Top of the Funnel Lead Generation Strategy Tips

What is Top of the Funnel Lead Generation?

Top of the funnel lead generation should be the first step of your sales process.
You need to get people interested in your products through easy-to-find content.
It’s important to leverage social media as much as possible, especially LinkedIn.
Leads that this process generates become prospects when you reach out to them.
Boom Demand helps clients scale by optimizing lead generation and sales efforts!

What’s top of the funnel lead generation all about? It’s important to understand this initial stage of the sales process, and how it relates to your marketing efforts. What do you have to do to succeed here, and how? We’ll also take a look at how Boom Demand can help.

Building Momentum

The key concept to understand when we’re talking about top of the funnel lead generation is that this is how you drive interest in your products in the first place.

You need to generate content that your prospective clients will be able to find online. This content doesn’t need to be excessively detailed. The main thing is to build awareness and interest.

Later down the road, you’ll be able to educate your prospects further. That’s where sales development representatives and downloadable content come in. For now, though, it’s just about giving people a little taste of the benefits they could enjoy with your service.

The one really important key is that you want your content at this stage to be highly engaging and even entertaining. The reason for this is to get people to come back for more. The top of the funnel has a lot to do with top-of-mind as well.

If your content is engaging and entertaining, visitors that happened across it once will remember it. When they have a need for your solutions, they’ll come back. Likewise, for somebody who is actively looking for the kinds of services that you provide, you want to make sure that you hook them right away.

Another major aspect of the kind of work that goes into top of the funnel lead generation is the way that your blog and website themselves are optimized. Of course, you need to generate the content that search engines will find, and work to build links between yourself and other companies and individuals who can recommend your services. Even more important than that, though, your website simply needs to be easy to navigate and clearly understandable. If it’s not, prospects will leave just as fast as they arrive.

Leveraging LinkedIn and Other Socials

You also are going to want to implement a powerful social media strategy. Not only do you want to have an active content-generating presence on LinkedIn, as well as other social media platforms, you need to actively interact with your potential customers.

Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking a lot recently about the incredible organic potential of LinkedIn in particular:

“The $1.80 strategy is a concept I came up with a couple of years ago when people were asking me how to build audience on Instagram.
“My advice was to find the top performing posts in your space by searching relevant hashtags or looking at the “top posts” in your area — and add your “two cents” in the comments.
“Not fluff comments that so many bots leave, but something meaningful that shows that you actually consumed the piece of content.
“Do that 90 times a day, and you’ll start building a community and a personal brand.
“What people don’t realize is, the same strategy can apply to LinkedIn.”

(From “LinkedIn Marketing Strategies” by Gary Vaynerchuk)

This strategy will ensure that you and your company representatives will be able to drive exposure for your company across a wide audience.

Inbound Connects to Outbound

Top of the funnel lead generation is mostly about inbound marketing. Not so surprisingly, though, it ties in closely with your outbound sales efforts.

Once you have the necessary content in place, or even as you’re still developing it, you should have your professional sales team actively reaching out to potential prospects. The marketing content that you develop along the way can serve a double purpose as sales collateral, too.

This outbound sales strategy is where Boom Demand specializes.

Not only do we help our clients optimize their top of the funnel lead generation strategies, but we also proactively reach out to those leads to accelerate the whole sales process.

Our SDR teams work throughout the day to contact as many potential customers for our clients as possible. They do cold outreach over the phone, email, and social media. They schedule appointments for interested prospects to speak with your in-house account executives.

All of this saves enormous amounts of time and resources for our clients. Our work enables them to scale their businesses faster!

Contact Boom Demand today to enjoy the same benefits!

Lead vs Demand Generation: What’s the Difference?

What’s the Difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation?

Comparing lead vs demand generation, we see they’re not the same.
Lead generation focuses on gathering contact information for follow-up.
Demand generation is more concerned with raising awareness in general.
Both of them are essential because they reinforce and build on each other.
Boom Demand provides both services alongside focused sales development!

B2B marketing has gotten more complex over the past few years. There are more marketing roles to fill, and each of these roles involves greater specialization. One of the ways that marketing helps feed the top of the sales funnel has now become clearly divided into two components. We’re referring here to lead generation and demand generation. At first glance, many people will tend to think that these refer to the same process. The reality is that while both of them use the term generation, generating leads and demand for products and services each requires a different focus. So how do we compare lead vs demand generation?

