How to automate sales outreach to win more customers

Introduction

Let's say you're the owner of an up-and-coming restaurant in a major city. You started small with a food truck, grilled your way to growth, and then invested everything you earned into your restaurant. Now the restaurant is doing so well that you're unable to handle incoming customers and are looking for ways to add more seats in the available space. You browsed a few interior decor vendors specializing in the hospitality sector. A few of those vendors offered to set up calls; some urged you to start by trying their self-service AI; and others called you asking for slots to meet you in person.

A sales rep from one of those interior decor companies sends you an email saying he remembered visiting your restaurant a few months back, that he and his family loved your food, and that he had a conversation with his wife on how he would re-do the seating to accommodate more customers. Not only that, he shared a few practical steps–such as removing your reception kiosk, moving from a desktop to a handheld device for managing seating, and rearranging a few tables to accommodate more. He also shared several success stories of working with restaurants like yours along with pictures.

Now, as the restaurant owner, to which sales rep are you likely to respond?

Personalizing outreach via automation

Prospects today are spoilt for choice. Search for "eco friendly home floor cleaner" in your browser and you'll find products from over a hundred different brands in the search results. This isn't limited to the home cleaning products category; pick any product category across any industry and you're bound to find hundreds of brands—if not more—that offer similar products.

When multiple vendors offer products that solve the same pain point, personalization becomes the differentiator. Brands that deliver that personalized touch tend to stay in people's minds and make their way into shopping decisions. Statistics also confirm this theory: Nearly 70% of customers surveyed by SmarterHQ stated they prefer to deal with brands that cater to their unique needs. About 72% of customers declared that they would only engage with personalized messaging from brands.

Personalized messaging not only helps attract more customers into your sales pipeline, but also keeps them coming back for recurring purchases. 

How to set up a personalized sales outreach program for your business

Personalization isn't just about using the prospect's name in the email subject line; neither is it about sending an email mentioning the products the prospect browsed on your site. It's a continuous outreach plan that's tailored to each prospect's wants, needs, and preferences. Simply put, you reach out to a prospect with a message that makes them feel as if it was curated just for them. Doing this on a one-on-one basis is easy. Doing this at scale requires strategy. 

1. Research is the key

First, start with the research. Get to know your prospects inside out. Know where they work, their company's size and yearly revenue turnover, and what products they're interested in. Dig deeper and try to find out things like: What are their daily goals? What are the obstacles that prevent them from achieving their daily goals? What are their major pain points? What are the nitty-gritty details that annoy them greatly? When you show them how to solve at least one of these issues, you mark yourself as a clear winner. But to do that, you need data.

Collect as much data as you can from your prospects. Research their LinkedIn profiles, look up their social media profiles, read through their posts on Reddit, and note them all down in your CRM. Gradually, you'll see a pattern emerge among your prospects. Let's go with CRM buyers as an example: You'll notice big companies with 5,000+ employees frustrated that their current solution doesn't have user-friendly customization capabilities, or fast-growing companies ready to jump ship because their current solution can't support their growing and emerging needs.

This data will serve as the basis for setting up clusters or segments.

2. Create multiple prospect segments

Clustering sets the stage so your sales team can reach out to prospects with personalized messages and offers. Businesses usually form clusters based on a hierarchy by grouping customers into broad segments and then refining them further according to relevant attributes; based on data density, which involves building clusters around dense regions in data according to a combination of demographics, behaviors, buying patterns, and lifestyle types; or based on specific features, such as income or purchase histories.

Don't let the number of clusters intimidate you. Many well-defined clusters simply make it easier for you to customize your message for each group based on their interests. Without this, you might end up sending brochures for a high-end condo to a family looking for a rental apartment, which doesn't look good for your brand.
 

3. Don't be afraid to let go of leads

Unless your sales funnel is filled with leads that are well-suited to your ideal buying profiles, you're unlikely to see any great improvement in sales figures. To achieve this, you need to keep your funnel clean, which means not having unqualified leads stagnate in your funnel. Understandably, this can be an enormous task for salespeople.

Salespeople tend to be loss averse, so even if they notice a deal isn't going anywhere or spot a lead stagnating, they rarely remove those leads from the funnel. It's much easier to cling to hope that these leads may eventually convert—but this is an unlikely scenario. It's more likely that you'll end up losing valuable time and effort spent on fruitlessly nurturing those leads.

Don't hesitate to ask difficult questions early on in the lead nurturing process, such as:

• Does this lead fit the carefully-curated buyer profile?
• How does this lead fare against the qualification framework?

If you don't see positive responses to both these questions, it's best to remove such leads from your sales profiles and move on. Use that reclaimed time to focus on better prospects. 

4. Build authentic connections with leads wherever they are

Communication is a two-way street. It doesn't matter if you keep sending messages and emails to customers when they're not responding to your efforts. It's important to listen to what customers want, get them to talk, offer meaningful help, and become a trusted business partner.

