Top 5 sales triggers you can track easily and sell more.

sales triggers

Whether you are looking for a new deal or figuring out how to move existing deals forward quickly, tracking sales triggers adds momentum to your efforts.

What are sales triggers?

Sales triggers are events that signal an opportunity for cross-selling, upselling or new customer acquisition. 

In sales, timing is everything, as per Craig Elias, author of Shift Selling, your odds of closing a sale improve by 74% if you reach out to the decision-makers at the right time

Tracking sales triggers provide sales reps with unique business context to initiate highly personalized conversations at the right time. 

Sales triggers help you uncover actionable insights both at the account and prospect level.

Getting the information about an event is only half the job done as your competitors might also be receiving similar information. How you use the insights to make a conversation relevant to your prospect gives you the real edge. 

Here are 5 sales triggers you can track easily. We will also cover how to track and effectively use them.

1. New Funding round or Additional Funding.

2. Geographical Expansion/New Market Entry.

3. New Product/Service launch.

4. New Hirings.

5. Management changes


1. New Funding or Additional Funding round  

Any company raising funds is an indication of an increased budget for spending across functions. Companies’ focus areas of investing fresh money may vary depending on the stage at which they have raised new or additional funding.

An early-stage company might plan to spend more on product and services that help accelerate growth from a marketing and sales perspective, whereas, a late-stage company may look to expand to a new market or geography or build a new product line.

Based on the stage identify which companies can benefit most out of your product/services. 

How to track – 

Globally on an average 1000-1200 companies raise new rounds of funding and there are multiple sources you can use to stay fully updated – 

1. Using Google Alerts, you can set daily funding alerts globally or any specific geography.

funding alert

2. Use Easyleadz to access recently funded startups and contacts, list is updated on a regular basis and download needs a small share and love from you.

recently funded startups

3. You can use Crunchbase Pro to set alerts for receiving regular updates about funding.

funding

How to personalize messaging

Your prospects would be getting Congratulatory messages left, right and center. Congratulate them but go beyond just congratulating and immediately making your ask. 

Use insights from funding information to share how exactly they stand to benefit from your product/services at this point in time. Create urgency without being pushy.

For e.g.

It takes persistence to build a thriving and growing business, on top of it getting the validation from the investment community is commendable. I wanted to congratulate you for the recent funding round.

At this phase of the growth, businesses start adopting processes to build a scalable customer services team, with it comes to the need for implementing a scalable customer service software.

We at X  helped companies like {similar customers to the one you are approaching} at the same stage {benefits}.


2. Geographical Expansion/New Market Entry

An existing customer of yours might be having plans to start pitching their product to a new market or a foreign entity may be planning to move into the geography you already serve.

In such events budgets are already lined up for expansion and the time is right to make a move and engage the decision-makers early. 

This is also the time when companies start making new hires. 

How to track –

1. Business expansion news via Google Alerts

2. LinkedIn sends Daily Rundown every morning and covers majors Industry and Company events. Follow target company pages and any company related mentions or news will appear in your feed.

news alerts

3. Twitter is another free source where companies send out such announce via their official handles or you can use Twitter’s advanced search functionality to search for specific keywords.

twitter search

How to personalize messaging

Expansion to any geography or market brings its own set of challenges like identifying new vendors, hiring locally, looking for new office space, etc. 

Identify the pain points your product/service stands best to address. Be specific with how you have helped other companies post-expansion. 

If you have helped a competitor and it has been a success even better.

For e.g.

I came across the news of your companies plans of expanding to X {location/geography/market} and having an immediate conversation would be valuable.

We at {company name} have helped companies like A, B, and C in building a talented team of software developers by connecting them with top-notch talent in X {location}


3. New Product/Service Launch

Whenever new product or services are launched or about to be launched, there are budgets and resources already allocated. 

For e.g. An e-commerce company moving to an omnichannel retail strategy by opening up a line of stores.

Generally, there are two types of opportunities that open up – 

  • When there is an announcement of an upcoming launch.
  • When a company has recently launched.

Depending, in which scenario your product/service could benefit you can track either or both.

How to track

1. Use Twitter to get information about upcoming and recent launches using keywords like “recently launched” and “launching soon”.

2. Google alerts

3. Follow company pages on LinkedIn for updates.

How to personalize messaging

Product/service launches present a short window of opportunity. It’s important to do your homework before reaching out to your prospects as to how exactly your product/service can make the launch successful.

For e.g.

With the launch of your new upcoming stores across 5 major cities, I thought to drop by and ask if we can connect and discuss, how we can help furnish your stores.

