Predictable Prospecting
Crafting Cold Emails to Engage Buyers
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Episode Highlights:
- Introducing Bob Kelly
- Common marketplace trends: Products and ideal customers
- Sales conversations and buyer personas
- How to make the most of the current trends in account-based selling
- Engaging with the ideal contacts in a company: hyper-personalized selling
- Selling to multiple tiered accounts v.s. Selling to core accounts
- Strategic pipeline method
- The major faults of the CRM tool
- Bob Kelly’s top content generation techniques
- Upcoming challenges and predictions for the future
Resources: Predictable Prospecting: How To Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler Contact Bob Kelly by emailing him direct: bob.kelly@strategicpipeline.com or by visiting the Strategic Pipeline website
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hey, everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Bob and I are partners in Strategic Pipeline and we have quite the past history of him mostly being my boss throughout my work history but we are working together now at the consultancy where we help clients, large and small, put in the strategic pipeline process, much of which is discussed in the new book Predictable Prospecting. If you worked with us, you’ll see some things in there that look very, very, familiar. I have a lot of respect for Bob since he’s been doing this for quite some time now in the sales area taking it all the way to close and he’s also run a ton of companies. Without further adieu, welcome Bob Kelly.Bob: Hi Marylou and thank you so much for the introduction. I appreciate that. I look forward to this discussion. Marylou: Yeah. What I wanted to share with our listeners today is the path that you and I have taken since the release of Predictable Revenue and actually since you and I joined forces going on now our fourth year. What have you seen in the marketplace, where do you see things going and what still remains the biggest challenge for our target audience out there in the field? Bob: That’s some interesting questions. Just to give the audience a little bit of context, Marylou and I worked with companies, business to business companies that typically range from early stage $3 million to $5 million in revenue although we’ve gone even lower than that when people were just getting started, up to more enterprise-level companies that have been up to $100 million in revenue with a variety of objectives, some are just trying to get off the ground and others changing their approach to their market or stratifying their sales approach from more of a general market approach to incorporating things such as targeted-account selling, or enterprise-level selling. Some of the things that we see, there’s some things that will vary by the size of the company, the history, and how much experience they’ve had in developing their organization, time and experience, and of course resources, to the type of market it is. Most of our clients have tended to be technology-oriented, quite a few are software companies, others services-oriented companies, people services, professional services. A combination of product and services approach in markets that they’re going after. One of the common things that has tended to exist in virtually every engagement that we get into is the initial understanding of do they know who they’re trying to sell to, first of all, who they are within those companies, and why they should care. Whether you’re a very small company or whether you’re a larger company, it really comes back to that basic understanding who your ideal customer is, who the buyers are within the customer, and then the characteristics of those buyers, and then the situations which they’re looking to buy or they will buy. What that comes down to to a great extent is the same product or service has one benefit to one particular buyer, and it may have completely different benefit to another buyer. For instance, I’ll give you an example. One of our recent clients with the exactly the same software as a service product was talking to the customer support executives, the customer experience executives, as well as e-commerce. In one case, the rationale was a support ticket deflection and another case it was trying to increase the customer experience, less of a cost reduction related benefit is important of retention of customers, attraction of customers. In the third case, it was really a revenue increase, trying to avoid cardigan in an e-commerce environment but the product was exactly the same in all three cases. Understanding those buyer scenarios as we call them and what’s going to motivate that particular buyer within a company to first of all become aware of your solution and then once they’re aware, see that it is going to provide them with a benefit so they become interested enough to move into a sales process. Marylou: Right, the actual conversation. I was just on a call prior to this call. We were talking about the buyer persona and the difference of those profiles that are built in marketing versus the profiles that you and I built for the sales teams. Your point well taken is that the sales conversation really has a number of different facets to it so we have to make sure that we really think through the buyer personas or prospect personas and define them in a way that allows us to have conversation where they’re at. I think one of the biggest things that we’ve encountered is that the personas are really the core of what we need to instill and actually assemble a really robust sales process. In addition to the ideal