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4 Ways to Research Your Sales Prospects Like A Journalist

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How well do you really know your sales prospects?

Do you know that they eat a poppy seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese and cinnamon at that cafe on 2nd and Market, or do you barely even know their first names?

You can’t craft a good cold email if you aren’t thoughtful. The first step to creating a single cold email or building a full-blown campaign is to deeply understand your audience.

Who are you sending cold emails to?

Personal trainers are very different than CEOs, and both are an entirely different creature than a VP of Marketing or Engineering.

Before you start writing any cold emails, you need a crystal clear understanding of who you’re writing to. Without this you’re hopeless.

Step 1: Be Curious About Your Sales Prospects

The best salespeople I know are genuinely curious individuals who are fascinated by their prospects and want to get to know everything about them and their pain points.

Before you start researching your prospects, you should have a few questions in mind. These questions will guide your investigation to make it more effective.

Ask yourself these questions about your audience or “buyer persona” before you start writing an email:

  1. What title/role am I contacting?
  2. What size company do they work for?
  3. What industry are they in? (Is there industry-specific jargon I should include?)
  4. What are their priorities at this time?
  5. What pain points do they have? What’s really keeping them up at night?
  6. How can you solve these pain points?
  7. What do they read? Who are experts they respect and follow? What do they talk about?

Step 2: Scour Your Sales Prospects’ Social Media

It’s great if you can actually talk to someone who fits the same buyer persona. This could be a friend, colleague, or one of your customers. However, if you don’t have access to these people and need to get started, a great approach is what I like to refer to as “e-stalking.”

Once you have decided what persona you’re reaching out to and what criteria define that persona, make a list of 5-10 people in each buyer persona that you want to contact.

Once you have a list of these people, research the heck out of them.

Go on Linkedin and learn everything you can about them.

For example, when I searched for Vice Presidents of Sales at Software companies with 200-2000 employees, I found some of these people:

sales prospecting

Let’s take a look at Doug Landis’ profile. He’s the VP of Sales Productivity at Box.

sales prospects

When doing prospecting research, you want to pay careful attention to your prospects’ “about section” to see how they describe themselves. In Doug’s case, he had a description about Box that was probably written by marketing, so that didn’t tell us a lot. So instead we can look at how he describes his past and present roles:

It’s not a big surprise given Doug’s role as “VP of Sales Productivity,” but Doug’s descriptions and recommendations are very sales driven, and focused on “strategy,” efficiency/productivity, and how he manages various programs. This gives us some clues about his duties at Box, as well as what he cares about and values.

Now let’s look at some of Doug’s skills:

sales prospects skills

Like the rest of your prospects, Doug’s skills are rich with keywords that tells us about his priorities and what technologies he regularly utilizes in his job. For Doug and other VP Sales at software companies, you’ll notice “Salesforce.com,” “CRM,” “SaaS,” “sales management,” and “leadership” all tend to appear.

These may seem obvious, but it’s important to make careful notes of the keywords on each person’s profile so you can start to see which keywords are repeated across 5-10 profiles to spot trends.

Let’s take a closer look at the recommendations Doug has received:

sales prospecting referrals

These recommendations both help you discover more keywords, and also give you a sense of the tone that is used in his industry, department and what KPIs matter to his career. You begin to see how “productivity” and managing programs are a theme for Doug. It’s important that we compare these to the other profiles though to see if Doug is an outlier with a unique experience, or if he has characteristics that are similar across our entire buyer persona.

After you finish 5-10 names of similar profiles you can see if there are any overlapping keywords that you should weave into your email campaign.

Next, hit twitter and google. Parse through their twitter feed to see what kinds of things they share, and pay attention for content type and recurring keywords. See if you can find any blogs they’ve created on Google, and check out their Google+ if they’re active on there. If they’ve spoken at a conference or other things, you can look at that too. The more you know about them, the better off you are.

