The document provides tips for tailoring a sales strategy for the mid-market sector. It defines the mid-market as companies with 100-1,000 employees and $5M-$100M in revenues. Tips include preparing reps for longer and more complex sales cycles, researching accounts thoroughly before outreach, personalizing communications, leveraging multiple stakeholders, testing subject lines and scheduling techniques, and getting entire companies engaged through referrals and templates. The presentation aims to help reps move "from mouse hunting to deer hunting" by targeting larger mid-market deals.
20. Best practices:
1. Identify the top performing
templates for each role.
2. Understand why they
work.
3. Share effective strategy
with your team.
Using Templates More Effectively
21. Total Emails to Send
How many emails should I send before
I get a reply?
There are different ways to slice and dice this. This is a slightly adapted version from the US SBA. Key thing to note is that there are approximately 5M companies in SMB, and only 4% as many in the mid-market. It takes much more focus, and requires higher pricing in the segment for you to have a reasonable TAM.
Case in point, this illustration from a VC shows how, if your product sells for $1K per year, you’ll need 100,000 customer to build up a $100M business, whereas at a $10K price-point you’d only need 10,000. You can go up-market or down-market. Prominent examples of companies going up-market include: Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS, Slack. Doing so requires product maturity & investments on the security, integrations, and customization side. What’s why going up is more common than going down (an example of which is IBM). It’s easier to build an MVP that nails a need in SMB/MM, before moving up. As a business, you may want to go up-market to capture a bigger TAM, to lock in bigger, longer-term contracts, and simple due to the prestige. By the way, you may notice that it takes as long to close a $20K deal as a $5K deal—that’s also a great reason to go up-market.
Buyer doesn’t even know! (approvals, forms, etc). Don’t be shy. “I know when we buy software…”
Multiple stakeholders – even if 1 DM, others will need to give thumbs up
Deals can fall apart: champion leaves, economic change, strategy change
Ask the hard questions: “what are the other priorities that could derail this project?”
Don’t underprice - big price commands respect and commitment
Ask for multi-year deals – that’s what big buyers expect, and it gives you a bargaining lever.
Build in price for add-on users
Expect legal to get involved – build this into your timing assumption
New notes:
SMB deal: 3 emails and 1 call over 2 days.
MM deal: 68 rmails, 5 calls, 1-in person meeting over 45 days.
RISKS: longer deal cycles (more chances for deal to fall apart—champion leaves, economic changes, strategy change), multiple stakeholders—even if 1 DM, others will need to give thumbs up, Expect legal to get involved—build this into your timing assumption.
TACTICS: Ask the hard questions: “what are other priorities that could derail this project?”, dive deep into buying process
- Buyer doesn’t even know! (approvals, forms, etc). Don’t be shy. “I know when we buy software…”. Don’t underprice—big price commands respect and commitment, ask for multi-year deals—that’s what big buyers expect, and it gives you a bargaining lever., Build in price for add-on users.
Control freaks & impatience are a plus, homework super important, Complex slide decks, Need comprehensive training across sales, product, etc.
What research have you done on their needs?
How will the prospect measure success?
Who could derail the deal?
Who are the Decision Makers?
What do the stakeholders care about?
What’s going on with the business at the executive level?
You’ve done all the hard work to identify the right prospects, now make sure that your reps are representing your company professionally. A brand can be damaged a lot faster that it’s built. Personalization is key. « Beyond a reasonable doubt. » Here it worked too well.
Segway: It obviously takes a lot more than one personalized email to break into the mid-market. I’ll hand it over to Tracy, who has some great data to share around best practices with email campaigns in particular.
Take advantage of this by casting a wide net. Work all possible angles to get your foot in the door at a target company by expanding your outreach to include other key stakeholders aside from the decision maker, and personalizing your outreach to show how your tool can address key pain points in their specific role. Sending a personalized
In SMB companies, many team members wear multiple hats. This makes simplifies the sales process, because it means, if you do your research correctly, that the person you are targeting to buy your product is likely both the person who will be using your product and the decision maker. This also means that titles don’t always correlate exactly to job function when you’re prospecting into smaller companies.
Mid-market companies are much larger, which allows individuals to specialize. This gives mid-market reps more insight into an individual’s role based on job title, and lets you collect more reliable data on what kind of messaging resonates with individuals in each role, and what kind of pain points they are experiencing that your tool can help with.
For example, Gwen, one of our mid-market SDR’s, made an impression and got a referral to the correct contact at a company by researching the prospect and personalizing her outreach to build a relationship with him.
After the 2012 presidential election, former Obama campaigners made headlines when they revealed that their most wildly successful email subject line consisted of a single word: “Hey.” By their account, that email alone brought in millions of dollars.
