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Discover the data, tactics and trends shaping successful prospecting in 2023 - based on 49.5 million emails.
Posted on: May 17, 2018
Reading Time: 16 minutes
Category: Prospecting
We’re proud to prospect.
Prospecting gets a bad rap. Dismissed as the grunt work of the sales process, at best, a necessary evil.
For us, though, it’s a pure, unadulterated pleasure.
The reason the thought of prospecting instils either tedium, fear or revulsion is not too hard to understand. Very few people do it well, and no-one likes to slog away at something that yields minimal success.
Every time.
Why trust Sopro?
We’ve picked up some great insights along the way, it is hard to imagine a more experienced pack of prospecting experts than team Sopro, so today we’re here to share some tips on what works and what doesn’t.
We’ve smelted our gold dust down to just a few valuable nuggets of wisdom, six simple steps to improve your prospecting results. Each with the ability to double your conversion rate and halve your lead cost.
Okay, Day 1 – let’s assume your scores on the doors look something like this:
Poor you.
It’s no wonder you claim prospecting is the unglamorous side of B2B sales and can be heard muttering under your breath about the shit end of the stick.
Let us sex things up a little for you. Let’s turn your uninspiring lead rate and frankly embarrassing cost per lead into the talk of the town.
Here’s what you’re aiming for.
Hard to believe there are just six easy steps to take you from zero to hero.
Your first step to greatness is child’s play – simple as chips, choose the right channels and forget the rest.
Here’s a secret, there’s a classic case of hedging bets that goes on with digital marketing, or to be more precise, ham-fisted number fudgery. A surprising percentage of companies spread their limited budgets across several channels, as if quantity ever won over quality.
The truth is, there are always one or two channels that outperform the rest. Sometimes significantly.
Our first lesson is this: forget covering five, ten or fifteen channels and, instead, concentrate on maxing out the one or two channels that truly deliver.
Source – Sopro client survey 2018.
Do what we do – rather than what everyone else does. Find a couple of channels that work for you, and then forget the rest.
And, if you’re looking for the best place to start, look no further than prospecting. In B2B scenarios, the cost per lead wins hands down, every time.
You just halved your cost per lead.
Now that prospecting is a priority channel, you can start focusing on the other things that matter.
Time to lock sights on the source of your data.
The thing is, prospect data has a very short shelf life and nothing less than 100% fresh data will do.
The first rule of data club is never buy lists. The second rule of data club is never buy lists.
We also recommend burning your database.
You may need a second to pick your jaw off the floor after that sucker punch. While you are reaffixing your chin, let’s explain.
Most studies agree that, on average, we now change roles about once every three years. We recently posted some interesting stats on employment churn here.
This gives any database, owned or bought, a half-life of just 18 months. Which is to say that any database that is more than 18 months old will most likely contain less than 50% valid data.
Prospect data becomes obsolete very fast indeed. It’s half-life hits during year two, but who in their right mind would prospect data that is even a third unreliable?
The data swilling around in your database can easily be four years old. Purchased lists are often even older. Let’s break down exactly what that means:
A lot can happen to data in four years, but trust us, not a lot will happen to your sales pipeline if you re-use four-year-old data to drum up sales conversations.
Using fresh data is the only reliable way to ensure you are not flogging a dead list. And by fresh we mean “verified today, accurate today”. Don’t waste time with any other strategy. Read our guide to discover how to build an accurate prospecting list.
Congratulations. You’ve doubled your lead rate twice, halving the cost per lead each time.
Time to lock in the hat trick.
For this we’re going to dive deep into the technology you are using to execute your prospecting activity.
Picture this:
Your Head of IT head is smiling for once. He’s just checked the deliverability stats and is smuggishly humblebragging another job well done. A 90% delivery rate on this month’s outbound email activity.
90% – that’s cool isn’t it?
Just one in ten mails bouncing, and you should see how many are going out every day.
Yet, your Head of Marketing is sweating… face contorting like she’s just eaten hot chilli hedgehog.
She knows that 90% a delivery rate could easily see:
So what went wrong?
At the heart of deliverability lies your sender reputation. This, in turn, is affected by a variety of factors including your domain and mailserver IP reputation. The factors may change but the results of a bad sender reputation are always the same. Senders with a good reputation get mail delivered – and those with a bad rep are junked (or blocked).
You can think of your sending reputation as being like trust:, you get the benefit of the doubt to begin with, it can be quickly and easily lost, and it takes hard work, time, and effort to build up again if lost. Sometimes the damage is never be repaired.
Here are the factors that can build or quickly burn your rep.
Your domain reputation is just as critical as the IP address you send from. If messages sent from your domain generate spam complaints and your domain is blacklisted, then switching your senders IP address won’t help.
A poor domain rep ensures messages are fast tracked to spam, wherever they originate from.
Every mailserver uses an IP address or a range of IP addresses to send emails from.
For the SEO buffs out there, this is the email equivalent of your websites user experience. ISPs take note of how your email messages are handled once delivered.
They consider:
If you are sending poorly targeted emails or using data that is far from fresh your engagement and deliverability metrics will soon suffer.
You’ll be a SPAM box regular before you know it.
