As we plan our sales goals for 2019, let us examine the lessons we learned last year and applied to our processes.
2018 saw two key trends: saturation of email automation software market and enforcement of the GDPR. While these two developments are inherently incompatible, the second half of 2018 did not see a decline in cold emailing usage.
With email automation tools flooding the market, combined with a strong push approach to acquiring customers (which is inherent to email automation software companies), have led more sales professionals to use cold emailing tactics to generate opportunities.
The increase in popularity of cold emailing tactics among companies resulted in higher traffic of cold emails. This has lead to higher noise levels in the mailboxes of recipients which caused the quality of cold email campaigns to plummet. So the entire practice suffered from negative press.
Even though B2B sales’ reputation has suffered, it also opened a door to a better status quo. The market will achieve a better standard of cold outreach while punishing malpractices (of which, I am sure, you have been at the receiving end).
The advent of GDPR and greater scrutiny of cold outreach tactics will force the outbound sales industry to improve.
When considering the impact of GDPR, one does get the full picture of what is going on in Europe. Some countries were more affected than others (Germany more than the UK). Overall companies had to adapt their outreach efforts to comply with new laws which made email outreach much less effective. Or, at the very least, challenging.
Based off of these developments in 2018, I can make a calculated guess as to what will take place in 2019, so let’s dive in.
Social selling will take hold and evolve from its infancy
An alternative channel to the saturating cold email market in 2019 will be social media platforms that connect professionals.
Here are the two main ways social platforms will be used for cold outreach:
Social channels will become the main vehicles of business relationships, initiated by connection requests. These introductions are effective because they do not ask much of the target and are a building block of a ‘yes’ ladder. If the prospect has already accepted a connection request then they might as well listen to your well planned follow up message.
Conversely, a tactic that will serve to warm up cold leads is to serve a specific audience ads with helpful content. For example, you can upload a list of verified emails and expose them to case studies or full guides. These low intrusion ads will work to warm up leads to increase the effectiveness of your cold outreach campaigns.