Defining Lead Generation

First, let’s examine what lead generation is, specifically. Leads are contact information that we gather and follow up on. They correspond to individual people who might have some interest in learning more about or purchasing what we offer for sale. What sales teams do with leads is call them, email them, and reach out to them on social media to discover whether they could become qualified prospects. Lead generation, therefore, refers to the process of getting leads in the first place. The main ways to do this are by developing written content for which individuals must exchange some of their contact information to be able to download and read it. This content can come in a wide range of forms. Perhaps the most basic is an email subscription. Other forms include detailed reports, white papers, and ebooks. In other words, lead generation relies on content with limited distribution. It involves an exchange of information.

Demand Generation: More Free Stuff!

Now, when we look at demand generation, by comparison, we’ll see that there is a very distinct difference. Demand refers to the overall interest in your products or services, your company, or even your entire industry. It should come as no surprise to marketing and sales professionals that many of their prospects have never heard of their companies before. In some cases, prospects may never have even heard that the industry we work in exists at all.

The Importance of Industry and Brand Awareness:

“‘If you build it, they will come.’ Or so says some baseball movie that everyone seems to quote in times like these. “The problem is that it’s not exactly true. Audiences today are more inundated than ever with marketing messages, new businesses and brands, and more tools that promise privacy, security, productivity, ease of use, and efficiency. “Building ‘it’ doesn’t mean anything if no one knows ‘it’ exists in the first place. “Enter the brand awareness campaign. Your quest is to put your brand name in front of as many relevant users as possible. That means not spending millions on a billboard when you have no idea who’s going to read it. Untargeted campaigns are campaigns that waste money.” – Danielle Bilbruck, for marketeer.kapost.com

The object of demand generation, therefore, is simply to raise awareness. It is to make sure that people know that we are available to serve them. It’s a way of bringing attention to problems people didn’t even know they had, and that there are solutions. The phrase “top-of-mind” is important in the field of demand generation. It refers to ensuring that when a potential customer thinks about their problem, your organization is what they think of as a solution provider. The way we go about creating demand is by providing content for free, and distributing it as widely as possible. In this category, we find articles and blog posts, social media sharing, videos, and main web page content. Demand generation also relies heavily on specialized techniques such as search engine optimization. The idea is to get this kind of content in front of as many eyes as possible, as fast as possible.

Lead vs Demand Generation: Where Should You Focus?

There is some overlap between lead vs demand generation, but it generally only works in one direction. Lead generating content usually only works when the demand already exists. If a potential prospect is already exchanging their contact information for your content, it’s because they already have a significant interest in the subject matter. That means that lead generation content is also very unlikely to create additional demand for your products in the marketplace. It’s still critically important, but it is, at best, a second stage. Demand generation content, on the other hand, will often feed into lead generation efforts. If your content is both useful and well-formatted, you will not only find people who didn’t know about you before, but many of them will immediately recognize the need for your product or service. They’ll search for additional information, and seek to contact your organization. Granted, this is the ideal, and not everybody who reads your content is going to convert into a customer. But you should be looking for those who will. So, when considering lead vs demand generation, what should you focus on? The answer is, both! You need both types of content in order to have a well-rounded marketing strategy. If your demand generation content doesn’t lead to some way to actually contact you, you’re just generating demand for your competitors. If your lead generation content isn’t supplemented by demand generation, it will be less effective, because, on its own, it won’t be able to draw in as many interested prospects. This is why so many organizations now have both of these functions in their marketing departments.

Demand Generation with a Boom

We provide our clients with a comprehensive marketing and outreach service. For us, it’s not a question of lead vs demand generation. Marketing and sales are a holistic function of every business that works best when both lead generation and demand generation operate in harmony. We build on that harmony and accelerate conversion with focused sales development. Contact us today to start scaling your marketing and sales outreach efforts!

Boom Demand SDR Life: What’s it Like?

A Day in the Life of a Boom Demand SDR

Being a Boom Demand SDR has some unique benefits
The fundamentals of the job are similar everywhere
The contact cadence we follow sets us apart from the rest, though
We also provide a unique work location that draws the best talent
Boom Demand SDRs provide businesses with a powerful way to scale!

You might wonder what it’s like to be a Boom Demand SDR. Sales development representatives everywhere have different opinions about their jobs, and what they enjoy about them. Boom Demand is a special place to work, different from all the rest. There’s no other company quite like us in the whole tech and business process outsourcing sector.

