As you're reading this, I guess you've not solved outbound sales. Yet.
And no, outsourcing to a lead-gen or meeting-gen third party isn't solving it.
Let's start at the start, shall we?
What's holding you back?
Well, if we're honest. It's probably the cringe factor.
You're probably thinking, "Nope - I don't want to send those cringy, tacky emails'.
And that's fair.
We've all received those shockers -- "Hi, we're a web agency, we specialise in PHP, WordPress and ...".
Sorry. I was just sick in my mouth again.
No one should be sending those emails. Yeah, I'm looking at you lead-gen agencies.
They're a pure-scale play. No sophistication, utterly pointless, and don't add any value or try in any way to cut through the noise and busy inboxes.
And also, where's the personality that the human at the other end can latch onto?
You can do better.
Well, the good thing is you're better than they are. Because you can do better, you could write a much better, more personal and value-added flow than they can. That's because they've set the bar so low.
Surely, it's easy pickings?
Well, it can be. But it's a noisy space with all of the crappy prospecting messages and email gremlins. But you can cut through.
How? Well, that's about following some basic rules.
Rule number one - don't feed them after midnight. Oh, wait, that's for a different type of Gremlin.
Rule number one - don't sell.
Building the right messaging flow.
Yes, it sounds counterintuitive, but that 'Don't Sell' philosophy will keep your integrity and help you find the right messaging.
To support that, a simple model ensures you can follow the don't sell approach and always bring it back to solution-finding and problem-solving.
- Current pain
- What market challenges are you talking about?
- What's the pain you're familiar with in their business (and sector)?
- How can you demonstrate your knowledge in this sector?
- Potential outcome
- What does a good outcome look like?
- What are the results? Can you reference results from other clients?
- What is the positive impact they can expect?
- How we'll solve it
- What do you have that no one else has?
- What makes you different?
- Where would you start?
- The method
- What does the process look like?
- The guarantee
- Can you guarantee a result?
- What other brands have you delivered results for?
- How can you de-risk your offer?
Enriching your messaging.
Depending on the platform, you should take an even softer approach. On LinkedIn, for instance, you need to take a much softer approach and go for the relationship build and a heavier value-added approach.
To support this, you can bring in a number of components to change how you're trying to build a relationship with your prospect.
The first place to start is by sweating existing assets you've already invested in. Yes, your content. And this is why you need to write long-form content even if you're not getting engagement directly on LinkedIn. And I specifically mean LinkedIn and not your website because it adds more credibility and social proof.
Content is the backbone of effective demand generation. It adds purpose to the effort that goes into writing it and really leverages one of your most important assets - the goodness in your brain.
This method is known for its high ROI and long-term benefits. According to HubSpot, companies that publish 16 or more blog posts per month generate 4.5 times more leads than companies publishing 0-4 monthly posts.
But to make that more relevant and modern, if you apply your content to your demand engine, you can x10 those stats.
Another excellent use for your demand engine is driving footfall for webinars and live events. As an authority-building mechanic, they're brilliant. They provide a platform to showcase expertise, interact with the audience, and directly address customer needs and concerns.
The stats show that between 20% and 40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads, with a conversion rate of approximately 5% to 20% for those leads becoming customers. But there is an entry price. They need a lot of energy and time. Not just time in the organisation and management, but you need to be driving demand up to three months in advance to get the right results.
The final one is back to that point of social proof. It's critical to land your authority; customer reviews and testimonials can dramatically influence buying decisions.
We don't want to be showy here. It has to be delivered in the right way. But this will pack a real punch in your demand engine when they do.
Now you have the basics, it's time to scale.
But let's be clear. Demand gen is a numbers game. You need to be cracking the scale game if your better messaging will have a chance to capture someone's attention.
But it can be done.
Email can give you major scale - and remains one of the most effective demand generation channels.
It allows you to deliver personalised and heavily segmented campaigns to different audiences and should be packing a decent open rate of 14.32% and a reply rate of 3.2%.
Sounds good? Well, they're just industry stats.
If you follow the above recommendations, you could see more than 50% on the open rate and 15% on the reply rate.
Let's wrap this up.
Outbound demand generation is a good thing. It's just that, more often than not, it's poorly executed. It's not the tools at fault. It's the people using them. And you can do much better.
If done right, you can genuinely take control of your outbound sales efforts. With the correct scale, you could deliver 40+ MQLs into your pipeline each month and build your pipeline towards scalability, predictability and sustainability.
So what are you waiting for?