Structuring Multichannel Cold Outreach
Structuring Cold Outreach for efficient and hyper-effective B2B Sales
Welcome Back Sales Animals!
This is a long overdue post, promised back with the cold outreach primers.
It’s an important one for Individual Sales Reps, Managers, and Startup owners alike, to ensure you make the most of every action in your outbound motion.
In the modern business climate a multichannel outreach approach is a requirement. As people work remote, over odd hours, and use many different tools that can be used for communication.
To build efficiency into your outreach approach, you cannot rely on cold email blasts to book your meetings, or just smiling and dialling boiler-room style. You will need to build a strategy, and constantly iterate.
We will break down our logic of how to structure outreach and example sequences based on them…
Outreach is best done with a multichannel Sales Enablement/Engagement tool like Apollo, Outreach, Salesloft, etc. but can be done manually.
A quick recap:
Cold calls are best for connecting with prospects, understanding their needs, and being persuasive because you can work and react in real time.
Emails are the most scaleable outreach method and work in essence as brand marketing – ensuring prospects know who you are and what you do.
Social Selling is hyper niche brand marketing, building a community of people who may be interested in what you do, and over time can convert or introduce you to more.
To state the purpose of structured multichannel outreach – We are trying to get our product in front of as many potential customers as possible, learn about their needs, qualify them as potential buyers, and book a meeting with them.
If we only wanted to get in front of as many people as possible we would use email. If all we cared about was qualification phone would be the best route. To achieve a mix, we to use a mix.
There are a number of different sequences that we will need to discuss the psychology of, each of which has subtypes, then each should be further broken down into industry/Vertical:
Completely Cold Outreach
o Decision Maker
o Business User
o Groundswell
Warm Outreach
o Reconnect
o Inbound Lead
o Referral
Nurture
Engaged Prospect
** Further breakdown example Technical Decision marker, Finance Business User
Decision Maker Sequence
The decision marker sequence needs to be short and sharp, spanning fewer touch points and a shorter time period.
We like to start with an email to get the name in their inbox. Focus again on short/sharp.
Hi John, usually I work with {{title}} who are interested in impriving {{Need 1}}, {{Need 2}}, {{Need 3}}. But I suppose that doesn’t relate to you at all, right?
-Dingo
Follow that with a call the next day – calling is your best friend, if you get a DM on a call, you’re able to get as much qualification as your skill level allows and increase the chance of a demo happening and a deal closing.
The decision maker sequence should have less automation and will require more effort from you as they don’t take kindly to spam. Most steps should be calls, and emails should all be kept short.
Sample follow up.
“John – thoughts?”
These sequences are shorter because the focus is conversion. Build and iterate for maximum booking rate, almost ignoring other metrics unless they lead to it.
The Business User Sequence
This can be a little bit more automated than the decision marker and email heavy as the purpose here is intelligently directed maximization of surface area. You should be again starting with an email, explaining who you work with and what pain points you often solve. Followig up with a call as your next step.
This then allows you to do 1-2 follow up emails between calls offering a bit more value than the blunt questions you’re asking a DM.
Examples of this are follow ups mentioning how you’re working with similar companies and recent case studies that your company has released that you think the prospect’s persona is likely to relate to. DO NOT go heavy on links and attachments, keep this all text based and truncated, but offer to send them more if they are interested. Only reply with links or attachments AFTER a prospect has engaged with you.
Let the sequence go on longer as it isn’t taking up your time and the focus is surface area. Build and iterate on reply rate for your emails.
Groundswell
This is a unique cadence type that should be used only in specific circumstances.
The groundswell sequence is an account-based marketing approach where you target end users and managers rather than decision markers in an enterprise company, not asking for a meeting, but rather giving value offering help, tips, useful tools that would legitimately make their job easier.
The Purpose here is that enterprise companies are often so large that navigating them can take time and even when you do break in, if no one knows about the tool it’ll take multiple rounds of interest before there is enough noise to act and review your software.
By engaging in groundswell marketing with lower-level personas, when your DM level prospects inevitably mention your tool, they get a positive response from their team and skip the multiple rounds of interest. OR if the team mention it to a DM that hasn’t yet replied to you, but recognise the name, it increases your chances of the DM reaching out / telling their team to reach out.