SDR Work Fundamentals

First, it’s important to understand the basic principles behind SDR work. An SDR is a specialized sales representative who focuses on finding interested leads and scheduling appointments for account executives to close deals with them. Any company that uses SDRs has split its sales team and sales process into two specialized parts. That means they can dramatically increase the efficiency of the process. It also allows each sales agent to focus on the things that they’re best at. This doesn’t mean that anybody is ever stuck in a dead-end career. On the contrary, the most effective SDRs will receive promotions as they improve and exceed their goals, and in turn, they become some of the very best account executives. This is something that happens often at Boom Demand.

The Cadence

One of Boom Demand’s unique strengths is the cadence that each of our SDRs follows as we go about doing the work of making sales appointments. Each Boom Demand SDR follows a specific sequence of 19 touch points across 18 working days every time they reach out to a potential prospect. This sequence, or cadence, focuses on three methods of contact: cold calls, cold emails, and LinkedIn connections. A Boom Demand SDR won’t use every method every day, and in fact, on some days there are no contact points at all. Those days give us the space that we need to reach out to other contacts, and always keep the sales funnel full. The cadence itself makes it easier for us to do our work more effectively. One especially helpful aspect of how we do our work is that we now use Salesloft to organize our efforts. Salesloft offers us the luxury of having everything in one place. We can even send our emails directly from its platform. When we get to the office in the morning, we clock in and immediately see which steps on our cadence are due, and then do those steps. It’s incredibly simple and streamlined.

The Office

Now, one thing that makes working as an SDR at Boom Demand extra special is where we’re located. Boom Demand provides SDR services to U.S. clients from our nearshore office in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Supervision and training come from our headquarters office in Lehi, Utah. Additional support comes from other agents in Puerto Vallarta, as well as from our large call centers in the Philippines. All of this means lower costs for our clients! Having our offices in Puerto Vallarta, which is a major international tourist destination, allows us to recruit some of the best sales professionals from around the world. Not only is this city a hub of skilled sales activity, but it’s also a tropical paradise that’s fun to live and play in. Our offices are a 10-minute walk from the beach. Excellent food options surround us. There are all kinds of fun activities to find in this old but modern jewel on the Pacific. We get a lot of tourists here, but the city itself is an ideal place. It’s not too crowded, but it has enough people and attractions to keep things interesting. There’s always something new to discover around every corner!

Becoming a Boom Demand SDR

Boom Demand SDR work does have to do with sales. That said, it doesn’t involve so much of the pressure that comes from closing deals all the time. It’s more a question of discovering who has an interest in what our clients are offering the world. We then help connect them with each other as effectively as possible. If you want the opportunity to work in a rewarding job in a beautiful location, consider applying to become a Boom Demand SDR today! If you’re looking to scale your business and want to get some truly dedicated professionals on your team, reach out to us and we’ll get you started!

B2B Sales Funnel Implementation

Building and Using a B2B Sales Funnel

A B2B sales funnel is a complex system of interactions with product information and purchasing opportunities.
Calling these interactions a funnel hides how they truly work for sales prospects.
Leads, prospects, and customers can enter and leave a sales funnel at any point.
Sales funnels follow a basic formula, but organizations can make them more specific according to their needs.
Boom Demand provides specialists familiar with a variety of sales processes.

The sales funnel has become one of the standard models by which companies describe and plan their sales process. This is important because the idea of a funnel itself shapes the way we think about sales. It’s easy to get subconsciously caught in the idea that the funnel merely focuses and directs sales opportunities. That’s part of what it does, but not all it does. This is especially the case for a B2B sales funnel.

Visualizing the Funnel

If you’ve ever used a funnel in a kitchen or a car shop, you know that their function is to make it easier to fill containers. you pour a solid or liquid material into the wide top of the funnel. It comes out slower and more directional from the narrow bottom into the container. A B2B Sales funnel works in the same way on the basic level. Numerous opportunities enter the wide top of the funnel in the form of web traffic, brand awareness, cold calls, and many other sales and marketing tactics. A limited number of prospects leave the bottom of the funnel as completed sales.

