Is cold emailing suitable for me and my product? What kind of results can I expect from a campaign? Is it even worth starting? These and many other questions concern our clients before they decide to collaborate with us. Is there a way to make your offer stand out in a competitive market so much that everyone wants to talk about it? In this article, I will try to answer this question based on the experiences we’ve gained from running campaigns for our clients.
Database preparation
To evaluate the potential of your offer, we can’t work in isolation from the ideal client profile. I assume you have and are using a CRM system, or at the very least, you can extract data such as a customer list from your accounting system. Much has been written about creating a set of variables that define a persona (the ideal client profile). In this article, you’ll learn how we do this at AMU. Therefore, I’ll focus on what criteria to pay attention to when analyzing an offer targeted at a persona. Specifically, it’s about listing the reasons why your clients chose to work with you. However, I don’t mean whether you offer a better price or whether your product or service is of higher quality compared to the competition.
- In this exercise, it is important for you to create a list of your current or former clients consisting of those companies with whom collaboration has been the most successful. These should be clients who regularly pay (or paid) their invoices, and ideally, if possible, pay their invoices on time.
- The companies on this list were or are willing to recommend your service or product within their network of contacts.
- For each entry, include information about the specific reason for the collaboration. In other words, add details about what solution your client was looking for in the market.
Use our example:
- slabs.pl — sought to reach both international and domestic clients for smart home solutions
- bsservices.co — wanted to outsource their prospecting activities.
- bpower2.com — aimed to schedule meetings with major companies whose sales rely on field sales representatives who visit clients.
- workai.com — sought to reach corporations in Poland, Germany, and the UK.
- fujitsu.com — was looking for a new way to proactively reach out to leads.
- inteliwise.com — sought methods to connect with managers handling complaint management and customer service departments.
Reviewing the Offer — Evolution or Revolution: What Are Your Chances of Generating Leads from Cold Emails?
Once you have completed work on your list, focus on reviewing your company’s offer. In my experience, the most frequently considered criterion is the price of the service or product. In my opinion, this is a mistake. For the outcome of the campaign, it doesn’t really matter whether you are selling a SaaS subscription for $10 per user or an intralogistics system for $1,500,000.
Price
Price is a relevant criterion when determining whether it’s worth servicing leads from a particular channel. Thus, price matters when considering your margin and calculating the number of leads you need to acquire within a specific timeframe to set a goal for your cold emailing campaign before it begins. If you want to acquire a customer whose Lifetime Value is less than $2,000 and your margin is below 50%, it’s not worth the effort. However, if you expect to secure purchases exceeding €50,000 in the first transaction, your average sales cycle exceeds three months, and you cannot afford to collect leads that you’ll revisit regularly for at least a year, do not have a lead nurturing plan, and expect your potential client to be ready to buy immediately, know that you have 2-3 chances per year by consistently sending emails to 300 people monthly. Personally, I have secured contracts worth €150,000 by hiring programming teams — all it took was having a CV that exactly matched the client’s requirements. However, there were sometimes 15 leads a month requesting such CVs (but they did not want to wait a few days for me to find a candidate). For a purchase of €1,000,000, the key is to establish recognition and presence in the potential client’s awareness, not just as a company (which the marketing department will handle) but also as a person. You’ll schedule meetings at trade shows and conferences, increase attendance at webinars, support the sales and marketing department’s plans, but do not expect immediate transactions.
The Pain of the Client
Nie jest też najważniejsze, jakie problemy twoich klientów rozwiązujesz. Istotna jest odpowiedź na pytanie, jaka jest bariera wejścia twój produkt lub usługę. Czy będzie ona stanowić ewolucję, czy rewolucję w życiu firmy twojego klienta? It’s also not the most crucial factor which problems your clients are solving. What matters is the barrier to entry for your product or service. Will it represent an evolution or a revolution in your client’s business?
- Evolution: This category includes products and services that are not essential for the functioning of your client’s company but can provide measurable value from the purchase. Lead generation is one such service. Building websites on WordPress is another example. Other examples include smart home systems, chatbots and voice bots for complaint management departments, marketing services, R&D projects, new mobile and web applications, and employee recruitment.
- Revolution: This refers to products and services that bring about significant changes in a company’s operations, fundamentally transforming them (in a positive sense). Examples include ERP systems, intralogistics solutions, overhauls of existing IT systems, HR services, or revamping e-commerce platforms.
Additionally, consider whether the potential client is already using a similar solution. If so, you need to understand what part of the market this pertains to and how often there is an opportunity for a new purchasing window (for example, with ERP systems, this might occur no more frequently than once every five years).
