Make Your Emails Relevant, Not Personalized with Jed Mahrle

That's like a buying trigger, right? Somebody who just joined a new company or they're hiring whatever department you sell to or, I mean, funding is another example. You don't really want to use that in your messaging. But sure, that could be called a buying trigger, but you can get a lot more specific than that. Basically what we're doing is we're looking for these buying triggers on the outside and then we're structuring our messaging around that. So, hey, saw you just got promoted to director of Sales development. Typically when, you know, SDR directors start off, this is what they're looking for, yada, yada, yada, going down that path and all the messaging seems super specific to these people, even though we're not personalizing it much because we spent a lot more time on the front end kind of breaking it down by buying triggers.

I talked about the three eyes of targeting, right? You target low for info, middle for insight, high for influence. And so often people are targeting high for insight, right? They're trying to find out what's happening. If you're reaching out to me, you better already know what's happening in my business. And you find that out by targeting low. So talk to me about that. Talk to me about like targeting low and high because there's still a ton of people out there just like, go after the decision maker. Go after the decision maker. Get, you know, get the, get the CTO on the phone. You're like, what the. So talk to me about how you work the different levels differently and kind of when you work those levels.

Yeah, first of all, that three. I thing. I think I may have heard that from you in the past before, but I'm definitely writing that down again, like, that's. I know I've been using that type of strategy, but that explains it perfectly. But I completely agree, right? One of the biggest things, again, so I sell to salespeople. If you're fortunate enough to sell to salespeople, you need to be talking to the sales reps, the SDRs, the AES there, and getting info from them because they're always going to respond to their messages. Their inbox is not as flooded. So one of the first things we do when my sdr, when an sdr, my team, myself gets into account, I want to go after. I'm not going to talk to the director, not going to talk to VPC level. I'm going straight to the ground floor and just asking for info. And it can be as simple as just sending a quick message or if you use Like a, a gifting software. You can say, hey, just curious, like what software you guys are using for XYZ, you know, here's a $5 coffee gift card. Thanks for the help. So something simple like that. And we do that like over a three day period and then we gather all this info and then we start targeting that middle level, director level. Hey, you know, when speaking with your team, these are some things I've noticed. Is any of that relevant? Sometimes we'll book a meeting with that person, but if not, we can go to the C level and really just condense down everything we've learned and say, hey, here's like the problem I think is happening in your organization. Would it make sense to chat further? But yeah, it's working your way up the ladder. And I think the problem is that a lot of people, you know, they just want to rush, they want to make the activities and it's really hard to take a step back and work your way up and not just go directly to that C level, but take the time to actually research the account and then go, go to that higher level.

That, that's the key here. And as you mentioned it, like you said it perfectly, man, because so often a lot of this is the leader's fault. It's not just the, the sales dev REP or the AE's fault is like we're so addicted to speed that we do things the wrong way. We're even just slowing down for a month. Just one month of intentionally restructuring and doing things the right way would pay for itself 10 times over the next three months. Because if you go low for info, right, I find out you don't have a sales engagement tool. Info that's not that hard to figure out, right? Can reach out to seven or eight different SDRs or AES at a company. Y' all use a sales engagement tool. One person responds back, says, no, now I got some info. Now I can go to the middle and go, hey, I know you don't have a sales engagement tool. So how are you managing X, Y and Z? Like what, what does that look like? Now I'm engaging with some insight. I speak with a director. It's like, well, we manage it through this. We do this, we do this. Now I go to the top and go, hey, my guess is as a CRO, you want more revenue in speaking with your team. There's no engagement tool, which means that they are having to do this manually, which means reps are losing time. You can't book nearly enough. And there's no Tracking of the data needed to make better decisions. Could we at least have influence? Right. All because through the levels to get there, and it wouldn't take that long to reset your process to do that. But everyone's just going to the CRO saying, we've got three extra pipeline. That CRO is like, you don't even know my pipeline.

So it just doesn't sound relevant. Yeah.

So perfect. And you just use the word I wanted to go into next. Right. So how do you bring relevancy into prospecting? Because there's still, you know, personalization versus customization. All, you know, this goes back and forth. But like, just because you email me and say, hey, I saw you went to Wisconsin, go badgers, it's not relevant to anything. Like, it's personalized, but it's not relevant. So talk to me about relevancy. Right. That was one of the first words you mentioned to me when we were kicking this off. You brought it up again. What does that mean?

