Hyper-Personalised Outreach: Engineer Top Quality Leads - Recording

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:04

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a show for startups who want to improve how they sell. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today, and a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. My background is as a computer scientist and ex software engineer with over two decades experience of b2b marketing and sales experience. And I'm joined today by my co host, and friend, Kiran. Hi, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:36

Hi, Alastair. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill. I'm also a co-founder and director of the operative partnership. I've got 25 years worth of experience across business development and sales operations. I've worked in finance and also in technology.

Alastair Cole 0:55

Thank you, my friend. Well, very excited about today's show focusing on hyper personalised outreach, and how that can be used to engineer higher quality leads. And it's an absolutely critical area given just the amount of noise that is out there. In the marketplace, it feels like we're inundated with messages and email sequences and sales messages constantly. It feels very hard to cut through the noise right now. Maybe it's a good way to start about what's your definition or your thoughts on what is hyper personalised outreach, from your point of view, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 1:38

So hyper personalised outreach for me is where you're using some kind of technology to help you assess. Now we've tried to cut through the noise as Alastair was saying there was what we've got here is a lot of noise out there. And we've got tools that help us do either semi automated, or probably might even automate some of the functionality by itself to have to cut through the noise.

Alastair Cole 2:04

Yeah, we know that suborn because recent Gartner stats show that 87% of b2b buyers expect to be delighted before and after the sale. So it isn't just leading up to the sale, but afterwards, too, but across the board. Buyers are expecting to have their content and their experiences. personalised and this is where personalised outreach is sitting, you want to talk us through this cue and where you see it sitting in the sales process.

Kiran Gill 2:38

Yeah, so when we're talking about outreach, and especially when from the hyper personalised outreach point of what we're doing this LinkedIn live today, this is the top end of your funnel. So when we're talking about cold, warm and hot prospects, this is where you're warming everybody up. Potentially, they might be building you people you've had contact with, they might be people that you've never had contact with. So it's the top end of the funnel, it's about getting that first meeting, that's what you're attempting to do. It's outreach, it's there to try to get you to either that first meeting, or maybe it's even to get them into the web, you know, to your website to purchase something, you know, depending on what you're selling, how you're selling it, you might have different outcomes that you're probably trying to achieve.

Alastair Cole 3:22

Yeah, and if you're thinking about getting into this area, hyper personalising communications and outreach, then don't, don't worry, if you're right at the beginning of your journey, you're gonna get something for the show. And if you're further advanced, as well, we're gonna look at that too, we're going to be running through the five phases that are needed that you need to stitch together in order to make it all work. And that, that, you know, outreach, this, this whole technology powered outreach sits very much in this the green segment on the left the this is the seven core areas of startup sales. So obviously, it's a big part of lead generation. There's also big elements of sales strategy. So it sits a little bit of a customer success too. But really, the big focus is on lead gen. And these are the seven areas that we assess startups when we move through our 360 sales diagnostic and you can also see that we break that down into 52 core metrics so very much in the lead gen space obviously outreach and let's talk a little bit about where we've had some success in this area the past and current oh you want to maybe touch on our work with with similar died?

Kiran Gill 4:32

Yeah, so when we implemented our sales strategy into lead generation into similar dying, it was probably properly hyper personalised, but we used several tools to do outreach to get to the right people to push them towards a meeting or a potential demo of the actual tool that they were selling. Now this was quite high level and in the sense of high value, so the outreach is going to be very hard to be very personalised, it wasn't something that we could be generic. So we had a process that we put together. And you can see the numbers there are quite impressive, because at the time when we met our friends at SR dying, they were really struggling to get meetings or getting meetings or getting in front of clients to actually even show the tool or even speak about it. So we devised the plan, and also a process that helped them get more meetings. And that obviously helped them generate more sales because they could get in front of people. The Hyper personalization, part of it was we were making sure that the people that they were sitting in front actually had that need and that pain point that they were addressing, and that's a part of hyper personalization, I think sometimes goes amiss sometimes.

Alastair Cole 5:45

Yeah, and I think, you know, it's not maybe not the easiest phrase to save, it feels like it's quite, you know, targeted but actually the philosophy for me behind hyper personalising stuff really climbing into the research at every single point, making sure that the communications are tailored so that your buyer you're good with buyers get something very special, we like to talk about it as a gift, they get a gift every time you reach out to them. And that kind of philosophy of just being outstanding in terms of your retailer communication, and how you engage is absolutely key. And that sits throughout each of these five phases. The first one of which is data collection, right? It's absolutely critical that if you're going to undertake any kind of automated semi automated personalization, you've got to have good quality data. Right? And, you know, what are we talking about? What are the kinds of building blocks of data we should be, we should be thinking about extracting from our company, if we were a start up on the call, care and what kind of data should we start getting together?