Why the Funnel Analogy is Incomplete

In a regular, tangible funnel, all of the material that enters the top will also exit the bottom, as long as you don’t overfill it. That’s the whole point of a funnel: to prevent spills. It is best described as a temporary container. That’s fundamentally different from the way a sales funnel works. Not every lead that enters the top also comes out the bottom as a completed sale. Anyone who’s been in sales longer than one rejected cold call can understand that. What’s less obvious is the fact that not every sale that does come out the bottom had to necessarily enter from the top. The walls of the sales funnel are porous. Prospects can actually enter and leave it at any point. Only a few that fail to close just stay inside the funnel, which only happens if sales teams aren’t careful about managing their leads. Likewise, a funnel that ends with the first sale fails to account for future opportunities connected with those deals, like referrals and upselling. This is all because no two prospects are the same. None have the exact same needs as any other, and none are ever exactly where it would be perfect for our sales and marketing teams to find them. Some leads show interest, but only to gather information. Others jump into the side of the funnel with all the information they need because an existing customer referred them to the team. As a matter of fact, it’s that question of information that makes the sales funnel’s structure.

Processes of Gathering and Acting on Information

Sales funnels come in all shapes and sizes and arrangements of terminology, depending on the needs and philosophy of the company using it. One thing that remains fairly constant across different models, though, is this idea of increasing information and decision-making as the funnel narrows. A modern B2B sales funnel will be shared by both sales and marketing teams. Both play a part in providing the information a lead needs to become a prospect and then a buyer. That means they are partners in building a process. We’ll take a look now at the critical parts of this process. Your organization may find it useful to break each part down into increasingly specialized chunks, as well.

Generate and Negotiate

The very top part of the funnel can be categorized as the lead generation stage. Just below it is where negotiation happens. In both of these stages, several forms of information arrive into the lead’s hands. Cold calls and emails, online content, and search results all bring leads into either of these two funnel spaces and empower them to start making decisions. Often, they will decide to leave the funnel. Those who decide not to leave may move up or down the funnel as needed or stay in place. A lead in negotiation may decide to withdraw, but refer someone else into lead generation, or bring them in directly to negotiate as well.

Buy, buy, buy! … and then what?

Those who decide to purchase arrive at the narrowest part of the funnel. There are still many ways for their journey to go, though. They might become brand ambassadors helping to generate more leads, or they might cancel their contract. These possibilities constitute a kind of reverse funnel of delivery, feedback and reselling. Here as well, sales and marketing activities have an impact on how buyers use the information they continue to gather as they move through the funnel. Organizing special events, seeking referrals, providing a platform for reviews, and networking on social media can all contribute to additional positive and useful buying experiences following a sale.

Boom Demand’s Flexibility

Our outsourced sales development teams work directly with our clients’ sales organizations. They’re experienced in adapting to different sales processes and strategies. That includes every different type of B2B sales funnel imaginable. Not all organizations need to follow the same exact process or strategy in their sales and marketing efforts. Their prospects and customers certainly won’t. Different needs call for different adaptations. Contact Boom Demand today to learn how you can count on our dedicated sales specialists to boost the efficiency of your B2B sales funnel!

Sales Development Rep Hiring and Strategy

What is a Sales Development Representative, and Why Should I Hire One?

A sales development rep finds qualified sales prospects for dedicated closers.
Modern and traditional sales are as different as factories are from workshops.
SDRs use strategic cadences to maximize the efficiency of contact efforts.
Outsourcing sales development reduces management costs versus in-house.
Boom Demand provides better SDRs, in a better environment, for better results!

The average salesperson will make no more than two attempts to contact each of their leads before giving up and moving on to another. Unfortunately, the average is in no way good enough. As recently as a decade ago, it already took between three and four attempts to make a successful connection. Now, it takes a minimum of eight tries. Average won’t cut it. Every company needs to be able to count on a team of truly excellent sales professionals. The problem is that the most excellent closers can’t afford to spend their time making eight or more cold calls or email attempts for every single lead. Enter the Sales Development Rep.

What is a Sales Development Rep?

A sales development representative, or SDR, is a person in a specialized sales role. Since leads and prospects have become increasingly reluctant to answer their increasingly swamped phones and inboxes, it takes a far more dedicated effort to get their attention. Rather than having their entire sales team spend more and more time starting relationships instead of building them, many organizations are splitting their sales teams into two or more specializations. A sales development rep will specialize on the front or top end of the sales process. They dedicate their efforts towards finding and contacting qualified prospects. They do many of the same tasks that start the process of the traditional sales cycle. Once they find qualified prospects, SDRs schedule them for follow-up by account executives. AEs, in turn, focus on deepening these new relationships and closing deals.

