This post is brought to you by our friends at Sendoso, the Engagement Delivery Platform. Source, send, and centralize direct mail, swag, and gifts all from one platform with Sendoso. Guest author: Brianna Valleskey, Sr. Content Marketing Manager.
Strategic marketers aim to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
But rather than pushing a demo after three nurture emails or calling a prospect two minutes after downloading an ebook, I think we should interpret this idea to mean personalizing your outreach so that you’re talking to the right person about the right things at a time that makes sense.
And I’d venture to say that we should be instructing our sales teams about this level of personalization across the funnel. Our buyers are telling us they want personalized experiences, and we know that targeting them on a one-to-one basis increases response rates by 50% or more.
This doesn’t mean simply using a CRM field to add your prospect’s first name, company name, or title into an email subject line. That’s customization. Personalization is about connecting with them in ways that are relevant and meaningful—understanding who they are as a person, what their goals are in their role, where they are in your sales funnel, why they’re talking to you, etc.
More importantly, we can (and should) educate, reinforce, and equip our sales reps with methods for implementing this level of personalization at scale; turning them into micro-marketers, if you will. There are a number of ways to do this, but here are a few ideas we can use to start.
How to Turn Your Sales Team Into Micro-Marketers
1. Leverage Sales Email Touch Points
Your sales reps send and receive a whopping 10,000 emails a year. And every single one of those email touch points is an incredible opportunity to sprinkle in marketing messages. But we’re not talking about the email text itself. Research shows that when someone receives an email, the majority of their attention goes to the email signature! That means your sales reps can drive awareness for events, promote new marketing materials, share product updates, and more all without taking away from the actual email message.
Of course, you don’t want to have to bother your team to update their email signature every time you’ve got something new to promote. But an email signature marketing platform like Sigstr enables you to centralize the entire process and autonomously update email signature templates for your entire sales team. Plus, it works. Sigstr found that email signature marketing campaigns achieve 1,500 more clicks than traditional marketing email clicks. You can even add an extra layer of personalization to each email sent by your sales team with dynamic templates that automatically display specific banners based on a recipient’s industry, account, and even sales stage.
2. Initiate personalized Direct Mail Sends
A prospect’s email inbox is one way to drive personalized communication, but a package on their desk is an opportunity to engage them in a tangible way. So, complement your sales team’s personalized email sends with powerful and relevant direct mail touchpoints! After all, direct mail is more likely to drive behavior than digital media, and I don’t just mean postcards. Encourage your team to send physical gifts, handwritten notes, swag, wine, or even cupcakes. Studies reveal that even sending a small gift can significantly impact the success of a negotiation in sales (increasing revenue by more than 300% in some cases).
Direct mail sends have traditionally been a batch function run by marketing that could take up to 20 hours of work for a single campaign. But fully integrated direct mail and gifting solutions like Sendoso give individual reps the autonomy to send anything—including the examples listed above—at any time on a one-to-one basis (without all the grunt work). Salespeople can even use an Amazon integration to send hyper-personalized gifts specific to their prospects’ interests. Companies have seen up to 60% response rates for packages sent and generated $1,000 in pipeline for every dollar spent. Plus, there are hundreds of ways to get creative and rise above the noise with prospects.
3. Train Reps on Storytelling for Events
Live events can be a critical leverage point for your sales reps, both in terms of discovering new prospects and accelerating current deals. More than 91% of over-performing businesses place a greater emphasis on live events as a marketing channel than their counterparts. Conferences and trade shows account for one-fifth or more of planned meetings activity as well. But the key is to arm your sales reps who attend these events with a toolbox of powerful stories they can tell, personalized to each of your buyer personas.
Empower reps with the right stories: What is the most important thing each of their target prospects needs to know about your product or service? Why should they care? At events, they must be able to answer these questions on the fly. As stated in SmartBug Media’s SaaS Marketing Strategies report, this requires training and enablement. You can host your own internal training sessions on a regular basis (perhaps weekly or monthly, depending on your bandwidth), or consider leveraging a learning management system like Lessonly to train everyone in detail, but at scale.
Executing these small, yet powerful strategies doesn’t mean sales reps will be operating at the level of your actual marketing team, but rather supplementing the campaigns already in action. And you don’t need to stress over sales team adoption. Each of the tools mentioned will help streamline the process and make these interactions as easy as possible for your reps.
