Email Responses Best Strategy: Positivity

What Gets More Email Responses?

Many sales professionals resort to using fear to get email responses
Positivity is proven to be a better motivator than negative wording
Boom Demand SDRs help prospects to see the bright side of a deal

Anyone in sales who regularly sends out cold emails can attest to the sheer volume it takes to find someone who’s interested. If you send out hundreds of messages each day, you have to consider that so do all of your competitors. Your leads’ inboxes are filled with competing messages vying for a few seconds of available attention. Getting email responses is therefore no easy task, so every strategy that sales teams can implement helps enormously. What are some of the best tactics to consider when writing you emails in the first place?

The Dark Side?

During the history of the profession, a lot of salespeople have turned to using fear to make a sale. This is highly understandable because fear motivates people. No one is comfortable with the idea of losing everything that they’ve worked so hard to build. This is even true in business. At the end of the day, businesses exist for the sake of earning money that we need to survive. We all need food, shelter, love, and many specific things that money helps us to secure. The fear of losing money, and thus losing our ability to cover our needs, is powerful. Some salespeople exploit those fears and focus on them to make prospects see why it would be dangerous not to buy their solution. The problem is that it’s been done so often now, that it’s almost a cliché. People everywhere are so sick of negativity that their brains actually become less active when they encounter it. So what can you do to stand out from the crowd?

Ditch Fear. Embrace Optimism. Get More Email Responses.

In fact, the best and perhaps the easiest way to distinguish yourself in the minds of the people you’re trying to reach is to actively make their day better. Rather than forcing them to dwell on all of their worst problems, and how much worse they could get, be optimistic. Gear your cold email proposals towards warmly looking to a future of better performance. Acknowledge that maybe, right now they are already doing quite well. But the possibilities for improvement are endless, no matter how good you are right now. The reason for this is that positivity is simply more attractive, and even more motivating, than negativity. Many companies have learned that they get better email responses when couching all of their messaging in positive language with an uplifting tone:

“We recently ran an A/B test comparing positive and negative language in an email campaign for our post on using autoresponders to onboard new employees. “The aim of the email was to get people to click-through and read the post, and in Version A we utilized negative language to emphasize the not-so-great realities of starting a new position. “[We] specifically chose language like ‘difficult’, ‘don’t know many people’, and ‘not familiar’ to create a strong sense of negativity in the email and deactivate the reader’s brain activity. “In Version B of the email however, we deliberately chose positive words like ‘exciting’, ‘new, intelligent people’, and ‘learn a whole set of new tools’ to give the email a much more positive feel. “The results? The email copy filled with positivity had a 22% higher click-through rate than the negative version. “Like the research suggested, the negative copy in Version A caused people to switch off, become disengaged with the copy of the email and not click-through to read the full story. “However the positive copy in Version B had the opposite effect. People remained engaged with the copy, increasing their motivation to read the full story and therefore making them more likely to click-through.” — Campaignmonitor.com

Boom Demand Keeps it Upbeat

Boom Demand sales development agents use positive language in their pitches. This helps our clients’ prospects to visualize the great possibilities that come from working with them. To get Boom Demand SDRs working for you and making a positive difference in your sales, contact us today!

A/B Testing for Prospecting Campaigns

The Science of A/B Testing Your Prospecting Campaigns

A/B testing works best when you have a specific result to test for
Make sure to test only one change at a time for clear insights
Test adjustments in a logical order that will help you improve faster
Boom Demand can help you implement testing at a larger scale

One of the most important ways that marketing and sales teams can collaborate within an organization is by testing how effective your sales copy is. This takes some coordination and requires leadership to develop a vision that both departments are fully on board with. Marketing teams mostly concern themselves with delivering high-quality material that accurately reflects brand values. Sales teams tend to focus on increasing volume and achieving targets as fast as possible. Neither of these objectives is mutually exclusive, though, and both teams can find value in each other’s work. A/B testing of marketing materials helps both sales and marketing drive toward achieving their goals faster and better.

What is A/B Testing?

In our context, A/B testing is a way to randomly experiment between the results of using two different versions of the same marketing material with the same objective. When we say that we’re using two versions of the same material, we’re talking about discovering the effects of adjustments in just one element of the copy. For example, every prospecting email that your sales team sends out should have at least a subject line, a body, a call to action, and a signature, among other characteristics. Each one of these parts can have different effects on how the potential prospect responds to them, depending on how you design and write them. To determine how to get better responses and boost sales through more effective copy, you first have to learn what copy is more effective! To do this, you can send one version of an email to one random group of leads, and a different version to another. Tracking and analytics software helps you to discover which version produces better results.

