Sometimes you’ll have the opportunity to close a deal by sending cold emails to a single person and getting their buy-in as the primary decision-maker.
However, most sales involve multiple deal stakeholders across several departments, each with different needs, concerns, and points of view in the buying process.
If you don’t have an understanding of who influences a deal, you risk targeting sales leads that aren’t the right fit or losing out on outbound sales with the wrong cold email approach.
To ensure you’re starting sales conversations with the right people at the right time, you need to break down the stakeholders involved in winning your specific B2B sale.
Transactional & Mid-Market Deal-Making
When outbound deals are easy to qualify, move forward, and close, there are fewer people and processes involved in winning a sale.
Transactional and mid-market sales have shorter sales cycles and aren’t as overwhelming as enterprise deals. The right target account might even have a sole decision-maker for purchasing your solution.
However, it’s still important to keep your target buyer and their buying process in mind. The people involved in a deal will often vary from company to company.
Once you know the journey that qualified buyers need to take for a potential conversion, you’ll have an understanding of how to start the sales conversation and who to email.
Complex & Enterprise Deal-Making
With sales involving enterprise-level or technical solutions, closing outbound deals usually requires multiple contacts, many touchpoints, and a longer sales cycle.
This type of deal-making requires a well-positioned, multi-threaded outbound strategy and often means managing multiple conversations simultaneously.
While final decision-makers will have the biggest impact on closing the deal, it’s not always a good idea to go directly to the highest level of leadership with cold emails.
Depending on the buying process, it might be better to build influence with the departments involved or finding a bought-in stakeholder to be your deal champion.
To win outbound sales involving more complexity, you should keep the buying journey in mind when choosing who to cold email and how to move the deal forward.
Cold email best practices
Cold emailing is a widely used practice in business communication, but it can be difficult to get right. A cold email is an email sent to someone with whom you have no prior relationship, and it’s often used to introduce yourself, your company, or your product. Here are some best practices for writing effective cold emails:
- Personalize the message: Personalization is key when it comes to cold emailing. Take the time to research the person you’re emailing and personalize your message to their interests and needs. This shows that you’ve put effort into understanding them and that you’re not just sending a generic email.
- Check your mailing lists: Make sure to check your mailing lists to ensure that the email addresses are valid and up-to-date. This can help reduce bounce rates and improve deliverability.
- Authenticate your emails: Verifying your emails with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC can help improve their deliverability and reduce the chances of them being marked as spam.
- Establish credibility: When you’re sending a cold email, it’s important to establish credibility and trust. Mention any mutual connections or shared interests, and provide some background information about yourself and your company.
- Be conversational: Cold emails should be conversational and friendly. Write as you would talk, and try to build rapport with the recipient.
- Avoid sounding generic: While templates can save time, they can also make your email sound generic and impersonal. If you use a template, make sure to tweak it to sound more like you.
- Provide value: Since the recipient doesn’t know you yet, it’s important to provide valuable information in your email that engages them and convinces them to keep reading.
- Maintain a good sender reputation: Your sender reputation is crucial when it comes to cold email marketing. Make sure to maintain a good sender reputation to increase the chances of your emails being delivered and opened.
- Monitor the results & optimize your campaigns: Keeping track of performance metrics is essential for optimizing your cold email campaigns. By monitoring metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and response rates, you can identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Conclusion
The roles you target, their seniority, and the company’s industry, size, and location are a few of the many factors that impact your approach to cold email prospecting.
Without a clear understanding of the verticals and personas you’re targeting, you risk losing opportunities because your cold email approach doesn’t align with your buyers.
The solution is to seek clarity.
By breaking down the needs, pains, and motivations between one deal stakeholder and another, you gain visibility into how cold email fits into your outbound sales process.
Not only does this enable you to optimize the outbound sales experience for any buyer, but it also provides insight into how leads compare to one another using cold email.
[Generating outbound leads? Check out our new free video series the Cold Email Playbook to get insights and content from 7 cold email experts]