3 Core Components in Outbound Marketing Target, Vehicle, Message

There are multiple core components in Outbound Marketing. From time to time people get excited about a new tool that's going to be the game changer in their business. It can be a piece of software that's going to generate an abundance of leads, a magic script that's going to get your prospects to say YES or a specific approach that will do all the above. Although these are marketed as stand-alone systems, each one of these represents a core component of outbound lead generation. By understanding what these components are, you can optimize each part and incorporate all of them into your campaign to compound your results. At that point it becomes only a matter of documenting each step to standardize a process for your organization and make sure that it is followed by all, every time. Today I will like to focus on 3 core components of outbound marketing: 

This is where you're creating your ideal client profile, your buyer personas, and building your highly-targeted list. Your target is the most important component to your campaign. If you were selling steaks to a list of Vegans, you probably wouldn't do so well. Your goal is target the prospects that would be a perfect fit for your product or service, making the decision to respond an obvious one. Find the people or companies you can add the most value to and have the greatest impact on. If you can't solve their problem or you can't help them, they won't respond to your messaging and they won't become your next client. Although this is bad, I'll tell you what would be even worse. Targeting someone whose problem you couldn't effectively solve, someone you won't be able to deliver for, and they do become your client. That would be a nightmare. 

Best Practice: Instead of the waterboard approach of pouring all your efforts onto just one individual in the organization, I recommend the top-down waterfall approach of reaching out to multiple decision makers in the organization. If you don't get the response you were hoping for from one individual, you still have other irons on the fi re at that company. This will dramatically increase your responses. The reason for the top-down approach of reaching out to higher level executives is also recommended because you will often get bunted down to the person that is responsible for handling that task. When you reach out to that individual and explain that their boss's boss suggested you meet with them, that becomes a relatively easy meeting to get. On the other hand, attempting to do this in re-verse and telling a higher-level executive that they should meet with you because a lower level employee suggested so, will not nearly have the same effect. 

Vehicle: 

We have many different delivery vehicles to choose from and deciding which to use often depends on the size and complexity of your sale. If you are trying to generate leads to reach small business owners, it can be as simple as only using cold email or LinkedIn for prospecting. If you're trying to get meetings with C-Suite executives of large corporations, you may have to use a combination of those, plus direct mail, telephone, digital marketing, and even singing telegram. I'm not suggesting the last one but the more you touch your prospect using different vehicles, the better your chances of achieving awareness. This is the first stage of the AIDA Model: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. 

Even with all the excitement surrounding cold email, the reality is it's just another vehicle. At one point, direct mail was the go-to vehicle until that became oversaturated and the term 'junk mail' was born. Cold calling was all the rage until people got tired of 'telemarketing calls'. Just as quickly, cold email is being abused and, just like fifteen years ago, more and more people are talking about getting spam. At George Athan MindStorm, not only do we incorporate cold email into all our clients' campaigns, but we also use LinkedIn in a specific way to prospect, because executives that are on LinkedIn hardly get any other messages in their InMail box. As an added bonus, LinkedIn also sends an email copy of the message to the user with almost 100% deliverability to their inbox. 

Best Practice: Contact your prospect using multiple vehicles. Consider both the value of the meeting and the potential profit from the sale and adjust your spend accordingly. For big ticket sales and high value meetings, consider adding 3-Dimensional mailings to your campaign. These are physical items being delivered, which require uncommon mailing packaging. Sending someone a FedEx package will have a completely different effect, thus response rate, than sending a regular envelope, even when the exact same letter is inside. Start with easier and cheaper vehicles and then escalate to more expensive, attention-grabbing methods over time and touches. This will enable you to capture the low hanging fruit and secure many meetings at a lower cost per lead. This is an important strategy considering we are building a system that we will scale to manage volume. 

Message

When we're talking about the message, we're talking about the language used to communicate with a prospect. This can be everything from the copywriting of your landing pages or direct mail letters, to the telephone scripts your salespeople use. The message is what connects the benefit of your product to the target audience you're reaching out to. This is another vital component to your lead generation process because regardless of the vehicle you're using to connect with a prospect, without the right message you'll never move them through the next phases of the AIDA Model - Creating Interest and Desire for your services, eventually getting your prospect to Act. 

When we talk about systems, we mean processes that can be repeated to get predictable results. To achieve this, certain things have to be constant so that they produce results that are consistent and therefore can be relied on. One of these constants is the message. How can you predict with certainty the outcome of a campaign if the message changed every time? You couldn't. The more variables that you make constant, the more you can rely on your expectation of the results. Even yet, with all things being the same every time, responses change because people change. What works today will not necessarily work tomorrow. With this much uncertainty and constantly moving targets, it would be impossible to generate predictable results with a different message each time. 

