdriver and say 'Okay, go to it'. You can't do it. You need all of the tools in your toolbox. And that's the phone, email, social selling, and anything else that's at your disposal from tech. So it's really a matter of using all of the tools at your disposal because different people and prospects will respond to different kinds of outreach," he noted.
Sales outreach occurs when you have already researched a prospect list and chosen the right potential customers for your business. Sales outreach methods are designed to target potential clients that fit your sales process and business offerings, gel with your ideal customer profile, and have strong potential to convert them into members of your client community.
What is a Personalized Email?
A personalized email is an email with a subject line and content designed to speak directly to the person and business you are addressing. To be effective, these must be carefully researched and addressed to the right person to have an impact. Content can range from addressing pain points, and showing social proof from similar companies, to addressing the person by name and referencing their favorite sports teams. Whatever your prospecting method to new clients may be, it must address the right decision-makers, provide value, and showcase how your product can improve revenue, efficiency, or any other pain point your client may be experiencing. In your outreach email, you must deliver the answers that your prospect needs.
When effective outreach such as a personalized email works, it is guaranteed to increase your pipeline and bring in more deals for your sales team. According to BacklinkO, just a personalized subject line boosts response rates by 30.5%. Personalized body copy stimulates responses by another 32.7%.
The Problems with Personalized Email Outreach
The challenge with effective outreach is that it requires time, a lot of time. Your sales team needs to set time aside for company research, decision-maker research, and company vertical research. Most sales teams are too busy trying to hit their sales goals to put this much time into each and every prospect on their list every day.
Owler Max slashes that research time by delivering the news and insight you need on the companies your sales team follows - directly into their CRM and communications tools. This data-driven insight means more effective sales, more efficient use of their time, and better ways to personalize that email and reach out. Your cold emails just got a lot warmer.
What is a Cold Call?
A cold calling is a phone call made by a salesperson trying to sell goods or services to someone they do not know. Many of us are familiar with the spam-type sales calls you recieve where the caller has no idea who you are and why you might need their product or service (I'm looking at you, insurance companies!). This Reddit thread gives some of the worst examples of cold calls ever.
However, there is such a thing as an excellent cold call, and it all starts with that sales buzzword, personalization. Much like research for personalized emails doing it right takes time. Still, if it is done right, the returns are much higher, the chance of getting the phone put down on you is much lower, and the opportunity for revenue generation is much higher.
The Problems with the Cold Call
Like with email, there are ways to do these types of calls really wrong. The first big no-no is not doing your research and not knowing either the business or the person you are talking to. We can all see the difference between starting a phone call with 'Hi, how's the weather?' Or 'Hi Dr. Smith, what a shock win at the Kentucky Derby this weekend! It was a great race to watch, and I noticed that one of your horses ran in that race. How did you feel about her run?'
You have to make sure your outreach message is on point and timely and encourages engagement from the person on the other end of the phone.
Generic Outreach Email
According to Moz, less than 8% of generic email messages are opened. That seems like a big waste of resources and time spent to type it all out when you know return rates are so meager. There are ways to boost email open rates, but the incremental increases in email open rates on generic emails are hardly worth the time.
Go with What Works
Why rely on an outreach program that has low response rates when personalization paired with follow-up emails brings much higher results? Have an outreach plan for your team that enables them to research, find the right ways to reach out, and spark conversations that matter with new customers. There is no one-size-fits-all in effective outreach. Focus on your customer, be buyer focussed and boost that customer experience.
With personalization, either in sales emails or cold calls, you can reach the right prospects and the right potential buyers with the correct information at the right time. You will know what pain points to address before starting the conversation.
Start Revenue-Generating, Stop Time-Wasting: Our Top 6 Tips:
Start with Your Tech Stack - ensure that you have the right sales tools integrated into your CRM and communications tools to enable better company research, and push information to you, so you don't have to go and search for it, and that helps you find the right prospects.
Know Who You Need to Reach Out to and Why. That means writing an email addressing your prospect by name, referencing their favorite sport, college, or a charity they volunteer with.
Don't Just Pitch - build a relationship. Ask questions, chat about interests, and provide solutions to their problems.
Show Who You Are in Your Email - inject personality and feeling
Lead With 'You' not 'I' - make your client the protagonist in this story.
Do Your Research - Make your emails hyper-personalized, and include personal details, but don't be creepy.
As Venuti says about personalization in outreach, "It's time-consuming. It's a lot harder than putting 600 people in a cadence and hoping somebody responds, but if you do it right, the ROI is there."