Let’s analyze a few Twitter profiles from other VPs of Sales. I’ll look at Bridget Gleason from Yesware.

sales prospects twitter

Here’s what you’d find after searching just 5 minutes on Twitter:

  • Bridget recently attended the AA-ISP 15 conference
  • She seems to be focused on hiring, since she’s posted a number of articles about interview questions
  • Bridget highly values professional self-development based on the type of content she is consuming and sharing on Twitter
  • She is very data-driven: “Data almost always matches my intuition.” (April 21 tweet)

If you’re targeting a particular industry, research that industry a bit too. If you’re looking at salespeople, research things like “Top 10 sales influencers” or “Top 10 sales blogs.”

sales prospects research

Forums are also a great place to look. Once you decide which forums to look at, you should search them internally for specifics.  Quora, Reddit, and Linkedin Groups are great places to start looking.

Step 3: Take a Tour of Your Prospects’ Offices…Virtually

You need to understand your prospects’ environment if you’re going to grasp their mindset.

If I’m looking at software or technology companies, I typically start out by searching Crunchbase to see if they have any recent news or funding, but you also want to do a google search and visit their website. If their company has a blog, try to parse it for topics and tone, paying special attention to any blogs that are popular.

Learn to read like a writer. For every piece of content that’s being created and shared, you want to analyze the intention or goal behind it.

If someone posts an article called “5 Ways to Prospect Smarter,” their business is probably somehow related to sales or prospecting. After examining the company blog, product page, and price page (assuming they have them), try to determine what each company is trying to accomplish and who they’re selling to.

Then go a layer deeper and think about what their customers goals and pain points are, and how they’re trying to solve them with their product. This also helps you make sure this is indeed the correct audience/person for you to be reaching out to.

After you’ve gathered all this information and taken extensive notes, you’re ready to start thinking about how to create your cold emails. Skipping this step will make your cold email campaign a guaranteed flop.

Step 4: Make an Imaginary Friend & Write to 1 Person

This simple tip will make writing cold email campaigns so much easier.

Instead of trying to write an email that appeals to thousands, hundreds, or even just dozens of people, focus your message on a single person. Try to imagine everything you can about that person–from their morning routine to how they interact with their boss and their colleagues. The more you can imagine every detail of their life, the better the emails will be.

Do whatever you need to do in order to accomplish this—name them, print out a photo, draw a picture…whatever works for you.

Don’t worry about being too specific or narrow. The more you can feel you know this individual, the better your emails will be. It’s best not to think too much when you’re writing.

I always tell my friends and clients, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

Once you write the email, you can always go back and check your results against other names in your list to make sure what you wrote also works for them.

We have a great Buyer Persona Research Worksheet that you can use to build your own buyer personas based on the same internal methods our copywriters use when researching an email campaign. (All you have to do is create a free account on the SalesFolk Cold Email Crash Course, and you’ll be able to get that worksheet and preview other lessons in the course for free.)

4 Reasons Vanity is Ruining Your Cold Emails

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Vain Cold Emails

The overwhelming majority of the emails in my “bad cold emails” folder have one thing in common: they’re too company centric. Every day I get emails that drone on and on about about how great their company or product is, while failing to acknowledge my needs as a customer.  This week’s cold email critique focuses on how to make your outbound efforts more customer driven. So if you’re cold emails are falling flat, take notes.

1.You’re focusing too much on yourself instead of the customer

 “ We’ve been getting ready for a huge year here at _______after helping scale 16 companies in 2014. We’re gearing up and scheduling our next few companies that are preparing to scale in 2015. “

Your opening sentence should be engaging and dynamic enough to reel your prospects in and keep them reading. The issue with this line is that it’s far too self-focused. It’s not exciting and it doesn’t keep me interested.Your prospects don’t care what you’re up to; they want to know how you can help them be better. How can you expect your potential customers to buy into your services when you haven’t even explained the very basics of your product?

