Cold to Committed
Page 12
Warm Accounts Sequence
When you speak with a contact for one of your accounts, they may ask you to reach back out to them in a few months. This could lead to a meeting, but the prospects request to reach back out is far enough away that we risk them forgetting about our conversation. Because we want to capitalize on our first conversation and stay relevant to the prospect, add them to a warm account sequence. The purpose of this sequence is to help the prospect remember the conversation where they asked you to reach back out in a few months and to provide them with some value in the form of resources and articles. You are staying connected with the prospect by periodically reaching out. Let’s take a look at a simple warm accounts sequence.
Call with a follow-up email, then a Step every 3weeks.
This sequence begins the day that you had the call with the prospect and the first step is sending a post-call follow-up email. We will cover the content of an email like this later in this chapter. For now, notice the spacing between steps—three weeks. Every three weeks this sequence will prompt us to send a custom touchpoint. What touchpoint you send is your decision and should be relevant to your prospect. You are not reaching out every three weeks with the intention of booking a meeting. The goal is to reach out every three weeks and provide some value that will keep you top of mind with the prospect. A great example would be sending the prospect a blog post that you read that’s relevant to their industry or any resource that you believe would be helpful for them. This is something that gives the prospect the impression that you are thoughtful and care about them beyond just booking a meeting. This aids you immensely when the time that the prospect asked you to reach out arrives and you call them to book a meeting. Here is an example of what that might look like being sent to a prospect in the artificial intelligence space.
Hi Bill,
I just finished reading [Link]this article that I thought you might enjoy. It’s about a company in Georgia developing an A.I. that will be able to train a dog! Wow! How far away do you think we are from no more potty accidents in the house?
Best,
Kyle
Reschedule Meeting Sequence
Not all of your meetings are going to materialize. Yes, it’s sad I know. In order to stay organized with your rescheduling efforts. you should build a reschedule meeting sequence. We will cover the messaging you should be using when attempting to reschedule a meeting in chapter 9. For now, let’s take a look at what a reschedule meeting sequence looks like.
Call with a follow-up email, then a Step every few days.
As you can see, this sequence starts off with a lot of touchpoints very close together. This is because our best chance of rescheduling is shortly after the meeting was supposed to take place. You will also notice this sequence lasts a lot longer than our others have. Rescheduling a meeting is easier than booking it was, so it’s worth extending the time we continue to make attempts to connect with the prospect.
Having a sequence for cold accounts, warm accounts, and one for rescheduling meetings will keep you organized in the vast majority of situations. Organization is important to ensure that things aren’t slipping through the cracks.
If you haven’t thought of this next question yet, you will at some point…
What do we do when we have multiple contacts at an account?
Working Multiple Contacts
Having multiple contacts at an account is necessary in many situations, but it also complicates your processes. “What do I do if...?” Questions pop up frequently.The answers aren’t always intuitive. So, how do you properly work more than one contact at an account? How do you handle some of the common situations that come up?
Let’s begin with when you should add a second contact to a sequence.
Adding Another Contact
Adding a second contact at one of your accounts to your sequence will increase your chances of connecting with someone from that account. This is a huge upside that is absolutely worth your time, but, there are also downsides to consider.
The first contact we add to our sequence will typically be the main decision maker. That means that every contact we add, after the first, is getting farther and farther away from the decision maker. For the most part this is not great because ideally, our meetings are booked with people who have decision-making authority. This is not always the case. Booking a meeting with a stakeholder in the decision-making process can be an effective entry point into an account. It is up to you and your company to decide who you should be meeting with.
As I mentioned earlier, the main value of adding the second contact is to increase our odds of connecting with someone at the account. If we were to add the first and second contact to our sequence at the same time, we would spend twice the amount of time working one account, because we would be reaching out to both contacts. If the decision maker answers the phone on the second call we make, it wasn’t necessary to add that second contact. This is why I recommend adding the second contact after three touches to the first contact without any response. I would even recommend adding it as a step in your sequence, so you won’t forget.
Breaking the Rules of the Sequence
Have to? Want to? Need to?
Sometimes it’s necessary to break some rules, which I love to do. There are three different scenarios for when you will need to break away from the safe structure of your sequence—when you have to, when you want to, and when you need to.
Have to?
