Solving The Ongoing Challenge of Hitting Your Quarterly Sales Targets

It’s a tale as old as time, and one we are all very familiar with. You KNOW that your business can offer prospective clients exactly what they’re looking for, but just how do you convince them to choose you over your many competitors? So how can one Hitt quarterly Sales Targets? 

It can be complicated to cut through the noise of it all, and solving the ongoing challenge of hitting your quarterly targets is a struggle all software companies are familiar with

So what’s going to make you stand out from the crowd? First, reaching the goals you’ve set out for yourself is essential, and it can often be discouraging when you’re not generating successful leads.

Luckily, there are solutions, and we’re here to tell you what those are.

First, we must consider exactly how we can reach the right people at the right time. So how do you find prospects interested in what you’re putting out?

Utilizing LinkedIn and email marketing are successful ways of reaching your target audience where they are. What’s more, these options of lead generation marketing are instant, easily accessible, and, best of all, free!

Next, perhaps the most critical step is to have a large enough pipeline to secure genuine, quality leads. On average, the number of targets you’re reaching out to needs three times the amount you need to close. So, if you’re trying to close 10, you must have 30.

To get a significant pipeline, nailing a hyper-targeted campaign via email or LinkedIn is essential. The more you hone in on your desired audience and their specific pain points, the higher your conversion rates.

So, we need to assess what our prospects need before ascertaining how we can help them. Focus on THEIR pain point first – what are they looking for? What is it the company is struggling with? Then, dig into the recurring needs of people within the industry until you find exactly what it is you can target, rather than focusing on the means to an end.

Opening with a strong one-liner that speaks directly to their unique pain points is a guaranteed eye-catcher and will have the reader pausing with a “they understand me!” moment. After all, relatability is everything.

We get it, hitting those quarterly sales targets is a feat many have yet to conquer. Building an extensive pipeline of the right audience and focusing on solving a genuine pain will help you get there. Personalize your messaging and let them know that you genuinely understand them.

Once you nail these elements, you will have a better chance of meeting your quarterly sales goals. 

Are you ready to smash those sales? Success!

Read our next article Follow Up Sales Strategies for Success.

LinkedIn is a social media platform that every business or singular professional must-have. And yet, it is still relatively foreign to most users. We know how to sell our brand, but just how do we generate the leads we need via the network? So first, we need to understand just how big of an influence the platform has.

LinkedIn is the number one social media site for accessing influential people, like-minded specialists and, most importantly, desired clients. There are approximately 810 million users across 200 countries and regions worldwide!

If you’re not using the platform to target your target audience, you’re missing out on a massive pool of potential business partnerships. But worry not; we’ve got the inside scoop on utilizing all that LinkedIn offers to the best of your ability, ensuring those leads come pouring in and your network doubles and improves your lead generation strategy.

Tip #1 Make your profile stand out

Without a complete, optimized profile, the audience you’re targeting, and potential clients you seek won’t fully understand what you do or precisely what you can offer them. Ensuring your LinkedIn profile is completely up-to-date, looks professional and reflects all your expertise and experience is vital. Here’s how to make your profile pop:

1. Use your brand logo or company head as your profile image.
2. Include an attention-grabbing banner image.
3. Angle your ‘about’ section to the needs of prospective clients (what can you offer them that others can’t?) Sell yourself!
4. Optimize all of your copy for SEO, ensuring relevant keywords clients may be searching are present.
5. Showcase your industry experience, unique offerings, skills and awards or achievements.

Tip #2 Connect, connect, connect!

Growing your network is only possible if you reach out to the right people at the right time. So do some research about which of your target audience is present on LinkedIn. Then send out those connection requests! Then, not only will you have immediate access to competitor content, but you’ll also have your desired database on tap. Here’s how to start:

1. Look through the suggested contacts LinkedIn will provide, and begin with those! Chances are they’re 50% of the people you want to reach or are mutual connections with the network you seek.
2. Stay consistent, sending no less than four requests a day.

Tip #3 Send direct messages & engage with connections for better Lead Generation

We cannot stress enough how important it is to remain active on LinkedIn. What is the point if you’re not engaging with your connections? Right? One prime way to reach the people you seek is to send out direct messages introducing yourself or offering your services.

