Have you shown your prospect that you care about them?
Perhaps you have received an email or maybe sent one yourself recently that started off with the following:
In these uncertain and difficult times, it is important to maintain a long term perspective. That is why I am reaching out on behalf of Big Important Co. to share with you blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah….
That my friends is how to nuke trust, credibility, and rapport in under ten seconds. Poor messaging will destroy sales before you even had the chance. Especially now when the lives of our prospects has been turned upside down, we need to be much more empathetic and sensitive to how our outreach lands when engaging prospects and customers.
Last time I wrote about how to build the right message so that it resonates with your prospects key motivations. There is more on the line however than personal reputation. When reaching out to prospects, you need to ensure that you are not harming your brand equity. You must keep in mind the following principles in your prospecting efforts:
Personalized
Relevant
Actionable
These three principles are the bedrock to deliver the type of content that will resonate with your targeted personas and be perceived as valuable. Outreach is the culmination of personas, messaging, and cadence and the comprehensive execution plan for how to prospect at scale with high engagement.
“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”
— Dale Carnegie
The first principle is personalized. If the message is all about the messenger, it will be ignored, and this is how most prospecting outreach reads from the perspective of the recipient. If the message does not sound like it is about them and for them, it will be ignored. If it read like a generic template with a few “personalized” fields, then your messages will be sent to spam.
You want to avoid lazy “personalization”. Real personalization is about incorporating information about the prospect that is complementary and demonstrates thoughtfulness. Remember, you are stealing people’s time with your outreach, so you better make it worthwhile for the recipient.
What will pique the interest of a contact? While you may not have the exact key that triggers interest, there are specific ways that tap into the psyche of your contacts that will help bypass people’s filters. And what is the most important thing to most people? Themselves of course. We love to hear all about ourselves.
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
— Dale Carnegie
To help identify “me” triggers, use the 3x3 research process to tailor your messaging. The approach is to find three interesting things about a prospect in three minutes. Use Google search, LinkedIn search, and other data sources/networks to quickly gather useful data points. By employing this approach, you reduce time spent on research while maximizing your prospecting efficiency.
The second principle is relevant. The message must be of value to the reader, otherwise your efforts to personalize will fall flat. This will not always work since you do not know the most pressing needs of the people you are contacting. Messaging should be in the ballpark however and doing the Motivator and Messaging Matrix exercise will help to frame your outreach to specific personas with the right discussion points. If the proposition is clear and relevant, even a non-response or declined offer presents an opportunity to re-engage at a later date when our solution could be of value.
The third principle is actionable. With every point of engagement, there must be a next step that creates progress and momentum towards a “Yes” or “No” decision that moves a prospect along the sales pipeline. However, this is where you need to stop and put on your “empathy hat”. In normal times, you would want to conclude with a clear call to action or a call or meeting or demo. These are not normal times though and it requires you take a different approach.
Instead of the actionable in terms of progress on the sales pipeline, the only ask you make is to confirm that you are “Directionally Correct”. This is a question to establish if the content of the message aligns with the interests and motivations of the prospect.
What does this look like? You would say something along the lines of:
“If you find what I shared useful, would you like to receive
more content about this topic?”
An even better approach is to change it to an open ended question, such as:
“If this was helpful, what else might be of interest for you?”
If we have done an effective job with our personalization and relevancy, then we would have established a clear reason for a prospect to respond. Again, the key is to always be focused on what the prospect cares about, not what you want to push. This is the time to build trust and credibility with potential buyers in order to build your pipeline 90 days out when the global situation stabilizes.
What does this look like when we put it all together? You use the following template as a helpful framework in creating and customizing your messaging:
Hi [FIRST_NAME],
[INTERESTING THING ABOUT PROSPECT]. [MY BRIEF REACTION TO INTERESTING THING].
[RELEVANT CONTENT OR TREND]. [WHY CONTENT OR TREND IS IMPACTFUL].
[DIRECTIONALLY CORRECT PHRASE]? Thanks,
[MY NAME]
Much of this can be templated using the Messaging Matrix except for the personalized portion of the message. I would also recommend varying the language for the Directionally Correct part. If you have done a thorough job on the Messaging Matrix, you should have at least 8 to 12 templates per target persona.
The next step would be to load your prospecting for delivery, but there are a few steps before launching your sequences. I will address that next week in this series when I share how to create a narrative with your outreach messaging for greater impact and how to set up the mechanics of the sequences to be effective at scale.
Cheers and stay positive!
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