Kiran Gill 6:50

Okay, so if you've been around for a few years, you've sold your product a few times, you've got a CRM system, hopefully, you might not have you might have an Excel spreadsheet, whichever way you've got an understanding of who your clients have been or who your best clients have been, since you've started selling your product or services, that's the first place you should go to also your sales playbook. You should have one if you haven't got one to speak to us. But if you've got a sales playbook within your sales playbook, you should have a very, very detailed, ideal customer profile, giving you an understanding of exactly who you're targeting and who you should be looking for. So that's the foot, probably your two basic pillars. Once you've got those, you can then spread that out and get a little bit more technical in the sense that you might have web traffic, you might have intent data that you might be able to pull in. But as a startup, normally those two places are the places I would start with.

Alastair Cole 7:42

And talking about the importance of an ideal customer profile. HubSpot reported last year that companies that had a strongly defined ideal customer profile, you know, 68% more accounts for one, when that definition was done, and that work was done. So it might feel quite basic, but it's essential that you get that it's essential that you do your due diligence on the buyer personas, and you write down what the definitions of who the individuals might be, and their behaviours and the characteristics and the psychographics. But also things like as you mentioned, from the playbook, so value proposition, you know, a lot of the softer things, the definitions, because those are used to then go and do that deep research into your target market and who those target customers are going to be. And that that all that information, we collect that in our own platform, a 360 sales diagnostic platform, looking at some client data, but we collect a whole bunch of data from different places, and aggregate that and we connect with other tools that you've got, whether that's CRM, or support sales automation tools in order to gather the very highest quality data that's gonna go into the hyper personalization machine. Some of those numbers, some of those are words, and we crunch that down. So that data collection phase is absolutely critical, some of that is automated, some of that thrown has to be done by hand, right? You know, there's no getting away from copying top line data from various sources. And sometimes those businesses don't have that information to handle. We work with them to go and dig out exactly how many first demo second demos other meetings that they're having and capture that information. So phase one, data collection. Phase two is research and recommendation. This is where we take all that data that we mined and we use it to go out there and start our research. What about you Kiran? What are your favourite research tools right now? What are you using right now that other people should be thinking about?

Kiran Gill 9:54

I personally think you know that anyway. My personal favourite is Apollo. duct I O is quite a large platform, those of you have not seen it, it's out there. It's really good in the sense that it's a place where you can do your email sequencing. But it's also got a lot of data in there about potential clients and customers, it'll be you can put your ideal customer profile in there will help you score your ideal customer profile. So you'll be able to start, then finding out who's the best fit, you can then go through that data link straightaway into LinkedIn. So you don't have to move straight into HubSpot. So it's integrated with all the tools that you're probably using. I use both LinkedIn and HubSpot myself. However, you don't have to. And then, what you'll be able to do there is create an actual target list against your ideal customer profile. And the great thing about Apollo is it's going to help you score those to see which ones are, those are higher fit, and which ones are lower. It takes a bit of time, like all of these tools, don't expect to go in there and try to learn in two minutes, however, valuable as anything once you've got it working, because it saves so much time.

Alastair Cole 11:08

Yeah, and I think there's also a healthy component of, you know, desk research that's needed in this research and recommendations phase, you know, going and digging out individual companies, looking at their website, finding out about them, you know, we use tools like check up T and various API connectors with other tools in order to go and suck information and get a very quick digest of whether that target company is one that we want to go after in order that it goes on to the recommendations list or not. So there's all that kind of semi automated stuff with through tools like Apollo and API's, and then quite a lot of, you know, rolling your sleeves up and going through that data to work out exactly who we're going to target and who we shouldn't, can't just let the machines run off with us, can we my friend. So we've shown, you know, we've talked about a couple of tools there. Obviously, some of this data is quite sensitive in terms of sales, navigator, spreadsheets, Apollo, and other big tools that we're using so difficult to show perfect examples. But some of those tools that you mentioned can be really, really helpful. And then we come back with our kind of master lists don't we have where, where we're going to go and target where we're going to start? You know, looking at engaging with prospects. One of the things we've covered on other shows, Kiran , is the size of the buying group, right and buying groups are growing, it's hard to get to everybody, but you have to shepherd everybody over the line. What are your thoughts on how much research in this phase of outreach is needed of different people in the buying group and, and how much research should be done? Okay,