We at {company name} have helped companies like A, B, and C during their pre-launch phase of expanding their stores across the country.


4. New Hirings

Information about hiring patterns of a company can uncover a lot of insights which would otherwise be hard to find. All you need to do is access job boards regularly mostly free of cost.

Tracking hiring can help you identify – 

  • Fast-growing companies. If any company in small-mid size range has a lot of job openings across different functions that is your cue.
  • Technologies used by companies. Not all technologies used by a company can be uncovered from the outside, either you ask someone or look at which roles they are hiring for and indirectly identify. For e.g., If a company is hiring for Salesforce admin (given the company is not a hiring agency or technology services provider) they ought to be using Salesforce.
  • Product/Services they may need. Depending on the role a company is hiring for and growth in a particular function will help you identify if there could be an arising need for the product/service you are selling. 

We at Easyleadz have used New job hiring for prospecting and sending cold emails to companies hiring for B2B sales, Inside Sales and similar roles. Using this approach our response rates increased by 30-40% across all our campaigns as compared to targeting companies who are not currently hiring.

job hiring campaign

For one of the campaigns, we targeted startups hiring for Inside sales roles via Angel.co and got a 28% response rate primarily because we reached out at the right time while they are expanding their sales team and trying to drive more revenue.

How to Track – 

1. Set up customized job-alerts via Angel List For e.g., If you help companies in providing talent for Data analytics, set up job alerts for the hiring of Data analytics, Big data analytics, data science, and other similar roles.

angel hiring alert

2. Use LinkedIn Job search to track the number of open vacancies for particular accounts you are looking to target and more filters to create a targeted search.

linkedin job search

How to personalize messaging

You can use new hiring as a conversation starter, it also shows your prospect you are making efforts to know more about their company than just being generic.

For e.g.

My army of robots told me that you are hiring for Inside sales at @companyname. 

I thought of dropping a quick note about how we can help your expanding sales team by providing contact details of right decision makers for lead generation campaigns.


5. Management Changes

Whenever senior management changes take places, it leads to changes in how decision making is done at any organization. Creating an immediate impact at a new job is a top priority on every new hire’s agenda and more so at the C-level. 

If you can make a new VP make a positive impact at the start of their stint through your product/service, you not only have a loyal customer but also an advocate.

Track these changes – 

  • When a new senior-level management shift happens at your existing customer.
  • Senior-level management shift happens at an account you had been targeting. 
  • A senior-level manager at an existing customer moves to a C-level position at a new firm.
  • Promotions, a bit underused but you can use it to great effect with someone in your existing network or when you come to know of a new prospect moves from managerial to executive level.

Initially build a relationship and start pitching about your product/services down a few months into their tenure. Don’t pitch just when they have joined/moved as initially mostly it is about settling down and getting familiar with the new workplace. 

Decisions worth making generally start to take priority 2-3 months down the line. It is the most opportune time to close the sale.

How to Track – 

1. Set up Job alerts for senior-level executive positions relevant to you via Linkedin or Angel List

2. Use sales navigator to track job changes at positions you want to track along with other targeting criteria applicable. Linkedin also gives you a notification when someone in your network gets promoted or starts a new 

linkedin navigator

How to personalize messaging

Don’t just congratulate your prospect, everyone would be doing that instead take this opportunity to show your prospect how you can help them make an impact in their new role.

Keeping the conversation only to a congratulatory note would be the waste of an opportunity. 

For e.g.

I wanted to congratulate for assuming the responsibility of the VP of sales at @companyname. 

Hope you are settling down well in your new role and thought of sharing a few articles which might be helpful for getting started in your new role.

[links]

Wishing you success!


Here is what to do next

1. Tell us which sales trigger you have used and how

2. If you are curious to learn more about sales triggers. You can read more in this post by Hubspot

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Sales Intelligence

How to Set up Cold Email outreach for B2B lead gen

cold-email-outreach

The genesis of this guide comes from our experience of talking to a lot of customers who buy custom email lists from us for their lead generation campaigns. On asking them “How are you going to set up your Cold Email outreach?” most of the times reply was –

“We will use MailChimp to send emails”

That got us thinking that it’s high time we laid out the process for sending cold emails based on our personal learning and experience.

At this point you might be wondering why are these guys hating on Mailchimp, well we have nothing against MailChimp. In fact, we love MailChimp and use it ourselves for sending out newsletters and setting up landing pages. 

However, a tool is not suited for every application although it might have a certain feature.

You can chew the food on the plate with your teeth, but you can’t possibly be chewing the plate itself, even though you might be capable of it!

