We, salespeople, always strive to become better in our craft, looking for ways to improve our reply rates, build better sequences, increase closed-won conversion rate, etc. The list goes on đ
So today, I wanted to share 3 tactics I use as an SDR to improve the copy of my cold outreach templates:
G2 reviews
AI email composers
LinkedIn profiles
Hereâs an email template that we at Reply use as a part of our cold outbound sequence. Iâll use it as an example to decode these tactics âĄď¸
Disclaimer: The template above is totally ok when it comes to cold outreach and it helps generate a decent amount of cold demos for our SDRs. But what if there are ways to improve its results?
1. âď¸ G2 Reviews
The first way I wanted to share is to use the product or service reviews your customers leave on relevant platforms. In our case, itâs G2 reviews. As a result, instead of relying on your marketing teamâs or your own vision of what our product is, you can rely on the collective wisdom of your customers.
To some extent, this is a mirroring tactic that you can use at scale. You can read more about mirroring in sales here.
Here is one example:
In short, Reply has helped other {{Standardized_Title_Plural}} from companies in the {{Industry}} industry, such as {{Similar_Company1}} and {{Similar_Company4}}: our sales engagement platform accelerates their sales by automating communications with prospects and putting sales outreach on autopilot.
In the email template above, I refer to Reply as a sales engagement platform, but people may have no idea what it is. So I checked Replyâs G2 reviews to see what our customers think about Reply, what they like or dislike, and how they tend to call our software category.
As you can see, they typically call us âSales Automationâ, âEmail Outreachâ, âEmail Sequencingâ. âEmail Campaign Prospectingâ tool etc.
This got me thinking: maybe, itâs better to change my email template and say that Reply is âan email outreach automation toolâ or âsales and email outreach automation platformâ instead of calling us âa sales engagement platformâ?
In short, Reply has helped other {{Standardized_Title_Plural}} from companies in the {{Industry}} industry, such as {{Similar_Company1}} and {{Similar_Company4}}: our email outreach tool accelerates their sales by automating communications with prospects and putting sales outreach on autopilot.
As a result, more prospects will get my reason for outreach and value proposition.
So here is a sample workflow:
check out your existing email template
go to G2 or any other relevant listing with user reviews
read and analyze as many reviews as possible
use real words instead of your website copy or marketing teamâs pitch
change your email template accordingly
2. đ AI Email Composers
A few years ago, OpenAI introduced one of the most powerful language models called GPT-3 that could use deep learning and AI to produce human-like text in seconds. Since then, many developers and entrepreneurs have built stunning demos and products on top of this technology.
Of course, the technology has found a use case in sales development, evolving into a whole new software category of âemail composersâ. Simply put, these are the tools that use AI to generate cold email based on some text snippets or just a brief description of what you need it to say.
You can find a pretty exhaustive list of these tools here:
https://sales.reply.io/#/ai-email-composers
Here are some of my top picks:
Replyâs Email Assistant > https://reply.io/sales-email-assistant
SmartWriter > smartwriter.ai
Lavender > trylavender.com
Flowrite > flowrite.com
How can SDRs and Salespeople use it to improve their email templates? You can ask AI to generate new email copy as many times as you need until you get a really cool and creative template you can use.
3. đ¤ LinkedIn Profile
Typically, SDRs contact multiple decision-makers, evaluators, and influencers from the same company. And we need to find the âright keysâ for every prospect based on their vertical, department, seniority, job title, etc.
How can we do this? We can analyze LinkedIn profiles of existing customers or prospects (their Experience section, to be precise) and find out what they have accomplished in a specific role, what their main responsibilities are, and so on.
For example, we need to customize our template for:
SDRs
AEs
SDR leaders
VPs of Sales
To do that, I will visit a few LinkedIn profiles of Reply customers with the corresponding job titles to learn more about their responsibilities. For example:
Using this information, I will update my template to appeal specifically to the SDRs:
Or, for example, here are some of the responsibilities of an Account Executive:
Based on this info, we can also adjust our value proposition:
We can repeat the same procedure for all other job titles we want to reach out to. As a result, we can dramatically increase our reply rates, because:
our email templates are now personalized for each Persona
our templates correlate with their responsibilities (basically, we want to help them solve their problems)
and our templates clearly articulate the practical value of our product for each Persona
These are some creative ideas in case you need some inspiration to rework your email templates. Hope youâve enjoyed decoding them with me!
Stay tuned for more âĄď¸