account profile, that’s another one that a lot of people, a lot of our clients, we try to get them to hone in from the plethora of accounts that they could sell to, which are the ones that we want to focus on in order to start conversations and actually build an active pipeline. Which brings the question to you Bob about account profiles, account-based selling, what trends are you seeing with respect to account-based selling and how do they impact the type of work that we do in creating and optimizing a top of funnel sales process? Bob: Certainly, this is an area that is getting a lot more attention today than it did a year ago or two years ago, or certainly three years ago. Although we’ve had clients over that three-year period and one which we’ve started almost two and a half years ago. That was moving immediately into that approach of account-based selling. In general, I think that that trend is being driven by the fact that people are becoming more aware of who their ideal account profile is, who the companies are that are within that. If you’re a smaller company, you don’t have a lot of resources to go after the entire market. Also, it’s kind of an interesting dichotomy like when you’re starting up a company and believe me, I’ve been there a couple of times, any prospect is a good prospect. But then you figure out that it takes just as long and just as much resource and it’s just as hard to close the ideal customer profile or customer prospect with, in some cases, a larger deal as it does to spend time on trying to close the smaller ones. Really getting your hands around who that ideal customer is is driving companies to say, “Okay, now these are my top tier,” whatever you call that top tier. Some people call it the core, some people call it the anchor accounts. There are number of different words for it, it doesn’t really matter but it’s that top tier of people, of companies that you want to go after, and that you can identify by name. That’s the key, if you can identify subset of your total available market, by companies by name, then you can have an account-based approach. What that means then is that your sales development reps are spending a lot more time working directly with and trying to engage with the contacts within those companies. Typically, this ends up being a larger and a larger enterprise-oriented approach because if you’ve got a product or service that addresses a fairly general market across a large range of company sizes, then it may be more efficient for you to address that entire market with a traditional predictable revenue or strategic pipeline, cold queue approach or new queue approach. But if you can identify these specific accounts by name so that you can then go and do the research to determine who the likely buyers are who have the roles, your buyer roles within that account that could be people in marketing or people in customer support, or people in finance or HR, whoever those roles are, they’re usually influence around those particular contacts that you can go after, it gives your sales development reps the opportunity to be much more personalized. Marylou uses the term hyper personalize which means you’re really understanding who these people are and based upon their backgrounds, their history, where they’ve worked before, who their interest networks are, their educational background, where that particular company is, their growth patterns whether they’re doing mergers, acquisitions, all the changes that go on. You can become very personalized, hyper personalized in your approach to those individuals. That is a trend that we’re seeing with clients who are able to identify that top tier of potential prospects in their ideal account profiles. Marylou: Sometimes though when you think about account-based selling, you’re almost thinking about, “Well, what about the other tiers of accounts?” Is it common for people, for teams, to want to focus just on those core accounts or do we have other ways to still hit the extended universe or a tier three, if you have multiple tiers, leveraging some of the processes and methods from strategic pipeline or predictable revenue or is it that you’re seeing teams are just focusing on those core accounts and that’s it? Bob: That’s a great question. On one side, it’s a matter of focus and if you decided to do account-based selling, you want to have a really strong focus on those top tier accounts. But at the same time, you have to recognize that there is the rest of the market, there are accounts that don’t necessarily play in that top tier, there may be a second tier, and there may be a third tier which is the rest of the market. The best approach to this and one that our clients have taken who have done this before with us is to have this focus in the top tier with their sales development reps and they may say, “Okay, my target is 80% of their time is focused on the top tier, the anchor accounts, the core accounts. 