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Why Effective Sales Prospecting Requires Specificity

March 2, 2021 By Heather Leave a Comment

How specific is your “buyer persona,” or “Ideal Customer Profile” (ICP)? 

In other words, how do you define your target audience or ideal customer when doing sales outreach?

Too often I see sales and marketing leaders defining their buyer personas as “Marketing” or “C-Suite.” However, a CEO and a CTO are very different people with extremely different responsibilities and priorities. Even more commonly, I see “Operations” getting lumped together with marketing and extremely different departments that manage different aspects of the business.

How to build solid “Buyer Personas” for more effective sales campaigns

It’s so important to think carefully about your audience, and try to be as specific as possible when defining your ideal customer.  

get specific with buyer personas

On average companies who generically define their buyer personas as “Marketing” or “Technical decision-maker” tend to get 10-30x worse results from their sales prospecting efforts than those with detailed ICPs. 

Whenever possible, try to define:

  • Which role or roles you’re trying to target (if they have different priorities they should be DIFFERENT PERSONAS!) 
  • The company size (roles at a 20-person startup are very different than a 2000 person company; a VP Marketing at a 10-person startup probably has less authority and budget than a Director of Marketing at a 300-person company.)
  • Industry –you don’t always have to segment by this if your business use case is generally the same, but it’s worth thinking about in terms of what customer examples you reference. 
  • Other firmographic information that determines how qualified a prospective customer is to buy or not (are they hiring, are they growing or shrinking, did they raise money recently, what software they’re using…?)

Example of redefining a Buyer Persona & copyediting a real Cold Email 📝

If you found this video helpful, please like it and share it with your friends or coworkers. 

More free Cold Email treats 🍡🍦 from my sold-out workshop 

The video I shared is part two in a Youtube video/blog series, based on my recent sold-out Cold Email Copyediting Workshop. Since everyone who attended was very engaged and had many questions, the Zoom event went into overtime and lasted about an hour. Therefore, I decided to chop it into bitesize videos, which I’m sharing on the SalesFolk blog and SalesFolk Youtube channel over the next few weeks.  sold-out SalesFolk workshop

Be sure to subscribe to our Youtube channel if you haven’t already, in order to not miss out on free tips on cold email, sales, negotiation, and optimizing business processes.

In case you missed it, here’s part 1, “Why most emails don’t need graphs or images.” 

Want help with cold email or sales prospecting efforts? Here’s what you can do…⬇️

First of all, feel free to ask questions by commenting directly on the Youtube video I shared or this blog post.  I’ll try to directly respond to your comments, assuming they’re relevant and NOT spam (We delete comments with external links to other websites). If the question is more complex, I might even create a Youtube video to answer, or include it as material in our upcoming Cold Email Course. 

SalesFolk Cold Email Workshop free March

I will be holding another free Cold Email Workshop on Thursday, March 18 at 2:30pm EST. Please RSVP promptly, as space is limited to 150 people, and the last one sold out in under 48 hours with zero marketing.

If you would like to get free feedback on your email templates, please submit your email copy here by Friday, March 12th at 5pm EST.  Please keep in mind this is also on a first-come, first-serve basis, so the sooner you submit an example, the more likely it is I’ll review it in the next workshop. 

Finally, I am planning to do some more comprehensive workshops for small groups of people.  This will be a much more affordable alternative to my hourly consulting. It’s also a way I can help more people and businesses, as I have very limited bandwidth for these sessions, which are currently mostly reserved for my investor portfolio companies. 

If you’re interested in having me do a private workshop for you and your sales team, please submit a consultation request, and we can discuss. Just add “(request private group session)” to your title in our website form. 

Finally, just make sure you’re subscribed ↖️ to the SalesFolk email newsletter 💌 (we’ll actually be setting up automated SMS 📱soon so we can text you “cold email tips of the week) to get updates. That way you’ll hear about free workshops, paid cold email copywriting training sessions, and announcements and discounts related to our upcoming Cold Email Course. 🐐SalesFolk consultation form special request

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Filed Under: Cold Email Feedback, Outbound Sales Tagged With: buyer personas

Why most cold emails don’t need graphs or images

February 10, 2021 By Heather Leave a Comment

Do you attach or embed images in your sales prospecting emails?

I’m not talking about sales emails with qualified leads you already had a phone call with, but “cold emails” to people you’ve never met or spoken with before.

The problem with “email images” is that they don’t always load, and can easily screw up email deliverability.

picard meme: email images fail

Also, some of the charts and graphs that salespeople like to share are not that clear or compelling.  Some of them are even downright boring…

You can’t expect strangers to take the time to analyze a complicated chart your marketing team designed.Excessive graphs in sales emails

The following video explains more about why not to have images in your emails, and what to do instead.

Treats from my sold-out Cold Email Copywriting Workshop

I recently gave a virtual workshop on cold email copywriting to 100 eager participants. It was packed the entire time, and we had a blast together! Thanks to everyone who attended. 🥂 🍾 🐐 🐐

During this event, I gave live feedback with tracked changes 🔨 and comments ✏️ on 5 real emails sent by attendees.

I know many of you wanted to attend, but were unable to because it sold-out in less than 48 hours, without me doing any marketing.

Don’t worry: I’ll be doing another one soon (be sure to subscribe to the SalesFolk email newsletter and follow our Youtube channel for an invite to the next one!).

But in the meanwhile, I wanted to share the video recording with you.

However, the workshop went into overtime a bit since we had so many great sales prospecting questions and real cold email examples to review, and it ended up being almost an hour.

Rather than posting 1 LONG video, I decided to chop it up into bite-sized pieces and share them with you over the coming weeks. Each part will include a different cold email that I reviewed, and gave actionable feedback on.

Fun Fact: one of these later parts of this workshop has me doing a little freestyle I wrote about cold email! 🤓 🐐 😎 So be sure to stay tuned!

Here is part 1:

Want me to give you feedback on your emails?

Cool! All you have to do is submit your emails with this simple form, and I might review them over an upcoming email workshop. If I do, I’ll definitely make sure you’re invited.

Don’t worry–I’ll be much nicer than the SalesFolk “Hall of Shame!” 😜 And you can also stay anonymous, as long as you remove personal details from the email. Just check the box on the form that says you don’t want me to share who you or your company are.

Please keep in mind I do get many requests, so I might not get to your email right away. The sooner you submit your email, the more likely I am to review it.

You can submit more than one email, but I probably won’t review 8 emails from one person in a workshop. That way we can keep things more interesting, and make sure everyone gets a chance to have my feedback.

You do NOT need to submit the same email multiple times; that won’t increase your chances of me picking you. If anything, that will decrease them. 🤣

Looking forward to reading what you wrote! 🐐 🧞‍♀️

…I dream of a day where we can all safely gather together 🐐🐐🐐 for some really fun live events and SalesFolk workshops. Please stay safe and healthy in the meanwhile! 

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Filed Under: Cold Email Feedback, Persuasive Writing Tagged With: images in cold emails, tips for sales prospecting emails

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