Prospect list building is a crucial part of the outbound sales process. The first step is defining your ideal customer profile (ICP). But as soon as you've done that, you actually need to find the right accounts, people and their contact details. Here's a tool stack for step two. A collection of outbound prospect list building tools and services that will help you regularly feed Woodpecker with fresh contacts.
Desktop cluttered with dozens of CSV files, their copies, and copies of their copies. Sending CSVs back and forth between your team members. Time wasted on finding a way to stay organized despite the chaos. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Indeed, for many salespeople, it is a daily struggle. So why not ditch the CSVs for something easier to manage and more teamwork-friendly? For example, build your prospect list in Google Sheets and have it integrated with your follow-up automation tool? No more copying, importing and exporting. Let me show you how to make your prospecting more productive with the new Google Sheets integration, we’ve just rolled out.
B2B prospecting is always a challenge but there are some shortcuts to success. I’ve put together some tips for boosting your chances with some simple but effective improvements you can make to your cold outreach.
List building is the outreach phase when we should learn as much as we can about our prospects so that we know what to put in our cold email copy. But what if we don't know what type of information to look for besides simple facts, such as company name, size, the number of employees, etc.? How to structure the research process to squeeze out the most of it?
Good email copy is important. In 2015, I wrote over 40 posts on various aspects of good cold email copy. But even with the best copy but no people to send it to -- we're stuck. So except for good copy, we need a list of contacts for our outbound prospecting. Outbound prospecting isn't easy. Building a prospect list is hard. It requires lots of time and effort. And with respect to your time and effort, there's one thing you need to do before you roll up your sleeves and start collecting contacts. Actually, it's a question you need to answer to yourself. Here's the question and how to find the answer.
Outbound emailing requires a lot of research into a target group and A/B testing before it can take off and become truly predictable. It's not unusual that a sales team (ours included) loses its motivation before that happens. Either that or they lose focus and target prospects ad hoc, just to get their numbers right. There is something that helped us. It is a proper goal setting.
To get replies, a cold email has to be short yet powerful, and intriguing. That's why each part of this short message has to bear meaning and play a crucial communicative role. Check if you know these 6 tremendously important steps to write a cold email for sales that works.
You can have control over your cold email deliverability. In outbound outreach, it's crucial how many of the emails you sent actually get to your prospects' inboxes. There are at least 14 points on a deliverability checklist that you can, and should, go through before you start off your email campaign. I've listed them below in three categories. Some of them you may already know of, but some may be new for you. Check the list and see if you're doing everything you can to ensure that your cold emails actually get to their destination.
A few posts back I showed you how you can maximize your webinar ROI by creating a webinar sales funnel. The foundation of the funnel are the follow-up emails for each stage: to drive more registrations, boost the show-up rates and post-webinar conversion. In this blog post you’ll find a bunch of email templates for each stage of the webinar sales funnel and a few tips on how to turn more webinar attendees into customers.