Kiran Gill 12:57

So depending on how sophisticated you know your service or product is to sell into a company, there is always going to be a first person that you're going to try to contact to get in touch within that company. Now we've spoken about complex buying groups in one of our earlier webinars, and we spoke about how you have to build that kind of account, count plan to get into these accounts, you're still going to be reaching out to just one person, you might have multiple people within a company that you can reach out to. But remember, we're talking about personalising that message. So whoever you're going to reach out to, it's probably the ICP that is the ideal customer profile, that you've done all your homework on that buying persona, that you say this is the first point of contact. And the great thing about Sales Navigator, Apollo luscious zoom info, whatever tool you're going to be using out there to collect this, it will give you an overview of the company. So you might only be connected to the founder in that company, however you want to target the sales manager. So through that, you'll be able to find out who the sales manager is and then start saying, right, how do I get in touch with the sales manager? Do I need to knock on the door, pick up the phone, we'll talk about how to do all of those things in a bit. But one thing about these tools is it gives you a great kind of understanding of what the landscape is for the customer's you know, the company and who's in what position. As Aleister said, sometimes the data can be corrupt, and it might be dated. And depending on now it's getting better. But however, I have always found anomalies. That's why you have to do this kind of second sweep of the data. Don't leave it all to the machines. And then suddenly you're connecting with maybe the wrong kind of profile and then thinking to yourself, why isn't my outreach working? So be careful. Don't leave it all in the hand machines.

Alastair Cole 14:46

We rely heavily on automation, semi automation, as well as the human check in that you just talked about. And actually we load our frameworks in To AI tools, and then compare companies against that. So, in order to do like a first round of filtering the absolute, you need that kind of humans and machines working together. And ultimately, we present those lists back to our clients and say, This is the final list of companies, we're going to target individuals, we're going to target and then we get signed off, and move forward. And that sign off is really important because it's at this stage at the end of phase two, when we've got to the end of our research and recommendations, we're ready to push the button, that we're able to move forward and fire up the next really critical phase, which is about content creation. And, you know, multifaceted sales, individual targeted sales campaigns these days have so many different kinds of content. What are your current favourites for us? What are your favourite weapons of choice? Are your types of content that you like at the moment care and what's working for you?

Kiran Gill 16:04

Yeah, so it depends on the person that you're outreaching to, isn't it? So please don't don't feel that one thing is always going to resonate with every single buyer. My personal, you know, I do like, I do like a good PDF, my personal view, but I like a good PDF does the person I'm sending to, that's the person we should be thinking about. Remember that it's a present, you're giving it to someone else. So maybe they don't want a PDF, maybe they want that in audio form. And it's the same piece of content, however, you've created it into an audio form, or maybe it's on a video, and it's a demo, and it's a five minute, you know, two minute demo on a video. It could be the same piece of content, but it can be delivered in multiple ways. And that's the one thing that we try to get over to our clients is, yes, you've created this one piece of great content, but let's make that into five pieces of great content, because we're all individuals and we all prefer taking information in different ways.

Alastair Cole 16:57

Yeah, there's a real cornucopia of stuff, everything from you know, simple posts, longer blog articles, and thought leadership, you know, highly personalised white papers and two pages and videos. And, you know, there's there's a, there's a whole plethora of copy that content that can be created for an individual. And that might feel impossible for people watching or listening back. But there are numerous tools out there that can help automate some of that, we're actually creating personalised PDF personalised white papers where a large portion of the white paper is, you know, it's standard. But the front section, we're personalising that with an introduction and abstract specifically for an individual, not necessarily using their face on the front cover of the white paper, but but they're it's personalised for them. And then the email that goes and introduces it is obviously highly personalised, and that email, and social, social media direct message, and the white paper itself, they are all being created automatically by Uplift technology that takes the ideal customer profile, you gave us the value proposition and all the data around the kind of opportunities and deals that work for you. And feed, we feed all that in and out of the back end, can remember a turnkey solution comes, you know, a year's worth of content of posts of articles of white papers, or at the push of a button, and then we share that with our clients and they then go put that out. So if it's feeling like creating oodles of personalised content is hard, it isn't if you've got the right technology, you know, feel free to come and speak to us. But we are seeing that that's really working, right? We're friends that when you get surprised, when you're more personalised, you're more tailored, you put more effort into an individual, you have a much higher rate of engagement. So that's, that's, that's phase four. Content to phase three content creation. Let's slide on to phase four. Now, dynamic distribution. And this is, you know, where you're got your sleeves, rolled up my friend, diving into some of the tools that you've talked about before other tools that we use for distribution dynamically of content. How does this all How does it come together? Talk to us a little bit about this kind of dynamic distribution phase, what's in their current? So,

