#030: 3 Prospecting Trends You Need to Know

Read time: 4 minutes

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We see so many bad prospecting emails where the messaging is

• Not relevant

• Has too much information

• Not differentiated

• Way too long

To fix this, we’re hosting a short 30-minute webinar. We'll show you how to write magnetic prospecting messages that attract your ideal customers and get them to respond.

Join us Wednesday, April 2nd at 12:30 ET (5:30 pm GMT).

We’ve sent over 125,000 prospecting emails for our clients in the last 3 months. Here are the things you need to know.

1: Email infrastructure is most important

Spam filters and mail servers like Gmail and Outlook are making it harder for your emails to reach the primary inbox. The primary inbox is a recipient's main inbox. Not spam, promotions, or quarantine.

When your message doesn’t reach the primary inbox, the chances it gets read drop to near 0.

When an inbox or domain is sending messages that regularly get marked as spam, it impacts the deliverability of every email sent from that inbox or domain. 

So if you’re sending cold emails from your primary domain (ex: @succession.bio) and messages get marked as spam, it could impact your emails from being delivered to customers.

The workaround here is to create different domains and inboxes that you use for cold email. For example (@joinsuccession.bio or @successionbio.com). This way, if they get burned, it doesn’t impact the deliverability of your main domain. More on this in the video below.

If you’re sending cold emails and they aren’t getting replies, it sends a signal to these mail servers that your message isn’t relevant. So when they see similar text in other messages, those future messages are blocked or flagged as spam. There are email warm-up tools that will help mitigate this issue. I talk more about them in the video below.

Google and Outlook are also monitoring how many messages you send per day. If you’re sending 100s of emails, that’s not something a normal human would be doing. They will start to throttle your deliverability because they know you are likely sending spam. To avoid this, you want to limit the number of emails you send per inbox to under 50.

If you buy or find a list of emails and don’t verify them (with a tool like Neverbounce) before sending them, you’ll likely get a high bounce rate. When a high bounce rate occurs, it can impact future deliverability. It sends a signal that you’re sending out mass emails.

These are only a couple of the challenges that make it harder to have your email land in the primary inbox.

If you want to learn more about this topic and how to avoid these issues, I made a video talking about it.

2: Messaging has to be differentiated

Prospects are flooded with emails. If you’re able to find their email address, 20 other sales reps are able to as well. So if your messages look just like everyone else's, they’re not going to respond.

Most prospects aren’t sitting around waiting to read all about your new product’s features and capabilities. They care about solving problems that they are currently facing.

Here’s a simple email framework you can use to highlight a problem and show how you can uniquely solve it.

Step 1: Call out something relevant to them that would make them a good fit for your product or service.

Step 2: Call out a problem or challenge that other customers were facing before working with you. This could be an alternative approach, an outdated workflow, or an unknown risk.

Step 3: What is the negative impact of not solving this problem? What to people hate dealing with? (Wasted time, money, and resources. Fear and risk. Lack of visibility. Bad customer service.)

Step 4: Describe how you can UNIQUELY solve this problem and reference a customer story (you don’t need to share names or companies).

Step 5: Have a short and soft call to action. Interested in seeing the data? Worth a brief conversation?

The hardest part of all of this?

Keeping your email to under 100 words and optimized for mobile reading.

We’re hosting a webinar on Wednesday all about prospecting messaging. Sign up for the webinar

3: Email by itself isn’t enough

You have to include multiple channels to get in front of prospects.

Alternative channels are things like LinkedIn, phone calls, events, direct mail, and communities.

You also need to mix up the types of messages you send. You have additional mediums like video or audio that you can also leverage. Nick Clare ran a workshop recently about how to use video in your sales process. You can find it inside Succession.

If you want a great example of how someone uses LinkedIn to find customers, go follow Jeff Bissen. He has built up 20,000 followers from all the information he shares publicly. This helps him increase the number of inbound leads he receives, but because of his brand, he’s able to increase his outbound messaging conversion rates. When people recognize you when you reach out, your chance of getting a response dramatically increases.

If you want some other creative ideas on how to stand out and use alternative channels, we’ve created a 20-day prospecting challenge. It’s one email, one action, and one resource every day for 20 days. It will help you build a prospecting habit and start Q2 with a bang.

Sign up for the 20-day prospecting challenge.

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Episode 10: [Sales] How AI is disrupting sales and drug discovery with Jason Steiner

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• Raising money for cancer research

• Using AI for sales and commercial teams

• Learn the different technical terminology

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