TL;DR
– Systematically test two ideal customer profiles over a week with precise segmentation by company criteria
– Short timeframes of one week allow for quick experiments when comparing the ROI of 3-5 campaigns
– Write 80% about prospects and 20% about product, as no one cares about features
– Integrate LaGrowthMachine with CRM via Zapier to track conversion rates and analyze cohorts
– Measure quality beyond MQLs by continuously tracking which audiences generate the highest closing rates
If you are a young company (like us at Whaly), everything is complicated: you have limited resources, you are under high time pressure, and you naturally don’t know which campaign strategies to implement best.
However, one thing doesn’t change: outbound marketing is an essential part of your business. If you have relatively low inbound marketing (which is often the case in the early stages), this can be the easiest and most effective way to gain more prospects.
Before the process can be made efficient, you need to know all the stages, such as targeting the right people, extracting and validating emails (this can be done automatically with LaGrowthMachine 😻), before you can get started.
To find out what yields the best MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) results, measuring the success of your campaigns can be tedious.
Over time, we have tracked all sorts of configurations and tried to understand which campaigns generated the best leads.
This is a brief overview of our first campaigns, our experiences, our failures, and above all, how we managed to improve the conversion rate by 30% in 10 days by measuring campaigns!
How to do it? A good way is to make the entire cold outreach process by email as simple as possible and focus on three things: audience, timeframe, message. And you measure all of this.
Find your audience
When maximizing your outbound activities, it’s all about one thing: targeting the right audience.
Believe me, everything else is secondary.
If the audience you are addressing truly has a need for your product/service, the channel, the message, and the tone will not matter much.
If you target the wrong audience (like I did when I started with LaGrowthMachine 🤦), you harm your brand and waste a lot of resources!
And when someone replies with a simple “doesn’t fit me, please remove my email from your list,” it hurts.
When we (at Whaly) launched our first outreach campaigns, we were unsure about the exact focus (ideal customer profile and buying persona). So we wanted to try many things to refine it.
This was a big mistake and a waste of time (and money 💰).
A good, quick, and simple strategy is to try 2 campaigns within a week, aiming to target 2 ICPs (ideal customer profile = company types) and one persona.
A good ICP is precise and should include criteria such as number of employees, market/industry, geography, internal organization, etc., that truly make your product or services relevant.
We found that the percentage of tech employees is important, as Whaly helps non-technical teams create their own analyses: we save developers and data teams a lot of time by making business teams autonomous. Therefore, we add value to companies that have limited technical resources or want to focus entirely on product development.
Short timeframe = fastest trials
The ideal timeframe for a test run is one week with two campaigns, so you can compare the ROI. People usually get back to you quickly by email, LinkedIn message, or LinkedIn email, so start your tests as quickly as possible with 3-5 campaigns.
This way, you can measure the ROI of your campaigns after just 10 days: you keep the campaign that yields the best results in terms of responses or sales. Discard the second one and replace it with a new campaign.
A short timeframe reduces the risk of wasting a lot of time before realizing your campaign isn’t working.
Make communication personal
Cold outreach is about getting replies and setting up meetings, not about selling your product.
Nobody cares about your product ← read that again
Because there are tons of products or services very similar to yours, especially for potential customers who are not experts like you.
A good message talks 20% about you (product or service) and 80% about your audience (Sales Targeting).
Try to make it personal.
People can smell from a hundred miles away if you wrote your prospecting email like a robot.
A good method to determine if you’ve made it personal is to read your email out loud and ask yourself: “Does this sound like a human?” Make the effort and try to bring yourself and your prospects closer together.
Measure and track everything
Measuring can be a difficult thing. The first experiment is easy. But when you start iterating and launching many campaigns, it can get damn chaotic.
After three months of campaigns, I felt like I didn’t know what was working and what wasn’t. A good measurement mechanism is to integrate your marketing automation with your CRM.
With LaGrowthMachine, you can connect Pipedrive, Hubspot natively, and almost any other CRM with the Zapier integration.
Once your account is connected to your CRM, you can track conversion rates and repeat test runs much faster.
Ideal for prospect generation is analyzing categories & conversion rates with your CRM.
This way, you can analyze the level of conversion rates per week and easily adjust your campaigns over time.
Another important metric is comparing the quality of the prospects you generate.
For example, go beyond simple MQL analysis by checking which campaigns (and audiences) generate the most closed deals.
For us, one audience generated fewer MQLs, but the closing rates were very high. It would have been almost impossible to understand this without capturing the data in our CRM.
Of course, with Whaly, we measured everything, both the MQL influences of LaGrowthMachine campaigns and the conversion rates of each deal.
In short: Whaly is the platform where you can centralize all your scattered data and build measurement on top of it. It’s the “one-stop shop” to:
- get a complete overview of your prospect generation campaigns and the number of qualified leads generated (more on buying B2B leads) by matching your lead generation tool with your CRM (e.g., LaGrowthMachine, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.)
- create cohort analyses and drill-ins for each campaign to achieve the best results and repeat them over time
- share your analysis with your entire team for your different retros and OKRs
In Whaly, you can match your campaign logs with your CRM.
Whether you want to match data based on campaign names, dates, or emails, custom integrations always work.
Once you have this data, you can dive deeper into channels (read more on multichannel campaigns) and messaging.
Get 3.5x more leads!
Want to improve your sales team’s efficiency? With LaGrowthMachine, you can generate 3.5x more leads on average while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes. Sign up today and get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!
Summary
In short, we improved the performance of our outreach campaigns (read more on lead campaigns too) by following these 4 simple steps:
- Experiment first with a small number of campaigns: two is a good number to compare performance
- A short timeframe speeds up iteration (~ one week campaign and a few days of measurement)
- Ensure a personal touch, don’t sound like a robot
- Measure and track your performance with all your tools unified