#004: How to personalize your outreach

Welcome to part 4 of our series on outbound sales. How to create more pipeline by sending the right message to the right person at the right time through the right channel.

Part 1: How to build your target lists (right person)

Part 2: Write messaging that gets replies (right message)

Part 3: Get your message delivered (right channel, right time)

Part 4: How to personalize your outreach ← This post

Read time: 4 Minutes

Scientists are bombarded with irrelevant emails and it’s salespeople’s fault. Most sales reps don’t spend the effort to research or understand the HUMAN they are reaching out to. They load up a template and blast the same message to hundreds or thousands of people.

The good news is, you can take advantage of their laziness.

Personalization is the way to stand out from the noise bad sales reps create. If you can be great in a sea of average, you will stand out.

What is personalization?

Let’s start with what personalization is not.

It’s not fields you can automatically input from a data source like title or company name.

“Hi Harrison - As the Co-Founder of Succession…” - This doesn’t cut it anymore. Anyone can automate this.

True personalization should be something unique to the individual receiving your email. It’s a “message for one”.

This doesn’t mean every word needs to be crafted individually. Data shows that you only need to personalize ~20% of the message to get the biggest return on time investment.

In a 50-100 word email, that means you need 1 sentence of personalization.

Personalize the hook

The hook is the first sentence of the email. This sentence shows up as preview text in their inbox and will be the line that grabs their attention.

The goal of the hook is to 1) stand out and get their attention and 2) get them to read the next line of your email.

6 ways to personalize the hook

These are stacked ranked by most impactful to least impactful. As you do your research, start at the top of your list and work your way down.

Channels to find this information

Here are a few tools and channels you can use to find this information

• Social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc…)

• PubMed, bioRxiv, etc… (see what they have published)

• Company website or lab page

• Funding sites (Crunchbase, Owler, Pitchbook, etc…)

• ListenNotes (see what podcasts they’ve appeared on)

Leverage “event triggers” to time your outreach for the most impact.

Inbound triggers are actions they have taken with your brand

Outbound triggers are external to your company but could be a signal they are a fit for your offering.

5×5 method

Spend 5 minutes researching the person and 5 minutes writing the email. Any more time and the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

The more you practice this, the faster you will become.

💡Pro Tip: Save your personalized research to your CRM or sequencing tool so you can reference it later. Do the work once and repurpose it.

When should you personalize?

Not all prospects have the same potential. Spend your time personalizing messages for the highest potential return.

Segment your prospect list by your Ideal Customer Title (ICT).

You will spend your time personalizing messaging towards your High ICT group. These individuals will be worth the effort because they have a higher potential than the Low ICT group.

For Low ICT, you should create highly relevant emails that can be sent in an automated fashion (don’t require manual research for each contact).

TL;DR

1. Personlize the first sentence of your email for a 2.5x increase in replies

2. Prioritize your list by High ICT and Low ICT

3. Use the 5×5 method to quickly find relevant information

4. Work top to bottom on the personalization hierarchy

5. Leverage triggers to identify the right time to reach out

That’s all for now. See you next week!

If you know any other experienced or aspiring biotech sales professionals, please share this newsletter with them.

P.S. Thanks for reading this far! Our goal is to help you take your sales career to the next level. Let us know what you want to learn more about so we can best serve you.

P.P.S If you want help putting any of this into action, book a strategy call with us.