Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
by Aaron Ross
Breakthrough #2: Mass emailing C-level Fortune 5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails, can generate 9%+ response rates. Those high response rates (7-9% or more) from high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients in 2011, seven years later. Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text).
Breakthrough #2: Mass emailing C-level Fortune 5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails, can generate 9%+ response rates. Those high response rates (7-9% or more) from high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients in 2011, seven years later.
Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text).
Rather than sending hundreds of mass emails at a time in big bursts, the idea here is to send a regular, smaller number (50-100) of emails per salesperson each day, a few days a week, as a rolling campaign. The main goal of this stage is to generate just 5-10 new responses per day. Reps can’t handle more responses than that per day without dropping balls.
The goal of every mass email should be to establish and close a prospect on a next step. That next step should be either one of two things—but NOT both: Who is the best point of contact for …?” (to get a referral); Or, When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around…?” (to set up a conversation with the prospect).
Seeds take a lot of time to cultivate and to ramp up, but once they get going, they are unbeatable with the highest conversion and close rates. These include developing happy customers, organic internet search/SEO, public relations, local user groups, most social media, publishing expert content.
"Breakthrough #2: Mass emailing C-level Fortune 5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails, can generate 9%+ response rates. Those high response rates (7-9% or more) from high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients in 2011, seven years later."
"Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text)."
"Rather than sending hundreds of mass emails at a time in big bursts, the idea here is to send a regular, smaller number (50-100) of emails per salesperson each day, a few days a week, as a rolling campaign. The main goal of this stage is to generate just 5-10 new responses per day. Reps can’t handle more responses than that per day without dropping balls."
"The goal of every mass email should be to establish and close a prospect on a next step. That next step should be either one of two things—but NOT both: Who is the best point of contact for …?” (to get a referral); Or, When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around…?” (to set up a conversation with the prospect)."
"Seeds take a lot of time to cultivate and to ramp up, but once they get going, they are unbeatable with the highest conversion and close rates. These include developing happy customers, organic internet search/SEO, public relations, local user groups, most social media, publishing expert content."
"Prospecting cycle length: Measure the time between a) when the prospect first responds to a campaign to b) when a quality opportunity is created or qualified (this means the quota-carrying Account Executive has re-qualified and accepted the opportunity that the prospector passed over)."
"Spend serious time on identifying and clarifying your Ideal Customer Profile. Define what companies are the most similar to your top 5-10% of your customers, defined as the ones likeliest to purchase for the most revenue, and develop focused target lists based on these tight criteria."
- →Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text).
- →Experienced salespeople are terrible at prospecting. Experienced salespeople hate to prospect. Even if a salesperson does do some prospecting successfully, as soon as they generate some pipeline, they become too busy to prospect. It's not sustainable.
- →Predictable Lead Generation, the most important thing for creating predictable revenue. A Sales Development Team that bridges the chasm between marketing and sales. Consistent Sales Systems, because without consistency you have no predictability.
- →Making the field salespeople do cold calls means having your highest-cost (per hour) sales resource perform the lowest-value (per hour) activity.
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