In most cases, businesses reach out to customers only to sell—whether it's in the form of promotions, offers, or wishes. This kind of self-centered outreach doesn't resonate with customers. Instead, look for what customers truly need. Offer valuable feedback, and earn their loyalty by becoming a brand that makes them feel heard and valued. Right before a public holiday, El Jannah, a popular chicken place, sent out a campaign advocating that households not cook at home that holiday and instead eat out at its outlets. The combination of the messaging and the timing hit the mark with customers who were dreading the prospect of cooking at the end of a long work week. Another food delivery app from India also tried a similar campaign by sending out messages to its customers, asking if they'd like some popcorn to go with their IPL (Indian Premier League, a professional Twenty20 cricket league in India) watching experience. Some customers whose favored teams weren't on a winning streak that day didn't like the approach, but overall, the campaign was appreciated for its well-timed messaging. 

5. Create a memorable journey for leads

A customer's journey with your brand can start well before their first interaction with your brand—regardless of whether you're selling software or a soft drink. They might hear about you at their local gym, see a brand advertisement, encounter one of your employees on the subway, or attend an event at which you exhibit. When crafting customer journeys, keep in mind that each interaction is a test of compatibility that either nurtures your relationship toward a purchase or weakens your relationship and ultimately leads to separation.

Regardless of the first point of contact with your brand, customers fall into one of the stages mentioned below and follow a similar journey:

As a salesperson, your B2B or B2C sales outreach doesn't have to be all about making a bunch of cold calls and dropping random emails into inboxes. The key is well-timed and curated follow-ups that help you strike a chord with customers. Let's say a customer purchased a piece of software; make sure they install the software and onboard users in the next 24 hours. Craft personalized email sequences gently nudging customers to use the application. Offer help and support via calls, and when the customer opts for assistance, let them pick a date and time out of your calendar—all through an automated system of emails, tasks, and calendar bookings.

When prospecting, be cautious in your approach. To keep in touch with prospects, don't drop random product updates, press releases, or whitepapers into their inboxes; instead, tie every interaction from your end with an interaction or a piece of information from the prospects' end. When prospects download a whitepaper, follow up with them and ask if they've had a chance to read through the document. Send them an email that neatly summarizes the whitepaper into precise bullet points. Call them to discuss your own thoughts on key concepts discussed in the whitepaper. Build rapport through thoughtful communication like this, and introduce them to your products or services. During your interactions, if you find that the solution that they need doesn't match the one that you're offering, don't hesitate to point them in the right direction.

Once you have journeys like the ones mapped out above, all that's left is to craft the content and set up the triggers and automated sequences that follow the triggers. 

6. Know when to stop automation

The average office worker receives close to 121 emails per day. Any email you send will probably end up in the same pile. So plan to make the emails memorable and personal, and stop sending them once the sequence ends or if you haven't heard from the prospect throughout the sequence. While it can be tempting to continue sending emails to unresponsive prospects, persisting in this way risks ruining your brand's reputation.

Create frameworks for when to hit the stop button. Some experts suggest the rule of three; that is, you reach out to prospects three times, and if there's no response, stop. One alternative that we'd like to propose is to reach out to customers through other channels. So you tried emails as your primary mode of communication and that didn't work; try calling prospects—or reach out to them on LinkedIn. This is much smarter than bombarding your prospects' inboxes with emails. Even in this case, stop after a couple of attempts and round off the total number of attempts at five.
 

Personalize outreach automation with AI

Personalization in outreach attempts is a great strategy on paper; execution, however, gets a little tricky due to internal hurdles, such as shortages of staff, skills, time, and data, or inflexible organizational setups. Regardless, an easier way to overcome these hurdles—and a benefit of living in the AI era—is the convenience of using AI to bear the brunt of the hard work. Some areas where you can deploy AI to aid your automation efforts are as follows:

• Enrich the quality of your CRM data to categorize prospects into the right segments.
• Use lead scoring to identify promising prospects and prioritize sales efforts where they matter the most.
• Forecast the likelihood of deals closing and identify high-value deals that could benefit from personal attention and care.
• Get recommendations into deals that are similar to past deals (from the same organization or similar organizations), plan calls and meetings around the best times to contact each prospect under a given account, and get suggestions for the next best actions to take for leads.
• Generate smart emails that appeal to prospects and prompt action; generate compelling email subject lines that make your emails stand out amid a sea of marketing emails.
• Transcribe calls into call notes and store them in each prospect's record. Use them later to plan further activities or create additional meetings or calls with simple voice or text commands.

If you're looking to scale and grow your business, automating outreach is the way forward. A highly personalized email sequence with curated content and well-timed outreach is the key to getting a response from prospects and starting a relationship that paves the way for bigger wins and deals.

If you're looking for a CRM that's packed with automation capabilities, built-in AI, and seamless integrations, look no further than Zoho CRM. For more information, and to see how well Zoho CRM fares against competitors, check out our comparisons.