The SaaS Founders Playbook
for an Awesome Outbound Sales Automation
Outbound Sales is still one of the most effective sales strategies for SaaS Businesses. Done right, it offers nearly infinite connections to potential buyers and relevant decision makers. But for many people, outbound sales and spam are still two names for the same thing. Understandable.
Most of the time, cold emails are seen as stealing attention, wasting time and not giving anything in return. To make things even worse: GDPR makes it even harder to do cold emailing right.
This Article is about certain techniques that help you to deliver the right values to the right people (of course GDPR compliant), which increase your odds of building a trustful relationship out of a cold email.
So! Let’s grab a coffee and get to work.
Become a Profiler
To begin with, the most important thing is to develop a clear understanding about whom you want to target and why. It sounds simple, but this step often isn’t given enough attention, even though it impacts every subsequent step within the outbound process.
So, don’t take it lightly. Invest the time needed here to become the profiler you have to!
At the beginning, you want to end up with around 3–5 profiles. Consider each profile as a stated hypothesis, you should be able to test it. You should also make sure to analyze its results and continually refine your stated profiles. Imagine profiling, at its core, as building a feedback loop. You continually move through testing, analyzing, and refining your hypothesis about your targeted audience.
If you already have customers, awesome, start there! Search for common characteristics among your existing customers. What problems do they share? Why are they using your product/service? Identify common threads, and they’ll help you to find the right criteria.
If you’re in an early stage where you don’t have customers or are tapping into a new market, ask yourself- who you believe will use your product/service and who will find value in it? What problem is your product/service solving, and who would be interested in having that solution?
There are tons of different ways to define your profiles based on common characteristics like industry, company size, job title, etc., but you can get way more creative here! Think about funding announcements, hiring rates, growth rates, or used technology stacks (we’ll take a look at how to discover these later on).
And don’t forget: It’s an experiment! Don’t suggest, test! And find what works best for you.
Line up your communication
Once you finished profiling, create a profile table. It’s the foundation of your outbound campaigns and helps to develop a clear communication strategy for everyone at your company.
The key piece of this table is in the middle “Problems/Motivations”. Make sure to group your prospects according to shared Problems/Priorities/Motivations.
If you’re having problems identifying the right people, this article might help you out.
And remember, your goal is not to get it perfect right away, but to get it done so you can quickly iterate through your hypothesis.
Find your audience
Okay, once you know how your communication strategy looks like, you’re ready to start searching for prospects.
Prospecting has become a bit more complicated, considering you need to be GDPR compliant. But as you’ll see, it’s not impossible.
Let’s start with some common prospecting tool stacks & standalone tools:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Skrapp.io (Sales Navigator: Starting at 65$/mo. Skrapp.io: up to 100 emails free, 49$/mo for up to 1000 emails)
- Mattermark (Starting at 49$/mo)
- Datanyze (Starting at 600$/mo)
- Leadgenius (individual pricing)
In our experience, most of the standalone tools generate good insights (such as technology stacks or decision makers). However, they do not work on a very high-quality level (which makes it hard to use them sufficiently), so you always need to deal with high bounce rates, which slows down the overall process.
Therefore: I personally would recommend using Sales Navigator & Skrapp.io. You can easily integrate them with Emaillistverify, to break up with 20–30% bounce rates and secure just pushing clean data into your CRM.
Focus on things that matter
No one likes to do repetitive tasks, we neither. So we wanted to automate lead generation as quickly as possible. We ended up with a Sales Automation, using the above-mentioned combination of LinkedIn, Skrapp.io and Emaillistverify which worked out pretty well for us. It accelerated our lead generation from merely 500 Leads a Month to almost 5000 a week. In case you want to test it out — feel free to engage with us, as we’ll happily share it with you.
Crafting drip campaigns
When setting up email automation or drip campaigns, keep in mind that it’s all about creating personal and meaningful relationships with your recipients. Close interaction combined with personalization is key to get there.
Here is a template, Tyler Bosmeny (CEO @Clever) gave to us during Y-Combinator:
John — my name is Tyler and I’m the CEO of Clever.
My company has developed new technology that reduces
the time spent doing SIS integrations by 80%.
I figured this might be of interest to you given the new
middle school reading software Scholastic just released.
I’d love to get your feedback even if you’re not in the
market for this right now. Do you have 20 minutes this
week? I’m open Tuesday at 1 or 2pm EST if either may work.
Tyler
Super simple. It’s short, it’s to the point, it’s actionable and has a topic that personally relates to something that matters to the recipient.
Don’t hold lectures, look for conversation
A common problem I want to emphasize is that most cold emails or drip campaigns don’t feel like conversations, they feel like lectures. “Here, you should try this” or “Hey again, you should do that.”
Make sure you’re standing out by building up your emails like conversations.
How?
Listen! The best salespeople on this planet realize that sales is actually about active listening and understanding!
Is there anything I can do for you?
I’d love to get your feedback!
That’s how you start conversations, not lectures.
Keep getting closer
It’s fine to reach out to someone with an email, trying to provide value, but there are better ways to interact with human beings than emails. Therefore we always aim to create closer connections by suggesting hangouts sessions or video calls.
I’m always surprised that so many salespeople miss out on that Opportunity. But anyway, I would always recommend going for closer personal interaction, especially at the start of a relationship, as it really helps to build trust and loyalty in the long run.
#1 Personalize, #2 Automate, #3 Win
There are a lot of useful tools out there to create automated drip campaigns. Here are a few popular ones:
- Mixmax (Starting at 9$/mo)
- Persistiq (Starting at 40$/mo)
- Activecampaign (Starting at 17$/mo)
- Outreach (Individual Pricing)
All of these tools have capabilities to craft really powerful and personalized email campaigns. One tip that might be obvious, but is worth repeating, is to use as many variables within your templates as possible. You can create deep logic around the data you’ve gathered, so make sure to leverage your data and use it accordingly to build a personal first interaction.
If you’re located in EU and concerned about GDPR compliance, all of the tools noted above work GDPR compliant (you can find links to their DPA’s at the end of this post).
Takeaways
At this point all your work pays off:
- You’ve prepared a well-stated hypothesis about the values you want to create for your targeted audience.
- You’ve developed a clear understanding about whom to target with those values.
- You’ve got the technology under your control to find prospects and execute your drip campaigns, GDPR compliant as well.
If your potential customers decline — well you can’t win every battle, but you’ve certainly tried! And if they accept — voilà, it’s the perfect start to a long-lasting relationship.
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About us
Encore is the world’s first data integration platform for business people. We help companies collecting and leveraging data without the need for complex data integration or programming skills. We took part in Y-Combinators Startup Programm, and now want to share our Growth Hacks and Techniques, that everyone can use and implement by themselves to keep their Startup growing.
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