20% of their time is going to be dealt with leads that come in through marketing programs we call marketing qualified leads or through other cold approaches that come out of the predictable revenue strategic pipeline approach of having an automated engagement system where you’re sending out emails that are focused on pain points around the critical points by persona that may get somebody who wasn’t aware of you previously to become aware and have enough interest to look at the content that you’re including in these emails, to learn something about you. At some point, if they have that pain and they recognize that this might be a solution, raise their hand without having to have the sales development reps actually spend time trying to find these people. It’s a multi-tier approach and it incorporates your SDRs who are handling and targeting and focusing on that 70% or 80% of the time on the top tier, 20% or 30% of the time on marketing qualifying leads and people who respond. Then the third level is your marketing programs which are trying to go out the marketplace in general, and again targeted at your ideal account profile types of companies and the personas within that but your marketing programs that could include webinars, blog posts, trade shows, even advertising, depending on the market you’re in and how broad it is. Those are the programs that you’re trying to develop awareness, you’re trying to get people to know that you exist and that you have something that they might be interested in. In that middle level, what we’re really trying to do is to get the targeted buyer persona within that middle tier of accounts to become interested enough to raise their hand and respond and say, “Yes, I’d like to have a call or I’d like to attend this webinar, or I’d like to take an action that shows that they’ve developed a level of interest.” Marylou: Yeah. In the best of all worlds, and what we’ve instilled in our client base is to really focus on what matters most. It may be account-based selling if you have the actual ideal size of revenue per account to actually warrant an account-based approach and then leverage technology where we can to wake up the chill of those folks that are maybe lower tiered but still can bring in good revenue for the company, and then we wrap it all in technology to be able to track how they’re moving about into the active pipelines so that our email streams and our content assets, everything just gets smarter because we’re able to tell exactly the breadcrumbs they took to get to either a response as you said or they may click through or follow up on click throughs. Now, there’s ways to kind of have it all as long as we start with really identifying who these accounts are and organizing them instead of one big bucket, get a little smarter at segmenting where these accounts lie and then the people within those accounts. And then once we do that, and assemble all of that, then when we activate, we can fine tune with our optimization methodologies. Personally I think that that is a good way to activate a top of funnel prospecting pipeline when you have multiple tiers of accounts that you can go after. Bob: Definitely. I think as we engage with strategic pipeline, one of the things that we endeavor to do that most of our clients don’t have when we first become engaged with them is really the tracking of their activities. They don’t really know what’s going on in these business development activities. If they’ve got a marketing automation tool like a Marketo, they’ve got some scoring typically if they’re a larger company in place and so they have marketing qualified leads that have been defined at a certain level. When they bubble up to that level of qualification, they get passed into the business development or in some cases straight to a sales rep to an account executive. In most of our clients when they’re just starting up, they haven’t reached that level yet. When they’re doing proactive email engagement, they don’t really have the process in place to understand what to look at, what methods they should be striving for, how to set the goals for that optimization that you mentioned and being able to track the conversion rates within the business development pipeline. Almost every client and actually almost every sales organization that I’ve been ever involved with and know about has a very defined set of stages in their sales pipeline. That’s the first thing that a sales manager will do when they come into an organization is look at how to find that some cases the customer journey but how they define from qualified opportunity to close and the stages in there. Very few people have defined, in any way other than maybe some marketing score for inbound leads from that first engagement, the cold engagement through the business development process to a qualified opportunity, whatever you call that. Whether it’s a sales accepted lead or sales qualified lead or just a qualified opportunity, very few people are measuring the process in that part of the total pipeline. That’s a very important thing to do, you’re investing these business development resources, sales development people and time and process, and management, and content development etc. If you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know if you need more people, less people, how successful you are or whether your process is working at all. Marylou: Unfortunately, what you’re talking about Bob is some of the faults of the CRM tool because we have a situation where there is something called an opportunity record so we’re able to track from opportunity down to close. Top of funnel stages are not something that’s inherently built into the software application. You have to be pretty inventive as to how you’re going to track that information and build in the metrics because they’re not metrics that you can just select from the CRM itself. We’ve had our challenges there trying to get software to respond to process instead of the other way around which is define the process and have the software work within the process. We’ve had to fight our way through using the current tools set that’s out there which is unfortunate but we figured it out of how to do that. Once we do that, we’re able to then really know right down to the penny what our cost per sale, at least to get