Why It’s Important to Test Copy

Doing this kind of science matters to business, because we never get anything perfect the first time we try it. Not only is there a learning curve, but the curve is always moving. We’re constantly networking, and discovering more compelling ways to write to encourage a sale. Likewise, our customers are always getting exposed to the things we write and reacting to them. Society changes, values and priorities shift, and what worked yesterday is obsolete tomorrow. Sometimes the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, and sometimes it just keeps smashing through the wall without stopping. The point is that marketing and sales must always go to where the customers are, and reach them the way they want us to. Finding that sweet spot requires experimentation because they won’t just tell us what we have to do for them to give us their money! As anyone in sales can remind us, many times customers don’t even start out knowing that they needed our product all along. We have to help them make that discovery.

How to Apply This Kind of Science in Your Business

Firstly, it’s important to be very specific about what you want to accomplish. Sending an email can have many different results. Are you just trying to see what gets more clicks into your video presentation? Or are you hoping to discover what leads to more final sales? It’s important to be sure of what you’re looking for, because what you test might change more than one result. An adjustment might lead to fewer clicks, but many more of those clicks that still happen might convert, and actually increase revenue. Second, only test one variable at a time. If you make two changes, how will you know which one made the difference? It’s almost impossible to tell, no matter which way the data goes. Third, test your changes in a logical order. Thinking about emails, if something about your subject lines is making prospects go “meh” and hit the little trashcan button without reading further, how much value is there in first testing variants of your call-to-action? This is especially important if you’re actively trying to discover why your current copy might be underperforming. Start at the top, and work your way down. Fourth, you need to get lots of data. The more, the merrier. The more data you can find, the more likely that you will see statistically significant results. The reason for this is that every lead is different, and will respond differently to your unique copy. But in most cases, there are only two or three ways to react to any element of it. They can reject it, they can ignore it, or they can engage with it. The more data you acquire from more leads, the more likely you are to get away from individual preferences towards larger social tendencies that you can bank on in bulk.

Boom Demand: Your Sales Laboratory

That’s where we come in. Our sales development representatives, working on your behalf, can help you dramatically boost your outreach efforts. By implementing A/B testing, we can help you kill two birds with one stone. Not only will you be able to improve your marketing efforts, you’ll have a dedicated team funneling warm leads right to your top salespeople. Contact us today to get started!

Books for Sales Director Success

Top 5 Books for Sales Director Success: Your Must-Read List for 2019

These excellent books for sales director success arm you with better strategies
Experts in a variety of fields provide powerful insights for you to apply to sales
Boom Demand helps sales directors implement better tactics faster

We invite our readers to reflect on whether 2018 was a good year for them or a mediocre one. If you’re doing well but know you can get better, or need to get back on your feet after a knockout punch, it’s time to add some new tools to your sales strategy workshop. We’ve put together a list of the best books for sales director success that we can recommend. The insights these authors provide will help directors see their work with new eyes and finish this decade stronger than ever. Remember that if you’re not always learning new things and applying them, you’re stagnating and falling behind.

Mike Weinberg’s Sales Management. Simplified.

With the subtitle, “The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team,” Weinberg helps us remember that no matter how good we are at sales, managing a sales team is different. He covers no fewer than 16 basic errors that sales directors are prone to, and how to overcome them. Chief among them are matching performance and roles better, more effective coaching, and more useful meetings. Learn how to focus on culture, offer better compensation, and even how to keep scheduling under control.

Tony J. Hughes’ Combo Prospecting

We’re now over a decade into the radical shift in global communications wrought by the advent of the smartphone. During this time, social media has turned into a ubiquitous force in both our personal and commercial lives. It’s easier than ever before to find prospects (and to be found), but harder to stand out amongst all the other sales teams clamoring for their attention. Hughes shows us how to use these tools to punch through the very wall of noise they created, and get right in front of the executive buyers who need what we have to offer.

