Sales may have gone back to basics this summer, but that doesn’t mean your tactics have to be basic, too. Even if your prospects are working from couches and kitchen tables for a while longer, they still expect personalized interactions.
Engaging accounts – and the teams behind them – and getting them into your pipeline is still your team’s top priority. But how do you grab their attention, especially when there are so many others vying for it?
Here’s my advice. It’s an unconventional time, so turn to unconventional sales tactics to catch your prospects’ attention and make an impact.
Humanize the ‘Hello’ with LinkedIn videos 👋
Social media use is still on the rise as offices stay closed and people work remotely. We’ve been seeing more outreach on platforms like LinkedIn, but if your LinkedIn inbox is anything like mine, there’s not much creativity happening. Usually, it’s a generic invitation to connect (or worse, a straight-up pitch) – without the why you should get to know each other in the first place.
You need to capture prospects’ attention from the get-go. And you need to make that first conversation valuable for them. LinkedIn videos can help you do that. They’re very much like phone calls and emails you’d normally send, but giving your team a face and a voice adds another level of engagement. Plus, you can personalize your initial greeting and make it meaningful for each prospect.
Recording these types of videos is actually simple, once you get the process down. Your team’s computers should have everything they need to get started. A few tips to keep in mind:
- Make sure you’re in a well-lit environment
- Elevate your computer, phone, or webcam to eye level
- Speak clearly and bring lots of enthusiasm to the conversation
- Keep your finished product short – 60 seconds should be enough to open the door to another, longer conversation
Tools like Drift Video can integrate with LinkedIn and help your team deliver great videos and track success metrics. Using video, my team has been generating more meetings over LinkedIn – even as everyone works remotely.
Want more video tips? Learn how this account executive uses Drift Video to turn new LinkedIn connections into meetings.
Deploy Media Coverage During Prospecting 📰
Whenever you reach out to prospects, your goal should be to share some sort of information that will help them do their jobs better. It could be a demo, a one-pager, or an FAQ. No matter what it is, the purpose is to showcase your ability to help your prospects reach levels of success they have not in the past.
While the focus should always be on providing value, have you considered how you’re doing this? Have you thought about how you can both provide value and amplify your company’s profile at the same time? If your marketing team has an active thought leadership program and is placing your executives in the media, you have an excellent opportunity at your fingertips.
Sales teams that work closely with marketing teams can use media coverage in their sales cadence to provide their prospects with thought leadership and help their team improve. For example, if your prospect is a marketing firm, you can share an article in a marketing publication written by your CMO or a piece quoting them on a hot industry topic/strategy. Delivered at the right time and buying stage, a prospect seeing your expertise cited by a media outlet can give you a leg up on the competition and offer more than a one-pager ever could.
If you haven’t been able to align your sales and marketing teams yet, this presents a great time to do so. Set some goals and track metrics when you share content with prospects. You can make it a win-win for both teams while offering solid information to the people who need to hear it.
Load a Personalized eStore with the Best Swag 🧢
Every touchpoint in your prospecting cadence should have varying levels of personalization – not only from the account level, but also on a personal level. While it’s important to know who your buyers are and what they’re looking for, a great cadence should also make that info exceptionally interesting and compelling for everyone involved.
Admittedly, physical gifts and direct giving through the mail have earned a bad reputation. Without enough personalization, you may end up blindly sending gifts to prospects who aren’t ready or interested. They’ll send your item right into the landfill, and you’ll waste dollars, too.
We’ve found making the direct giving process more buyer-centric sets prospects at ease and offers a more compelling reason to accept a meeting invite. Injecting buyer intent data into the conversation tells salespeople when a prospect is most likely to accept a gift and when it’d return value to you.
There are plenty of resources out there to help you manage and actualize that data. For example, we use Alyce to manage our direct giving with prospects. The awesome part is that we can work with them and supplement their information with our own buyer intent data to build personalized estores. We invite our prospects to browse the store and select a gift that’s most meaningful for them. There’s nothing as fun as surprising and delighting them with a nice, useful gift.
With these resources at the ready, your SDRs can deliver the personalized experience prospects expect and offer some truly compelling content and engagement opportunities in the process. Help your sales team be ready for the future with these unconventional (but powerful) sales tactics.
As the Director of Sales Development at 6sense, Ernest Owusu leverages his passion for helping others succeed as well as his insights from the field to foster a winning team. With previous experience as an NFL athlete, Ernest thrives in team environments full of high collaboration and healthy competition. Outside of the office, you’ll find him tackling the industry’s diversity problem by mentoring and empowering under-represented people so they can confidently grow their careers.