Tenor.com

First, let us have a look at Why Mailchimp is not the best-suited tool for running cold email outreach and then we dive into the basics of cold emailing and learning how to set up an email outreach campaign to generate leads.


What Mailchimp is suited for?

MailChimp is simple and yet powerful marketing software for – 

  • Building beautiful landing pages.
  • Building your subscriber list via Opt-In pages.
  • Running Newsletter and Email marketing campaigns for your subscribers.
  • Managing and segmenting your audience.

Why MailChimp is not a good fit for cold email outreach?

Violation of Basic Terms

First of all, MailChimp forbids cold emailing. It clearly states in its TOS that you should have subscribers in your list who have opted in and allowed you to send them marketing emails. 

Violating the policy may lead to suspension of your account.

Deliverability

This is one of the most important reasons as to why it’s not a good fit. MailChimp triggers campaign emails from shared servers which means originating IP of your message may be flagged as spam by the recipient’s email server if it has received spam messages in past from the same IP, which likely can be the case.

Without sounding too technical what it means for you as an end-user is that your email deliverability is impacted as your emails are more likely to end up in the Spam or Promotions folder.

Additionally, this lowers your open rates and hence the response rates.

No follow-up scheduling

You can’t set up scheduled follow-ups based on replies, which improves open and response rates. You will have to create another campaign and the whole process becomes manual and unscalable. We will explain this in detail, later in the post.


Why Cold Email Outreach?

Cold email outreach is a powerful technique to get in front of the right prospects. People have launched startups, grown blogs and landed their dream clients by sending cold emails.

Now let’s dive into the scenario where you are looking to generate leads for your business.

You have a list of emails and your objective is to reach out to these prospects who yet don’t have any idea about your product or services. 

What do you think should be the prime objective if you are looking to generate interest and close a sale?

It should be to get responses from a few of the prospects if not all and jump onto a discovery call to understand their pain points and challenges.

How can you achieve that or what would it require?

You can achieve that by setting a cold email outreach process that works as a growth machine to drive leads.

Now let‘s explore each step one by one.


1. Targeting and Email list building

Targeting lays the foundation to generate high-quality leads through any channel let alone cold emails. Setting up any lead generation process without getting the targeting right is like building a castle on shifting sand. 

Right targeting will drive your outreach in the right direction. So how do you get targeting right?

Start off by researching into the business needs and challenges of the Industries and companies (within those industries) who stand to benefit the most out of your products and services.

Once you have narrowed down, now look at which decision-makers would be the right prospects.

This exercise will help in 4 key areas you will –

  1. Get to know who your potential customers are and save you tons of hours which otherwise would have gone in trying to reach out to everyone.
  2. Be able to create your Ideal Customer Profile which will help you in building a targeted contacts list.
  3. Know customers’ pain points, challenges that not only the companies face but also the individuals, which can be used for crafting personalized emails and boost replies.
  4. Get better at lead scoring and comprehending reasons behind why a particular customer is buying and why not.

Now that your targeting is in place next important thing is to get the email list ready. At this step, you can go in 2 directions –

  1. Either build the list yourself using Email finder tools or
  2. Buy a list as per your targeting requirements from data providers like Easyleadz.

Either direction is fine as long as you have weighed in on the following factors –

  1. How niche or broad is your targeting criteria. (Doing In-house vs Outsourcing)
  2. Availability of time and Budget.

Learn here about Building a quality B2B email list


2. Writing personalized email copies

This is the step where people falter the most but the only way to become good at not faltering at this step is by repetition and experimentation. That is how we have become better here at Easyleadz. 

As is the case with building any other skill you become better at cold emails as you write more and keep on experimenting with formats and optimize  

There are dozens of email templates out there, in fact, we also share templates with our readers but truth be told simply copy-pasting a template won’t get you much success.

Instead of simply copying, make any template your own.

Meaning, understand the structure of communication and add your own personalization based on the understanding of your audience. it’s definitely hard work. 

Most people skip the hard work and then complain we are not getting responses.

Tenor.com

In the beginning, write cold emails from scratch, draft a few different versions and test them. Having said that there are few Cold email best practices that you can always follow – 

  • Personalize subject lines and test different versions. Short and crisp or long form such as asking a question like Joe, Are you looking to scale lead generation?
  • Opening lines should be engaging and warm up the reader to read through the whole email. You can be direct or quirky or clever. Try all different variations and assess what works best in your case.
  • Make it about your prospect’s problem and how you have a solution and not about your product features or bouquet of services.
  • Always close with a call to action and preferably a single one. It is necessary to direct your reader towards making a decision at the end. Never leave it. You can ask about connecting over a call or seeking their permission to send more information or simply asking them to watch a video or webinar.
  • Keep your signature short and crisp with links to social profiles preferably LinkedIn. Don’t stuff it with too much text and company logo.
  • Don’t use too many links or images in your email body. It will negatively impact deliverability.
  • Don’t include attachments as at times google’s spam filters route the mail to spam even if its a scanned attachment.

