Nadja Komnenic breaks down how to reach 10 million people with unorthodox outbound methods. Start with a tight ICP, personalize at scale, and hook prospects on their actual pain points and trigger events. Getting replies matters more than forcing demos.
Chapters
Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff.
So I've warmed things up. I've got good deliverability. How do I still then now drive that open so I'm being delivered. What are some of those best tactics to get the email opened and then to get the email responded to?
Okay, so we're going back to the basics, literally of selling, which is knowing your icp. When it comes to knowing your icp, the reason that it's important is not only that you know your value prop, you know all of the things that you want to say. It's more about how do you then do your lead generation. So when you're doing lead generation and when you're reaching out to prospects, they are the people who are right now relevant, who are right now willing to buy your product and who are actually perfect fit for you. Because if you're sending 100 emails and you're just sending them randomly to random people, maybe in the same industry, maybe with the same title, but they're not really your icp, you will not get responses because you're not going to be relevant to Them and your product might not match their needs and their pains. When you have the very nailed down ICP and you know, what are the like buying signals or trigger events or however you hold them? Let's say maybe for us it would be any new company that got a new head of business development or a new SDR or is expanding into the new market. This is your trigger that you can then leverage in your copy throughout the sequence. And always personalize. Even if you're doing like personalization at scale and you're not investing so much effort into creating, you know, personalized intro lines, etc. You can make the email feel personalized and relevant simply because you're talking to these people who are going through something at this moment that you can help and address specifically because they're going through this time. To give a very simple example, when we started expanding our outbound into the US market, I got a lot of cold emails which were basically a lot of spammy ones as well. But the good ones were very personalized in a way. Relevant, I would say. I saw your spending right now into the US market. Obviously companies that are going through this are right now facing similar challenges. And then he would highlight some of the challenges. And then even if it's like not personalized to me personally, I do know that this is something that can actually help me out because I am going through this challenge. So this is how you can scale the personalization. As you mentioned before, you land in the primary inbox, you get the email first things that you see. Subject line, intro line. What you see here is the one way that you're going to determine whether you're going to open an email or not. If the subject line sounds like a newsletter, ish, marketing, shame, whatever type of copy, nobody's going to open it. If your intro line says, hey, I'm John from XYZ Company, I'm doing this and this, I don't care, why would I open it? Still nothing about me you need to intrigue in the first subject line and the first sentence of your email. This is where I put additional personalization personally. So like I would do the research on the prospect. And when I say personalization, I don't mean cats, dogs, family that they posted on LinkedIn. It's about business related subjects that you can touch upon and where you found the common ground with them. Something that you would like to compliment them on, but it always has to be genuine. Don't just put anything in there just to make it feel personalized. When it's Not. And I think that's the most important part. Following that, tying that intro line with the rest of your email again is the second challenge that you will have. And it's all about making it connected and staying relevant in the course. Like not splitting the personalized line and then going straight into the pitch again, it will not make sense and giving them room to breathe, you know, like really building that relationship. The end goal of the first email, at least that you send, is not really to book a demo. It's to get a reply. It's to start. Start a conversation. That is the one thing that you need to focus on, whether just to raise their curiosity, get a reply, start a conversation, and then eventually book a meeting. You can't rush it. Even though I know we are all under pressure.
And that is something that I wish more and more people truly understood. Where it's like those first emails, I'm not trying to get a response. I'm trying to get any type of engagement right. Can I get you to click right? If I can get a response, great. But I tell my own team, if I. If it was as easy as sending templated emails and asking for 30 minutes, I wouldn't need salespeople. Like, if, if it. If it were that easy, if I could just send a templated email with, hey, Nadja, I see you're the head of business development at Lemlist, and I'd like 30 minutes of your time to sh. I wouldn't need salespeople. I could literally just blast everybody and get it back. This is where the salesperson comes in, is to make it relevant. I love how you said connect the dots, the personalization. You have to connect it to the value prop, and you have to connect that to then whatever that call to action needs to be. And you said it well. I feel like. Hey, KD, loved your post. We help VPs of sales. Da, da, da, da. Like, you had me for one second. You had me for a second, right? And so I actually want to spend a little more time on this. How do you craft that second part? Right? Like, you know, you've touched around a little bit. Like, really knowing your Personas, really knowing your icp. How do you craft that value prop or that hook that makes them okay? Like, this person gets me a little bit or this person's worth talking to. How do you craft that part of the email?