1. If you already know the connection you’re messaging, you could start by presenting them with a campaign idea on how they can grow their business further.
2. If you don’t know the connection and want to form a relationship, simply reach out with a short, punchy introduction to your company and offer – again, sell yourself.
3. Always include a website or contact (aside from LinkedIn) that they can reach you on to further your connection

Tip #4 Post regularly & keep your feed interesting 

Being active in connecting with your network via messages is simply not enough to keep eyes on your brand. Adding extra value is vital and offers a great way to promote your unique services further. Keep things interesting by:

1. Sharing links to exciting podcasts or articles you and your target audience will relate to.
2. Curating and posting informative blogs that shed insight on applicable themes and services.
3. Offer unique insight and insider knowledge to your network, showcasing how much value your company has to add to the industry.

Tip #5 Become a part of your community

Connecting and interacting with like-minded individuals and businesses is key to broadening your insight into the industry. Making your presence known to critical players in the sphere. Becoming a part of your community is a great way to grow your LinkedIn network and your client base! Here’s how to do it:

1. Join groups where your clients will be. LinkedIn allows you to join up to 100 groups. Still, it distils those you want to be a part of by searching for keywords related to your target audience and unique business offering – an easy way of finding “your people”!
2. Become a part of discussion boards and comment sections focused on your niche. This is an excellent opportunity to connect with similar minds in real-time.
3. Celebrate the successes of your clients and partners, praising their achievements and showing those that matter that you’re “in their corner”.

We understand how overwhelming such a large platform can be for companies looking to expand their network, but by following these five simple steps, you’ll be on the road to success in no time! The future is now, and staying in the know and active on social media is a great way to reach prospective clients and business partners. So, are you ready to get LinkedIn and lead generating?

SSC: A Leading Lead Generation Company

Effective lead generation remains a core component of any B2B organization’s success and viability. This multifaceted and complex aspect of your marketing strategy requires you to engage experts who can deliver results.

As a company that lives and breathes lead generation, SSC does not leave anything to chance or guesswork. We measure every component of our outreach, from subject line to message content to the optimal time of day to approach your prospects.

With the data dictating our process from strategy to conversion and beyond, our SSC team will ensure your business starts this important journey on a sound footing, guaranteeing a lead generation process that is effective, credible, authentic, and transparent.

SSC can make explosive growth your reality today, from generating a higher ROI and reducing your cost per sale to developing your ideal customer profile (ICP) to driving conversions. So get in touch right away and let our knowledgeable team assist you in learning more about the SSC service suite so you can make sure no lead goes unnoticed and no opportunity is missed.

Read Next Article The Holy Grail of Software Companies

B2B lead generation is complex — the sales cycles are long, customers fewer, and it involves more decision-makers. This makes it far more complicated than B2C lead generation, where customers are many, and sales cycles are shorter.

That’s why any B2B business needs to give special attention to their lead generation efforts. If you don’t do it well, you may as well end up wasting a lot of your marketing budget, and here’s what would happen to your campaign:

This is perhaps the reason why marketers gave preference to lead generation in 2020 as well. So, to ensure you have a steady stream of leads and customers, we’ve put together this B2B lead generation cheatsheet.

So, let’s dive right into it.

Cheatsheet for B2B Lead Generation in 2021

From email marketing to content marketing, there are loads of approaches that you can take to generate leads for your B2B business. Here are the best B2B lead generation hacks to help you out.

1. Email Marketing

Email marketing is an excellent way of going about B2B lead generation. It’s also highly effective, with an ROI of over $40 for every single dollar invested in it. The best part about it is that you can use it to acquire leads and nurture them and move them further down your sales funnel.

Here’s how you can leverage email marketing for B2B lead generation:

1. First, build a list of potential prospects.
2. Collect their email addresses.
3. Draft a cold email and send it over.
4. Send reminders after a few days, if they don’t reply.

While this may seem simple enough, there can be many challenges along the way. Simply compiling a list of prospects and sending out cold emails won’t help your cause. As the Black Panther would say:

The key here is to segment and micro-segment your email list to craft targeted cold email campaigns for B2B lead generation.

You can segment your audience based on their interests, demographics, or locations. This can allow you to target particular buyer personas and thus personalize your offerings further. As a result, they’ll be more likely to find the email relevant.

With micro-segmentation, you can take this targeting one step further. You can dive deep into your audience and create granular clusters among them. This allows you to personalize further your cold email messaging.