Yeah, so I'd say relevancy is the way I and my teams have been able to be a lot more efficient in terms of not having to spend a lot of time doing personalization. But just talk to the right people, get more responses. And it starts with what we just talked about, which is doing account research. And the best way to do account research, in my opinion, is just to talk to people on the ground floor. But secondly, most of my messaging and the sequences in email campaigns that we build out is based around buying triggers. These are things like, well, first of all, it starts with looking at who are our customers and why did they buy? Why are these inbound leads coming in, for example? Are they coming in? Oh, they just hired their first sales leader and now he came inbound and wants to look at our software. So that's like a buying trigger, right? Somebody who just joined a new company or they're hiring whatever department you sell to or, I mean, funding is another example. You don't really want to use that in your messaging. But sure, that could be called a buying trigger, but you can get a lot more specific than that. Basically, what we're doing is we're looking for these buying triggers on the outside, and then we're structuring our messaging around that. So, hey, saw you just got promoted to director of Sales development. Typically when SDR directors start off, this is what they're looking for, yada, yada, yada, going down that path. And all the messaging seems super specific to these people. Even though we're not personalized, it much because we spent a lot more time on the front end kind of breaking it down by buying triggers. So that's what kind of relevance means to me is we spend more time in the front end breaking up our lists and our target accounts by buying triggers, and then we load them into sequences and campaigns that align with those buying triggers, and we come across as a lot more relevant without having to spend time, as much time on personalization. Most of our. We'll just call them sequences. There's a million different ways to call it. Most of them are built around a buying trigger. Right. So we'll set it up. It's built around a buying trigger and a specific Persona. So for each Persona we're going after and each buying trigger, there's a different sequence. And then we talked about it earlier, the top three problems that you hear from that Persona, there's three different clusters within that sequence focused around a different problem. So we're not mentioning all the problems we typically hear on that first email or in that beginning messaging or breaking it out across the sequence. That way we can spread out the touch points and still be relevant without being redundant and just mentioning the same problems. So there's three different clusters. And typically within one cluster, it'll be one or two phone calls, a voicemail, a LinkedIn touch, and then two or three emails. So it's that email referencing the. It's like call LinkedIn email referencing the pain point, kind of like a bump email, another call, another LinkedIn, and then maybe we'll move on to the next cluster a week later, a few days later. And so it starts by really structuring what are the top buying triggers we're seeing, or to your point, expectation triggers. You have to break that down really well by looking at your customer and inbound data. And then what are the top three problems for each Persona? And that's how I break down the messaging to stay relevant across two, three weeks of touch points.

And you're the only person I've ever spoken to that talks about this other than me, around where I start my outlook. I start my outbound by reviewing all the inbound. That's where I start because I'm going to learn what are they searching for, what are their keywords, what ads do they like, what language do they seem to respond to? What do they download the most? Right. So talk to me about this, because this is. This is gold that a lot of outbound teams miss out on is they don't pay attention to what's happening with inbound.

Yeah. It's like. It's like tracking the weather. When I first started as an sdr, my manager, he told me every inbound lead was an outbound lead yesterday. So I was like, all right, like, Ben, I'm gonna figure out how to say that again.

That was gold.

He said every inbound lead was an outbound lead yesterday. That was Troy Barter. Yeah. So he. He told me that. I'm like, all right, I just have to figure out how to. I'm an outbound rep, you know, I'm not going to let that lead get to inbound. I'm going to figure out what they're doing to become an inbound lead. Like, what are the trends? So I went into Salesforce and I would look at all the inbound leads. I would break it down in the spreadsheet. What are all like the technographic or what is all the data I can find on this lead and why they came inbound? Like, what sort of trends can I start to see? And yeah, it's one of the biggest things. It's not hard to go into your CRM and find that data and then kind of work backwards from there. But you're almost like predicting what sort of things was I seeing before this inbound lead came in that cause them to go inbound and then using that for your. For your outbound targeting, that's kind of high level. We can obviously dig in, but that's. That's pretty much the gist of it.