Implement dynamic outreach campaigns
After acquiring the B2B database, you need to jump into the main part of reaching out to your prospects. At this step, you should be getting ready to launch an omnichannel outreach. This is the art of interconnecting channels such as social media, email and phone to engage your prospects and generate leads.
An effective outreach strategy gets your prospects’ attention on the channel they are most active on or where they are most comfortable engaging with salespeople. Since we do not know which channel that is, an omnichannel outreach approach is the best way to discover this.
There are some crucial parts to launching a dynamic omnichannel campaign:
Multiple channels
An omnichannel outreach campaign is a sequence of touchpoints made over time and across a variety of communication channels such as email, LinkedIn, phone. Each touchpoint serves the purpose of attempting to provide enough value and interest to prompt a reply. Rather than selecting only one or two channels, you should use a synchronised combination of all of them–which is called omnichannel outreach.
Integration in channels and tools
An effective omnichannel outreach strategy should have seamless integration between channels and tools. This includes CRM integrations as well as integration of channels like email and social media accounts. This is to sync your mailbox and social media accounts on a single platform and do outreach across channels. The outreach process so achieved closely resembles hand-typed messages manually sent from personal accounts.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a core ingredient of getting the attention of your prospects in the targeted pharmaceutical company and it goes above and beyond just customising the message content. A good way to achieve personalisation across channels is by launching a dynamic campaign through outreach automation software. A dynamic campaign considers responses from your prospect and generates automated follow-up sequences based on it. The more data points you have on your prospect, the better your execution in this step will be.
Follow up
The stage of following up after the first contact can be one of the most challenging steps of outbound sales, yet it is also one of the most important ones.
According to IRC Sales Solutions, only 2% of sales are made during the first point of contact. This means businesses lose 98% of their potential sales leads if they do not follow up.
A crucial part of follow up is classifying your leads as Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) or Marketing qualified lead (MQL) as that will help you understand which stage your leads are in and tackle their objections accordingly. Let us look at these two lead classifications in detail.
- Sales Qualified Lead: SQL is usually ready for a demonstration of your product in the near future. They usually rarely need to be given initial stage resources (e.g.: ebooks, cheat sheets, general blog posts, etc). Instead, they are interested in the demo/free trial through customer references or stories.
- Marketing Qualified Lead: MQL will need more convincing and engaging before they are ready for a demo, a free trial, or even a call. Therefore, customer stories are not yet appropriate at that stage of readiness. They need blog posts, pdf and ebooks that educate and provide insights on the industry.
A specialised outreach software like hubsell will help you determine which stage your leads are in based on customer intent data such as opens, accepted connection requests, links clicked. This can then plan your campaign actions and move across single or multiple tracks to achieve true personalisation.
Overcome sales objections
Next up, we have objection handling and the subsequent process of qualifying prospects as opportunities by answering the replies. This process can be partially automated through a few template email responses, as we will discuss in this section.
Some responses will repeatedly appear in your campaigns. In particular, we have found eight replies in our experience with our customers, so below is a guide on how to reply to them.
- Indicated interest
Response: email scheduling a call
- Reply requests additional information
Response: email with more detailed information
- Reply communicates a lack of priority
Response: email implying that you understand and that you will reach out a few months later
- Replies stating the prospect is not the right person
- Scenario 1: They say they will connect you with the right person and give you an email address or cc you in the forwarding email.
Response: Wait for the response of the right person or send an introductory email.
- Scenario 2: They say they will forward the email to the right person (without cc’ing you)
Response: Wait for reach out from the other person or start contacting other decision-makers in the company.
- Scenario 3: They do not connect you with the right person.
Response: Start contacting other decision-makers in the company.
- They say they are satisfied with an existing solution
Response: Thank them for their time and ask them to reach out to you if they have any problems.
- They reply saying they do not need the solution in the first place
Response: Thank them for their feedback and assess targeting.
- Desire to be not mailed/contacted again
Response: Remove them from your outreach list.
- Indicate that the prospect did not receive your first email (only relevant for replies on the second email in your sequence)
Response: send a summary of the first email and send some more information
For each of these possibilities, it is important to adjust your approach depending on the industry you are targeting, the country, the authority in the company, so that you maximise your interaction, without offending anyone or losing opportunities.
Set up calls or demos
After you have sent out your first campaign and established a conversation with decision makers, it is time for the last stage aim, to book a call, free trial or better even, a demo. This will allow you to calculate conversion rates on the whole outreach process to determine the number of prospects, positive replies and demos you need to get one sale.
Converting a lead into a call is often perceived as a high friction point because it can be a decent time commitment from the buyer’s side, so, to maximise the chances of converting as many leads as possible you may use software like Calendly to sync your calendars automatically regarding the time of the meeting.
After you move leads to the bottom of the funnel, it comes to the skills of your sales team in finally closing the deal. We have done a detailed analysis on closing the deal here but below is a quick summary of the same.
There are four steps to closing the deal namely:
- Consulting the customer: This is the first step where you speak to the customer, gauge their objections, and deal with them. These can be related to the pricing, the level of customer support, the functionality of the product, etc.
- Negotiating the offer: This is often the second step of the deal after your lead asks about moving forward with your solution. When negotiating in B2B, aim for a win-win scenario with the prospect that solves their problems.
- Creating the offer: This step includes creating a contract that includes all the clauses based on the discussion in the negotiation phase.
- Closing the deal: The aim when closing a deal is to mitigate the last-minute resistance of prospects and push for the deal to get done at a comfortable pace.