Same Industries, Different Scales

To understand how modern sales teams work in tandem, it’s helpful to think of the difference between a workshop and a factory. Both the artisanal craftsman and the factory worker engage in the same industrial processes. They both focus on creating something of value. let’s use the example of a table. The craftsman takes the time to select the type of wood they want to use. They plan out how they’re going to cut and shape it. They have been trained to use all of the specific tools they need, and they are personally involved in every step of the process. By cutting, trimming, shaping, and assembling it, they can build a beautiful table in a matter of a few days’ efforts. That’s the way traditional sales teams work. One salesperson does all the prospecting, contacting, and closing. The modern sales team is more like a factory. Rather than one person doing everything, multiple individuals of equal talent specialize in particular activities. Each table or sale goes through the same process of cutting, trimming, shaping, and assembling. The difference is that a different person performs each of those tasks. Each one uses one specific tool. They can spend the same amount of time on each product they work on, and even improve their skills faster. That’s because they aren’t switching to other tasks as much. The result is a finished product of similar or equal quality to that of the craftsman, and ten others just like it produced in the same amount of time.

Specific Sales Development Rep Tasks

SDRs spend their time following specific strategies for contacting and nurturing leads into prospective customers. They engage primarily via email, cold calls, and social media. Based on the repetitive nature of those tasks, the most successful SDR teams therefore use proven cadences of contact attempts to maximize the efficiency of their efforts. SDRs manage these attempts with CRM software, and when they find a viable prospect, they schedule them for meetings with the right account executive or closer.

Outsourced SDRs

One of the most important ways a sales development rep makes a difference for a sales team is by reducing the cost of the sales process. By specializing as they do, they ensure that each member of the sales team is using their time in the most effective way possible. That’s how they maximize the company’s ROI. Organizations can take this a step further by outsourcing this part of the process. Bifurcating an existing team increases the costs of management, at least initially. Training also takes a bite out of productive time. Sales managers can instead contract with an established organization that takes care of hiring, management, training, and overhead for all of their SDRs.

Launching Sales Higher With Boom Demand Sales Development Reps

This is exactly how we help our clients at Boom Demand. We even take it a step further. Not only does each Boom Demand sales development rep integrate immediately and fully with your existing sales organization, but they also do so at a lower cost than you could ever achieve in-house. We hire and train each SDR with proven techniques and strategies. We then provide all of the equipment and space they need to succeed. These workspaces are in the nearshore global tourist hubs of Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, Mexico. That means we provide all the benefits of a diverse professional workforce from a variety of international backgrounds, but without the drawbacks of radically different time zones and travel costs. Our SDRs and supporting staff are happy to live in these cultural destination cities, earning generous, above-local-market wages. Even so, it costs far less to employ them than it would in the USA. Contact Boom Demand today to accelerate your customer acquisition efforts with a happy and specially trained sales development rep team!

Email Cadence Framework Building Tips

How to Build Your Best Email Cadence Framework Ever

Building a good email cadence framework helps your message stand out better.
Your success depends on answering 3 key questions about your objectives.
5 basic principles help guide your writing for maximum effectiveness.
Boom Demand SDRs are already experienced with this outreach process.

When you’re starting a new sales campaign, you may want to consider building a new email cadence framework. The ones you use on other campaigns may have been successful to some degree, but the marketplace is always changing. One thing that’s not changing, though, is human nature. There are certain rules and principles that we can reliably follow and use to achieve great success in a sales campaign. For maximum success, there are three questions you must always ask yourself before writing a single line.

Who Are You Looking For?

Before anything else, you need to understand your ideal buyer. Put simply, not everyone needs what you’re selling. So who does? You need to take the time to research your ideal buyer personas. Before you ever write a single line of your sales email, you should know exactly what kind of individual you’ll be reaching out to. You should know their position and buying power within their organization. Explore social media and see what kinds of pain points your leads have expressed, and take notes. This is a valuable way to find keywords for your emails. Always keep in mind that people in different roles within a single company will have very different pain points. Zero in on the one you need to reach!

What Are You Up Against?

Remember that you’re not the only person with a line in the water at this particular pond. you should know who your competition is and what they’re talking about. Visit the websites of your company’s main competitors and review the language they use. What do they offer, exactly, and how do they sell it? With this insight, you can start to build a way to contrast your product with theirs, and show exactly why yours is better. Because if yours isn’t better, then what are you even doing?

Why Are You So Special?

Identify the specific benefits that your clients get from what you’re selling. We’re not talking about gizmos, bells, and whistles. Not features, but rather, benefits. Your customers aren’t looking for something that’s going to take up more space, time and resources. What they want is to be able to do their job better. They want to get themselves in a position where they can reap more and greater rewards from their labor. It should be abundantly clear that your product makes this happen.