Cold Email ProTip #1: Be specific about how you can improve your prospects’ business or life. Speak to the customer like they’re your only client; not one of many on a list. Think about issues commonly associated with scaling a business: How can your product or service help ease those pains? The more you can personalize your cold emails, the more your prospects will connect with your message and respond.

2. You’re reaching out to the wrong people

“ We have 4 spots before the end of March and wanted to see if it makes sense to dig a bit deeper and explore if we are a good fit.”

The recipient of this email was not a qualified lead for this company, and so they shouldn’t have been emailing them in the first place.

You should be building a good targeted list instead of relying on your cold emails to disqualify leads. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re talking to a potential customer, don’t send the email. Remember, it’s all about quality over quantity. Sending out 3,000 emails isn’t doing anything for your business if you’re reaching out to the wrong people, and will brand you as a tactless spammer. While buying large pre-made lists might seem like a convenient way to cut corners with your outbound, they can actual cause more harm than good if you don’t check the quality and filter out noise. Bounced and untargeted emails are a waste of your time and money. Worse yet, bombarding the wrong prospects with unsolicited emails can get you labeled as a spammer, which can hinder your ability to execute cold email campaigns in the future.  

Cold Email ProTip #2: Spend time building a solid list for specific persona(s) based on title, company size, industry, location, etc. The higher quality list you have, the more effective your outbound efforts will be.  

3. You’re distracting your prospects from your core message

 “Here’s a quick program overview in case you have any questions:________ “

Don’t overcomplicate your message with links and graphics in cold email. Save these things for your content marketing campaigns; not your cold emails. If you have a high quality product, you don’t need bells and whistles to make is appealing to customers. When you ask prospects to click away from your cold email, you risk losing their attention. Your prospects don’t have time to be redirected to another site, so give them an overview of your product in as few sentences as possible.  

Cold Email ProTip #3: Keep your cold emails to 2-5 sentences. You don’t need to sell potential customers on all your product’s features in your first email. Focus your cold email efforts on intriguing prospects enough to get them on the phone, where you can explain your product in greater detail.

4. Boring your prospects with generic facts and figures

 “ PS. We have done 8 Marketplaces and 8 Saas companies since March. The first 5 raised over $215 Million in follow on funding from Top tier VC’s such as Sequoia, Google Ventures and NEA.”

Numbers mean nothing to your prospects without context. $215 million sounds like an impressive number, but your customers are looking for specifics. How did you help company X reach this goal, and how can this be applied to them? The problem with this line is that it’s not clear how this product/service helped these companies raise this level of cash. If you’re going to include figures in your cold emails, make sure those numbers are directly related to the performance of your product.

Cold Email ProTip #4: Invest in creating a quality case study with hard numbers that convey your strongest value add. Providing social proof (like the names of companies you’ve helped and your measurable impact) is a great way to instill confidence in the minds of your prospects. Remember, you’re asking potential customers to invest money in your product, so you need to lower their risk in trusting you and ease their doubts with a good track record.

The 7 Sins of B2B Cold Emails

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angry at B2B cold email

How confident are you with your cold email skills?

Are you getting 32 responses for every 100 B2B cold email you send?

Or do you only get 1 or 2 people responding?

Why didn’t all the other people you emailed respond?

You and your company are amazing, so what’s happening? Why aren’t the other 98% of people you’re emailing interested in hearing what you have to say?

If you’re hearing back from less than 10% of the people you’re cold emailing, you’re probably committing one of the 7 Sins of B2B Cold Emails.

7 sins of B2B cold email

#1. You’re sending B2B cold emails with crappy subject lines

Do you know your open rates? If less than 20% of people are reading your emails, your subject line sucks.

How are you ever going to get a higher response rate if 80% of your audience never even reads your email beyond the subject line? You can spend all day improving your email’s body text, but it won’t matter if you have a low open rate.

If you aren’t sure what your open rates are, but you wish you had some kind of crystal ball that would show you, get a tool that lets you track them.

#2. Your B2B cold emails feel impersonal like a robot

Do you have a docking station that you charge at, or are you solar powered?

