In this video, we discuss how to perform cold outreach in B2B sales. In the previous three videos in this training program, we discussed cold calling, cold emailing, and voicemail messages. We will now show you how to integrate these contact and cold outreach methods into a structured schedule designed to improve your ability to connect.
Getting Connected Is Challenging
When working in sales and trying to get into new accounts, simply trying to get connected with prospects can be one of the biggest challenges you will face. You can have the best product, the best price, and the best pitch, but if you cannot get connected with prospects, none of those advantages will do you much good.
However, the good news is that there are some real things you can do to improve your ability to connect with target prospects, and that is what we will show you in this video. We will discuss:
- Building your attack list
- Prospecting cadence
- Organization movement
Building Your Attack List
The first step you will likely need to take when you are about to conduct cold outreach is to build an attack list. Here are a few resources for getting or finding contacts to pursue:
- Appollo.io,
- Seamless.ai
- Zoominfo
- List brokers
Whatever resource you use for contact data, you likely end up with an extensive list of contacts. You can treat that as your master list and then break small segments off the list to create your focused lists, which is the list of prospects you will focus on with calls, emails, and contact attempts.
Prospecting Cadence
Once you have your list, it is time to reach out. And when you perform cold outreach, it can be common to ask:
How many times should I call? How often?
How many emails should I send? How often?
How many voicemails should I leave? How often?
What we show you in this video should help answer those questions because we will provide a prospecting cadence, which is a structure and schedule that will show you how to mix your calls, emails, and voicemails.
You could look at a prospecting cadence as a rhythm for your contact attempts in terms of how much time you leave between each attempt. Once you have that rhythm set, it is much clearer when and how often to reach out to your prospects.
We break our prospecting cadence down into four rounds of calls, emails, and voicemails. One reason we use this four-round structure is that each round draws on a different building block: Value Points, Pain Points, Customer Example, and Product.
In the attached video, we explain this prospecting cadence and guide you through each round of cold outreach attempts step by step. The good news is that each round is exactly the same, with the only difference being a different building block being used for the messaging.
Organizational Movement
The prospecting cadence will help us maintain a consistent, repetitive cold outreach approach. But as you probably know, some prospects will never answer or respond, regardless of the number of times you try to contact them. To help with that, we recommend implementing what we call organizational movement. This is where you proceed to identify a new person in the organization to contact. And we break this concept down into two types of movement: 1) horizontal movement and 2) vertical movement.
Horizontal Movement
Horizontal movement is where you move laterally by moving to perform cold outreach to a different functional area or department of the organization. For example, if you are calling into IT and not getting a hold of anyone, you can then apply organizational movement and move horizontally to find a contact to reach out to in operations.
You are not just calling anyone for the sake of contacting someone new. But in a lot of cases, you can often sell your product to different departments of the organization. Even if there is one department that will be the ultimate buyer, there might be stakeholders in other departments, and that can provide you with another way into the organization.
Vertical Movement
If you cannot reach your target contact, you might want to move vertically within the organization by moving up or down in terms of management level. If you are calling a director and running into a dead end, you could move up to try to reach out to the VP of the department. Or you could always move down and call the manager who reports to the director.
Combining the Cadence and Organization Movement
The end of round 2 in the prospecting cadence is a good way to start to apply organization movement. When you reach the end of round 2, you have made some calls, sent some emails, left some voicemails, and if you have not connected or had any responses, this is a good time to start looking for another contact to perform cold outreach to.
What you can do is go to LinkedIn or your contact list database provider and search for a new contact. When you find someone who makes sense to reach out to, you can then add that person to your prospecting cadence by starting them at round 1. You have now increased the number of contacts you are pursuing at that particular business, which increases the likelihood that you will reach someone who responds to your outreach or answers your call.
We hope these tips provide you with some new ideas for what to do when you perform cold outreach!