Execution

Now that you have the ingredients, putting your email cadence framework together is easier than it seems. All the research and thought beforehand is critical, so that you yourself can fully believe in what you’re selling.

“If you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need, it’s your moral obligation to sell it.” — Zig Ziglar

Since you believe it, since you know that you’re offering something that will make another person’s life better, you can write clearly. Here’s how.

First, keep it short.

Four or five sentences is plenty, and your lead doesn’t have time for anything beyond that. A good test of length is that your email, including your signature, should be short enough to read on the screen of a small smartphone without scrolling.

Second, personalize it.

Addressing your lead by their name is an absolute minimum. Better still is to refer to something relevant that they said recently on social media.

Third, you are not part of the message.

Do not talk about yourself. Don’t waste time saying that you saw their post on LinkedIn, and thought… blah blah blah! If you reference it, it’s obvious that you saw it. Just say that their post was really insightful or profound or thought-provoking, or whatever it made you feel, without referring to yourself. Link this sincere compliment about their thoughts on their pain points directly to some concrete evidence of the benefits that your product would give them.

Fourth, bring it home.

Keep the message limited to one single topic, and issue a clear and simple call to action. Make it as easy as possible for them to respond with minimal effort. Asking for one-word answers is good, and so are links to follow-up pages.

Fifth, read it out loud.

Make sure your message is conversational in tone and uses clear and simple wording. Industry jargon requires extra effort to interpret, and it’s so overused that it’s tiresome. Read your finished email out loud to make sure it sounds as natural as possible before you hit send.

Using Boom Demand’s Successful Email Cadence Framework

One of the great advantages of using Boom Demand’s outsourced sales development team is that we’ve been doing all of this for years. Our representatives have experience crafting and refining an email cadence framework for each of many different types of clients. They know how to reach the right people who are ready to buy, and how to speak with them and bring them to you. Contact us today to learn more about how SDR teams can integrate into your existing sales organization and accelerate the entire process!

Crafting Cold Emails for Higher Open Rates

The Art of Writing Cold Emails That Leads Actually Want to Open

There’s more art than science to crafting cold emails that work well
Successful emails are the result of careful testing, as well as solid principles
Techniques like A/B testing and market research inform email writing efforts
Boom Demand takes on the experimental burden so sales teams can focus on building relationships!

Crafting cold emails, as the name implies, is an art, not a science. Imagine if there really were just one single, tried-and-true method or formula or format that always worked, no matter what company or industry you were reaching out to. There would be no need for the hundreds of other articles and blog posts out there talking about how to do it. And yet, here we are. Since clearly no one has yet discovered the One True Email Template, sales professionals are free to innovate and experiment. There are some good principles and practices, however, that we do know about. Following these is the way that the most successful salespeople achieve better email open rates.

First, Don’t be Afraid of a Little Trial-and-Error

We’ve all heard the famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” There’s certainly something to be said for persistence in the face of a difficult goal. Sometimes the way forward only becomes clear after traveling a short distance down a wrong path. What we’re getting at, though, is not that you need to get lost in the woods or keep sending out messages that are clearly not getting a good response. It’s that crafting cold emails is an iterative process. It works best in the context of A/B testing. Each time you have an idea for a better way to approach a certain class of cold lead, compare the performance of that idea with a control group like the previous best performer.

A/B testing allows individuals, teams, and companies to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. This allows them to construct hypotheses, and to learn better why certain elements of their experiences impact user behavior. In another way, they can be proven wrong—their opinion about the best experience for a given goal can be proven wrong through an A/B test. More than just answering a one-off question or settling a disagreement, A/B testing can be used consistently to continually improve a given experience, improving a single goal like conversion rate over time. (Optimizely)

Always strive to improve your open and response rates by testing different email sales copy in a controlled way!

Severe Underperformance Calls for Deeper Analysis

If you find that a cold email campaign is getting very poor responses, you may need to consider how to reformulate it completely. First, though, you need to know why it’s not getting the kind of engagement you expected. One common reason for this is having a simple misunderstanding of the quirks of a particular market segment. Different industries and industry sectors tend to have distinct traditions and tendencies. Some of them, for example, are incredibly tech-savvy, but others may have a strong preference for face-to-face relationship building. Your email pitch should reflect that in your call to action. You also may need to make sure that your template addresses the real pain points that are common in that industry. Likewise, the solutions and value you present should be relevant. Many of these things you can only easily discover through that process of trial and error. That’s good, though. The sooner you learn of them, the sooner you can correct for them.

