Stand out from the competition
"Fast growth" is what distinguishes startups from other companies and sets pretty high revenue targets. To grow fast, startups need to build a
predictable and scalable sales process at the early beginning to beat their competition and win the market.
When it comes to sales,
personalization is one of the strongest weapons against salesy competitors who care more about the number of messages sent or calls made than real engagement with their potential clients. While your competitors are still sending generic and human-less messages, you have a wonderful opportunity to make your
outreach authentic and remarkable. Considering all the latest economy shifts, you can try to think in terms of challenges that your prospects are more likely to deal with.
A couple of challenges that you can help your customers solve:
- set up the working environment
- organize effective internal communication
- urgent need to reconsider the offering or target audience
- a major decrease in pipeline revenue
- loss of long-term customers
- massive layoffs
If you did your research and are pretty aware of what they are going through, tell how your solution can be a cure for their headache. If you do not know for sure what's on top of their agenda at the moment, genuinely ask about how they and their team are holding up, how much their business was affected, what they're focused on right now. These questions will show your prospects that you're not looking for shortcuts, pitching your solution right away - you ask questions, you explore, which means
you CARE.
Increase your response rate and conversion
So many sales teams underestimate a personalized approach mistakenly assuming that simply changing a company's name, a person's job title or industry could help them rock their outreach. In reality, customers are very knowledgeable and these tricks no longer work.
What you should do is search for companies and leads that perfectly fit your ideal client profile, research their website, LinkedIn profiles and other social media to learn more about their business and craft your message based on these triggers. Thanks to hyper-targeted research and personalized outreach, we managed to
increase our response rate by 3 times and get 4 times higher conversion.
Here is an example of the message we use to engage
SaaS sales leaders in a discussion:
Hi Josh, It seems that you work with VC-backed startups to help their HR team automate daily routine tasks with your SaaS solution. Since the main challenge most SaaS companies are facing right now is to switch from the "here is our list of benefits, let's talk" approach to personalization, I connect with sales leaders to explore how their outbound sales process works. At Prosply we help companies build relationships based on mutual trust with their potential clients and initiate the discussion focusing on the quality of outreach, not just quantity. Here is our latest case study that describes how such personalized outreach allowed us to triple the number of meaningful conversations for a SaaS EdTech startup. Does this align with your current objectives or what would you consider as your main sales priority for 2020? Best regards, Alena. Gain trust from the early beginning
Being spammed by salespeople all the time, prospects are getting more selective when it comes to making new connections. They can recognize when a person doesn't value their time and is just throwing some generic information without conducting thorough
research first or trying to
understand their pain points.
If you do that, prospects not only will get annoyed sending you messages like "PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE" or "NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN", but they will never remember about you when they need solutions like yours. Even if your solution is not something they're looking for right now, the way you approach them can pique their curiosity, so they are more likely to view your profile, website and hopefully keep you in mind.
Working with different tech startups, we discovered that a personalized approach also helps
get valuable feedback from your target prospects. Maybe they are not ready to consider your solution because they work with another provider, or due to their company policy, or perhaps it's not their priority for the next quarter. There are plenty of reasons and you should rather get the answers to all possible Why-s to understand if it makes sense to pursue this company in the future.
Create a powerful brand voice
There is only one chance to make a good first impression. It's up to us, all sales professionals, how we plan to position ourselves and what emotions we want to provoke in our potential clients. No one likes to be a victim of a hard-selling sales manager, who is not listening to what you say and is not interested in understanding how you feel, what pitfalls are on your way and how urgent you need to get your job done.
Over the last years, the idea of
educating instead of selling has spread widely. Today the best marketing teams double down on organizing webinars, virtual events, happy hours, courses to give others their knowledge, experience, guidelines and help them become better in what they do. When the time comes to choose a vendor, whom would you keep in mind: Company A that sent you a batch of sales emails or Company B that shared with you a significant amount of valuable content that helped you overcome struggles X,Y,Z?
While changing the perspective from selling to showing how to do things, proactive companies
establish a powerful brand as industry experts which makes it much easier to attract their potential clients. The role of personalization hides in the way you address the current challenges of a specific group of people and your willingness to go the extra mile to provide a free piece of advice without asking for a long-term commitment.
Let's wrap it up
There are plenty of sales techniques and tricks that have been revealed and spoken about lately, so sales professionals often feel overwhelmed searching for the perfect one. The one that could bring them true success. The missing part of such an approach is a
human need — the need to be heard, the need to be understood and the need to be cared about.
If we treat sales like
human-to-human relationships, not another set of rules to follow, we start hearing what the market says. If we learn how to value the time of every single client and invest our efforts in getting to know them better, nothing can stop us on our way to
rocking the sales.