Saleslove on Tour, Austin: Top outbound takeaways

Each year, our friends at Salesloft take the proverbial show on the road with Saleslove on Tour, a series of events across the country that share the same goal: helping customers maximize their investment in the Salesloft platform while learning new things and figuring out how to overcome the sales challenges they face.

On November 16, Saleslove on Tour made a stop in the awesome city of Austin, Texas. Our co-founder and CEO, Mei Siauw, participated in the event’s keynote while our COO, Ben Kwon, took part in the partner showcase.

We might be a bit biased, but one of our favorite highlights from the event was when Mei unveiled our new integration with Salesloft Rhythm, a signal-to-action engine that transforms buyer behavior into recommended seller actions.

Our top takeaways from Saleslove

But enough about us. Saleslove on Tour was packed with incredible sessions, panels, and talks designed to help sales professionals hone their craft. In this section, we’ll explore some of the key takeaways from the event that really resonated with our team.

1. Cold email best practices

In the world of sales, cold email outreach comes with the territory. 

Since the average worker receives more than 100 emails a day, it’s critical for sales reps to craft cold emails as best they can.

Saleslove on Tour was full of all sorts of advice on how to improve your cold email efforts. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five key best practices we took away from the event:

• Don’t make the story about you. When your cold email opens with you talking about how awesome you are, your prospect isn’t likely to be impressed; there’s a better chance they’ll roll their eyes. Instead of focusing on yourself, become a storyteller and treat your customer as the hero of the narrative you create. You’re simply the guide who’s telling them how to overcome the villains they’re facing.

• Keep it short. Since everyone is super busy, you can’t expect prospects to take huge chunks out of their day to read the novel you sent them in an email. According to Salesloft data, messages with 1 to 25 words had a 40.5% reply rate boost, messages with 26 to 50 words had a 45.1% boost, and messages with 51 to 100 words had an 18.1% boost. Write longer than that at your own peril. Emails with between 101 and 200 words had a 23.7% decrease in reply rates; messages with between 201 and 400 words fared even worse, with a 24.7% decrease.

• Be brief with subject lines. The same idea holds true for subject lines: Keep them as short as you can. According to Salesloft, subject lines containing between 0 and 5 words receive reply rate boosts. Believe it or not, one-word subject lines performed best, with a 35% uptick. Once you hit six words, reply rates decrease the longer and longer your subject line gets. Ten-word subject lines, for example, decreased reply rates 39%.

• Write for elementary school students. You might think that using big words and complex sentences is the key to success, but you’d be wrong. Salesloft data shows that emails written at an elementary-school level receive a 62.8% reply rate boost while those that clock in at a middle-school level earned a 34.9% uptick. On the other hand, emails written for high schoolers and college students generated a 25.6% and 44.2% decrease in reply rates respectively.

• Personalization is still king. Ultimately, cold outreach success is all about personalization. When 20% of an email is personalized, senders receive 90% more positive replies. When 90% of an email is personalized, senders receive 130% more positive replies. The more personalized you make your cold outreach emails, the better outcomes you’ll experience. Learn how to personalize a cold email in less than five minutes.

2. Proven sales triggers

Sales triggers help reps identify opportune moments when potential customers are most likely to buy or upgrade. Understanding these triggers allows sales teams to align their outreach with a customer’s needs and challenges, increasing the likelihood of a successful conversion.

What sales triggers should reps be looking for anyway? Here are five of the top sales triggers your team needs to keep an eye out for, courtesy of Salesloft:

1. Colleague referrals. If you’ve been referred by a colleague or someone in your network, by all means let the prospect know. According to HubSpot data, 55% of buyers use word-of-mouth referrals to make purchasing decisions. Need some help asking for a referral? Read this.

2. Conversation history. Has your company had an opportunity with the prospect in the past? Did they ever reply to any old cadences? Refer back to those in your cold email outreach. 

3. Content. Did your prospect write new blog posts, participate in a podcast, or post an insightful comment on LinkedIn? Use it as an opportunity to engage with them.

4. Congrats. If your prospect has changed jobs, gotten promoted recently, or achieved an important life milestone, reach out to connect. It’s an easy way to get your foot in the door with something that resonates.

5. Company. Keep tabs on things like funding announcements, company events, product launches, or anything that the prospect’s organization is posting about that is relevant. Use this information to personalize your cold outreach.

3. The power of simplicity

Resist the urge to overwhelm your team with too many cadences. Keep it simple and make sure each rep has a manageable workload — and that each message in the cadence is simple, with clear language, not too many ideas, and an intuitive call to action.

For the best results, follow these common cadence plays:

4. The future is robotic

Win rates are decreasing, competition is increasing, and mobile connect rates are plummeting. As a result, sales reps are spending 34% of their time researching leads — and that time would be better spent engaging with prospects directly.

The sales teams of the future will be powered by artificial intelligence, automation, and integrations. In turn, reps will have tons more time to spend prospecting and selling.

In today’s fast-paced sales world, the three pillars of effective pipeline are:

1. The ability to reach the right person at the right time with the right message,
2. Having the right processes in place, and
3. Using the right automation.

The LeadIQ Salesloft Rhythm integration is the perfect example of what the future of sales looks like. Without the integration, sales teams have an average of 133 touchpoints in their prospecting workflows. Together, LeadIQ and Salesloft Rhythm whittle that number down to 32 — helping sales teams work tremendously more efficiently together.

To learn more about how your sales and GTM teams can get better business outcomes using LeadIQ and Salesloft together, read about the latest development of our Salesloft partnership.