Let Boom Demand Take the Lead at Crafting Cold Emails

This process of crafting cold emails in the context of trying to get better open and response rates is an essential chore, but clearly, it’s time-consuming. Your in-house sales team probably does not have the time to be constantly adjusting their messaging. They would rather be building relationships and closing deals. That’s why Boom Demand’s sales development teams are such an important and game-changing solution. Our SDRs not only specialize in sending warm leads directly to your best account executives, but they also serve as a kind of sales laboratory. We can test and determine the most effective ways to reach your target markets. Contact us today to start enjoying museum-quality sales art!

Drawing of person at computer who is alarmed

Spam Emails: How to Avoid Becoming What You Hate

How to Avoid Getting Your Emails Spammed

Legitimate business contacts are sometimes confused for spam emails
The best ways to stay out of the spam filter are to be careful with words
Boom Demand makes it easy for you not to worry about being spammy

Even after decades of changing strategies, cold emailing is still one of the pillars of B2B sales outreach. You can call and try to connect on LinkedIn all you want, but some prospects hide behind firewalls of gatekeepers or just aren’t interested in social media. Sometimes, there’s just no other way to reach a potential prospect than by sending them an email out of the blue. This is important because if an email is how they prefer to hear from you, you want to be sure they’ll actually get it. Now, no one likes getting spam emails, including you. They’re a huge waste of time and often not just spam, but outright scams. That’s why so many people are leery of cold emails. It’s also why email service providers continue to develop increasingly sophisticated filters to make sure we never see the seedy underbelly of the internet.

Confusing Cold Approaches With Spam Emails

Sales professionals have the responsibility to do all they can to be seen as respectable and legitimate. That’s why their outgoing messages have to be both creative and attention-grabbing, but also truly helpful. A problem arises when you realize that many of your legitimate business proposals are likely to contain language that’s very similar to the wording of spam emails. Spammers do this on purpose, to create the illusion of legitimacy. They also try to be enticing. You’re both trying to create interest, but they’re doing it specifically to snooker their victims. Unfortunately, that puts the burden on the sales professional to be even more careful. The reason for this is because of the advanced spam filters used by email administrators.

What NOT to Do If You Want to Reach The Inbox

IBM’s SecurityIntelligence blog provides some insight into how spam filters function, and what are the biggest things to avoid doing to prevent your emails from getting trapped in their webs:

“There’s no one rule for how spam filters work. Each has its own quirks. Some frown on email sent from free services like Hotmail and Gmail, for example, or may downgrade messages targeted just to an email address without an accompanying name. Each engine is unique. Fortunately, email administrators can manipulate most of these settings to their liking… “The art of spam filtering comes into play when analyzing the contents of a message. This is where the best filters shine, but it’s also where legitimate messages can end up in spam purgatory. “Some content tactics are almost certain to land a message in the spam folder. Emails containing attached executable files or links to blacklisted websites are sure giveaways, as are those with common spam keywords. A few years ago, many spam filters flagged emails containing short codes from services like bit.ly and 3.ly. With the profusion of short codes spawned by Twitter, however, that tactic is less common today.”

Words Not to Use

Beyond those kinds of suspicious blunders regarding attached content files, the most important thing you can do to avoid getting your cold emails lumped together with spam emails is to be careful of the specific words you use. The basic rule is to not sound too pushy, or too-good-to-be-true. Exclamation points in your subject line, especially when combined with words like “free!” and “act now!” are screaming neon red flags to spam filters. Most of the time, sales professionals shouldn’t have any need to resort to desperate language like that. Just in case you want to be sure, though, you can find some excellent and fairly comprehensive lists of the kinds of words you should avoid using in your email content here and here. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by looking at those long lists, but it’s important to remember that they apply first and foremost to subject lines. Your subject lines, along with the coded headers that you don’t see, are what the filters comb through. If you have legitimate reasons for including those words in the body of your message, don’t sweat it. As long as you don’t overuse them, they should be okay.

Let Boom Demand Handle Your Email Work

If you’d rather not worry about this kind of problem at all, that’s a great reason to let Boom Demand and our professional team of Sales Development Representatives take on your outreach tasks. Our SDRs accelerate your entire sales funnel by finding and driving warm leads directly to your top salespeople. Your teams can switch from traditional, comprehensive sales tasks to working as specialized account executives. You can spend all day building and closing deals with the leads we bring in! We do this by focusing on a specialized cadence of contact points, expertly using the phone, social media, and of course email to reach your prospects. Our emails go out on an individualized basis, using the most effective wording possible to turn cold leads into warm prospects. Contact us today to stop worrying about accidentally sending out spam emails, and accelerate your sales growth, instead!

