Tips for Hyper-Segmented Outbound List Building

Struggling to roll out meaningful personalization at scale? Flip the script. 👉 Current: Identify your account list and go find triggers. 👉 New: Find a trigger and build your account list from it. STEP-BY-STEP EXAMPLE: You sell a sustainability software to CFOs. Trigger: 🌱 Company received an award for their sustainability effort. Let’s call it - Top 100 most sustainable brands 2023 🌱 Identify which of the brands are your accounts & create 2-3 common sub-triggers. Sub-trigger examples: 📌 CEO made a public commitment to achieve a sustainability criteria. These statements are easily searchable. Look for an annual statement or mentions of sustainability of earnings calls. That search could look like “Company name” AND “earnings call” AND sustainability 📌 This is the 1st year the company has released an ESG or CSR report. 📌 CFO is less than a year in seat 📌 Any other qualifier that allows you to segment the list to create relevant, valuable outreach at scale. Now you should have a pretty tidy list of highly relevant accounts to contact. Because you’ve trimmed your territory down by only contacting folks that the trigger applies to you may only have 20 or so folks on this list. That’s okay. THE RESULT: You can build a highly valuable and relevant sequence for this list. It might look something like: 1. Hyper-personalized email 2. Call 3. LinkedIn connect message 4. RE: to email 1 5. Call 6. Email with a relevant deposit or sharing a valuable insight << you can really make it matter without personalizing because you know exactly who you are talking to. 7. LinkedIn message sharing the same deposit or insights 8. Call 9. Email P.S. Personalization must be RELEVANT for it to work. This technique helps strike a balance between a quality v quantity approach & can be rolled out with zero tech stack. P.P.S. If you’re looking for an easy way to find new relevant triggers, try a Google Alert. #coldoutreach #b2bsales #salestraining #enterprisesales #emailoutreach

I haven't posted in a bit about Sales but have had some conversations lately with orgs that are struggling to build their outbound motions and wanted to offer some advice. Proper preparation breeds success in outbound Sales. With the amount of information and noise that is out there, using data to hyper-target companies with relevant messaging is a strategy that has worked for me for many years. It takes time to do this, but the results speak for themselves. I'll be the first to tell you that you can absolutely achieve results by loading 20,000 contacts into a cadencing tool and blasting out some templates. I've done it in the past. But at what cost? - You burn your book of contacts and (even worse) accounts. - You don't capitalize on referrals. - You run the risk of broken tokens. Been there and it's not fun. - CAC goes way up as a result of mistrust if you do this too often. - The list goes on. Moral of the story is that the quality of the list matters. A lot. I'd argue it matters more than messaging in most cases. Build your process around research and squeaky clean data. Kick folks out who don't fit the ICP unless you have an extremely compelling use case such as a referral, active project or inbound request. If you don't know where to start, start with really cleaning your data and defining your ICP. There are a ton of Sales professionals in my network. Would be interested to hear some other tips and tricks.

If you're getting nowhere prospecting right now, here's the 3 things you need to check to get the pipeline growing again: --- 1) List building is more important in a bad economy than messaging. Stick with me. Going wider when companies aren't buying doesn't give you better odds. This is the time to revisit your ideal customer profile and get ruthless building high quality, smaller lists. Yes it'll take more time, but the results are exponentially better when you focus on a particular segment within a particular industry with a particular problem then blasting every company with X00 employees. --- 2) State the negativity in your messages. It deflates it. How? Like this: "When things get rough with layoffs and slow downs nobody is eager to stick their neck out and call for organizational transformation. But I'd imagine your exec team still expects strong performance and is looking to see who will be clever working with less. Are you opposed to exploring ways to improve the process without needing to battle internally?" Take away people's obvious objections to buying things right now by just stating them. A seller can never lower their status with a buyer by being informed. --- 3) Fortune is in the follow up when you're prospecting. The best, most abundant meetings come from the companies you were prospecting months ago that asked you to follow up. Why? Because you're almost guaranteed to have the timing be wrong when you outbound. So lead with that and start collecting amazing follow up leads. Tell prospects "I'd imagine my unexpected message in February did not catch you at the right time when this problem becomes a priority. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem all the same. At what time of year does this become more relevant? When I follow up with you then, what do I need to include in the message to get your attention at that time? And is there anyone else that's going to prioritize this problem then as well?" --- Now we're cooking. Better lists. Clearer messaging. Nailing down the timing. Don't prospect like a maniac. Be ruthless with your time. --- Ready to conquer cold calling anxiety and start meaningful conversations with your buyers? Join +5,500 sellers using the Mic Drop Method, an easy to learn framework for starting dialogue with skeptical prospects: learntosell.io

Bain consulting --> Marketing Leader = Rigorous approach to market segmentation when running campaigns. Rachel Corn is the CMO of GoPowerEV, EV charging for multi-family homes. Prior to that she's led strategy consulting at various firms, including Bain. Right now she's applying the same level of market segmentation rigor towards the EV market when crafting the right messaging, identifying the right channels. Once she's found success in one channel and established a beachhead, it became easier to expand from there. It was harder to sell when they didn't niche, because they weren't appealing to anyone specifically. Rachel then does a combination analysis of which channel or product is the most profitable, which one is most likely to go to help reach the company's long-term goals. "It's a combination of market attractiveness and which is most addressable by your product" This is how she's able to take a holistic approach of maximizing the returns of the business not just through the marketing lens. If anyone's hiring for marketing leaders, keep an eye out for folks with strategy consulting backgrounds. How this can be applied to B2B Sales today: I've spoken to many leaders in the space (Sam Nelson, Adem Manderovic, Scott Martinis) who share this perspective that if your outbound lead gen process isn't working, first step is to look at how the lead lists are being created. If you're not segmenting your audience appropriately by intent, relevance, ICP and applying the right channels, then all your downstream optimizations aren't solving the core issue. Segment your market appropriately, focus your resources specifically on where and who you're finding success with. Do this before you're A/B testing copy or think it's a people problem when you're not hitting goals 🙂