Lesson 21 - Reach Out with an Industry Trend

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Prospects value insights about their industry. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to incorporate relevant industry trends into your outreach messages to provide value and spark interest. Your assignment will involve researching an industry trend and creating a message tailored to a specific prospect.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, we're going to continue exploring different outreach strategies for providing value and getting meetings with your prospects. Today's lesson is about reaching out with an industry trend. Now, why is it so useful to reach out with industry trends? Well, first, industry trends are, by their very nature, new, which gives you a specific reason for reaching out right now, which is the why you now part of the framework right industry trends usually come with challenges against what you can position your solution. Industry trends are naturally personalized. They matter to specific roles in specific industries more than others. So it gives you some built in personalization. And industry trends are usually top of mind for your prospects. This is usually something that either excites them or gives them anxiety, but either way, it makes them feel something right towards towards these new trends that are coming up, especially if they're an expert in this trend, or if you see it on their LinkedIn profile, or something to that effect, maybe they're blogging about it. So if you are a thought leader in the space, and you understand or have insights into how other organizations in their industry are approaching this trend, because you've worked with their peers or their competitors, that gives you some incredible value, and it really makes them want to have a conversation with you. So where do we start? The first thing that you need to do, just like we did with the product updates, you need to go in and you need to identify what are the top three most significant, most relevant new trends in the industries that I serve. So for example, if you're an account executive for Sprout Social the industries you care about are social media marketing. And the question then becomes, where can I go to find the latest trends on social media and marketing? So let's follow this example. I realize that you probably don't work in social media or marketing, and that's okay. This can be widely applied to any industry function or, you know, area of tech, but I think giving a specific example will make this easier to follow. So I work for if I work for a social media company, I'm going to start by looking at Industry Reports. So that's what you should do as well. Let's look at the Pew Research Center. Let's look at Gartner, let's look at Forrester. Let's look at hub states, state of marketing report, eMarketer. Basically, I'm going to look for any reports that are relevant and valuable in my industry. And you can ask chatgpt or perplexity, or any AI tool to help you with that. The second thing I'm going to do is go to social media platforms, not because I'm using social media in this example, but no matter what you're selling, if you want to look for trends, go look on social media. So look. Look for LinkedIn groups that have to do with your industry. Look for Twitter trends, or x trends, or whatever we're calling it these days. Look for hashtags for your industry, if it's an industry that is relevant to social media, look for forums and online communities. So if I'm a social media marketer, I might do hashtag or sorry, subreddit social media, subreddit marketing, which will be good for catching up with discussions about new tools, new industry changes, new strategies, etc. I might look at something like growth hackers, which is a community that's focused on marketing and growth strategies. You also want to look at webinars and virtual conferences. So you want to be for me, if I'm a social media salesperson, I might look at Social Media Week, Content Marketing Institute, marketing profs, events, but look for relevant webinars and virtual conferences. Look for blogs, thought leaders in the space. I realize this is sounding a little repetitive. We talked about this in a very early lesson when we talked about where your community congregates, where your prospects congregate, but that is also where you're going to go to find industry trends. So look at blogs, look at thought leaders, look at industry newsletters. For social media, I might look at Ad Week or the drum. Look for trade associations and groups. Go to their websites, interact with them. So for social media marketing, I might look at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the American Marketing Association. Go to corporate websites, listen to investor calls. That's where you're going to hear a lot of you know other CEOs talking about the industry trends that they've noticed with their investors. In fact, just saying that out loud, I think that is a really valuable one, right? If you can go to some of the top. The companies in the space, and listen to their investor calls, you'll hear their trends, the trends that their their owners and CEOs are noticing. And look at their annual reports, because you'll also see trends written in those reports as well. Obviously, this is all going to be very different depending on what you're selling, but as a rule, you will find that those are the places to look to find industry trends when it comes to your space. So do the research, find and list the top three trends facing the industry you support, and then list out the job titles or roles that this trend would be relevant to. You don't want to bring and also, you want to choose trends that are related to the product or service that you offer. It doesn't really matter if it's a trend, if your product doesn't address it or help with it in any way, right? If it's not a challenge that you can solve, then that's not something that you want to talk about. But for each trend, you identify, list the job titles. List the roles with companies that are most likely to be impacted by that trend. Understanding who to target is crucial here. And then, once you've listed that out, go to your top three accounts, look for those titles within those accounts, and using the why you, why you now framework, reach out about that industry trend to those titles. Here's an example to drive that home. Subject line, how is your team navigating the latest social media marketing trend towards automation, naturally curious about that? So the person that you're sending it to should be naturally curious about that trend. They're going to click on it, and then I say, Hi, Jessica. My name is Nick. I'm in charge of trendy apparels relationship with Sprout Social I'm reaching out because we've helped customers like trendy apparel to navigate the growing trend towards automation and social media management. As trendy apparels, director of digital marketing, I believe there's a unique opportunity for you to further enhance your team's efficiency and reach given the recent changes in consumer online interactions, now is an ideal time to explore the ways sprout is set up to help our latest features will not only save you time, but also provide deeper insights into campaign performance, ensuring your team stays ahead of the curve. Would you be available for a 15 minute call next week to dive deeper. So notice a few things I've done there. I've told her why I'm reaching out to her because she's, you know, that she's facing this new trend, just like everybody else, she's their director of digital marketing. I've told her why I'm reaching out to her now, because there are recent changes in the way that consumers interact with online or have online interactions. I've had my call to action, simple signature line, right? I'm following the framework, so don't overlook the power of industry trends and reaching out to and having well informed discussions. It showcases your expertise. It showcases that you're a thought leader in this industry. It's a proactive approach. It's personalized, and it helps you to stay informed and to be relevant to the people that you're serving. So now it's your turn for today's assignment, you're going to identify a relevant industry trend, or two or three that impact your target accounts, determine what contacts, job titles those would be relevant to draft your message, check it with your mentor manager or new hire buddy, and then if you're feeling comfortable, send it out. Your study guide is going to walk you through this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quarter. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.