Thesis-Led Prospecting
Following up on my previous article (Spray and Pray Still Works…to a Degree), I received a lot of feedback challenging my claims around how spamming people still worked.
During the month of April I decided to run a little experiment, focusing the majority of my cold outreach efforts on highly-tailored first emails, with more generic phone/email follow up, vs. relying on the spam I was sending during Q1.
The process needed to be scalable in order to get the proper volume and last the entire month of April, so I built and leveraged the template in the above picture to introduce repeatability, and also broke down the structure below:
Subject Line/Part 1: This is the “hook” - show you’ve done research on them individually as well as their company. Even if it’s not a fit, the fact that you’ve put in effort will lead to many more opens and positive replies.
Part 2: This is the “thesis”- synthesize what you know about the company through research and your company’s value prop to create questions designed to elicit pains that you can solve. This is the most critical part.
Part 3: Concise value prop. This can be canned and should be framed to answer the leading questions asked in Part 2. For efficiency sake, copy/paste this in each email (make sure to include a call to action).
Each note takes roughly 15–30 minutes to research/write (maybe 35 mins once 6PM rolls around and you’ve already cranked out 20+ that day), so the outreach volume is much, much lower.
Additionally, for comparison purposes, I wanted to focus on target executives at top target companies that already went through a “canned” outreach cycle during Q3 2021. The results were fantastic (see below):
While 8 meetings may seem low, 2 COOs, a VP of CX, an SVP of Global Business and a CDO, were among those that agreed to meet…the same # of meetings with better titles, with ~5500 fewer touchpoints than the previous quarter. The open rate was more than 2X and the reply rate was almost 8X…which was pretty astounding.
To boot, 3 of the executives had already gone through a full activity cycle 6 months prior without engaging.
Moving forward, so that I don’t burn through high-valued accounts too quickly, I’ll spend 70% of my business development time on high-valued prospects at high-value accounts, with the remaining 30% on lower-volume automated outreach.
I will caveat this by saying that the offering we provide is broad, and the industry has been around since the 1970s (outsourcing). While the value we provide is disruptive, it is not an off-the-shelf technology platform that solves an emerging market need. That is to say, “who we know” leads to higher meeting conversions than “what we do” — which I suspect is inverted at tech companies playing in emerging markets.
As growth models shift within the B2B world, would be interested to hear what SDR experiments have worked and what haven’t within the SaaS world and see how the data compares. If you have it readily available, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Some articles will be first-person, and some will be just general thoughts on industry trends. Feel free to reach out with feedback, thoughts, etc… nate@bluebirdanalytics.co