You will have to break away from your sequence whenever your prospect has engaged in some way with your messaging. For example, your sales enablement tool alerts you that your prospect is reading your emails. If this happens you will engage in something I call “speed to lead.” I didn’t make the term up, but I love it. Speed to lead is when a prospect engages with your messaging and you give them a call as fast as possible. Research shows that if you call a prospect quickly after they engage, you have a dramatically higher chance to connect.
Want to?
You will encounter times when you will want to break away from the shackles of sequence structure (next book title?). You will get this urge when you want to test some different messaging or try out a new prospecting tool, like adding a video to your email. I encourage you to experiment and go against the grain from time to time. When you do this, choose what metrics you are tracking and decide what success will look like. Like I explained in a previous chapter, it is important when you’re testing something to know what metric you are trying to improve and what the impact of succeeding will have. As long as you are clear about that, test away, my friend.
Need to?
The final situation that will cause you to put on a bandanna and break the rules is when you need to. You may find yourself in a position where you’re on the cusp of hitting quota and need one or two more meetings. In this situation you will need to break the sequence rules and engage in my favorite prospecting activity—dialing! One of the main reasons why I think the phone is the most powerful prospecting tool is because it has the ability to move the needle quickly. If a prospect reads an email you sent, they may eventually respond to it. If you get the prospect on the phone, they will immediately respond to you, positive or negative. Whenever you are in a position where you need to move the needle, quickly, simply...smile and dial.
Email
Using email to book meetings can be a challenge, because of the number of emails prospects get and how easy those emails are to ignore. You have to stand out in an environment where everyone is trying to stand out. Do you think a peacock would catch your eye if you were at Coachella music festival? This characteristic can cause SDRs to spend way too much time customizing emails, only to have them end up in the trash.
In this section let’s cover how to write an engaging email tailored to your prospect and what you should automate to increase your efficiency. Before we dive into the writing, let’s tal
k about how to research the information that you can use in those emails
THe 3x3 Research Method
There is a popular research method called 3x3 research. The basic premise is to find three pieces of information about the contact you are targeting in three minutes. Three minutes isn’t much time so don’t feel bummed if your research is taking a bit longer. What you will find is that the more contacts you have researched in your career, the quicker you are able to find useful information. This is because you will know what to look for and where to look.
What you are looking for is any useful information that you can use to build rapport with the prospect by showing that you did your research and are thoughtfully reaching out. Now, before you start digging through LinkedIn pages and crossing your fingers in hopes that you went to the same college as one of your prospects, remember what I said earlier. Everyone is trying to stand out. So, when they zig you have to zag.
A college connection is good, but don’t stop there. Take a look at a list of potentially useful information that you may be able to find online about one of your prospects.
You both went to the same college
Similar hobbies and interests
You have read their favorite book and can quote it
Similar career path
Their profile picture is at a location that you’ve been to
They created a piece of content you can reference
Their company was in the news for something exciting
You’re in the same group on LinkedIn
Interesting piece of industry-related news
Industry-related content
This list has a few examples of what you might be able to find when doing 3x3 research. When choosing the research you are looking for, make information about the individual contact a priority. Tailoring your emails with information that is relevant to the contact will have the largest impact on their response rate. You may find yourself in a position where you can’t find much about the individual contact and you’ll have to venture out and research the company itself. When using company research to aid you in tailoring emails, try and find news or an interesting fact that you’ll be able to relate to the contact. For example, if you are tailoring an email to the VP of sales and are able to find an article talking about how their company had a huge sales month you should use that because it’s extremely relevant.
Three useful pieces of information in three minutes!
Time yourself and really make an effort to keep your research to under three minutes. Being able to tailor your emails to the prospect is powerful and will have an impact on your response rate. It can also be a time hog. If you’re not careful you’ll look at the clock and realize that you’ve been reading LinkedIn recommendations for twenty five minutes. To help keep your research in the three-minute timeframe, have a hit list of websites you will use and create a research workflow. Here is an example of a research workflow.
Organize your research workflow from your most effective research source to the least. By doing this, you will be able to finish your research faster, because time will not be used on less effective research methods (unless necessary). There are also tools that you can use to aid in your research and some are even built into the sales enablement tool you are already using. Do what you can to increase your efficiency, so you’ll always be able to keep the research under three minutes.
Tailoring Emails
Once you have your research, you must now use it to tailor your emails to the prospect. We will talk about how to write a paragraph body later on, but for now, I want to focus on the first few sentences in the email. This is where you’ll be doing the bulk of your tailoring. First, let’s use a piece of information as an example.
