Cold calling and email prospecting still remain two of the reliable and popular channels for B2B sales teams to fall back on, to drive their sales pipeline and overall sales success. With the number of growing digital channels today, in a hybrid selling environment, it is crucial to not only double down on only the ‘’most efficient’’ channels based on where your target prospects are most active, but to also optimize internal processes, metrics-assessments systems and outreach practices to streamline efforts and boost potential ROI from your chosen channels.
Most business professionals use their business email throughout a typical working day, for a B2B salesperson to ignore email outreach would cause more dearth to the health of a sales pipeline.
For sales people to optimize how they can measure the effectiveness of this channel while trying to boost ROI from it, the following few points might help:
Email Open Rates Are Not Enough
Sales reps need responses and they need responses fast. While most B2B sales cycles are typically longer than cycles in other industries, what is important to keep in mind is that – open rates for a marketing team can in some cases be a suitable metric to understand the performance of a campaign.
But a sales person needs to focus on something more pertinent, like reply-rates or click-through rates to better identify what can drive the prospect forward in the buying journey or where the prospect’s potential interest lies.
Including relevant links (to a product or pricing page) can be useful in enhancing the email outreach and measurement experience, for instance.
Reducing Bounce and Preventing Opt-Outs
Bounce rates and opt out rates are elements that both marketing and sales teams need to be attentive towards based on their current campaigns. For marketers, better data cleaning practices and regular update of records can help reduce bounces and better visibility into what type of message a prospect would respond to can help reduce unsubscribes and opt-outs.
For sales people, while data cleaning is important in keeping bounce rates for their prospecting campaigns low, it is also important to try and identify why prospects are choosing to opt-out if the unsubscribe rate seems too high for a particular email send.
Because, high opt out rates for a sales campaign could mean: the target list is not optimized enough, or that the high-interest prospects or those in-market for your product have not been identified properly, or that the health of a prospect list is poor…
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Automated Sequences Need to be Tweaked, not Left Alone
Most larger sales teams will choose to automate sequences to a certain target list based on who is on that list and what message they want to broadcast.
But this is where sales reps / sales people can build more impact, by not just scaling their outreach efforts through automated sequences but understanding how to use the right metrics to tweak automated sequences in real-time. Not a lot of sales people end up doing this, with most preferring to automate a set of emails and moving to a next campaign or outreach initiative.
Sales Email Prospecting can be Challenging, But That’s a Good Thing!
With customer sentiments constantly changing and market dynamics undergoing shifts, B2B marketing and B2B sales teams need to stay atop latest trends and practices while finding newer and more innovative ways to hack the typical B2B buying journey or cycle.
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