Kiran Gill 19:42

Again, going back to the content, you're gonna have certain clients that might respond to certain, you know, distribution methods more than others. So you know, you've got all the you've got your top three, what tends to be, you know, caught phone calls, I know not A lot of people do those. But let's call that voice for now, you've got emails, and you've got direct messaging. Now you can use those in any such way. And probably now also, you've got video in there. Now, these are all different ways of getting, you know, content out to the people that you're trying to talk to. Now, remember, in the early phase, there's a chance that these people are cold, and you've never met them. You might have been lucky enough to meet them at either an event or it might be a referral, whichever way they don't know you. So you don't actually understand, or you might not have an understanding of how they prefer that content to be, you know, given to them, or, you know, do they respond to direct messages on LinkedIn? Are they better on email, would they prefer, you know, to be sent by a carrier pigeon, who knows everyone's different. carrier pigeons are expensive, and I, you know, I'm not gonna go down that route. But however, if you think about it that way, just think to yourself, now, once you've got that relationship with a client, you already know that they're going to respond to you in a certain way, because certain things work for them. And you could even pick up the phone to those people, and you're not so embarrassed, and it's a lot easier. However, at the start of the funnel, it might be while you're, you're trying things to see whether that person is going to respond. Remember, we're talking about hyper personalised outreach, you might have to try multiple ways of delivering that same message to the person for them to suddenly respond to you and say, hey, wow, that's great. I really understand what you're trying to say, though, you've sent that message, you know, the same message in different ways, and they didn't get it. So this time, you've got to do or maybe you meet him at a networking event, and they suddenly remember you, oh, you're the guy from the video. It's still broken, it's a part of the process. And it all counts. And building that process is the hard part. Because what happens, and a lot of the times the clients we work with, they try something they want, and that's it, one email, they didn't want it, or one message or if you have to try multiple times. And that's why building a sequence with multiple assets is the best way of doing it.

Alastair Cole 22:04

Yeah, the traditional requirements of a salesperson to try different routes is exactly the same even whether your content is highly personalised or not, you just get a better likelihood of engaging them, if you tailor it. So that's section four, done dynamic distribution. And once that's gone out, once the birds are in the air, the campaigns are launched, and you're monitoring them, then we come into, you know, outcome enablement, which is focus, you know, the whole, the whole reason for doing this right from the start from zero all the way up is is to try and make a high quality engagement, turn that prospect into a high quality lead and get them in for a meeting, right, that's the ultimate aim. And so what should people be doing immediately? And once once that once the campaigns are launched, we move into this kind of outcome enabled, what should say sell as b2b sellers be doing to support the campaigns that have launched, you've

Kiran Gill 23:10

got to be constantly monitoring your communication channels, you need to respond to your client as quickly as possible. So you've created a video. And that video, and I forgot to totally talk about the tool of choice here, the two choice with me on videos is Vinyard, you'll be able to find that also out there, Alice has made it there you go, that's my my kind of, you'll be able to create lots of videos on there, it's aI powered, again, is talking about hyper personalization, you don't even have to use yourself, you can create an avatar to do that for you. It's amazing. Now, the thing with that is your client will respond to that. And the big thing is that you need to respond to your client as quickly as possible. And also, you need to be looking at this all the way through the week, all the way through the month, because you're going to be creating a lot of dashboards, some things might be working some things might not be, you might have created a piece of content that you think is amazing. However, the click rate on this piece of content is going down, it doesn't happen. It's not going to or you've you know, you've created an event and no one's really come to it, or you've created another vendor, and everyone's come to it. And you're thinking, okay, and it's that kind of data that is really important. But remember that what you're trying to do here, there must be an outcome, a target that you've already tried to arrange at the start. And like I said, for a SaaS platform, it might be that you want people to go to your website and sign up for the free tool. However, through somebody who's selling services, it might be that I want a meeting with a client because you know, there's nothing to purchase on my platform. So think about what your outcome is and what you want to get from there and then run that campaign. i We always say 12 weeks is minimum, you run the campaign for 12 weeks, and what you want is that multiple touchpoints and by the end of the campaign, you're collecting data all the way through. So that's one of the things that I would turn around to you. So it's monitoring continuously and because if you don't, you really don't know what's going on. So make sure that there's communication between yourself. Remember, the teams that we tend to work with are kind of small, the marketing team, the sales team are working together very closely. So there's a lot of data flying around, you just need to make sure that you're all aligned.

