Marketers, according to Nooks data, have the lowest connect rate and the lowest connect-to-meeting rate. This makes them one of the toughest verticals to reach out to over the phone. Also, from speaking directly with Marketers, they are constantly getting bombarded with an array of messages from lead generation and content agencies.
So we sat down with Jessie Lizak, Katie Penner and Jonathan Rowley to learn best practices for cold outreach to the modern day marketer. We learned how to maximize creative emailing, build connections on social media and then capitalize on those phone calls to tie it all together.
Here are our five biggest takeaways:
1. Marketers have stressful goals
Much like Sales people, the modern day marketer is consumed by more than just creativity and delivery dates. They have KPI goals that require meticulous attribution tracking, can sometimes be lofty, and are somewhat out of their control in the short-term. When reaching out to them as a seller, it's important to appeal to their real struggle; hitting metrics.
2. They respect creativity
As professionals who are constantly creating and promoting, they admire when you're doing the same. On the other hand, copy+paste templates and generic outreach leads to the dreaded "unsubscribe" button. Jessie, Fractional CMO at BDEX, says that she requires 50 touchpoints across social media posts, direct messages, emails and calls before she's going to take a seller seriously. Part of that is building your own brand and promoting yourself through posting.
3. Subject lines should be boring and short
Katie Penner, who's been selling Sendoso to VPs and CMOs for over three years takes a page out of Will Alred's book and keeps subject lines generic. This is the once place to be generic because exaggerated subject lines scream 'SPAM.' This is different from the body of the email where you can get creative and person - better yet, get creative in the email preview to get them to open.
4. The ultimate framework
According to Katie, personalization and relevance is key to communicating with ANY buyer, not just marketing. It's best to come off as a friendly advisor instead of a sales person who just wants money. You should know what their company sells, who they sell to and how they're doing that before even reaching out. Her team uses this template, created with Jen Allen at Lavender, with variable tokens in a manual step for initial outreach:
<Name>,
Noticed <company insight> seems to be your company focus.
Does your company ever struggle with <problem>?
Our company has helped <relevant customer 1> and <relevant customer 2> close that gap with <solution>.
Worth a chat?
P.S. - Saw your recent <personal attribute>, wanted to send over <gifting link, helpful article, etc.>
5. Use parallel dialing to maximize dials
Since marketers are the hardest vertical to cold call, teams that sell to the modern day CMO and VP of Marketing can maximize calling time by using an AI-powered parallel dialer like Nooks. Parallel dialers help cold callers dial multiple numbers at once and connect them to the first pick up so they can 5x their call volume. With that, each conversation will bring up helpful notes and data on the prospect so they are ready to book meetings right from the intro. Save hours dialing your marketing contacts and get to the meeting faster.
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Jessie Lizak, Katie Penner and Jonathan Rowley post and create helpful content for SDRs and their teams and are super involved in the B2B SaaS Marketing community on LinkedIn.
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