🕵🏻‍♂️ Cold outreach 🥶

Feb 16, 2022 12:56 pm

While tons of B2B companies are getting satisfactory results from their cold outreach strategy, there are plenty of them that are having a hard time with it.

In this newsletter, I will walk you through the best practices of cold outreach by covering the following:

I- The state of B2B Marketing

II- The pre-requisites of successful outreach and 3 layers of personalization

III- How to leverage intent data for list building

IV- How to personalize your outreach and get replies

Before we dive into it, here are some remote positions from our job board that might interest you or someone around you.

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

FILEBASE IS HIRING A SENIOR DIGITAL STRATEGIST (REMOTE), $75-125K

Here are some of the things you can expect to do:

Develop, test, and iterate on the company's digital content marketing strategy;
Work collaboratively with other departments to create a regular cadence of content for lead generation (ebooks, webinars, blog posts, etc);
Plan and manage a promotional calendar across all content assets to ensure a high level of activity.

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

LABELBOX IS HIRING A PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER (REMOTE, US)

Here are some of the things you can expect to do:

Lead go-to-market strategy and execution for all products and features within a core Labelbox product area, partnering with cross-functional teams including Product, Marketing, Business Intelligence, Customer Success, and Sales.
Develop compelling product-centric content for prospective and existing customers including emails, blog posts, webinars, product videos, sales sheets.

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

ORBIT IS HIRING A SENIOR GROWTH MARKETING MANAGER (REMOTE, US), $150-175K

Here are some of the things you can expect to do:

Day-to-day management and execution of ongoing programs. Optimizing them by reviewing analytics, customer journeys, and content to identify growth opportunities;
Plan, implement, measure, and improve marketing campaigns to reach quarterly goals by driving new customer signups;
Report on growth initiatives, including signups, traffic, and conversion rates.

Learn more about this offer and apply here.

P.S. If you’re on the lookout for B2B marketers with proven experience, submit a job offer here.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.

I- The state of B2B Marketing

Andrei Zinkevich and Vladimir Blagojevic from Fullfunnel talked to +220 companies with long and complex sales cycles and here are the top challenges those companies deal with.

Not aligning sales, marketing, and client success teams
Low response rate to outreach campaigns
Targeting the relevant decision-makers

Let’s break it down. After an in-depth analysis of all the replies, we came to realize that these are some common mistakes that lead to those challenges.

A one-size-fits-all approach: sending messages with minimal personalization. Truth is, no software can help you get positive replies if you keep sending the same generic message to all of your target accounts.

Prospecting the decision-makers only: this is critical because if you are selling to mid-size or enterprise companies, you will be probably dealing with a buying committee and in those cases, it's extremely hard to pass through the gatekeepers and get the attention of the decision-makers.

Protip: Start building a relationship with people from your target accounts and from the buying committee before even launching the outreach campaign.

Broad market targeting: if you ever want to spend your time wisely on the accounts that are most likely to use your services, you must define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Absence of market positioning and Unique Value Proposition: an effective UVP tells your ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition. In other words, it provides your company with a unique differentiation.

Lack of warm-up and nurturing programs: the chances of getting a reply from a company or a person that is already aware of you are way higher than that of those who have never ever heard of you or your company.

Lack of creativity: you can imagine how many messages and emails decision-makers receive a day. So, if you want to cut through the noise, you must be as creative as you possibly can. If you need a tool to help you with that, you might want to check Lemlist.

II- The pre-requisites of successful outreach and 3 layers of personalization

1. Ideal customer profile and account segmentation

All customers and prospects are not created equal. Depending on the revenue potential of the companies you are reaching out to, you need to personalize your outreach. That said, it makes perfect sense to divide your customers and prospects into various groups based upon their specific needs or shared characteristics.

2. Account research

It always makes sense to find a fit between you and your prospect.

Lots of companies tend to think about scalability, and they build huge lists of accounts and reach out to everybody. They feel comfortable playing the game of numbers, sending these desperate emails, pretending that they might get 01 or 02 replies out of 1,000 emails.

But the question is, what will they do next after using up their account list? Go and hunt for another list of 1000 emails and waste it again?

Keep in mind that running a campaign on a small scope with a good quality list of researched accounts is way better in terms of ROI and results than running mass campaigns that never lead to any business opportunity.

3.Tier personalization

Depending on the revenue potential, you need to personalize your outreach messages.

Let's say Tier 1 is made up of companies with the highest revenue potential. In that case, you might be sending 100% personalized messages while you can run vertical-based and job role personalized messages for Tier 3. It doesn't matter if it's email, linkedIn or direct mail.

4.Creativity

Creativity is important in the sense that it helps you drive originality and gain an edge. Think outside the box and come up with an approach that cuts through the noise.

5.Multichannel follow-up cadence

You can't rely on one channel because the thing is, some companies have firewalls that block emails coming from unsolicited demands. Literally, you can’t get to their inbox. In that case, what results will you get if you don’t try contacting them on a different platform?

03 LAYERS OF PERSONALIZATION

Here are three (03) layers of personalization based on account segmentation.

Action steps here:

Develop an ideal customer profile, and
Define an account segmentation criteria

III- Leveraging intent data for list building

1- Leverage LinkedIn intent data

If you are running linkedIn demand gen campaigns, the goal will be to connect with target accounts, involve them in the conversations, and educate them with your content. Basically, LinkedIn will provide you with lots of data you can use for your outreach.

You can get to see companies and people who engaged with your content, visited your profile, visited your website, etc. You can install software like H appier Leads to have insightful data that will be used to build a list and start a conversation with those strategic accounts.

2- Collect info about website visitors

The critical point here is that while you might be collecting data about all your website visitors, you shouldn't reach out to everybody. It is important to have a clear list of engagement criteria. It can be :

Those who visited your WORK WITH US page
Those who downloaded any gated content
Those who spent more than X number of minuted on your website, etc.

If a company spends more than 30 minutes on your website, they definitely have some interest in your content and you can reach out and ask how you can help them. Always remember that a good relationship starts with helping.

3. Leverage searching signals

You can use software like Bombora to get a list of accounts that are looking for topics that belong to your services or to your products.

Again, the key idea here is that you make a list of companies that are potentially a good fit for your business.

4. Follow social signals.

Identify companies with a potential need that you can meet. It can be the public roadmap. Reach out to them with some good case studies on how you have helped companies X, Y, Z, with the same pain points.

5. Client Success supports Marketing with insights from in-depth interviews with customers.

This is a fantastic approach to identifying expansion opportunities. If interview your customers, and you're aware of their strategic goals, then you can meet their needs in a way no other company will ever do.

IV. How to personalize your Outreach and get replies.

The first thing is obviously analyzing hobbies, interests, universities, places of origin, and the likes.

Case in point. Andrei Zinkevich from FullFunnel noticed that one of their prospects is a big fan of cycling and that before covid, this prospect regularly went to France and Belgium for cycling. Based on this, Andrei created a highly personalized proposal linking cycling to B2B sales.

Check this out.

For Tier 2, you need to do a semi-personalization. You can adapt your messages to different buying committee roles. The same service can be pitched differently to different job roles.

At this point, we can’t stress enough the importance of creativity. When you’re creative in your outreach, people will always reply because this is something they don't receive every day. You might easily get a 100% reply rate, not all positive though.

In a nutshell, keep in mind that B2B doesn’t stand for Boring To Boring. So, think outside the box and do your utmost to grab that contact’s attention.

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Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches

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