2. Email Automation

Sending out cold emails can be a great way to approach B2B lead generation. However, when you’ve to scale up your cold email outreach, it can get challenging. That’s where email automation comes into the picture.

Using it, you can set up autoresponder sequences that will work without intervening manually. Then, all you’ve got to do is leverage an email marketing tool like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign and add your email list.

You can then segment your audience and create an email template to send to each segment. Next, you can set up autoresponder sequences activated based on how the recipients respond to them.

For instance, if the recipients don’t reply to your email, the autoresponder sequence will send a second email after a few days.

3. Email Deliverability

When you’re doing cold email outreach for B2B lead generation, it’s also essential to look at your email deliverability. You might have an enormous email list, but if the emails don’t get delivered, you’ll end up waste your time and budget.

To improve your email deliverability, here’s what you can do:

• Get your domain verified to ensure your emails don’t go to spam folders.
• Filter your list regularly to avoid those emails that bounce.
• Be consistent with your email volume.
• Don’t send spammy emails to avoid getting marked as spam.
• Instead, encrypt emails to build trust among the receivers.

4. Marketing Research/Data Analytics

To generate leads, you must target your marketing efforts well. For this to happen, you need to do in-depth market research.

The idea is to understand precisely who your audience is, as this will help you customize your messaging, which, in turn, can influence your B2B lead generation.

If you’ve already got a website or customers, you can dive into their data and try to understand who shows interest in your brand and buys from you.

While numerous tools can do the job for you, it helps to have a combination of professionals and tools. We at SSC combine both to deliver the most detailed and accurate database to help you target your marketing campaigns. From demographic to technographic data, we cover it all.

5. Content Marketing

Yet another way through which you can do B2B lead generation is content marketing. Nearly 70% of marketers leverage it for this purpose. Content marketing involves creating and distributing high-quality content through blog posts, images, videos, etc

The idea behind it is to become a helpful resource for your audience. Doing so can help improve your brand trust and may encourage your audience to become your leads.

Here’s how you can go about content marketing:

1. First, find out the pain points of your audience.
2. Then, create content around how you can solve them and weave your products or services into it.
3. Finally, add internal links to landing pages or registration pages.
4. Leverage search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, etc. to distribute your content and grow its reach.

Final Thoughts

Lead generation has a critical role to play in driving your business growth. Without it, you can’t expect to generate sales and drive revenues.

To generate leads, it’s essential to leverage email marketing. You must segment and micro-segment your email lists and personalize your emails for the best results. When dealing with email outreach on a large scale, it helps to use email automation to engage with your prospects without any manual interference.

Additionally, you should pay attention to email deliverability as it can make or break your campaign. It’s also equally important to conduct market research and analyze the data collected as well to understand your audience. Without doing so, even the best of campaigns can fail.

All of this can seem challenging to implement, but we can help. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you grow your business.

Email personalization at scale requires a well-thought-out, organized workflow. No ifs, and, or buts about it!

The more personalized your emails are, the more valuable they will be to the recipient. Not to mention, the better your response rate will be.

The inverse is true as well. If your emails aren’t personalized or relevant to the recipient, you have a greater chance of having recipients mark your email as spam. This will burn out your domain, and your results will tank.

When sending emails, you are sending your message to people who all fit different profiles and have other needs.

Emails are an effective way of reaching your audience and speaking to them directly. However, when you’re talking to your audience or customers, it’s best if you personalize the conversation.

Doing it for a few prospects can be easy. But what if you have hundreds or thousands of prospects or customers to whom you are reaching out? You need a well-thought-out process to do email personalization at scale successfully.

This article will help you learn how to manage email personalization at scale.

Let’s dig in.

Why Email Personalization at Scale Matters?

It’s easy to send out a random templated email to your customers. However, that may not get you the results that you’re looking for. Instead, it might be opened and sent to the Junk folder directly. Then, customers need only a few seconds to decide whether they like your marketing message.

Case in point: emails with a personalized subject line are 26% more likely to be opened.

Moreover, about 70% of millennials are frustrated because of irrelevant emails. By leveraging email personalization at scale, you can engage the recipient of your email on a one-to-one basis. Driving more engagement because the reader feels that you are speaking directly to them.

It is not only millennials who demand personalization. Nine out of 10 consumers (91%) are likelier to buy from brands that personalize their offers and recommendations.