In order to dive deeper into the technicalities of writing cold emails, you can refer to

Cold Email Tutorial by Cathy Patalas.


3. Setting up Email domain – Basic checks

Next thing you need is an email domain to send emails from. It is highly advised to not send emails from your main business domain such as easyleadz.com. Instead, use an alternate but similar sounding domain for e.g. easyleadz.in. 

The benefit here is that even if people mark you as spam on rare occasions it will not impact your main business domain.

Once you have your email domain set up, create a personal email account using your name. Don’t plan to send emails from ids like info@domain.com or sales@domain.com. It lends credibility to the overall personalization you are trying to achieve with your email body.  

You can create your email account either using service from your Domain hosting service provider or use Gmail for Business or Outlook. 

We would advise using Gmail since most of the cold email automation tools allow you to quickly connect your official Gmail account in a single step without having to go into technicalities of manually configuring IMAP and SMTP settings.

Irrespective of whether you have a new email account or an existing one if you are using it for the first time to send cold emails at scale, keep in mind these basic checks – 


4. Setting up Email Outreach Tool

Now comes the step where you can automate your outreach process and generate leads at scale. So what is an Email outreach or Cold Email automation tool?

Cold Email outreach tools help you send out personalized cold emails at scale while mimicking human-like sending behavior. You can set a sequence of emails (schedule followup emails in case no replies) for each recipient and the tool automatically send follow-ups based on reply detection on previous emails. 

You would be easily able to track open, reply, click rates and optimize the performance of your campaigns.

For e.g. you can easily check which email in the sequence is getting most replies and which one is not and accordingly optimize. 

You can set up your campaigns in 2 steps – 

  1. Connect your Email account and upload an email list
  2. Create Email sequence.

First 2 steps are easy, I am going to focus on the third.


Setting up Email sequence

You might be sending cold emails to 100’s of prospects but if you are not sending follow-ups your open rate is impacted negatively by at least 30-40% and reply rate by at least 10-15% 

This campaign had only one email

This campaign had one followup email

Note the difference in open rates and reply rates

In our experience of sending 1000’s if not millions of emails on an average, it takes at least 3-4 touches to get a response. 

Here are the basics of setting up followup emails – 

  1. Setup at least 3-4 follow-ups in your campaign, although recommended, is 5-6. 
  2. Keep the flow of communication in followup emails in context to the previous email. You can even take the prospect through an awareness journey wherein the first email your CTA can be as simple as reading an informative post and then in one of the next follow-ups you can ask for a call.
  3. Wait at least 2 days before sending a followup email. Give your prospects space and time to evaluate what you are offering to them.

Now coming to actual tools you can use, there are many of them with their own unique features and value proposition. 

However, there are certain standard features that most of the tools provide – 

  • Email verification and list cleaning
  • Reporting features like Open, Link and Reply tracking
  • Personalization tags
  • Follow-ups
  • A/B Testing
  • Contact Management
  • Integrations with Third Party apps.
  • Free trials.

We are going to look at 3 of the tools we have tried and loved them –


1. Woodpecker.co

Easy to use UI even if you are new to using email automation tools. Found it really easy to get started right away without much learning curve involved. 

Pricing starts at $40 per month and you can send emails to an unlimited number of prospects. They have 14 days of free trial available.

2. Reply.io – 

Reply has been around for almost 5 years and the team has added some exciting features like Direct Calling, Gmail Plugin, and Live Tasks to make the platform more powerful over the years and enterprise adoption worthy. One thing I loved about their email composer is the ability to choose templates right from the composer itself. 

Pricing starts at $55 per month with 14 days of a free trial. In higher plans, you get a has a host of team collaboration features

3. Lemlist

Lemlist is the new kid on the block and they have created quite a buzz with their Image and Video personalization features. Those of you curious to try out images and videos in cold emails Lemlist is your go-to platform.

Pricing starts at $29, in the base plan you can send emails to unlimited prospects with a cap on daily sending limit to 100 emails.


Here is what to do next

1. Tell us which part of cold email outreach you were not paying attention to earlier.

2. Download the PDF Version of this guide

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