Alastair Cole 25:18

Yes, and then, one of the things that we've touched on is the number of sales actions that are that people that we work with, that they have to the number of sales, actually, they have to perform things they have to do on a monthly basis. And you kind of scared me a little bit earlier with the number. What was it again,

Kiran Gill 25:39

It's 618 sales actions in a month. I think a single salesperson should be doing 618 sales actions a month. I would expect to run about at least 17 meetings. So you're looking at around about 123 conversations, start from those 680, that's about 400, of how my hand has about 400 prospects that you're trying to reach out into a month of those 400, you're gonna get about 123 of them, starting the conversation of the 123 probably going to go around, but 17 that are going to have a meeting with you. But these because of your hyper personalised outreach, our highly qualified, ready to roll, they know what's happening, they've got that need. So the likelihood of these people closing is so much higher than just going out there with a pepper pot kind of process. And another tool that I want to talk about here very quickly. It's something that I've tried out very recently. It's called Sally dot Pro. These guys are pretty new to the world at the moment. They're coming along. I really liked this tool. It's a personalised outreach tool that bolts onto your LinkedIn profile, and helps personalise those outreach messages. It's using AI, it's using a lot of chat GPT in the background, it's well worth a go. So it's Sally, that's SALEE.PRO, go there, I think you'll be able to reach out to the guys there, they'll be able to hook you up. I'm not on a commission here. I just think it's something worth trying if you're using LinkedIn as an outreach tool.

Alastair Cole 27:20

And I you know, those kinds of tools that we're talking about are able to automate and semi automate some of the sales actions. So again, 680, might sound absolutely impossible as a founder, but that includes all the automated actions or tools that can take a lot of the burden away from that number. Yep. As Ken and if you're, if you're thinking about getting started with hyper personalised outreach, or OVS, overhauling your sales function, you know, it needs a little bit of work, then you can do not much wrong by taking our 360 degree sales diagnostic product. It's, we do a 90 minute interview with you, and then do some desk research. And a few days, 48 hours later, we send you a full score and breakdown for each of the seven sections with bespoke recommendations, including critical first steps and a revenue roadmap of the additional income that you may be able to generate over the next six to 12 months by improving the power of your sales function. And the three sets the Sharp has a score breakdown just for you. We traffic light, every single one of the 52 elements that make up that overall score when we provide recommendations. And then the revenue roadmap shows how you've progressed in the last 90 days with both your 360 score, but also your meetings, the deals you've got in the pipeline, what you've closed and the income that you've generated. So if you're interested in that, you can head over to the upper left partnership.com forward slash 360. And it is exactly half assed well, so we've landed right on the button, my friend and really the last thing is to talk about the next show. So two weeks today, we're going to be moving away from the world of hyper technology into humans and relationship building. So there'll be the regular time 12 o'clock UK, seven on the East Coast of America and 1pm Central European Time. That's Tuesday, the fourth of June, titled TVC that we're going to be climbing into the importance of relationship building. Big week, there's a big event coming up next month isn't the

Kiran Gill 29:42

Yep, it's London tech week. So that's the week after and I think for a lot of us who are networking and trying to build those relationships. You know, it's always good to have a bit of a you know, a bit of a brush up, make sure that we're all doing those those actions We're ready be prepared for, for networking, especially, you know, there's not so many events that you can go to that might be perfect for you. So you know, that's a really good one in London. If you guys are around, it will be a pleasure to meet you out there. Yeah, we'll

Alastair Cole 30:14

be there at London tech week. And I think the focus of next fortnight's show will be, you know, how to extract the most value, which ones you should be going to and, and just building relationships virtually as well, because we can't always be in the same place with the new interview hybrid world. So looking at that rate relationship building in, in 2024 and beyond. Write Great. I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you very much for your time.

Kiran Gill 30:41

Thank you very much, Alastair. It was great. As always, yeah.

Alastair Cole 30:46

My pleasure. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Bye.