COLD EMAIL — A BLAST FROM THE PAST
Outbound sales drove early enterprise sales for Salesforce in the early 2000’s. As a result, an entire generation of salesmen grew up on the premise of building volume-based inside sales organizations that rely heavily on automated email and cold phone calls to fill the top of the sales funnel. Aaron Ross’s book Predictable Revenue, which is a popular read amongst growth marketers and salesmen, advocates this volume approach.
An entire class of software tools has sprouted to facilitate inside sales for reps who never need to leave the comfort of their desks. Classic inside sales begins with a database to supply targeted leads. This data flows into the CRM, and from there, automated sequence tools automatically place calls and send email cadences to draw prospects’ attention. Other channels such as conferences are still massive, but cold email and calling account for 60% of all outbound sales opportunities.
Sales reps go used to think that any email we send gets received by the recipient. But this isn’t the case anymore — spam and promotion folders capture a lot more messages than we can imagine. In sales, the golden standard metrics for measuring email performance are the opens, clicks, and response rates. These indicators, however, pose a blind spot even to the savviest sales operators.
- Open rate: This has become an increasingly unreliable metric. More and more anti-malware software opens every incoming email scanning the messages for malicious content, resulting in inflated open rates. Additionally, many email clients (e.g. outlook) automatically disable tracking pixels to protect users’ privacy, resulting in a lower and lower percentage of “genuine” human-triggered open stats.
- Click rate: Anti-malware filters click on all links in an email, making this metric similarly flawed to the open rate. Furthermore, intensive usage of tracked links can affect your spam score and cause your messages to land in the spam folder in the long run.
- Response rate: This is by far the most genuine and reliable indicator of interaction and action by the recipient. What matters, however, are the number of human responses and how many of them are positive. Typical sales tools bunch together all responses received so you can’t know if your reply rate composed of OOO, autoresponders, rejections or if you’re actually getting a good proportion of positive responses.
Email prospecting accounts for more than 40% of the total opportunities generated in a typical B2B pipeline. Most sales teams use sales engagement tools such as Outreach or Salesloft to automate the SDR workflow. These tools don’t give many insights into the actual deliverability of your emails or how the various email receiving providers are treating your messages, leaving the sales team in the dark.
In the world of marketing, there are many monitoring and optimization tools for email deliverability such as Return Path, 250ok, GreenArrow and others. These tools cater to the specific needs of Marketing teams: sending millions of emails per month — typically HTML-based — where the call to action is getting people to click on a link. For example, a hotel chain, such as Hilton, sends out millions of promotional emails every month and they work hard to ensure that their recipients receive these emails in their inbox.
However, when it comes to sales, there are very few solutions. With sales emails, the volumes of emails sent are much smaller (thousands per months, vs. millions in marketing). Also, the emails are typically text-based where the focus is on real human — hopefully positive — responses. But sales emails go to spam in droves. A popular solution to this challenge is Glock Apps, which sends test emails to a bunch of test email addresses to monitor if your messages are being classified as spam. However, despite such spot checking solutions, sales emails still lack daily stats, preemptive warnings, or indicators as to what lead data will perform best.
Sending cold sales emails is becoming harder and harder, as filtering mechanisms to protect users’ inboxes are becoming more aggressive. The irony is that many sales reps believe their email delivery is achieving exceptional results. Sales reps lack visibility on the mechanics of optimal sending. It’s quite nuanced and often hidden by the sending tools who don’t want their users to be aware that so many of their emails are going into the dark oblivion.
When we onboarded a new client in November to help their outbound sales, we were shocked to find out that their domain was blacklisted by G Suite. They had only one sales rep sending out emails, but their limited sending activity was enough to compromise their sending reputation.
The greatest forces influencing outbound sales are the networks, perhaps even more so than regulators. Internet giants such as Google (who owns G Suite) and Microsoft (who offers Outlook and now owns LinkedIn) both provide email hosting services commonly used by millions of businesses. Each of these networks also run their own advertisement business, which is their dominant revenue engine. The networks want to encourage customers to spend on AdWords, LinkedIn and Bing instead of sending unrestricted emails without adding to their revenue coffers.
In August 2018, Google released an update to its search algorithm called Medic. Aside from impacting ranking for millions of websites, this affected email delivery as well — a consequence that we, in addition to other companies, have witnessed first-hand with our own outbound email delivery results.
What will the Inside Sales team of the future look like? Enterprise-focused sales teams are starting to sell differently. Though they might use the same mediums such as calls and emails, social channels such as Linkedin are becoming more dominant in the sales process. Even though there is a level of uncertainty, what’s clear is that volume plays are a thing of the past. Savvy teams are focusing on quality over quantity across their sales interactions. Will outbound sales die out? Absolutely not. There will definitely be outbound selling, but it will be data-driven, optimized, low-volume and precise.
Take, for example, an enterprise sales team like Gong. Even though they sport a first-rate inside sales team that uses a familiar technology stack — such as Outreach and Clearbit — the Gong sales reps don’t send out mass cadences anymore. Instead, they send out quality emails written out to individuals they actually know and on whom they’ve done research. This approach is delivering the goods.
Here are a few tips for your next email campaign done right:
- Check your domain’s health and check if your emails go to spam. Then, ramp sending volumes slowly
- Measure positive responses before ramping up the sending volume
- Build your lead list based on provider domains that have yielded the most positive human responses to your first emails
Happy hunting!
Thank you to Federico Nitidi, Daniel Reidler, Steven Braid & Ben Lang for reviewing drafts of this post
