Businesses like Acquia and WhatCounts have been successfully using specific outreach strategies for their sales development teams.
Their strategies include precise cadences about how and when to reach out to prospects via phone and email. One of the most successful outreach strategies uses seven touches over a week long period.
As your sales development team puts practices in place, we created guidelines in a single page cheat sheet.
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Let’s dive into the specifics:
1. Send 50 Emails/Day
Start your day off by sending 50 emails to new prospects that were gathered the day before.
Start early and send these emails out before lunch, so you have time to follow up with other prospects who are further along in the process.
2. Integrate Social Media
Find your prospects on Twitter and follow their activity to supplement your outreach strategy.
Share useful information that is valuable to their business development and join conversations that encourage another avenue of engagement.
3. Develop A Call And Email Strategy
After lunch, pick up the phone and start calling the prospects you initially reached out to earlier in the day.
Make a detailed plan including time of day and whether or not you’ll leave a voicemail. Make sure to adjust and prioritize your calls based on activity. If someone has viewed your email or clicked on a link, call them first.
Here’s an example of the successful 7×7 strategy:
4. Send Targeted Emails
Send specific emails to elicit a response as you reach out.
On day 4, send an email that supports your message. We like to share a success story by one of the top thought leaders, Aaron Ross.
Our SDRs also send a funny “breakup” email (see below) if they haven’t gotten any response by day 7. This email typically has the highest response rate.
It ends something like this…
…or maybe you’re being chased by a hippo and need me to call animal control.
That’s the last email in the cycle, so if there still isn’t a response, it might be time to consider a drip campaign.
5. Leverage Technology
Salesloft’s Prospector targets specific prospects and delivers accurate phone numbers and emails.
Prospector searches professional profiles that you can add to lists in one click and syncs easily with your CRM. Supported by Google’s search engine, you’re able to find different market segments easily and filter by location, industry and job title.
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For quick reference, we’ve developed a single page cheat sheet:
Once you implement a strategy, the best results will come from testing and realign the individual steps of the process to figure out what works best for your business.