Personalize Your Outreach: Tools and Tips for Prospecting

Build a Relationship 🤝

If your ultimate goal is to get them to call you, you will be more effective if you use personalization for your prospecting. This is especially true for long-term buying cycles, as you will not only be top-of-mind, but they will get to know and trust you. 

Building a relationship is largely based on understanding the buyers’ point of view. The right message will reflect that, as it will directly address their common challenges. In fact, you can ask them for an interview to directly discover their problems. 

Bonus: Interviewing your potential clients will help you build the relationship while learning what you need to know to help them with these problems.

For example: You know that IT managers have the problem of being contacted for everything in their companies. Your solution allows company users to perform certain reports or activities themselves. You have the answer to their problems, so communicate it without reminding them of old midnight ads trying to sell them something they don’t need.

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By creating personalized messages, you are building a relationship based on your potential client feeling understood. If they feel understood, you are already “on their side” in their eyes. This is likely because what you are saying resonates with them.

Additionally, if you use LinkedIn, your response rate will be 3 times higher than that of a normal email.

Communicate in a way that you know they can understand. It will help them lower their guard a bit, which we all have now with new people. If they are open to learning about you and what you do, then they are more likely to give you a chance and provide honest feedback, which inherently means more responses.

Target Your Audience 🎯

Do you know who you are sending a message to? 

It may sound ridiculous, but many messages are sent every day with the “spaghetti method”: throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Targeting specific job functions, companies, or geographic areas will allow you to be much more specific in your messages, you can’t go wrong! 

In our own research, we have analyzed messages sent to smaller audiences and they get a noticeably higher number of responses than messages sent to more people. Although your instinct tells you that sending to more people is better, smaller audiences mean more personalized messages can be sent.

For example: You want to reach HR managers in North America. Create a list specifically with those people in great detail using the filters in Sales Navigator. Add filters that help you narrow down the number of prospects on the list, such as geolocation, industry, company size, etc.

Using the filters in the video above, you can now draft an email like

Dear [HR Manager Name],

You were looking for software that helps you identify the right people who will improve your Marketing business despite the amount of resources you have.

I wanted to reach out to you today because I am looking for people interested in trying our new software that does [A, B, and C]. 

Would you be interested in seeing if this would be a good fit for you and your company?

Sincerely,

Jacob

Creating a personalized message doesn’t have to contain something about them personally, but about the general challenges of the job, region, or industry. You have already heard them say what concerns them, and your product can help them. Identify that for them and they will feel heard enough to check it out.

Use Data

Consider if someone sends you a message like this

Hello Robert,

You have likely received numerous messages telling you how important you are and how great you are.

In reality, my goal is to tell you that you are already doing a great job. The tools you have been provided have not helped you as much as they should have, and you are still crushing it. 

However, if you want to save yourself some of those tedious tasks for an AI so you can focus on more important things, feel free to contact me at ____.

Looking forward to your reply,

Janice

Are you more likely to respond or find out more with this message than if someone just jumps in to say how good their product is? I’m willing to bet it’s much more likely. 

Using the data you have collected or the knowledge you have of the industry can shed light on their difficulties. It can allow you to communicate directly with them, even if you don’t know them personally. 

Personalized Prospecting Images or GIFs

Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” This holds true for images. Seeing our own name in an image makes us feel important. Personalizing an image for your potential clients increases your confidence level.

Creating personalized images in tools like Microsoft Paint or Canva might be fine, but creating them in automation is ideal if you are reaching hundreds of people. It is easy for us to resort to tools we already know, but using tools made for other purposes can be doubly useful.

A tool created for marketers to advertise –Abyssale– has also proven to be an extremely useful way to create personalized images or GIFs at scale. You can also use a tool like Uclic to integrate it with your email and create personalized emails in combination with your prospecting tool of choice like LGM.

Personalized Prospecting Landing Pages

One option is to have your IT and Marketing departments develop personalized landing pages for your prospecting. Another option is to develop simple pages on your own. Tools like Webflow make it easy to upload your contacts and create a place where people can see their name “in the spotlight.”

Making people feel connected helps them see you and your products in a different light. You have gone the extra mile, and that goes a long way with people. 

These landing pages can be a great way to showcase everything about you and your company and how you help. Adding testimonials from current or past clients is also an added bonus. 

If you don’t have the “social proof” of testimonials, ask your clients for them. They have been shown to be an excellent way to promote your business, and yourself. In fact, they generate 62% more revenue on average.

Personalized Prospecting Video 📹

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is priceless. Creating a personalized video for the recipient is an incredibly useful and unique tool. It is becoming increasingly popular, so there are always new technologies being developed. Currently, VideoAsk is one of the best tools out there for creating personalized videos, and at scale.

The idea is to develop a way to use the prospect’s name, company, or problems in a video format. Seeing it in an image is impactful, but imagine how special they will feel seeing their name in a video. 

LaGrowthMachine

Introducing prospecting automation into your tool portfolio is a perfect way to help you reach more people in less time. LaGrowthMachine will create a lead pipeline for you by automating how you contact each lead. 

Setting up a workflow template is also easy so you can identify the contacts you want to reach, how you want to reach them, and when you want to reach them. It can be as simple as this:

Or as complex as this:

Regardless of the complexity of the contact, you will be able to automate many steps of the process by knowing exactly who you want to talk to and what you are going to say. If you want to limit yourself to LinkedIn only, there are many LinkedIn automation tools that will help you automate that as well.

Zapier, IFTTT

Tools like Zapier and IFTTT (If This, Then That) can help you connect different systems you regularly use. These tools will help you automate tedious and constant tasks like adding an email address to your CRM every time you receive an email from someone new. 

These and other tools will help you do everything from tweeting new stock prices to emailing yourself a reminder to go for a walk every day. Think about all the things you do daily that you wish you had an assistant for, and there might be a tool to help you.