Most of our engagements with clients include cold outreach tactics. Companies come to us because they don’t have enough deals and/or discovery calls.  We employ two different sets of tactics with our cold outreach.  This post will explain how we structure our sales cadence, tools, and research plan. Both sets of cold outreach tactics require an ideal customer profile, email sequence, cold call script, and how to handle objections.

Account Based 

Account based sales is a more targeted approach to outreach. It focuses on outreach to a smaller focused list.  We have a client that has a very specific solution that works best if clients have two other finance solutions.  The ideal customer profile is very tight, but the revenue for the larger clients means a few wins will allow us to reach our revenue targets.  Here are the steps in our sales outreach for account based sales.

• Research: We start with named accounts and then find the best contacts using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.  From there we use a tool like Apollo.io to get there emails and phone numbers.
• CRM: Contacts are loaded into the CRM and we would typically use templated emails and send one at a time to the targeted contacts. Using templated emails makes the outbound quick to send.
• Sales Cadence: We would create a 3 or 4 email cadence with typically 2 telephone calls proceeding each email. If at the end of the cadence we don’t reach the intended contact or if they state they aren’t the right one we research a new contact and start the cadence again.

Mass Outreach

Our client might also have a large number of potential customers of decision makers. This is a better fit for a mass outreach effort. We have a client that literally has 100,000 decision makers around the globe for their product. The ticket price is more modest, so casting a large net makes more sense. Here are the steps we go through for the cold outreach plan.

• Research: We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator lead search to start the research.  We typically create a spreadsheet to keep track of the different search parameters. Thus could include a mix of geography, organization size, industry, title, seniority, and keywords in their bio. Once the list is created we use a tool called Wiza to create a file that can be imported into the CRM.  Wiza will pull the data from LinkedIn and also finds an email address. These lists are typically a few hundred contacts. We use Apollo.io to find phone numbers for contacts that are engaging with our emails.
• CRM: Contacts are loaded into the CRM and we would use an email marketing tool to create cohorts.  A static list is created to make each cohort unique and contained. If a contact emails back or we reach them on the phone we manually remove them from the list.
• Sales Cadence: We would create 3 or 4 emails to be sent out as marketing emails. We then review the email analytics and look for the contacts that have engaged with the emails.  For us this means more than 2 opens and/or 1 link click. These contacts are kept within the list, but we will call twice between each email. Once the cadence is over we research a new lead list and start the process again with new contacts and organizations.

If you would like to talk about how we can help you with your cold outreach, you can connect with me here.