B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing Considerations

All About Outsourcing Your B2B Lead Generation

Lead generation involves many time-consuming marketing and sales activities
Customers don’t look for the same criteria that concern sales managers
First impressions from lead generation strategies can make or break a conversion
Boom Demand provides powerful and effective B2B lead generation outsourcing

There is absolutely no shortage of advice available online about how to effectively market to your potential business partners and customers. Much of it revolves around the same strategies. Make sure you have outrageously good email subject lines. Don’t forget to post on weekends and at the right time of day on each of your social media platforms. Use video, but don’t make it look like a commercial. And content, content, content. Content is still king; you gotta have lots and lots of great and useful content that touches on all the right keywords without being too salesy. But who the heck has time to do all of this? If you’ve found yourself asking that question, that’s a good sign you might want to consider B2B lead generation outsourcing.

What Customers Want VS What You Want

As a person in charge of your company’s sales efforts, you may be most concerned with making sure that the company puts its best foot forward. You want to be certain that everyone on your team has the tools they need. You also want to avoid wasting time and other problems that could slow down the entire enterprise. While those are important goals, and the tasks that surround them are essential, there’s one very big problem causing a huge disconnect. That’s not what your customers care about. This may seem shocking at first. “Of course they care about these things!” you may say. If the company goes belly-up due to poor sales, where will they get what we provide? And yet, the market is vast. You have competitors who would fill in the gaps. Your customers would not go unserved. So what makes the difference now? What stops your customers, your lifeline, your fuel for growth, from going elsewhere? It’s what they really care about. It’s how much they trust your brand. Customers who have to deal with the ins and outs of their own businesses and personal lives may never look at your company the same way as you do from the inside. There’s a good chance they might be able to understand your issues, as many of them might be in similar positions in their own organizations, but their interaction with you is for a different purpose. For them, it’s all about getting this product or service and having it be worth the money. That means you’ll have to convince them first. Will they buy from you if they don’t trust you in the first place? And how will they know they can trust you before they ever see that product or service working for them? Well, how did you find each other?

How B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing Can Work For You

They say that first impressions are the most important. As humans, we have a tendency to form judgments about the people and organizations we interact with from the very first moment of our first encounter.

“We tend to get attached to our initial impressions of people and find it very difficult to change our opinion of them, even when presented with lots of evidence to the contrary. As a result, it’s important to be aware of how we come across to others during a first meeting. Then we can employ impression management skills—modulating any irritating traits and accentuating our strengths—to ensure that people have a more favorable opinion of us.” — Psychology Today

That’s why the way you first meet your customers matters so much. In other words, you have to consider the impression that your lead generation strategy makes on the people who end up buying from you. Perhaps more importantly, what impression has it been making on the people who are not buying from you? If you find that you’d like to improve the impression you give people when they first meet your brand, B2B lead generation outsourcing may be the key. Outsourcing essentially means letting someone else do for you something that they are more experienced at doing. This results in greater efficiencies and lowers costs, which should appeal to your bottom line. It also means that the company you outsource to is more likely to already be familiar with current best practices and the latest innovations in the field. That means you’ll have all the benefits of experience and creativity on your side, but at a much lower cost than doing it yourself in-house. What’s not to like?

Why Boom Demand is an Awesome Lead Generation Partner

It may seem counterintuitive, but what we’ve discovered over the years is that the difference between B2B and B2C is really quite superficial. At the end of the day, we’re always talking about relationships between individual people. In both B2C and B2B interactions, the people you want to reach are consumers of online content looking for solutions to their problems. Whether the problem is a domestic need or a critical business issue, the way to reach people is the same. You provide content that answers their questions, that entertains them, that tells them a good story, and they’ll provide their contact information. If they like your email subject lines, they might go for more. If your social media presence is fun and engaging, you’ll build brand awareness among both end consumers and potential partners. Boom Demand leverages these characteristics of human nature when our sales development representatives call and email and post online. With Boom Demand B2B lead generation outsourcing, we find people for you, and we help them find you. For those who want to get closer to you, we set appointments for them to have a conversation with you or your sales team. We let you focus on what’s most important to you: closing solid deals. Meanwhile, we fill the funnel! Contact us today for a river of warm leads!

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!