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Cold Email Basics That Everyone in B2B Must Know

There are so many benefits to using cold email, but you want to use it the most effective way possible to get the best result. In an effort to save cold email from its death, I’d like to teach you how to do it effectively so that the practice stays around as long as possible. Cold email is an amazing way to bypass the gatekeeper and communicate directly with a hard-to-reach executive. But choosing to send cold email without taking the time to learn best practices, you are participating in the extinction of a tool that, if correctly used, could consistently generate millions of dollars in sales each year for you.

Keep them short:

Nobody wants to read a novel from someone they don’t know, and I can say with confidence that nobody is interested in reading a novel over email, period, regardless who it comes from! Plus, most executives read email from their mobile phone. These screens are much smaller than computers, making it even harder and less interesting to read a long email. Lose the introduction. They can find your name and title at the signature on the bottom of your email if it’s interesting enough to read that far. This saves an entire sentence. Keep it short and to the point.

Exercise:

Imagine you’ll get paid for every word you eliminate from your email.  Do this with every cold email you write. People respond to very brief emails.

Personalize:

We’ve spoken at length about the problem of mass marketing and using general language. Your target prospect isn’t fooled anymore just because the software you use filled in his first name. Instead of creating a huge list and speaking to everyone at the same time, write one personal email and think about how that can be sent to more people. It sounds the same but it’s not. The same technology that allows you to insert their first name, also has the capability of inserting other inputs. For example; pretend you found 50 software companies in the fintech space that you feel would be a perfect fit for you service. During your research, you went to their blog and copied the title of a blogpost written by the executive you’re targeting. This information can be loaded right into your email software and as 50 emails go out, you can reference 50 different blog posts in your email campaign. This is just the beginning, because personalization should go far beyond this. You should have different ‘snippets’ of information that is personal to that prospect. Personalize as often as you can, showing you know a lot of information about them. This tells your prospect that you’ve done your homework and you already know it’s a fit, so they shouldn’t disregard your message.

You don’t matter, they do:

Fight the urge to use I, We, Me, Our Company, or your company’s name. Meanwhile, they love reading their name, they love seeing their company’s name, they love hearing the name of their products, they love talking about themselves. Your prospect is the only one that matters in that conversation – at least to the prospect. This is true in life as well. People don’t even realize how much they love to talk about themselves, so when you ask them a question giving them another opportunity to talk about themselves, they just eat it up. You want your language to light them up inside and if you make every sentence about them you will be moving that emotional needle in your favor.

Side Note: Do not lose authority in doing so. If you act like a gushing superfan, you will lose respect from the person you’re trying to connect with. Come from your power.

Don’t try to sell:

This may seem counterintuitive, but your goal is not to sell. Your goal is to create interest in having a conversation with you at a later time to see if there may be a fi t between the two companies. If you can’t create interest, it’s better to pique their curiosity rather than try to go long form and sell. Ever get those long IT emails from offshore developers trying to tell you about every service they can offer? You’ve seen the email before. It gives you the different rates for developers and project managers, tells you about all the different platforms they work on, and even give examples of sample projects. Besides the fact that they’re randomly sending emails to anyone (spam), they think that you’ll just read a sales pitch over email and miraculously be sold. Rule one, keep them short. Rule four, don’t sell. You’ll get a better response if you briefly ask if your topic is something they’d like to have a conversation about. The goal is positive responses at this stage.

Use email just to get them to engage:

Whether you get a positive response or a negative one, your response should always be to transition from email to the telephone. The reason for this is simply, you’ll get further on the telephone than you will over email. Once the prospect engages, it’s no longer a cold call. The prospect has heard of your company, knows of its offering, and by responding has directly sent you an email. There is nothing cold about this call. In fact, when calling back, often you have a direct number or extension because it was on the prospects signature at the bottom of the email. The newly formed relationship you have with the prospect is enough to get you past gatekeepers. When the gatekeepers ask you what the call is in reference to, simply respond with, “It’s regarding the email he sent me a few minutes ago. Can you mention George Athan is on the phone? Thanks.” Works every time.

What’s great about transitioning to the telephone is that it’s an opportunity to take the relationship further by using a more intimate form of contact. For example, what would you feel more obligated to respond to? A letter in the mail or an email sent to you personally? How about responding to an email or answering my question while we were on the telephone? One last scenario: Is it easier to hang up on me or throw me out of your office? This is why email (done right) gets more responses than direct mail, telephone (done right) gets more responses than email, and face-to-face meetings (done right) get a better response than the telephone. The same way it may not be efficient to go door to door cold because setting an appointment up over the phone first would make more sense, it wouldn’t make sense making call after call cold when you can wait to speak to the people who were willing to engage with you first. Trust me, if someone doesn’t even have the interest, courtesy, or enough respect for you to give you a response, there is zero chance of them buying from you. At least at this stage.