Why Your Outreach Messages Aren't Converting

What’s up, it’s Zayd.

I’ve spoken with hundreds of AEs and SDRs at this point. No matter who I talk to - everyone deals with it.

There are times when your outbound strategy just isn’t converting the way you want.

But a lot of what our intuition tells us to do is outdated - and might actually hurt the performance more than it helps it.

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing 3 practical things you can do to fix your outbound strategy today.

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Zayd’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Playbook for early stage startups (link)

• Key to launching outbound for the first time (link)

• Tips for >5% reply rates on outbound (link)

• Habits for PMF with founder-led sales (link)

• Clearest path to $10M liquid (link)

How to Fix a Failing Cold Outbound Strategy

Your intuition is to expand the TAM.

Jack up volume.

Send more messages.

Spin up new inboxes.

Don’t.

Here’s what you should do instead:

Level 1 → Address the low-hanging fruit

(1) Focus on the people you’re sending messages to. Don’t expand the TAM, dial it in.

Answer these questions:

• Who’s already buying your product?

• What type of company are they?

• What solution are you solving for them?

• What use case are they finding most valuable?

Don’t just look for more people to send messages to. Look for more of the right people. This might mean sending fewer messages overall, but they’re ones that are more likely to convert.

(2) Get to the point when you’re sending messages. Brevity is crucial - nobody wants to read a long message.

They want to know the thing they’re buying ASAP if they’re getting sold to.

(3) Within that outreach message though, you must cover why they should care. What specifically about that person made you think hey, you have a problem that we’re going to solve and here’s how we’re going to solve it.

Why do you think they have the problem they do?

Say that.

Make your outreach hyper-relevant to them.

Level 2 → Treat it like a retail store

I have this retail store analogy.

Let’s say you own a retail store.

• 3% of the people in the vicinity of your store walk in the door.

• The other 97% that walk by are just window shoppers.

Would you focus on creating a marketing campaign to drive more awareness to your store? Just to increase the number of window shoppers?

Obviously not.

You’d focus on how to get the 97% of window shoppers inside your store so they can start thinking about purchasing.

For some reason, people in B2B don’t operate like this.

The parallel here is your website.

3% of people on your site actually submit a request for a demo call. The other 97% click around your site, explore your offers, then leave.

So why are you creating a list of random individuals who have never heard of you? They aren’t looking for your solution. They have no idea who you are.

Go after the 97% of people who are window shopping.

Quick plug: We’re launching Valley Intent soon, which will allow you to go after the 97%.

Within 5 minutes of someone visiting your site, Valley will:

• Scrape their LinkedIn

• Research them/their company

• Craft a hyper-personalized connect message

Imagine that - you’re on a company’s website and shortly after you get a hyper-relevant connection request from the CEO. It’s a beautiful experience.

Level 3 → Use your own social graph

I was talking about this idea with Will Leatherman over at Catalyst - so full credit to him on this piece. But this part’s a bit more complex.

Look at the people who:

• Subscribe to your newsletter

• Like your posts

• Comments on your posts

How many of those people are current customers? How many currently fit into your ICP?

If they’re not current customers and they fit into your ICP, those are people you should be chasing down to book meetings with.

If you want to take this to another level:

• Create a list of those people.

• See who’s viewing your website and which pages they’re viewing.

• Send personalized outreach about the topics they’re reading about on your site.

If they read a blog, make your personalized outreach about that topic. How can you solve the problem they were just reading about in a blog? How can you get them similar results to the case study they just looked at on your site?

How I Can Help

Let me book sales calls for you while you’re sipping a pumpkin spice latte. Seriously.

I built Valley to be your automated SDR and empower AEs. Get started today and watch your calendar fill up with qualified leads.