What’s one task salespeople can’t do with, but can’t do without? Cold outreach. Any salesperson you meet will rant about the difficulties of cold outreach but end the conversation with “sadly, it’s a necessary evil”.
It’s getting tough to cut through endless messages in your prospect’s inbox get noticed. If you send 1 cold email almost every day for an entire year, you’ll generate….well, a little more than1 lead. It takes shocking 306 cold emails to get a single B2B lead.
Who are you cold reaching? Prospects? Let’s see what they think about your style of cold outreach.
Your prospects hate cold outreach
Think of your prospects who are always greeted with a “book a free demo” or “our free trial (of a platform they clicked on months ago) ends tomorrow”. Every inbox, every scroll has a sales pitch, vying for their attention. No wonder prospects never open 77% of cold emails.
The situation has worsened. These are a few trends to be blamed for:
- Multiple channels: Sellers buy prospect’s details from third-party data vendors. So do their competitors. From LinkedIn connection requests to emails, a lead’s inbox is bombarded with notifications popping out of every tool they use. This interferes with their day-to-day work. But I get why salespeople shoot their shots wherever they can. There are no sure-shot channels to place your bet on. For some leads, emails work well. For others, a friendly note on LinkedIn strikes a conversation. You simply don’t know.
- Overflow of messages: For sellers, cold outreach is a numbers game. For prospects, it’s inbox clutter. Your prospects receive dozens of messages with the same script from different senders. It’s exhausting. If you want the prospect to open your email, you’ve to personalize your subject line. But mind one, don’t follow the one-line-fits-all-prospect approach. Some might find a subject line with “Thoughts?” appealing while others will perceive this as a lack of effort from your end.
- Irrelevant content: Before you hit send on that mass email blast, think of an individual prospect. Will the content help them? Or is it generic advice available all over the internet? Have you considered your prospect’s unique challenges and solutions? ChatGPT won’t help you here. A buyer intelligence tool that tells you what motivates your buyers, how they make decisions, and how they’d like to be communicated is the real deal.
- Lack of trust: If any of these sound familiar, you haven’t built the right foundation with your prospect. They can’t trust someone who treats them as another name on the list. You need to know your prospects well to treat them right. Find out who they are. No, not just demographics but their real problems, workflows, and desires. In short, their personality.
- Independent buyer research: Buyers don’t prefer to interact with sales reps. In fact, 68% prefer to research on their own, online. There goes the tiny chance you had to build trust. They know about your product even before you’ve contacted them. Cold outreach that simply creates urgency or agitates buyers’ pain points does no good. Move beyond simply stating what your product does. Describe how it solves specific pain points of prospects. You should know their ideal solution and align your product messaging accordingly.
Actionable tips to warm your leads
Cold outreach has a bad reputation because it’s done badly. Every poor attempt of outreaching prospects takes them away from the good ones.
So, what’s a good seller to do? Simple. Warm up your leads.
Here are a few strategies to warm leads:
- Research extensively: Be active on forums and groups. If someone writes about problems your platform solves, strike up a conversation with them. Follow your leads on LinkedIn and observe the kind of posts they like and comment on. Break the ice with a simple “Hey, I noticed your comment on xyz’s post.” Mention the consequences of problems they face and then, subtly pitch your solution. Use forms and gated content on your website to capture their contact details and pain points. Be everywhere your lead is.
- Look for signs: Make sure there are some signals that the prospect needs your solution. Trace their digital footprints. If you notice that they like posts that detail out productivity problems of their team, you know what their pain point is. Analyze the prospect’s behavior on your website. What are the kinds of resources they’re downloading? What product pages are they viewing?
- Referrals and networks: Leverage your clientele and ask them to refer you. Did you know that 65% of new deals in a company are through referrals? Deals generated through referrals often have shorter sales cycles and a higher chance of conversion. It’s easier for sellers to start a conversation and build rapport.
- Right messaging: Understand your prospects, their pain points, and gaps in workflow. Are they driven by numbers or stories? Should you be direct or subtle? Do they like informal conversations? Read your prospect’s personality. Use that to craft messages that’ll strike the right chord. Tailor your communication to align with their preferences.
Examples of personalized cold outreach
After all the prep work, it’s finally crunch time. Using the information and insights gained via research, you need to craft a cold outreach message that will resonate with the recipient.
That partly depends on how well you did your research, of course. Even the most well-crafted message has no impact if the recipient doesn’t need your solution, or doesn’t need it at that particular time.
But even if you did everything right, it might be a swing and a miss. Why?
Because you didn’t account for the recipient’s personality.
It’s well known that different personality types respond to different types of messaging. D or Dominant personality types (as per the DISC model) prefer direct and result-oriented communication. On the other hand, I or Influence personality types prefer more sociable and enthusiastic tones in the communication.
Let’s take a look at how you could personalize the same message for each personality type.
Message for D Type prospects – Direct, concise, and with an immediate call to action at the end.
Message for I Type prospects – Social, cheerful and pleasant.
Message for S Type prospects – Formal, with a touch of friendliness.
Message for C Type prospects – Organized and well-structured with a focus on facts.
Each of these versions were crafted by Humantic AI’s email personalizer, using the exact same set of input. The only difference is, they are created for different personality types – to ensure the best possible response rate. This makes it obvious just how much it is possible to personalize the exact same message to appeal to different types of prospects, so that they hit the all-important “Reply” button.
Make cold outreach matter
If it’s for everyone, it’s for no one. Cold outreach follows the same principle. Buyers hate how generic every cold outreach is. Sellers, on the other hand, don’t have any other choice. They can’t personalize much with demographic and firmographic data.
People make decisions, not companies. You need to know the individual behind the screen. Analyze their behavior. Know what should you say to get things started. Don’t read the boring old sales script. With buyer intelligence tools like Humantic AI, humanize every interaction. Get detailed personality profiles of your prospects and hyper-personalize vanilla sales outreach in one click.
