Interested in finding more qualified opportunities with outbound email campaigns?
Being a great sales manager is very difficult. Sales managers are wearing a lot of different hats on a day to day basis. Most sales managers tend to spend their time very late in the sales process, as deals are about to close (which is one of the main reasons sales people don’t prospect).
It’s obvious to see why sales managers focus on late stage deals, those deals help them hit their targets and their bonuses. Most sales managers don’t spend enough time on the early part of the process, actually attracting clients into the sales funnel. If you had more people in the funnel you wouldn’t have to stress so much at the end of the funnel.
I advise every VP of Sales I speak with to make sure their team has an outbound email strategy. Over time, a great outbound marketing email strategy will replace the need for that last minute deal you have to close before quarter end. Great outbound sales strategies will give your team so many more at bats and a more predictable way to grow revenue long-term.
Sales managers should spend more time worrying about how to get people into the funnel than helping close the late stage deals.
You have high paid outside sales people for a reason; they should be able to close the deals by themselves. If you want predictable growth, implement and continually optimize your outbound email strategy. Get more leads in the sales funnel, that’s how you increase revenue.
Every company in the world should be using email campaigns to promote their business. Everyone does email a little differently and with varying levels of sophistication. At the most basic level you have individual sales reps or someone in a company sending prospecting emails.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could have a list of 50,000 email addresses and set up automation depending on whether the individual opens, forwards, clicks, or interacts with the email in a number of different ways. We break down our client sophistication in a pretty simple way, which is whether they are crawling, walking, or running when it comes to outbound email marketing.
Crawl – For the most part there really isn’t much more happening than one-to-one emails. Maybe you are using templates or sending to multiple contacts at once, but nothing overly sophisticated.
Walk – You are using an outbound marketing software such as CRM, Salesloft, Outreach.io, Toutapp, or Yesware to send a lot of emails at one time. You may have a monthly newsletter as well that all your contacts read, and overall the organization is doing an above average job at email marketing.
Run – You have email marketing experts on staff and are doing a great job segmenting groups. You are using outbound marketing tools and doing things such as A/B testing which headlines are working best and which emails have the best open rate and conversion. You are
There are many organizations that aren’t even at the crawl stage, they use cold calling and in-person visits to sell their products and services. How you close the final sale may not change with outbound email campaigns but creating the lead and getting the lead ready to buy can easily be affected with outbound campaigns.
Here are a few key things to consider depending on which stage your company is currently in.
Not At The Crawl Stage Yet
The number one thing you need to do is start building a list of prospects or people you have contacted in the past. Organize the list in Excel, try to get to a few hundred contacts where you have their first name, last name, company, and email address.
If you are not great with computers or this process is going to take you a long time trying to find an administrative assistant or someone you know who could complete this task quicker. You can also use services like elance.com where people will do very basic administrative tasks for you very cheaply. You could outsource someone building a list of 200 people for you for under $20!
Crawling But Not Walking
One of the easiest ways to improve your outbound email programs is purchasing technology to do so. Tools like Salesloft and Outreach.io allow you to manage email addresses and schedule outbound email campaigns. The max number of emails you can send per day is around 500, but that is too many for one sales rep to manage. We recommend implementing a tool and scheduling out emails for your team. If you are a B2B company, send those emails Tuesday-Thursday and be very brief in your messages.
Whatever you do, don’t send an email that has lots of links and way too much content, get to the point of why you are reaching out. Schedule 50-100 emails each day so you don’t get overwhelmed with the follow ups from people responding. Try to set the campaigns a few weeks in advance and plan an outbound email schedule so you know which messages are going out weekly.
Walking But Not Running
Set up A/B tests on each new campaign to see which messaging works best. Test using different headlines, different content, and different calls to action. Also, test the time of day you are sending your messages and the responses you are getting. As an example, send out 100 emails with one headline and another 100 with a different headline. See which one works best and use that headline for the rest of the campaign. In addition, make sure you are segmenting your groups as much as possible.
When you start major outbound campaigns it is critical that the messaging makes sense for the size of the company, industry, revenue, etc. If you have a very large list segmenting is even more critical. Which of these individuals may be customers? Where did we get their contact information from (webinar, purchased list, inbound campaign, CRM, etc)?
And if you are already running, great job, keep up the good work. You are in the 1% of sales teams trying to master outbound email marketing. I use the term “trying” when it comes to mastering email marketing because there is no such thing as fully mastering. You can always have better subjects, better calls to action, and better results.
From our perspective, a small sales team that is awesome at email marketing will always outperform a sales team twice their size that doesn’t use email effectively. You can only reach out to so many people one-to-one, email automation can keep you top of mind with your prospects and drive predictable revenue.
At OutboundView we help B2B companies implement top of funnel sales and marketing strategy using inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Contact us if you are interested in finding more qualified opportunities.
