New Year, Clean Slate: Kicking Off Your 2024 Outbound Sales
Happy New Year and welcome to the inaugural issue of our newsletter. In the coming months, we will dig into strategies for building your sales pipeline through cold prospecting – that is, reaching out to people who have no idea who you are or why you are even contacting them. You may believe they need your product or service, but they likely have never heard of you. In our world, this is what we call ‘cold outbound’. And it can be very successful. In this and future newsletters, we are going to help you learn the skills to master it.
Starting off a new year is like getting to hit the reset button. Everything is filled with promise. New goals are outlined. You’ve got a semblance of a strategy. And now you just need to run toward it. Right? Yes, but. You may be starting the year off with a clean slate of pipeline goals, but unless you didn’t do any sales outreach at the end of last year you aren’t starting from zero.
There are two main things we at The Ruevy Project do this time of year to kick it off right: go back and follow up on Q4 brush-offs and analyze how all our cold outreach performed last year (if last year is too many to look at, narrow down to last quarter).
Resetting from the Q4 Holiday Brush-off
Following up is a crucial part of outbound outreach -- it helps to nurture relationships and eventually get prospects to consider your product/service. Now that people are back in the office, thinking about business, and very likely to have a new budget pool, it’s a prime time to reach out to anyone who pushed you off during Q4. These are a few best practices:
Your timing is key: Determine the optimal timing for your follow-ups. Don’t bombard folks with repeated messages too quickly, but also don't wait too long, as they may lose interest. This can be tricky so let your experience and knowledge of your prospect be your guide.
Make sure you personalize: Reference previous conversations or emails to show that you've been paying attention and value their time. Address any concerns or questions that were raised during the initial outreach.
Offer additional value: Reach out with some resources, such as industry insights, case studies, or relevant articles, that can help educate and engage prospects. This demonstrates your expertise helps you to be seen as a trusted advisor.
Experiment with different channels: Don't limit yourself to just email or phone calls. Consider using other LinkedIn messages or personalized video messages to stand out and capture attention.
Be persistent but not pushy: While it's important to be persistent, avoid being overly aggressive or pushy in your follow-ups. Respect their boundaries and preferences, and be mindful of how often you reach out.
Nurture Formula + Template
If you haven’t been in touch for 45-days or so, and you’ve run an entire outreach sequence with no response here’s a good formula for a nurture email cadence. We teach this is our cold email course.
Email 1: The problem you solve, how you solve it, and soft CTA
Email 2: Share a success story from a happy customer to show that you deliver VALUE
Email 3: Share a valuable resource
Analyzing Last Year’s Performance
If you know everything worked perfectly last year with your cold outreach, by all means skip this. Chances are, though, that taking the time to review the data will give you some ways to mix it up this year and boost performance.
Step 1: Run through your scorecard for last year or at a minimum last quarter. Review your core metrics you are tracking. What were your email open rates? Which emails were opened the most and which had the highest responses. Were those the same emails? What about phone calls?
Step 2: Look at who, or which groups of who, were most engaged. What titles (aka personas), industries, prospect needs/pain points made into your pipeline most often?
Step 3: Take all that analysis and make a testing what. Do some A/B testing for subject lines, pain points, audiences. And, double down on what worked well.
Templates in this article
More from The Ruevy Project
Need a quick primer on cold email or cold calling? Grab one of our online courses.