How do VIPs respond to sales emails? [video]

We have crunched 800 000 sales emails asking decision makers for a meeting and surprises popped up.

 

How do buyer personas react to sales email sequences?

Thousands of sales reps and sales developers use email outreach sequences, along with calls and social actions, to reach out to decision makers. We all know how sales prospecting can turn into an headache but... when done seriously, results are astonishing.

 

"At least 62% of VIPs read the sales messages and 21% respond to the sales reps"

 

Our study shows that email prospecting remains by far the most efficient way to reach out to decision makers, whenever we address SMBs or large accounts. When we dig into the data, we can even see how VIPs respond, whether they reject the sales request or accept to set a meeting.

In average, 40% of the responses are positive.

 

source > Persona Reach Index - check live statistics for your buyer persona

 

Best practices of email outreach sequences

Experience shows that adopting a solution to automatically send sales email sequences does not ensure success. We all receive tons of prospecting emails and we hate most of them. Human beings have a dark side: give them an automation tool and they will spam the world.

Good news is: spam doesn't work! Copy-pasting sales email templates give ugly results. Plus damages the customer experience, or the lead experience. Most of our target decision makers out there are hard to catch, tough to make them interested, and most of us need to arrange a productive/intelligent conversation to uncover their inner needs.

As this prospecting technique spreads over the market, we've met more and more CMOs or VPs of Sales turning their back on that technology (even the one from our best competitors) because of bad results. Meaning 1 to 3% response rate... Why? Because technology doesn't save us from empathy and thoughtful thinking.

 

Our list of 7 key success factors to achieve top sales outreach results is:

• #1: Target the right decision makers (signals, patterns, scoring and machine learning can solve this)
• #2: Get a deep understanding of the psychology of your buyer persona (what keeps them awake at night, past good and bad experiences, mind drivers, perception, etc.)
• #3: Segment buyer personas with variables (industry, location...) and tactical approaches
• #4: Build sales messages with empathy, authority, creativity, right tone, etc.
• #5: Test and learn, run A/B tests and take some calculated risks
• #6: Improve by crunching your data (send time, best personas, best delays in cadences, etc.)
• #7: Adopt a strong routine for triggering new conversations (mix of sales emails, priority calls and social actions)

The fact is: most of our prospecting costs are salaries. Thus spending a few hours analyzing the time spent on lead sourcing or sales sequence responses is the best investment we can make.

 

Discover the full email outreach study

With all the data we collect on sales email outreach, we obviously wanted to go deeper and run a live webinar to uncover and dissect insights, such as:

• the impact of subject and body length on response rates
• the influence of message tone on responses
• the evolution of positive/negative feedbacks during the outreach sequence
• how variables (job, name, etc) affect response rates
• which weekdays work best for meeting requests

We invite you to take time to watch the video below:

 

 

How Artificial Intelligence maximizes and streamlines sales prospecting?

Let's stop saying that prospecting is a tough job for a minute. Imagine your sales reps can spend half of their day having productive planned conversations with their targets. Without feeling rejected all day long. Thus we would probably all want to be in sales development: building a variety of new human relationships, challenge valuable people or even change their mind.

To achieve this ideal work we might NOT ONLY automate tasks, but also be far more efficient in lead sourcing and sales engagement. At the end of the day, sales developers have very simple questions: "Will these leads give me a meeting?", "Who do I have to call first?", "How do I engage with them to make them interested?".

All of our sales actions or lead responses give us incredible insights to adapt and improve. The remaining issue is that our human brain can't crunch all that data and give us a quick response. Artificial Intelligence algorithms are designed just for that: finding patterns in data and give us reliable advices to make our life easier.

If this makes sense to you, see what simple answers can AI give you for your sales prospecting.