to opportunity are, the opportunity cost for resources, list, writing of emails, etc, etc, we have all that information that’s available to us and most importantly, we can track the progress of the buyer and how they’re engaging with our content, how they’re engaging with our sequences, our cadences, and then we’re keeping that information tracked so that the next time around, we get smarter and smarter which reduces the lag for us. It does take some planning and planning is a big part of what we do in order to help our clients become successful and create a predictable engine that if they want to scale, they can do so. Bob: I think what you’ve just described earlier and what we’ve seen is that there is a real deviation between the marketing automation tools and the Sales Force automation tools. What we had to do consistently because the Sales Force automation tools don’t do all the things we need in the very front end of our business development pipeline and the marketing automation tools don’t carry into the sales prospect development pipeline, that we’ve had to bring together data from the clients, the combination of the clients to tools that marketing automation or campaign management tool and the Sales Force automation tools which is a little bit tricky. Luckily, Marylou is a great software engineer as well as being a real expert in this area so we’re able to move stuff from all these different systems and as frustrating as it is, sometimes you always come up with a solution. Marylou: Yes, aggregating data. Definitely. In the time remaining, I’d like you to share with the audience your experience with content and really what I’m looking forward for you to share is this email engine because you’ve been really very proactive in teaching our clients how to generate an email that resonates, that has a call to action. What I’m asking you to share is what kind of mistakes you see more often than not when the business development or sales development reps are responsible for crafting their own emails? Bob: This is a great one because we see this all the time and it’s an area that Marylou spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to structure content to get someone to move from unaware to aware to interest and therefore into the sales pipeline. We call it compel of content. The reason I bring this up at the beginning of this is because what we’re really trying to do is to get someone who may be totally unaware of this particular solution to, from an emotional perspective, be triggered to at least read into the body and hopefully into the content pieces that we’ve developed. In doing this, there are certain sets of components that need to be included in each of these and they should go in succession but they don’t necessarily have to always go in succession. You have to get an emotional trigger which moves the prospect from being in the status quo situation of this contact to thinking that there is a better place or having a fear that they’re missing something. To get them to move to that next stage, understand then what the obstacle is that they’re encountering and why they feel this pain. They may not even understand that they have this pain, they’re not comfortable, they didn’t know that there was a solution to it and contrast that with what could be, what is the potential better place that they could move to. Once they’ve gotten to that point, then they’re going to be moving from an emotional state to a logical state. Then, you need to be able to provide some proof, you need to use case studies or statistics, anything that you have that shows that this is the improvement, these are the benefits that have actually approved to other companies that have adopted the solution. And then a call to action. Again, that could be setting up a meeting, or it could be attending a webinar, whatever you’re trying to accomplish with this. What we find is when you have two types of people who are writing emails, you have a marketing person or you have a sales person. The marketing person is going to initially write a very long advertising piece which is going to have multiple paragraphs and will sound like marketing piece. Then basically what they’re going to do is use too many words for the format that the email is trying to communicate in. Nobody’s going to read the entire piece of this email. We’ve actually seen marketing and the marketing departments and some of our clients write a page and a half emails to be used in a cold campaign. Nobody’s going to read those. On the other hand, the sales person who writes the email is going to try to sell from the very first paragraph their solution without ever telling the contact why they should care. The way we think about it, in the pipeline is first of all why change, why should this contact care, why change, why now, what’s important? What is going to accrue to me, what am I going to miss if I don’t change now. And thirdly why the company, why my solution? By focusing on using few words, action learning words, making sure you have that emotional trigger at the very beginning of the email, keeping it short so that the person is going to read all the way through it and having very powerful. And in the emails that have content, have relevant pieces of content that really portray the benefit or the possibilities of what is your solution going to deliver for a client in typical situation and what kinds of benefits are going to accrue to them? That’s a real art. We’ve worked with marketing teams and had to go through making it much more crisp and more straight-forward. We’ve worked with sales team. The sales teams again, also in