If you’re human, then write like a human, not a robot.

People want to communicate with people, not machines.

Your readers are much more likely to respond to you if your emails are personalized to them. Including more specific details about the person, company, or industry will increase your success. Use custom inserts in your email with “[ ]” or “<< >>” depending on which script or tool you are using for the mail merge to include personalized details beyond just “<<First Name>>” and “<<Company>>.”

Going as far as to include a “<<Custom Sentence>>” by using a column in your spreadsheet for 1 custom sentence about that company takes time, but is highly effective. Using multiple custom inserts in one sentence like “We recently helped <<Competitor Name>> improve their sales by 23% on the <<Campaign Name>>” also works well.

#3. Your B2B cold emails are longer than the Great Wall of China

Your  emails shouldn’t be longer than an episode of Game of Thrones.

Keep things short. Aim for about 3 or 4 sentences. No more than 5 sentences!

Remove any jargon, redundancies or other non-necessary details. Synthesize all your points to the bare minimum, leaving only the gold nuggets.

D O N ‘ T    F O R G E T    T  O   S  P A C E    O U T    Y O U R   W R I T I N G  !

No one wants to read an email that looks like a book, so don’t jam it all into one paragraph. You want it to be easily read, even from a smartphone.

#4. Your value is missing or muddled in a sea of junk

Why should your reader open, read or respond to your email? Where’s the value for them?

Don’t mistake your features as benefits.

“Matching new leads against pipeline and customers” is Feature. Benefits are things like “saving 7 hours a week with Salesforce” or “Getting 5 more customers for every 10 emails you send.”

Your readers don’t care about your features, even if they’re really cool, unless they are beneficial to them.

#5. Selling too hard: Don’t take your pants off on the first date!

Never try to sell someone in a cold email.

All you’re trying to do is get someone’s permission to start talking. If you try too hard to sell them it will backfire and they will either (A) recoil and mark you as spam or (B) laugh and share your terrible spammy cold email around with their friends and coworkers.

You wouldn’t take your pants off at dinner on the first date, so don’t talk about “sales, discounts, or a big opportunity.”

Resist the temptation to write like a marketing/sales email, even if that is your end goal!

#6. Dropping the ball with the Call-To-Action

Your call to action is the second most important thing for your B2B cold email after the subject line for getting your desired response.

What exactly do you want the recipient to do?

If all you want is a 15 minute call with them, be clear about it. Just saying, “I’d love your feedback” isn’t enough. You should say something like, “When’s a good time this week for a 15 minute phone call to discuss…?”

#7. Thinking you’re done after you sent 1 B2B cold email

Just sending someone a cold email once is not enough for B2B, or anything else.

It’s great to have people respond on your first email, but you can’t stop trying there or you’ll be missing out on many more qualified leads.

EXAMPLE:

  • I had 100 prospects I was cold emailing. I got 18 responses from the first email.
  • I removed the positive responses from the list and sent the email again with a different template and tactic. Result: 12 more responses.
  • I sent to the same list again with another template and got 5 more responses.
  • On the 4th email I got 2 more responses. On the 5th I got 1 more response. On the 6th I got no responses, but I sent one more email just to be sure no one would respond.

 FINAL RESULT: 7 emails and I got 38 responses from 100 prospects. That’s 20 more responses than if I had quit after the first email.

You want to be relentless with your emails if you want to grow your business. Keep emailing your list until you hear a yes or “F*#& off, I’m not interested!”

And if you don’t get responses from those contacts, try to reach other contacts at their company instead.

homer simpson snow angel

Keep Iterating on Your B2B Cold Emails!

No one is perfect.

You don’t have to be a saint to get 10% response rates, but avoiding the 7 deadly sins of B2B cold emails will go a long way.

The more you practice sending cold emails regularly and test your templates to iterate them, the better they will get. And your response rates will definitely follow.

Check out our Cold Email Mastery Course for more tips on crafting cold email campaigns.

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

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