"How is your Sales Development team using cold email at the moment?"

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Heather R Morgan, CEO at SalesFolk, who's hilarious LinkedIn tagline reads, "Economist who bitches about cold emails." You can imagine with a tag-line like that, when she asked me "how is your team using cold emails at the moment?" I couldn't resist the opportunity to dive deep into a conversation with a leader in the Sales Development world.

Let's start off right away by avoiding the trap and endless discussion on cold emails being dead and cold emails vs warm emails. Fact--nowadays, with all the technology and readily available information on companies and people, if you are sending what would be considered a "traditional cold/mass email" you are a spammer. End-of-discussion, knock it off, it has no place in B2B Sales Development.

Getting away from schematics, I want to focus my thoughts on providing an overview and some principles in an Account-Based Sales Development email strategy that has worked well for the unique needs' and opportunities of my teams.

Here are some major goals of a Sales Development email strategy:

Goal 1: Make your email outreach as custom as you need to and get the maximum ROI out of the email channel. Know the specific ROI for your team and company. When it pays-off to invest time and research into an email with a prospect, do it. When it doesn't, don't. Don't force it and don't avoid it. Drop your pre-conceived notions and anecdotal impressions and look at the data.

Goal 2: Maximize your reach into as many of your accounts as you can without sacrificing a personalized and valuable experience for the people you email. Have a balanced, multi-pronged approach.

Goal 3: Know why, when, and how you should treat people differently.

You can look at a Sales Development email strategy by how you adjust your emails based on (1) the company the person works at, and (2) the amount of engagement the person has had with your company.

How you can approach emailing a prospect based on their account:

If your Sales Development department is trying to follow an Account-Based Sales Development approach, they have to have some way of ranking, categorizing, or prioritizing their accounts. I've seen several different approaches to this, but the most common is a A, B, C, D rating on accounts or a Tier 1, 2, 3, 4 grouping. The different ratings and groupings are based on how that company relates to your Ideal Account Profile (IAP) or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The names might be different but the principle is that you look at all your current customers and attributes of some potential customers, and then you find accounts that match that profile.

With your accounts categorized, you can adjust your Sales Development email strategy based on what company you are targeting. I will use the tiered method to illustrate what I mean.

For a Tier 1 account, generally, all email is personalized to the specific person. You would also take the unique and insightful things you uncovered about their company and tailor the individual email to that as well. The value propositions are also tailored to what that specific person might be interested in.

This is a lot of work for a Sales Development Representative to do alone, so your success in this can be greatly influenced by how well the rest of the sales and marketing teams rally around the representative to provide them with insights, value propositions, personas, and approaches on how to engage the different people in the account. Your team won't be able to do this level of customization for all the people you work with at all your accounts. You have to be picky and maximize the ROI. The benefit of working a Tier 1 account is that if you do get the person to work with you, you are most likely to have a great solution for some of their most pressing issues--at an ideal customer account. Your return has to be larger for your increased efforts in a Tier 1 account.

Not everything needs to be crazy-custom just because it is a Tier 1 account. You may want to think of the people in a Tier 1 account and tier them as well. Even within an account you may spend way more time with a specific persona than another. You will probably find ways to leverage what you know about the account and increase your breath of engagement in the account. Just watch the volume and don't get too general. When you are really rocking, your reps might be able to work 5 or so of these accounts at a time, around 50 or so people, and spend 2.5 hours a day working in this way.

For a Tier 2 account, emails are personalized to the specific person, but the insights for their company are probably the same for most of the people in the company or group. You are trying to use personalization to engage with the prospect, but you are looking for them to self-select more because you may not be sure of the timing or fit. Your reps might be able to work 10 or so of these accounts, 100 or so people, and spend 2 hours a day working in this way.

For Tier 3 accounts, most of your emails should be sent to a few people at a time and tailored to the company. You have unique insights about the company, and you are reaching out to a few people at a time to generate engagement. You might also send out event invites or webinar invites, or something like that to see if you can generate interest. A representative maybe works 1 hour a day on these, most of the work on accounts in this tier is reacting to the engagement of the people in the account.

For Tier 4 accounts, you don't spend much time if any on them as an Sales Development Representative. Maybe, you might send email based on inviting people to webinars, sending ebooks, or grouping by industry, role, and job title. You would then customize your emails more only if they engaged quite a lot with your company.

How you can approach emailing a prospect based on their engagement:

Some ways you might determine engagement include:

Did they click on a link in your email? Did they return your call? Have they worked with your company in the past? Have they downloaded any of your ebooks? Have they attended any of your webinars? Did they talk with your company at an event? Have they requested a white-paper or article on a topic related to your company or the issues your solution can address? Have they directly asked to talk with you about your product from your website or other channels?

When you are determining how to email someone who is engaging with your company, you will also want to consider what tier their account is in as well. Think of engagement as a factor that escalates the customization of an email outside of what your normally might do for someone at the account. So a person at a Tier 3 account who attends a webinar, might get the same level of research and customization as a person at a Tier 2 account. A person at a Tier 4 account who engages with us in a powerful way may be emailed in a way typically reserved for people in a Tier 2 or 3 account.

Conclusion

I didn't want to get into too much detail, but wanted to illustrate that there is a lot to consider in any email strategy, but especially if you are trying to apply some of the principles of an Account-Based Sales Development approach. Keep the goals of your email strategy in mind, use technology and process effectively, and remember that you are a human trying to communicate with another human. Keep the content coming around any of these topics, I love to learn from other people's experiences.