In our research we discovered that our contact wrote an article called “The 3 Big Mistakes Most Hiring Managers Make, and How to Avoid them.” In the article our contact wrote about how most hiring managers start the process too late, which causes them to be desperate for talent. This leads to poor decision making during the interview process.
This is a great piece of information to use when tailoring our email. Other than the subject line, the most important part of our email is the first sentence. This is because most email service providers show a preview of the email and the first sentence is what is on display. Lead with something that grabs their attention and shows that the email is meant for them specifically. Let’s take a look at an example.
Hi Jessica,
Your article about the mistakes hiring managers make was spot on!
When your prospect sees that the first sentence of your email relates to something they did, something they are proud of, they will feel compelled to open it. As the prospect is reading our email, we want to make it clear that we didn’t just read the title. Let’s be a little more thoughtful, see example below.
Hi Jessica,
Your article about the mistakes hiring managers make was spot on! I think another reason why most hiring managers start the process late is because in our startup culture, the decision to hire comes after realizing a need for a specific role and, of course, they needed it yesterday. Any plans on writing an article about how to better forecast hiring needs?
The information we found in our research came together to create a very strong introduction. We grabbed the prospects attention by showing that we read their article. After that we added our own take on what we read, showing that we actually read it. We follow up with a personal question that also serves as inspiration for the prospect’s next article. This introduction is thoughtful and should do a good job of getting the attention of the prospect. Remember, this is the goal of tailoring an email. You can use the same framework to tailor an email with any information that you find in your research. Once you have created a strong, tailored introduction you will need to back it up with a compelling email body.
Writing the body of an email
The body of your email is intended to pique the interest of the prospect and ultimately get them to agree to have a quick call or book a meeting. Which outcome you strive for depends on the amount of qualifications you require before booking a meeting. I am going to assume you have an average amount of qualifications and will be trying to get the prospect to agree to a quick call with you.
The body of your email will be a template that you will use for the majority of your prospecting emails. There may be some light tailoring required but the main idea is to have an email body that you can “cut and paste” as many times as you need to. Check out this example.
In addition to liking your article I was reaching out because one challenge most hiring managers I speak with face is quality candidates withdrawing before the final interview.
We help fast-growing tech companies reduce the amount of days between interviews, resulting in a 30% decrease in time from application to offer and a 15% increase in successful hires. If this resonates, we should set up a quick call. Do you have some time tomorrow at 11am?
Best,
Kyle
The body of our email does a couple of things that all come together to motivate action. It starts off with explaining a challenge that the prospect is most likely experiencing. Being able to identify a prospect’s challenge gives credibility. In the next paragraph of our email we explain the type of companies we help and the impact our product makes. We use numbers here because we want the prospect to visualize what impact having that result would have on their business. Finally, we end with an assumptive ask for time. Let’s take a look at the entire email from tailored introduction.
Hi Jessica,
Your article about the mistakes hiring managers make was spot on! I think another reason why most hiring managers start the process late is because in our startup culture, the decision to hire comes after realizing a need for a specific role, and of course, they needed it yesterday. Any plans on writing an
article about how to better forecast hiring needs?
In addition to liking your article. I was reaching out because one challenge most hiring managers I speak with face is quality candidates withdrawing before the final interview.
We help fast growing tech companies reduce the amount of days between interviews, resulting in a 30% decrease in time from application to offer and a 15% increase in successful hires. If this resonates, we should set up a quick call. Do you have some time tomorrow at 11am?
Best,
Kyle
This email is tailored to a specific person and should do a great job getting that person’s attention. The next step for you is to create an email template so you can quickly populate the bulk of your email and just tailor what you need to. Let’s take a look at what this would look like.
Hi {{first.name}},
{{Tailored introduction with research}}
I was reaching out because one challenge most {} I speak with face is {{potential problem of the prospect}}.
We help {{industry}} {{solution to problem}} resulting in {{result}}. If this resonates we should set up a quick call. Do you have some time {{date and time}}?
Best,
{{my.first.name}}
Having a template built out will save you some time when constructing each email. You might have noticed we are missing one more piece that is very important for an email. This is of course the subject line. If you do a quick google search for “sales email subject lines” you will be overwhelmed with the amount of email subject lines that boast “best open rates!” For this reason, I am not going to go into too much detail about email subject lines, but I want to give you just a few tips that I have found useful over the years.