Lesson 17 - Develop Your Outreach Strategy

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Crafting an effective outreach strategy is critical for connecting with prospects. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to tailor your outreach using multiple channels, including email, LinkedIn, and phone. Your assignment will involve outlining your multi-touch outreach strategy for one of your top accounts.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to develop the outreach strategy for your top prioritized account. Now everything we've been doing so far has been leading up to this. You've learned your your product, your messaging, your buying committee, you've started to map out, you know, you've started to understand your personas and your customers and go to where they're at. You've started to develop your value ladder and your value hypothesis. You've begun to map out the value that you can provide to the specific members of the buying committee for your top account. So we have done a lot in order to get you ready to begin reaching out to your top accounts. But before you do that, you need to develop a strategy for how you're planning to do it. So many good sales people will skip this step because they think, oh, you know, I know how to reach out to people, right? I know how to send an email, I know how to send a LinkedIn request, I know how to make a phone call, but you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't stop to think, what is my overarching strategy here? Who am I going to be reaching out to? What are my goals for each of those individuals? How am I going to be reaching out to them? And you can't just reach out once anyone, if you've been in sales, you know that reaching out once is hardly ever going to get you the results that you want. You need to develop a longer term strategy. So let's do that in this lesson. The first thing that I want you to do is in your last I think in one of your previous lessons, I think your last lesson, you were able to map out the buying committee for your top prioritized account. What I want you to do is prioritize, who in that buying committee are you going to be reaching out to first, second, third, fourth, etc. Now, remember, we've talked about champions, economic buyers, influencers, executive sponsors, fans, coaches, detractors. The way that I would do it is for folks that you think could be potential champions, I would reach out to them first, for folks that you think could be potential economic buyers, I would reach out to them. Second, and for those that could be executive sponsors, I would reach out to them. Third, the exception would be, obviously, your manager might be telling you to do a top down approach. If you are able to find a tops down business initiative to attach your solution to, or if you're able to find executive to executive outreach or a team link connection, then you'll find more traction reaching out to your executive sponsors first. But in my experience, it's normally more fruitful to try and get in front of a champion, a team leader, potentially an economic buyer, and begin to kind of refer your way up the organization from there. This could be different for your solution. If your manager is cringing at me right now, follow your managers directions over mine. Ultimately, what I really want you to get out of this is prioritize who you're going to reach out to, first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Don't discount your fans or your coaches or your end users. They can provide valuable case study information and help you see the value that your solution is already providing, especially for an expansion opportunity. So that could be a really good way to to reach out to them and just start learning, just start learning about the organization, especially if you've given up all hope, right? Maybe you've reached out so many times to so many different people, and you just really are struggling to get in front of anybody. That's when your fans, coaches, end users, can come into play. And then when it comes to your detractors, I just wouldn't reach out to them at all at this stage, not yet, right? You're gonna reach out to them once you start getting traction in the deal to to unblock them as a detractor, but ultimately you want to reach out to champions, economic buyers, executive sponsors, fans, etc, so sort them into that list. Prioritize your outreach efforts. Who are you reaching out to? First, second, third, fourth, etc. Ask your mentor for guidance here. And then once you know who you're reaching out to, now I want you to map each person to the value that you're going to be providing them. What are you going to reach out to them with, and what are you hoping to get from them? And remember, we we did some of this in your last lesson assignment, so you should already have that handy, then you want to understand what is the sequence of steps, and what are the types of outreach steps that you're going to take to reach out to this individual. So like I said, it can't just be one thing an example an effective outreach sequence is going to involve multiple. Touch points across phone, email, LinkedIn, media, a number of different communication points. So an example of that might be on day one, you send them a LinkedIn connection request, you send them an email, and then you leave them a voicemail. On day three, you follow up with another email. On day five, you send them a second LinkedIn message. If they've accepted your connection request, you can follow up and you give them another phone call. On day 11, you might send them another email, right? And this time, you might include a case study. Your sequences are always going to look different, and it's really that was actually kind of a bad example that I just gave you, if I'm being honest, what I would do actually, is think about, Okay, I'm going to be reaching out to them across maybe a two to three week period. What am I going to give that makes each outreach different and makes each outreach compelling. So let's try this again. Maybe in your first outreach you're talking about how users, like them have been using your solution to achieve results. Maybe the second time you reach out, you're giving them some specific case studies. Maybe the third time you reach out, you're giving them a demo or some product education. Maybe the fourth time you reach out, you're giving them templates or ways that they can work better, maybe. But each time, you should be giving specific value that they're going to to be able to leverage, and you want to develop a sequence that includes LinkedIn, email, phone calls, voice mails and potentially media. A lot of people discount media, and what I would what I would encourage you to try, is recording videos and sending your prospects videos. This can go a long way. This has actually worked on me in the past and my previous boss in the past, where someone sent us over a video of them talking through their solution and how they think it can help make sure that you have that value hypothesis, that you're reaching out with that in mind, or you can send demos that are short, that are specifically tailored to that person, and that's going to go a long way too. So adding media can significantly increase engagement. And I would encourage you to try out things like loom or, you know, other video service providers that you can do that with. I think I can't remember the name of it now, but it's a Vidyard. Vidyard is another one that you can use for this cool, lot of tools out there that you can use for that. Now, before you send your first outreach, you should also do a couple of other things. One, you should set up some calendar scheduling software. You're going to want to include a calendar invite link where they can book with you. I've talked about this in a previous lesson. Use Calendly, use tidy cow, use Google Calendar integrations, but make sure that you have a way for them to easily do this. Next you should set up email tracking. If you're using sales, loft or outreach, you'll already have email tracking through them. Otherwise, you can set up something like, yes, where, but you should have some sort of email tracking to know when they're clicking on your email, opening it, reading it, replying to it, clicking links, etc. And then finally, this one is just kind of a pro tip, but keep your signature relatively simple. If you end up putting a lot of links in your signature, they can sometimes end up going to spam or getting caught in a company's email filters. So something to keep in mind. Cool. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to take your top prioritized account. You're going to prioritize who you're going to be reaching out to, first, second, third, fourth. You're going to be mapping out the value that you're going to be giving them in your outreach. You're going to be developing an outreach sequence that you're going to use. This is one where your company might already have it. So reach out to your mentor, manager, new hire buddy, and ask them, What are the most do we have sequences or outreach templates already? What are the most successful ones? What are the ones that are actually getting results? Can you connect me with those so that I can start to think about how I would enroll these contacts into this outreach sequence. Your study guide to walk you through this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time you.