David Brock’s Sales Manager Survival Guide

If you’re new to sales management and wondering what in the world you just got yourself into, this book is your new best friend. If you’re a veteran sales director looking to stay sharp in the most competitive sales environment in history, this book is your new best friend, too. As Brock shows us, the best practices stay true even after decades of experience. His advice cuts right through the fog of modern media novelty to remind us that we’re still managing and selling to human beings whose nature hasn’t changed much at all.

Keith Rosen’s Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

Do you understand the difference between training and coaching? It’s critical to know how and when to apply these different concepts for maximum sales team success. And it is definitely a team effort! Rosen points out that training isn’t what makes champions. Great coaches are how individual players become part of a championship team. Learn how to become a truly great sales coach and help each member of your team use and develop their unique talents.

Chris Voss and Tahl Raz’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

What’s the difference between a sales meeting and a hostage situation? Some prospects would say there isn’t any, but in all seriousness, we know the stakes are very different. Even so, you can apply the principles of the latter to any other negotiation situation to be sure your team members always get the best deal possible. These five books for sales director success offer powerful ways to change the way you do sales. We invite you to put these ideas into action. Boom Demand provides sales teams with the ability to expand flexibly without breaking the bank. With our sales development representatives on your side, you can drive far more efficient sales funnels that help qualified prospects convert faster. Contact us today to get started!

Software Sales Team Help: Finding Great Reps

How to Find Great Representatives to Give Your Software Sales Team a Boost

Software sales effectiveness requires adaptation to changing market conditions
SDR teams need to be able to scale up and down without hurting reps’ careers
The best SDRs will have some experience and training before joining your team

How do you make sure that your software sales team works effectively? It’s about a lot more than just picking up the phone and cold-calling a list. We live in one of the great ages of innovation. Societies and economies are constantly shifting, and we have to be able to keep up. The field of software and tech, in general, is at the epicenter of this commotion. So what does it take to get ahead?

Fast Pivot Ability

The first key to success in the modern world is that you have to be able to move fast. Not just to jump onto the latest opportunity, but to do so when you’re already working on something else. You have to be able to see the opportunities and evaluate them first of all, of course. Once there, though, you can’t afford to waste time. Discovering that the market may not like what you’re working on as much as you thought, and sticking to it anyway, is a recipe for disaster. You have to be free to change your stance and move in a new direction. Your sales representatives should be just as nimble. They should be open to constant training and coaching, constantly learning, even as they keep working hard. They should be accustomed to moving between different products and campaigns. Reps can certainly develop their own style and proven workflows, but if they can’t adapt them to new conditions, the game’s already over.

Flexible Scalability

Another key to success is the ability to manage resources. Using the right amount of time and money to invest in a new software suite are critical. This applies to each step of the design, development, marketing, and sales processes. If you suddenly discover that demand for your service has gone through the roof, or was higher than initial research indicated, how do you deal with it? How fast can you bring more sales staff on board to find the qualified prospects who are looking for a solution like yours? By the same token, if demand tapers off, or something else isn’t working right, how do you scale back? Your company values are at stake here. Does your corporate culture allow for handing out pink slips by the thousands? Or would you rather find a way to cut costs that won’t damage the lives of your trusted team members? What if you could be sure that a downturn would not put your sales representatives completely out of a job? What if instead, it only meant a temporary shift in focus?

New Solutions to Old Problems

These concepts of speed and flexibility are exactly the reason that so many companies have implemented the Sales Development role in recent years. SDRs focus more on the process than the product. They’re all about starting relationships, and the rules for that are the same regardless of what you’re selling. That makes it easy for them to start the sales cycle in any company in any industry sector. The issue of scalability has always been a tough challenge for many organizations, though. In economic downturns, we’ve gotten used to hearing about companies laying off thousands of workers, but it still damages their brand when it happens. That may not change yet next time. We’re finding ways to work smarter than simply putting people out on the streets when the wind blows in a different direction, though.

Looking for Experience

Boom Demand solves these problems for your software sales team by offering a highly adaptive approach to SDR team building. First, we save sales managers the headache of heading up two separate teams with different objectives and managerial needs. Instead of splitting your in-house team between Sales Development and account executives, we enable you to outsource your SDR needs. We take care of every aspect of hiring, training, and managing a team of SDRs on your behalf, at a far lower cost than you’d see doing everything in-house. We help reps gain experience in our own internal campaigns before they join your team. Once there, they integrate as closely as you need them to with the most effective collaborative technology. Best of all, as your needs change, you can expand or contract your SDR team without worrying about their needs. We’ve got them covered, and they adapt to their new campaign responsibilities just as fast as they do to your requirements. Contact Boom Demand today for the best possible version of your software sales team!

