Email Response Audit for Sales Reps

"Stop sending follow-up emails" That's what I told a struggling VP of Sales last month His team was sending 8,000+ emails weekly Converting almost none of them He thought I was insane Until we implemented a "no follow-up" policy and their pipeline exploded → Here's what most sales leaders miss: Your prospects aren't ignoring you because you haven't followed up enough They're ignoring you because you haven't said anything worth responding to After auditing 50+ B2B sales processes, I've found the same pattern: - 8+ follow-up emails to the same prospect - Each one more desperate than the last - Generic templates with fake personalization - Zero actual value added All while sales managers chant "persistence pays off!" The brutal truth? It doesn't One client was sending 14-touch sequences to every lead Their final response rate? A pathetic 0.7% We completely redesigned their approach: - Cut all automated follow-ups - Created industry-specific research for each target account - Developed 3 unique insights for every prospect - Built a "no pitch" first conversation model The results : - Response rate jumped to 20% - Meetings-to-opportunity conversion: Up 200% - Sales cycle: Reduced from 107 days to 70 - Team morale: Transformed overnight The most expensive myth in modern sales is that quantity of touches matters more than quality of insight Your prospects don't need another "just checking in" email They need someone who fundamentally understands their business challenges What if you deleted all your follow-up templates today and replaced them with actual business insights? That's not just a sales strategy That's a competitive advantage P.S. If you need help with your sales, send me a message

🚫 Growth ≠ more leads ✅ Growth = better systems For a long time I believed that generating more qualitative leads would be enough to ensure a sustainable a growth but I was wrong. If your sales process moves like molasses, no amount of demand gen will save you. You’ll just be first to lose the deal. 📍Real story from a recent audit: One of our clients in B2B SaaS had a strong inbound engine: → Dozens of demo requests each week → Well-targeted paid campaigns and high quality inbound leads → Dedicated SDR team On paper, they were doing everything right. But their average time to close a deal kept creeping up and win rates were sliding. We pulled the data in HubSpot and... 💥 → Average time to first reply after form submission: 42 hours → Some contacts waited 3+ days before hearing from sales → No alerts, no task automation, no accountability People don’t wait around for your rep to finish their follow-up backlog. They book with your competitor. ⚙️ What we did: → Built a HubSpot workflow to trigger task assignments within 5 minutes → Added Slack alerts for untouched leads after 2 hours → Implemented a “hot lead” pipeline for same-day follow-up → Created a leaderboard to gamify time-to-first-email by rep The result? → Time to first contact dropped from 42h to under 4h in 2 weeks → Close rate increased by 18% → Sales velocity finally started to climb again You don’t need more leads. You need systems that treat every lead like it matters. If you’re generating demand but losing momentum in the sales cycle, RevOps might be the missing piece. Want a copy of the “Time to First Email” report I use in HubSpot audits? Just comment “📬” and I’ll send it over. #RevOps #Growth If you don't know me, I'm Romain, a Growth Marketing and Hubspot Expert, and I'm diving into the RevOps world. ✌️

If your SDR team sends 5,000+ cold emails a month and gets <2% reply rates, here’s what I’d do in the next 30 days to fix it. Week 1: ICP Reset Most B2B SaaS teams target too broadly. Instead of 10,000 “maybe” accounts, narrow to the 1,000 most likely to buy. In one client audit, this cut wasted effort by 70% and doubled meetings per rep. Week 2: Messaging Overhaul Generic “quick intro” emails don’t work. Rewrite sequences to: - Lead with a customer pain metric (“Our reps cut time-to-demo by 40%”). - Use short, 50–70 word emails. - Switch CTA from “demo” or “15-min chat” to asking if it's of interest...response rates jumped from 1.2% → 6.5%. Week 3: Timing Triggers Stop cold spraying. Identify 3–5 buying signals (job changes, funding announcements, new tech installs). Outreach within 14 days of a trigger converts 3-4x higher than cold (in my experience). Week 4: SDR Enablement Equip reps with: Objection handling scripts (tested to lift connect-to-meeting from 18% → 34%) LinkedIn message frameworks (average 12%-29% reply rate) A playbook they can run daily without manager micromanagement By the end of 30 days, outbound isn’t guesswork anymore. It’s a repeatable system for booking meetings and hitting quota. 👉 If you want me to walk you and your team through this process step-by-step, click the link in the comments. -- If you're an established B2B SaaS company, I can solve these two problems. 📆 Not booking enough meetings? I'll help you fix your outbound campaigns and processes so you book more meetings. 🤝 Not closing enough deals? I'll help you optimise your sales process and upskill your sales team so they close more deals. Holla at me if you'd like to work together. #pipeline #salesprospecting #b2bsales

In the last 3 months I've audited sequences from 10+ companies - virtually no one has email working as a channel Here are the 7 important shifts outbound sales teams need to make in order to get sequences and email actually work First - good copy I have yet to see an organization that consistently hits all copy fundamentals Make an observation, infer pain, share a value prop, invite to a next step Short mobile friendly sentences, 50-75 words One pain point, one value prop Rarely done Second - persona building Very few orgs have clear validated messaging in the buyer language I've see a FEW good marketing personas... but they're rare AND you also need the ability to prove a marketing persona WRONG (IE I got 100 replies from an email with this persona message and <10 were positive) Third - contact research ZoomInfo and Apollo.io make it easy to automatically find the right buyers at a company using personas/buying committee Sales nav has this too (though it's not as good) NO ONE IS USING THIS So SDRs spend .5-2 hrs a day just adding contacts ENORMOUS waste of time Fourth - no segmentation by intent, triggers, direct dials or channel responsiveness 60-80% of your prospects don't really answer the phone And many data providers have around 50% coverage on direct dials Reps are manually research prospects that don't have direct dials who have 60-80% lower connect rates than responsive prospects To top it off... those prospects often aren't even in market You have to be focusing on prospects you can actually REACH Fifth - there's little clear direction on personalization ✌🏽Dorothy Huynh helped me write a sequence with an extremely clear personalization framework for emails Where to look, what to ask about, etc Most orgs don't have that Without direction they tend to flop And no, Clay doesn't match the personalization of good SDRs, not by a long shot Sixth - too few or too many manual emails, too few multichannel touches (when appropriate) Most orgs fall in one of 3 camps Everything is automated emails with little split testing or segmentation Tons of manual emails which get completed late (credit for Remington Rawlings and 🖋Dave Breshears for talking about this) Or too MANY emails, calls, Linkedin messages... often targeting prospects without direct dials or Linkedin presence Tie manual touches to the level of intent, data, and channel responsiveness you have with each prospect instead Seventh - continuous optimization No one really has the bandwidth to split test, optimize and manage all of this So sequences usually become a mess This is why I'm building the outbound engine We build account and contact lists for your sales team Craft buyer personas Write good sequences And optimize based on what's working Build a machine that your sales team lives in, don't leave everyone to figure it out for themselves (DM if you want help)