In order to stay ahead of your competitors, it is essential that you personalize your emails and communications with your customers. By doing so, you will be able to better connect with them and build lasting relationships.

There are numerous examples of brands that have benefited from personalization, and Amazon is a prime example among them. Every email that it sends includes personalized recommendations for the customers.

How to Achieve Email Personalization at Scale?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”… Romeo knows what’s up! Adding your customer’s name to your emails is the simplest personalization you can do.

But there’s much more to email personalization at scale than that. First, you must genuinely dive into your audience’s psyche and understand them.

To do this, you need to gather data about your prospects and customers. Then, once you have this data, you need to make sense of it. Then figure out how to personalize your emails for your customers.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool, but only if done correctly. Knowing who to send your emails to and when is half the battle; crafting an effective email that speaks to their needs is the other half. With the right tools and a little planning, you can make email marketing work for you.

So, let’s look at the different methods to help you achieve email personalization at scale.

1. Utilize Behavioral Analytics

To personalize your emails, you must first understand your customers by determining their preferences. While you can figure that out by carrying out surveys and asking your customers, behavioral analytics can help too.

Here’s how to collect behavioral data:

1. Segment your audience into different buyer personas. For example, in your email outreach, you may want to speak differently to a CEO prospect versus a Director level person. Both have different pain points. Segmenting your audience will help you craft the right message for the recipient.
2. Understand the customer journey for each persona. For example, does your prospect have purchase authority or do they have to ask a supervisor? Knowing this upfront will help you personalize your message more effectively.
3. Track customer behavior for each persona. Looking at open rates, response rates and click-through rates. Other parameters are a great way to track customer behavior for each persona. For example, as they click through to your website, UTM tracking helps drive prospects from emails to your website. This helps you can see their path to purchase more effectively.
4. Create an “icebreaker“ for each contact that is a point that would be relevant to them and feel personalized. Do some research before your and create an icebreaker. Having specific reasons to reach out will make you more interactive. It will also give you a personal touch that benefits you in the long run! Write it in such a way that it drops naturally into the message of your email. For example, note which posts they posted on their blog and take a snippet from it. Then when you send an email, you can include a copy like “I love your post on {{topic x}}. It spoke to me.” This becomes a very personalized email and shows this was not an email sent to everyone. You want to show them that you took the time to research THEM, so your message becomes genuine and well-informed.

Boosting Your Conversions via Email Personalization at Scale

Did you know that you can personalize images in your emails to increase conversions?

Segmenting your audience and using behavioral analytics to gather insights, can help you understand how to personalize emails effectively.

In today’s business world, first impressions are everything. That’s why when you’re reaching out to potential clients, it’s important to make a good impression from the start. A personalized image and a offer for coffee can go a long way. It makes you seem like more than just another salesperson. This makes your email significantly more appealing and will help you get the meeting you’re looking for.

2. Establish a Team

To achieve email personalization at scale, you also need a dedicated team to oversee your transition. From a traditional email marketing approach to a trigger-based one.

The idea is to ensure the transition is smooth and implemented without a hitch. Your team should include:

• A Campaign Manager who manages the entire program
• An IT Staff Member
• One or more SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) sending out emails. And replying to recipients who want to learn more. Their goal is to schedule as many sales appointments as possible.
• A researcher who builds your list uses tools like LinkedIn as well as other market research tools. This is an evergreen process.

Remember that this team would need to work together to improve your email personalization results continuously.

3. Employ Technology

Finally, you can’t go anywhere without technology and automation when you’re planning to do email personalization at scale.

The right technology can help you create numerous personalized variations and triggers. This wouldn’t be possible manually. At the same time, email marketing automation enables you to send such emails on autopilot, when the actions related to the triggers take place.

Some of the email automation tools you can check out are:

• Mailshake
• Hubspot
• Woodpecker
• Mixmax
• Lemlist
• Active Campaign
• Clickfunnels

Conclusion: Personalize Your Emails at Scale Now

Email is an important marketing channel. Personalization is a must. Consumers are now expecting it. If you’re not delivering, they’ll go to your competitors.

To wrap up, you should utilize behavior analytics and analyze customer usage. You should set up a dedicated team for personalization, and employ technology to achieve email personalization at scale.

However, doing all of this yourself can be challenging. It always helps to work with experts. We at SSC, have a dedicated team of professionals. We can help you with this and many other things. So get in touch with us now.