{"id":772,"date":"2015-01-14T05:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T13:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/salesfolk.com\/?p=772"},"modified":"2015-10-07T20:31:46","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T03:31:46","slug":"ambition-got-72-replies-b2b-cold-email-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salesfolk.com\/blog\/ambition-got-72-replies-b2b-cold-email-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"How Ambition Got 73 Replies From Their B2B Cold Email Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

Would you like to get dozens, if not hundreds of responses from each of your outbound email campaigns in 2015?<\/p>\n

During a 6 week engagement with Ambition<\/a>, a sales productivity and gamification startup from Y-Combinator, our initial cold email copy generated 73 responses from 578 leads<\/b> gathered by Ambition. The 578 leads were concentrated under 2 of Ambition\u2019s ideal customer personas: \u201cVP\/Director of Sales\u201d and \u201cVP\/Director of Sales Operations,\u201d and the campaign was created and ran based on the principles of Aaron Ross\u2019 bestseller Predictable Revenue.<\/i><\/p>\n

In addition to generating responses and qualified leads for Ambition, we uncovered cold email lessons that Ambition can use to further improve their existing and future outbound email campaigns. These same lessons can be used by any SaaS startup doing outbound sales.<\/p>\n

This is the first blog post of 3 about our experiences collaborating with Ambition in their outbound email efforts. This first post discusses the premise behind the engagement, and a few major takeaways from this outbound email experiment.<\/i><\/p>\n

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How to Create And Execute a Scalable B2B Cold\u00a0Email Campaign<\/b><\/p>\n

We began our engagement with Ambition by digging into to their value proposition and canvassing their customer personas. Successful cold email campaigns require having a deep understanding of the buyer persona\u2019s needs and pain points. In order to do this we leveraged our existing knowledge of VP Sales and VP Sales Operations titles while also talking to Ambition\u2019s sales and marketing team about their buyer personas and sifting through their sales and marketing collateral.<\/p>\n

After listing out a several dozen ideas for different topics that would make effective email copy for Ambition, we were ready to start architecting our campaigns. Each of the 2 personas would get 8 email touches, but since we A\/B test everything, we wrote 16 emails (1-8 A\/B) for each prospecting persona.<\/p>\n

The various list of email ideas include: opportunities to social engineer initial points of contact, like questions about the prospect\u2019s Salesforce account, benefits of using Ambition, and the potential negative consequences of not having a product like Ambition. \u00a0When setting up the sequence of the emails, I always order the emails in such a way that their progression feels natural while also letting me do AB testing. Specifically I\u2019m looking to see which value propositions resonate the best with the prospects and how the prospects react to positive offers that add value versus a fear of loss.<\/p>\n

After we completed Ambition\u2019s email templates, their sales team loaded the templates into an \u00a0outbound email tool called PersistIQ<\/a>, which is made for sending and tracking mass cold email campaigns. The lists for each persona were divided randomly into 2 new lists to create a \u201clist A\u201d and \u201clist B\u201d for each persona to receive emails 1-8A and 1-8B. Ambition started blasting out emails to their list from November 8th, and continued sending each prospect 8 emails approximately every 4 days until December 22nd, unless the prospect responded or unsubscribed.<\/p>\n

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Major Lessons & Results Learned From Ambition\u2019s B2B Cold Email Campaign<\/b><\/p>\n

We\u2019ll go into more detail behind all the findings of Ambition\u2019s email campaigns in the upcoming blog posts, but for now here are a few:<\/p>\n