The client
A young company that offers full-service IT and management solutions to laboratories was doing its first steps in outbound sales and needed to figure out the right strategy and targeting. With no experience in outreach, the client decided to use SalesNash services to build up the SDR process.
Summary
With their services mostly tailored for the healthcare industry, the client had to be very precise in terms of the outreach as it is a hard nut to crack. What we needed to ensure prior to starting the campaign is that:
– we target the companies you are capable of working with;
– our emails are sent to the right titles so not a bit of effort goes in vain;
– our messaging is to the point and interacts with the prospect from the very first words;
– the SDRs are persistent on the follow-up activities and leads aren’t wasted.
With that in mind, SalesNash took care of the client’s outbound activities.
Challenges
- Tough industry. When doing the outreach in a very niche market, open rates and response rates are usually lower than average, unless you come up with great targeting and relevant messaging.
- Target audience. The most important thing here is contacting the right companies and the right titles. If your message finds a fitting person at the wrong company as well as if it finds a wrong person at the fitting company, it results in wasted time and wasted leads.
- Messaging. What prospects initially see is a subject line and the first ~8 words of your message so when compiling a message you need to make SLs engaging, intriguing ,and meaningful and write your opener in a way that resonates with the prospect.
What was done
Work on the Ideal Customer Profile
The regular procedure for SalesNash is to share the ICP questionnaire after the discovery call so we are able to evaluate the initial prospecting volumes. However, further tweaks are done all along the way. Before the project started, we set up a call to discuss all the research aspects, while during the first two weeks the lists were shared with the client every 2 days so the client had a chance to look through the leads and share their comments. Afterwards, all the updates were discussed on the weekly calls.
Lab specification: Genetic; Clinical; Toxicology;
Sweet spot lab size: 5-25 employees;
Titles tending to engage: LIS Manager; Lab Manager; Lab Technician, CEO.
Take care of the domain reputation
With the current enhancement of spam detection mechanics, cold outreach requires a more sensitive approach. As the client picked a project plan with the bigger daily quota, a solution that allowed to avoid damage was necessary. Thus, in addition to a traditional one-week long warm-up, it was decided to create 2 email accounts instead of 1 to reduce sending volumes. This way we were sure that even if the project ends, the client will be able to keep on doing further mailing themselves.
Content writing
As I already mentioned above – the key to increasing the open rates is a proper subject line and opening sentence. However, it’s not enough to provoke the interest and induce the prospect to open the message, but to ensure he reads it, the whole message structure is important.
Here are the main principles we stuck to while creating the content for the client:
1 Starting each paragraph with the trigger words as most of the leads are busy and will be eager to read the whole message only after they skim the text.
2 For the same reason – add concise bullet points with the key info on what you offer.
3 The paragraph itself shouldn’t be bigger than 2-3 sentences.
4 Integrate some relevant statistics that may resonate with prospect’s pain points.
5 Avoid being too pushy on the call to action. It’s better to offer some more info on the company (best case scenario – a relevant case study) within the first wave CTA and suggest the demo after there is a noticeable interest.
LinkedIn is quite effective
Along with the email campaign LinkedIn outreach demonstrated quite good results. Used as a follow-up activity it allowed to connect with the prospects that aren’t checking their inbox that often. As SalesNash SDR functions as an extension to the client’s team we created the profile of the fake employee that had industry experience, was located out of the company’s headquarters city and during the warm-up activities built up the network based on CEO’s connections.
Results
Over the course of 5 months SalesNash managed to:
- Generate over 5000 cold leads and reach out to them with relevant messaging.
- Schedule 38 appointments with the prospects that had a high level of interest in the offer which led to the impressive conversion rate.
- Maintain open rate at 30 to 45 % response rate at 5 to 10%.
Even though the initial few weeks seemed to be a rough start with only 4 appointments scheduled throughout the first month further growth to a stable 8-10 appointments month allows us to judge that the work is done effectively and the all client’s expenses pay off, which is the best compliment for the sales development company.
