Lesson 20 - Reach out with a Product Update

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Product updates are a great reason to re-engage prospects. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to craft outreach messages that showcase product improvements relevant to your prospect’s needs. Your assignment will involve drafting and sending product update messages to three prospects.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to send an outreach message that is centered around a new product update. Now why are we focused on product updates? Well, there are a couple of reasons that product update gives a natural kind of reason for reaching out. One, they typically happen a lot. So every time your product gets updated, that gives you a new unique reason to reach out to somebody for whom that update is relevant. Two, a product update naturally changes your product for the better, which means for people that have lost interest in your product, think about people that have gone cold, right? Leads that went cold a long time ago, this could potentially be a way to rekindle interest in your product. So when you think about product updates, the first step is to identify all of the new product updates that are occurring and when. So one way to do this would be to subscribe to your own products newsletter. Another way would be to see if your product has some sort of a change log or a website where updates are are given regularly. You can also look to see if you have a customer facing product roadmap or an internal facing product roadmap, but typically you're going to want it to be customer facing. You want to make sure these updates are that you're allowed to tell customers about them. You can also set up a Slack channel with your product team. Reach out to your product team directly. But the first thing you're going to want to do is understand what are the latest updates to your product? Once you've done that, the next step is to essentially take these product updates and say, Okay, who would care about these? Who would actually be interested in this specific update? And you want to get specific to titles here. What are the job titles? What are the challenges that this update solves? What are the jobs to be done that this update solves? It's almost like you're thinking it of thinking of it like a mini product, right? So you want to understand the value prop for this product update, if you have a new product update that is specifically related to digital security managers, for example, then you can create a targeted campaign, which some people would call a sales play, and you can say, I'm going to reach out to this group of digital marketing security managers with this messaging about this specific product update, so let them know about it. Identify the recent updates right. Write down the titles that are going to care about those updates, and then look at your top prioritized accounts and say, Are these titles in my accounts? If not, move to your next stop account and try again until you find a contact with one of these titles that you can reach out to about your product update. Once you've chosen your contact, the update that you're reaching out about, it's time to write your email. And again, we're using that why you? Why you now framework, but here's an important call out. First, people don't buy features. They buy solutions. They buy impact. They buy results, right? So if you're reaching out to someone, you don't just want to say, hey, I have this new feature in our product that allows you to write social media posts with AI, right? That's cool, and that might entice a few end users to learn a little bit more, but ultimately, you need to understand how this product update is going to provide measurable return on investment, measurable results, how it's going to tie to top down business initiatives. And that might not always be possible, but that is the goal right for every product update, you should be tying it back to impact and results. So let's I'll read out an example here. So the subject line would be, enhance your social media efficiency with our latest Sprout Social update. Hi Mark. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive with Sprout Social. I notice you've recently stepped into the role of social media manager at Barkbox. Congratulations. I'm reaching out because we've just released a new platform update that could significantly stream streamline your team's workflows. Managing multiple social media platforms is challenging, especially when it comes to optimizing posts for each platform. Our latest update introduces a feature that allows you to create a single post and automatically adjust it to fit all top social media platforms. Effectively, this is going to save your team dozens of hours each week. You can take a look here, and then you might give like a brief demo, a tailored, personalized video of this update and how it would help them. I'd love to discuss how this can align. With your goals and your new role, would you be available for a quick 15 minute chat next week? Here's a link to my calendar. Looking forward to hearing from you, Nick, so what I've done there is I've reached out. I've said, here's why I'm reaching out to you. Here's why I'm reaching out to you right now because of the product update, this is why I think it would be valuable. Do you have 15 minutes? That's our call to action, my signature line, and that is how you reach out for a product update. I would encourage you to set up a regular cadence of doing this. Anytime you see a product update come out for your solution, ask yourself, who in my book of business would care about this, I should reach out to them and let them know now, your marketing team might be doing a little bit of that already. Your customer education team might be doing a little bit of that already. Who cares? Double up right. Reach out to them. They want to hear from you. They want to you. You know you understand their workflows, their job, their responsibilities, their challenges, and it will be good to hear from you about this update. It shows that you're thinking about them. It provides value in a natural way. It can rekindle interest from old prospects. It's a valuable way to do outreach. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to look at your product. Write down three new product updates. Map those to the titles that are going to care about them, and send or draft an outreach message related to one of those product updates for one of your prioritized accounts, you're going to review this with your mentor manager before you send it, your study guide is going to walk you through it, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quarter. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time bye. You.