Your email layout, the links it includes and the words in its subject line and body can impact on your reputation.
If your mails look sloppy they may well be marked as spam by the recipient, and you only need to poke your head above the 0.2% ‘marked as spam’ parapet to encounter some very heavy ISP crossfire.
Never use shortened links in your emails, these are treated highly suspiciously as they are often used by spammers to disguise malicious links leading to pages containing malware.
Similarly, watch what links your emails contain. A link to a website associated with spam or malware can prevent emails from being delivered.
Certain words can trigger spam filters too, especially if overused. Words like win, cash, finance, million, money and earn are obvious examples – but there are many other surprisingly innocuous words that have become associated with spam.
Top tip: Use Sopro’s email awesomeness checker to test whether your email content is up to scratch.
Cast your mind back just five minutes and we were telling you never to buy data. It’s not just that the data is no longer fresh – all that old data is adding to your spam rep.
Sending email to a large number of invalid or non-existent email addresses is killing your deliverability… and now your credibility.
Authentication and DNS Management
Authentication refers to how you verify that the mail you send is actually from you – and having poor authentication procedures in place is another way to damage your sender reputation.
Top tip: Use Sopro’s email deliverability tester to check if you’ve got your technical set up right.
Phew.
Glad all that tech stuff is over, it’s not the simplest to cover but the good news is you’ve doubled your performance and halved your lead costs again.
This is going great, and here comes the really easy part. We’re going to take a look at the messages you are sending. And we’re going to ask you to do just one simple thing: be a human.
Easy-peasy lemon squeezy.
A prospect is not a job role or a function. They are a human being first – and they’ll respond 10x more readily to messages that treat them as one.
Keep your messages simple and conversational. You are looking to set up a conversation – and no-one would want to chat to someone who speaks like this:
“Dear Sir,
Intech Software PLC’s recently released technology-driven integrated performance enhancement solution uses patented smart™ data management to provide an unparalleled opportunity to…”
The aim here is to knock their socks off but not knock them out cold.
Here’s how you need to craft a short mail that engages prospects.
So, what should your prospecting mail look like?
There’s no right or wrong – but try and take it from this:
“Dear Sir,
Intech Software PLC’s recently released technology-driven integrated performance enhancement solution uses patented smart™ data management to provide an unparalleled opportunity to…”
To something like this:
“Hi Dave
I read your post on cloud migration last week – really got me thinking about your approach.
Mind if I drop you a call… I have a couple of thoughts I wanted to run past you?
Do you have a few minutes on Thurs?”
Or, if you are feeling truly brave, try this:
We called it the great cow fail experiment – and it was remarkably successful. Not necessarily a top performing campaign but slightly above average. Certainly enough to make the point that features, benefits and social proof are not the lifeblood of an email campaign that traditional marketing theory purports.
To err, of course, is human. But so is to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and try again.
Failing to follow up your prospecting emails is an ROI deal breaker.
Don’t take our word for it though – take a look at some actual Sopro stats on how many leads come from chasers rather than first shots.
For those not willing to make the click – here’s the headlines.
Check it. Messages two, three and four have a better response rate than opening salvoes. This means that, in practice, 59% of all responses will come from chasers rather than your initial gambit.
So, if you’re too shy to chase – you’re kissing goodbye to the majority of your leads.
Let that sink in.
Going forward we are not going to affect that lead rate – successive doublings have seen it rise higher than most businesses would likely ever achieve internally.
From 0.5% to 8% is a heap of a leap. Halving the lead cost at every step.
But we can still halve your lead cost once more for luck.
Picture your average salesperson.
They sure as hell don’t. They like pitching, dealmaking and closing.
Yet, who does the task of prospecting usually fall on?
You guessed it: the sales team.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You don’t expect them to make their own clothes, so why are the sales team making their own leads?
Here’s the new prospecting manifesto:
Salespeople should be back to back pitching: it’s what they love and it’s what they’re good at.
The time has come to unhitch prospecting from the sales team and to let people who love it, do it.
When it’s handed over to people who specialise in it, guess what, we’ll do it twice as fast for half the cost… and I can guarantee you’ll more than halve your cost again.
And we know this because we’ve done it time and time again… it’s who we are and what we do.
OK, you’ve guessed what this is about: GDPR
Whilst compliance might not necessarily influence prospecting performance it can quickly bring you down to earth with a monster faceplant if you fall foul of the rules.
Your cost per lead is now at £37.50 and your lead rate at 8%.
Just don’t fluff the final hurdle.
IN 2018, Europe’s data protection rules had their largest overhaul in 20 years.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) hit on May 25th 2018 and drastically changed how you handle the information you hold about your customers and prospects.
There are new rights for people to access the information you hold about them, obligations for better data management and a new regime of ludicrous mode fines.
The changes include:
We set out more detail on the impact of GDPR on B2B marketing here: https://sopro.io/legal/#gdpr-faq
The best prospecting campaigns deliver a consistent flow leads and at a cost model that works. Now you know exactly how we operate… we’ve given you the keys to the kingdom.
But most of all great results happen when you love what you do.
And boy do we love to prospect.
If you want to convert more prospects for less, then give us a shout, we whistle while we work.
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