addition to trying to sell, the sales team and in many cases the marketing team will focus much more on I, we, us, the company’s name. We’re doing this, our product does this, so not really relating to contacts concerns and problems. It’s really an art to be able to write very compelling business development cold email streams that convey a story, convey a benefit, have that emotional trigger and will get people to follow them through and click through to the content and respond with interest to the emails. It’s a really interesting challenge but there’s definitely a methodology that we use with our clients that helps to move them from where they’re either coming from the marketing side or the sales side to get to this direct response type of environment. Marylou: Right. We feel so strongly about this and in the new book Predictable Prospecting. We’ve devoted at least two chapters that I know of, chapters four and five, to the process of crafting emails loaded with examples but we do follow a framework. Because we follow a framework for writing as Bob mentioned the rhythm in there of getting people kind of off filter a bit by triggering them, getting them to a low place, contrasting it to where they could be and then with specificity proving the opportunity and then of course the call to action. That’s the standard framework for any email whether it’s small, medium, or large in terms of length and we use them and populate and sprinkle them throughout the entire sales pipeline for business development at various stages. There’s a map in the book on page 83 that shows those different levels of awareness, how we use them, what content pieces we use, but the core of it all is it’s an iterative process, it’s something that we have expertise to assist clients in writing those emails, but the goal is always to then teach them how to fish as Bob says and make sure that they understand that the actual structure of the email and then we review with them over and over again because we’re always trying to improve conversion rates, we review those emails with the team. Bob in closing, what do you see coming in the near term as to the challenges that are going to be coming up? Essentially, where should teams should be focusing their time if they have this big pie of all these initiatives they have to do? Where would you as a sales manager, a director of sales and you have been in all those positions, where would you be focusing your efforts? Bob: I think the thing that you got to figure out first and foremost is this whole idea of why should they care. You can have the best process in the world but if you don’t know why the contact should care and you don’t know exactly how to explain that or demonstrate it, it’s not going to resonate. If I was going to say if there’s one place to start, it’s really to understand why your target market should care and what are the words, what are the support points that you have, what are the statistics that you have to build on that case for these content, these prospects. That is the biggest need I see in most companies that we deal with and companies that I’ve worked for before where we tend to be more focused, if you’re a technology company, on your product and its functions, its features, and all those kinds of things rather than understanding how they benefit the business of the client. And then what that means personally. We say in building our persona, our buyer personas, “How does this impact that particular contact from a financial perspective, a strategic perspective, and a personal perspective.” Financial, strategic, and personal perspective. Every person that you sell to, and sales is all about person to person. Every person you sell to who’s in an executive position has personal goals, they have company strategic goals, and they have financial goals both company and personal. If you don’t understand how your solution applies and benefits that particular role within your target customer, you’re not going to be able to put together compelling, resonating content that is going to get them to be interested to talk to you. Marylou: Or even have those initial conversations on the phone. If you don’t have your talking points aligned with the business reason for moving forward, you are going to get stalled and that’s when we’re called in, people are stalled in that first conversation or follow up conversation to get them moving further into the active pipeline. A lot of that we get back to basics as Bob said, “Why do you matter in the industry? What is it about you and what you have to offer that’s going to solve the client’s’ most pressing business issues and what’s specificity around your product or solution is differentiated out in the market so they understand why you’re different as well.” Bob, thank you so much for your time. If there’s people listening to this call who want to tap into your wisdom, how do they get a hold of you? Bob: bob.kelly@strategicpipeline.com Just go to our website, strategicpipeline.com and there’s information what Marylou and I do and as well as our backgrounds and experiences on how we got here. There’s also a form in there that you can reach us so contact that way as well. Marylou: Very good. Well, I do appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with everybody. I’m sure the big take away here is really hone in why you matter and then work on the pieces that will allow you to communicate that in a variety of ways, whether it’s highly personalize or hyper personalize as we call it right down to an automated fashion. Thanks again Bob, really appreciate your time. Bob: Thank you Marylou. Take care.