It's exactly as you said. So when you know who you're targeting and when you know why you're targeting that specific person, this becomes so Easy. So for example, you would be able to say, seeing right now that you're. Let's say, let's say a company is an example that is helping increase lifetime value of the customers. So like, you're focusing on the retention. And you may be like your lead gen might be based on companies that are focusing more on the client acquisition. So like investing into the client acquisition rather than optimizing their current clients and increasing their value to get more revenue. So you would be saying like, hey, so you're running, seeing your Facebook ads that you've been running these days. They're all over my feed. I'm curious right now if you're. And then you leverage that. Like, are you. Do you want to make sure that you're actually right now leveraging additional revenue channel not only investing like, you would be able to pinpoint what are the pains, highlight the pain. So what it is the pain that you're facing and then offer a solution based on that. It becomes so easy when you have this ICP because then you can connect it all together. And again, tying it in is about mentioning. Because of this reason. This is why I thought this would be interesting to you. You are going through this challenge that we're seeing every day from either you or your similar customers like yourself, and this is something that they do or that you can do to actually help it out and make sure that it doesn't happen. Have you thought about this? Like highlighting the pain even if they don't have it, maybe they are not aware that they have it and then bringing them to like an ideal world of what can actually happen if they do things differently.
I really, I love that type of style of like, you know, have you thought about this? Have you seen this? When's the last time you looked at. Have you asked your people this, like, planting those seeds of questions, early leads onto it. Now, last on this session, before we kind of move into some more mindset stuff as well around this is any tips on how to learn the icp. Well, right, because you are in a unique position where you're a sales leader selling to sales leaders who have sales reps. You have sales reps, so you know, you know the problem so you can speak to it for the people that don't. Right. And this is what's amazing to me still is I think it's like less than 10%. I think of SaaS. Salespeople use their product. So we got the other 90% that don't. Right. They're selling to security. They're Selling the finance, they're selling to hr, they're selling to biz intelligence. Right? They're selling like they don't use it. So how can a sales rep or a sales leader nail that ICP when they are not the icp?
Exactly. That's a great question. And first thing that I would like to highlight, it's not only on your manager. Like if you come as a new SDR and maybe your manager is not as good as you would hope it to be or like, like to be, maybe he doesn't walks you through the ICP entirely or onboard you properly. It's your job if you want to actually do your job well, to know your icp. So take an additional extra mile and learn about the icp, the ways that you can do it. For me, the best way was actually to hop on a call with customers, current customers, and talk to them like, what it is that you love about our product, what it is that you don't like about our product? Why are you using us and not the competitors? What it is that you're going through in your day to day life? Like what are your challenges in your position? Talk to them and really understand them well. Second of all, you can actually go on in research a bit the industry. So like the way that I would typically start my ICP exploration is I would go to our customer reviews. So like Quora, G2, etc. And just check out what the ICP is talking about you like what it is that they like about you. Maybe you have your value prop completely wrong. Maybe it's not the things that you're pushing, maybe it's something completely opposite. Then learn about the industry. Like join the communities that your ICP is in. If you're talking to sales, obviously communities, we know all of them that are right now very active. You can join the conversations, you can see what people are writing and talking about, be a part of those ecosystems and learn from the others. Networking is the best way possible to do it. Like connect with thought leaders in the industry, check what they're writing. For example, if you're starting in sales, check Kevin, check his LinkedIn profile and check the content that he's posting. You will get soon an idea of what it is, the common themes, struggles and everything that people are talking about.