Boom Demand Cadence Strategy Tips

What is the Boom Demand B2B Cadence?

Boom Demand uses a defined sequence of contact points to reach prospects.
Our cadence promotes a strong workflow that helps SDRs achieve their goals.
We use phones, email, and social media, so prospects meet us on their terms.
The Boom Demand Cadence is a tool that can work for your organization, too!

Fast and Focused

Boom Demand uses a proven sales cadence that brings us success over and over again. When our sales development representatives begin reaching out to a new cold prospect, they already have a robust plan in place before they even start. Every approach to these leads happens on the basis of a specific sequence of actions that we carry out with careful timing. One of the principal advantages of the Boom Demand cadence is that it involves no more than 19 individual contact points, spread across 18 business days. Many companies push for a considerably higher number of contact tries. What we learned a long time ago is that the law of diminishing returns is a powerfully counterproductive force. Spending too much more effort on a lead that’s just not responding isn’t usually worth it, so we focus hard on a lead for a few weeks. If they don’t qualify themselves, it’s time to move on to more interested prospects.

Persistent but Balanced

Another great feature of our sales cadence is that while it’s fast and focused, it’s not overbearing. We space out the 19 contact points and focus them on certain days. A given prospect will hear from our representatives 19 times in 18 days, but not every single day. During the first three days, we send multiple types of messages one way or another each day, but then take a rest until day six. We reach out again a couple of days later, then the very next day, then every second or third day until the last. The sequence seems random, but it’s actually a highly effective plan. There are at least three reasons why this kind of sequence is important for creating an effective cadence. One of them is that this kind of spaced repetition is considerably more effective at keeping brands and new ideas top-of-mind than a simpler daily pattern. By giving our prospects’ brains different lengths of time to let things settle in between contact points, it helps them better remember our message in the context of their specific pain points. It helps them make more effective connections between those problems and the ways we can solve them. Another reason for this specific cadence is that calling and messaging the same prospect every single day seems both pushy and robotic. Constantly filling up their inboxes doesn’t win friends; it’s just annoying and feels insincere. Additionally, the spaces or “off days” for one prospect are opportunities to focus efforts on other prospects. It’s a simple, yet powerful way to ensure that each Boom Demand SDR is always working dynamically. It prevents the stagnation of dull routines and keeps the work interesting. It requires coordination, planning, and careful recordkeeping, all of which lead to stronger outcomes.

Effective Outreach

Besides these strategic considerations, what makes the Boom Demand Cadence powerful is that it relies on three of the most effective modern communications tools. Our specific cadence starts with a phone call. If that call goes to voicemail, we send out an email. The next day, we connect via LinkedIn or other social media as needed, and follow up on day 3 with another email and another call. We pick the sequence up again on days six and nine with all three contact types. The rest of the cadence calls for two of the three methods on each subsequent contacting day. We’ve learned that for B2B sales, there’s nothing more effective than these three kinds of communications media. The combination of phone, email, and social media ensures that we’re likely to reach our prospect in the way that they most prefer to communicate and interact. That makes it easier for us to engage with them and help them see for themselves the value of our solutions.

Putting the Boom Demand Cadence to Work for Your Organization

Of course, the cadence is a means to an end. Whenever and however the prospect answers our outreach, we immediately break the sequence to focus on them. Their context, their needs, and their goals all help determine how we tailor our solutions. We do our homework ahead of time, too. If we were to start the cadence without doing some research and having a good idea of how to approach each prospect on a personalized basis, it wouldn’t matter much what else we try. That’s the secret sauce of sales, of course: we always remember that it’s not about us; it’s about YOU! This particular cadence is what works best for us. Other companies have different strategies, and it’s mostly a matter of trial-and-error. If you want to boost the effectiveness of your sales team, you could try developing your own cadence, but it will take time to see what works. Another possibility is to let Boom Demand do it for you! We’ve already done the hard part, and with our professional SDR team, we keep doing it. With our SDRs integrated into your in-house sales team, you can enjoy an increase in warmed-up leads, and higher conversion rates, at a far lower cost than splitting your team for the same goals. Contact us today to learn more, and put the Boom Demand Cadence on your side!