Impressive? Definitely. Could you get away with this subject line? Doubtful.
Drawing on data from over 500,000 sales emails sent by Yesware users in Q1 2014, we found that subject lines containing the word “hey” resulted in lower open and reply rates than other common subject line keywords.
What it means: There’s no such thing as a silver-bullet subject line. The best way to understand what makes some email subject lines more or less effective is to study what works for others and then try it for ourselves.
Here’s what we’ve learned from the best and worst email subject lines sent by over 1,000 anonymous inside sales pros.
The data reveals that some subject line keywords perform well across the board, resulting in both high open and reply rates. However, other frequently used words weren’t so effective. Here, you can see how keyword performance varies by open and reply rate, as well as results for comparable word groups.
Tip: You may be better off asking for a “call”, instead of trying to put some time on their “calendar.” Both words tend to be used when scheduling meetings, yet we see that subject lines containing the word “call” work best (62% open rate, 35% reply rate), while emails bearing “calendar” perform worse (33% open rate, 10% reply rate).
Try including some of the most effective subject line words mentioned above in your emails to see how they impact open and reply rates. You can perform an A/B test of your own subject lines using Yesware’s template reply reports to track opens, link clicks, and gauge email effectiveness.
Leverage your technical sales engineers to pull data on top-performing subject lines from Salesforce, segmented by job title. This data can help you master persona-based selling. Looking at the subject line that gets the most opens based on job title gives you an indication of what messaging resonates most with your target persona. Then, seeing which email get the most replies, tells you what content resonates most and allows you to make templates for future use.
Templates are closely related to subject lines.
In mid-market, templates can be helpful in two ways:
1. When trying to break through, creating templates that are tailored towards particular job functions to address personalized pain points can help you get your foot in the door. At the end of this webinar, we will share some of our top performing templates with you. Use analytics to find out which of these templates perform the best by persona, personalize for each deal, and use moving forward.
2. If you find yourself frequently dealing with stakeholders in similar job functions across organizations, create a template for reaching out to them to get them on board, and one that addresses their primary concerns for easy use and access.
Deciding when and how to follow-up with people who don’t respond to your initial email can be tricky — especially when you can see that they’ve opened it. It’s not easy to strike the balance between adding value and being annoying. So it makes sense that the majority of sales folk may choose not to follow-up at all.
We ran the numbers and found that 70% of unanswered sales email chains stopped after the first attempt. Only 19% went on to email a second time.
That’s a lot of missed opportunities.
It takes just one day for an email to be a lost cause... if your email is ever going to be opened, 91 percent of the time it’s opened within a day after you sent it. Furthermore, 90% of emails that received replies were replied to within one day after they were opened. During that first day, over half of opened emails were replied to within three hours.
What it means: It pays to be proactive. After you send a tracked email and can see that it’s opened, the countdown is on. Any replies will most likely occur that day, so don’t sit around waiting for a reply if you haven’t received a response within a day or two. Email them again.
% Replied on THIS Email
- If you send the second email after you haven’t heard from the first, you have a 21% chance of getting a reply.
% Replied Eventually
- If you keep sending emails, our data shows that the chance you will eventually hear back from the recipient is 25%..
But what if I never get a reply?
Mid-market companies are larger, which means that you are best off working multiple angles to get your foot in the door at the same company. If the Decision Maker isn’t engaging with your outreach, why not reach out to somebody with a similar job function and ask for an introduction? Personalized outreach can get you a good word with the decision maker and help you build trust.
What’s the best time to send an email? Whenever there’s the least competition
According to Yesware’s analysis of over 500,000 sales emails sent in Q1 2014, email open and reply rates are higher on the weekends. Why? It could be because there’s significantly less email being sent on weekends.
Think of it as the Late Night Infomercial Effect
Have you ever watched an infomercial at 3am?
It’s the time period known as the “Graveyard Slot” – when TV networks sign off and give up. But for certain companies (think Snuggie and ShamWow), the Graveyard is prime time and highly lucrative. That’s because when there’s nothing else on, night owls are more likely to watch an infomercial.
Similarly, when there’s little else being emailed, your emails are more likely to stand out and get noticed. This in turn could lead to greater open and reply rates.
We see this same line of thinking when we look at email reply rates over 24 hours.
Send emails in the early morning or evening
Emails sent in the early morning (between 6 and 7 am) and evening (around 8 pm) were the most effective at getting a response, with reply rates hovering around 45%. The graph above also reveals that much fewer emails were sent during these time slots.
The horizontal line is “hour in which the emails were sent”. These hours have been adjusted by the senders’ local time zone.
The basic pattern of “early morning and later in the afternoon off-work hours work the best” is confirmed cross different companies, though for some companies, early morning works the best, and for some companies, later afternoon works the best.