__________________________________________
Learn more about our lead generation services
__________________________________________
Case Studies
Once you have determined how challenging the decision is for your potential client when considering a partnership with your company, review the materials that describe the collaboration between you and your client, focusing on the results your work has delivered for the client’s business. If
- You have case studies available or can create them.
- You can highlight the clients you have worked with.
- Clients allow you to share the results you achieved working for them.
You’re on the right track. Otherwise, your strategy should focus on engaging with potential clients at trade shows and industry events, where the unique aspects of your offer are less critical. What should you focus on when examining case studies? Experience from our conducted campaigns tells me that the most important aspect is the presence of numbers that describe business results. Check whether you can discuss this.
- What gains did your client’s company achieve by working with you?
- What types of savings does your offer generate for the client’s company?
- What types of goals would your client not have been able to achieve without collaborating with you?
Outreach Strategy and Long-Term Lead Plan
Every lead that is acquired and every person who agrees to further contact should be placed into our sales funnel, which operates according to a pre-established plan. Such a plan should include at least the following assumptions:
- Knowledge of the sales windows for potential clients throughout the year
- Awareness and availability of industry events
- Knowledge and access to relevant associations/groups/networking organizations
- Calculated minimum, maximum, and average sales cycle
- Plan for re-engaging with the client, including contact frequency (e.g., once a quarter), renewal contact channel (email, phone, social media)
- Assignment of action scenarios based on lead classification (when and how many times to follow up, how to proceed, and when to enter the lead into the CRM and resume contact later)
The General Rule of thumb: If your average sales cycle::
- Does not exceed 3 months: Focus on the value proposition and run a campaign where you highlight it. You can expect 5 to 31 leads per month per campaign.
- Exceeds 3 months: In addition to your UVP, create a list of industry events where you will participate. You can expect 3 to 15 leads per 300 people per campaign.
- Exceeds 6 months: A UVP campaign will generate few leads (3 to 5 per 300 people per campaign). These leads will be extremely valuable, so you need a plan for them. The most effective approach will be campaigns aimed at increasing the audience for webinars, online events, and scheduling meetings at trade shows and conferences
Competitive Analysis for Each Offer
If you haven’t done this already, investigate how many companies in your environment might offer similar solutions to the same target audience as you. Forget about just Googling and approach it the same way you build your list of potential clients. From our experience, most companies are unaware of the extent of competition in the market. We are not surprised by this. By analyzing the profiles of potential clients and competitors using our new solution, ProspektMeUp, we can determine the extent to which competitive offers overlap with yours and assess the likelihood of scheduling a meeting, as well as the probability that a specific company will consider your offer.
The longer we conduct research, the more apparent it becomes that in many cases, our clients are completely unaware of the existence of companies offering competitive solutions in their market segment. This occurs because, depending on the sample and industry being studied, 20% to 70% of companies are inaccurately described online. (Below are the research results for specific industries.) Information Technology & Services
Automotive 
Machinery 
Marketing&advertising 
This means, for example:
- Their websites do not keep up with changes in the company’s offerings.
- Some companies, through internal decisions, choose to shift their business profile to highlight certain services or products that they believe their clients desire.
- Representatives of these companies, like most of us, view their offerings from an internal perspective.
When looking at your own product or service, you tend to describe it from your own perspective rather than that of a potential client. This happens because returning to an external viewpoint often requires consulting people outside the organization. Therefore, analyzing the competition for each offer cannot be a simple process of Googling a few key phrases and listing the links that appear. Unless we want to get stuck in an information bubble. We don’t need to understand the full range of competitive offers. It’s sufficient to determine the percentage and the entities that are competing with us. This allows us to quickly assess in numerical terms how unique our value proposition really is. We will also be able to create a list of hypotheses about which elements of our offer are distinguishing factors.
Testing the Reception of the Current UVP and Creating a New One
I recently read a brilliant post by Tomasz Karwatka, a well-known figure in the IT industry, who wrote, “Sales is your research.” We also believe that marketing and sales involve constant testing. The challenge is being able to view your organization from the client’s perspective. Fortunately, if we can gather data on what clients are looking for from us and have the right tool, such as our ProspectMeUp, we can conduct this analysis automatically without spending tens of thousands of dollars. In this context, what will our newly created Unique Value Proposition (UVP) be? It will be nothing more than a hypothesis that gains validation when it receives positive feedback in the form of a high volume of responses in campaigns, a significant number of leads, and increased impressions in our advertisements. The work on it is never finished; it always requires testing and confirmation from clients.
Check out our Campaigns on LinkedIn to learn how to get potential customers for your brand!