Why most sales outreaches fail and what to do about it.
You know that demand generation from traditional sales campaigns and outreaches is becoming increasingly difficult. Business leaders and decision-makers receive hundreds of emails every day. Prospects are constantly wading through an inbox full of requests.
Every sales outreach you make by email is received in that negative state. Dr. Carmen Simon of B2B DecisionLabs did research into how you as a seller can best deal with this. The research shows that after receiving many emails in text format, when a prospect receives an email in video format, they are still in a negative state, but less so. They’re not as anxious, and watching dynamic movements helps the brain moves towards a more positive state.
So that’s why Dr. Carmen encourages everyone to use video-based email & content, to prime your prospect’s brain from a negative to a positive state. B2B Decision Labs found that 60% of buyers said that dynamic movement and animations improve engagements and presentations. Yet, more than half of B2B Sales and SDRs don’t use these techniques. That’s a shame!
You need to explore the possibilities for sharing personalized video messages. You can do that by using Digital Sales Rooms. You send your prospect a link to a digital space, with contextualized content and personalized video messages that are highly relevant for them. What else is important for successful outreaches?
B2B DecisionLabs found out that you need to think carefully about outreach sequences. It does matter what asset type to use, at what moment, in your cadence. At the beginning of an outreach, an email containing a short infographic/text, received two times the email replies compared to longer versions. In this experiment: this sequence resulted in 64% more meetings! So remember, when creating awareness: shorter is better than longer, and a video is better than text.
You might be wondering: “do I really want long cadences of touch points?” If there is no engagement after the 5th touch point, just move-on to the next target? Right? Science says No! With that approach you are likely leaving money on the table. Let’s see what the study says.
The goal of the study is to answer what is the best choreography of content? Is there a secret formula for success? The answer is “Nope”. There is no ‘perfect cadence’. But they found the predictor of success: “persistent attempts over time”.
If you divide the cadence of steps in three parts: the first 5 touch points, 6 till 10, and 11 till 14, then 78% of all opportunities were created after step 5, after sending the first content asset. 50% were created after step 10 after sending the second content asset. Conclusion: after 5 touch points, you better hang in there if you want to get that customer meeting.
What about the handover between SDRs and AEs, were there any insights in the follow up? Does speed matter? Definitely! Speed matters. Overall, you can see here that sellers won twice as many deals when prospects received a response within 24h. That counts both for smaller and larger deals. But does responding quicker also affect the deal size? Yes, the deal size is substantially higher. Conclusions: speed matters, because it leads directly to higher conversion rates and bigger deal sizes.
Call to action for sellers:
- To empower customer engagements, use video-based Inmails & content. Remember: shorter is better than longer, and video is better than text.
- For outreach cadences there is no secret formula. The predictor of success is “persistent attempts over time”, hang in there!
- Aiming for higher conversion rates and bigger deal sizes? Then speed matters in lead follow up!