Caveat: This should be done based on the legality of fully automated marketing emails and NOT focused on smaller businesses as spamming everyone will end badly for you.
Warm Outreach
Warm outreach sequences are less common but have higher conversion rates. They are a large part of the Pseudo-Hybrid SDR role we want you to build.
There are many purposes for them and each purpose should have their own separate sequence for the sake of data tracking.
Examples of these are:
- Reconnecting with ex-customers
- Reconnecting with leads from closed lost opportunities
- Connecting with Ex-Users who have moved companies
- Reaching out to old trial or enquiry leads that are no longer actively being worked by the inbound sales team.
These should be email first, then call and alternate for a few times with a day break every 3 days.
Focus on being reasonably casual and helpful.
How can we help, can I ask why you didn’t go ahead, Is there any interest in bringing our software over to XYZ new company?
Get the gist?
Nurture Sequences
Nurture sequences are used to keep in contact with prospects who have shown interest but are not yet ready to book a meeting or buy your product.
There are usually three schools of thought on how these prospects should be treated.
1. They aren’t interested move on and find someone who is
2. Find the best time to reconnect and leave them alone until that date
3. Regular contact in case something changes since they have shown an amount of interest.
The fact is all three of those will be valid and there isn’t a right way. It depends on why they are interested and why not now.
You should build 2 sequences here for category 3 prospect – High tough, and Low Touch.
If you deem a prospect is a high touch nurture, and you want to contact them regularly, I would do max every 2 weeks, and probably once per month. Focus on giving a little update on how things are going with customers relevant to them (“We recently started working with ABC who implemented XYZ and saw this result”).
High touch prospects are those that are on the edge of being ready and want to keep in contact for a legitimate reason. Think going through approvals before getting on a call.
Low Touch – these are prospects who have a project, or a hard reason now isn’t the right time, but are unclear of when the right time will be – BUT have indicated it’s not long out. This should be maximum once per month email / call with again a small update and genuine interest in what their updates are.
These two should be used sparingly and only after trying hard to disqualify the prospect into the leave alone until a certain date category.
For Category 2 prospects, you should set a date in your calendar, a task on your CRM, or a reminder in your sales engagement tool, that is 2-6 weeks before the best reconnect date and reach out a little bit early. Simple.
For category 1, you need to be careful, because almost every prospect will need to fit into 2 or 3 when you start. You want to start building the skill of disqualification. Before accepting a prospect into categories 2 or 3, you need to push them away a little bit, find out how serious they are about reconnecting and if it is worth your time to keep contacting them no matter how automated it is. If they are just being nice, just interested in hearing news, or don’t have a strong reason why they will want a demo soon, do not both with them.
Engaged Prospects
This is a tool we created to help stop SDRs from losing track of prospects who are in active conversations.
One issue we found across all sales teams is when a prospect replies to an email, and in turn is kicked out of automated sequences to be worked manually, then most data tracking is stopped, there is no more centralised outreach from your enablement tool, and SDRs are forced to use tasks, calendar events, and their own memory to make sure they remember to reply, follow up, and engage. This causes inefficiencies and lost opportunities.
To solve these problems, you want to create a sequence of blank tasks – basically each enablement tool will have in their sequence a manual task step. Create your sequence with one of those every day or two days for 2 weeks. This is a go/no-go step where you decide if this prospect needs to be contact, or not contacted, then do it at that time.
Every time a prospect replies and you must start manually contacting them, add them to this sequence. You’ll never forget about a prospect again, you’ll save time from all the jumping around through different systems, and you’ll have data on replied to booked prospects.
Every outbound sales team should implement this.
Conclusion
If you lean too heavily on a single channel you’ll only manage to reach a fraction of the prospects you try to reach, if you use a generic sequence you’ll miss the mark in messaging, but if you segment too much there will be no usable data because every data set has only one point.
Simply, segment and personalise just enough to make meaningful messages, but not too much, ensuring you’re focusing on a multichannel approach.
-Dingo