Sales Sequences: How I Increased Impact to Book More Meetings

The most powerful tool we use to support our clients’ sales pipelines? Sales sequences.

These are HubSpot’s automated sales emails that thread in a continuous string of emails and have powerful personalization features. Prospects are also auto-unenrolled after responding to an email or using your meetings link to book time, ultimately preventing prospects from slipping through the cracks and giving time back to your sales reps.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss our sequence best practices as well as a strategy pivot that increased the impact of these emails by booking more meetings for one of our clients.

New Business Sequence

To start with the basics, let’s review our recommended structure for a new business sequence. When prospecting new leads, our sales content typically flows with these five themes in the first five emails:

• Intro: Be quick but don’t be presumptive; identify your customer’s most common pain points, then introduce your company as a solution at the end. Ask for interest, not a sales meeting.
• Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO):  Discuss your prospect’s peers, refer to notable customers, and share an impact statement that helps them realize that their peers are already investing in you.
• Data point: Why should they care about your solution? How big of an impact will doing nothing be to them?
• Recap: Provide a quick summary of your company’s solution.
• Referral: Politely ask if there’s someone else more suited for the conversation.   

Additional Sequence Types

In addition to the general sequence outlined above, there are a variety of different types that your sales team can use to sell better. These sequences can still follow the five step structure from above, just be sure that the content itself ties into the sequence theme.

Here are AK Ops’ most commonly used sequences:

• Nurture for later sequence: This sequence is for prospects who previously indicated that they were interested but not quite ready for a meeting. Reasons could include being out of office or waiting until a current contract expires to re-evaluate other options.
• Referral sequence: This sequence is for prospects that might not be our buyer, but have come into our database one way or another. Instead of asking for their time, we simply ask who might be the best person to connect with.
• Closed lost retry sequence: This sequence is for prospects who became qualified opportunities but the deal was ultimately lost. Of course, your emails shouldn’t bully these prospects into reconsidering your offer or regurgitate previous emails. Instead, highlight new deals, updates, or changes since the last time you were in contact with them. Your emails should answer, “Why should they be a customer now?”
• Competitor sequence: This sequence is for prospects who are working with your competitors. The idea isn’t to bash the competition, though. Focus your emails on specific advantages your product or offering has over your competitor’s and include as many real-life examples as possible.

Sequence Writing Tips

• Be brief. For these emails, use eight or fewer sentences.
• Stay away from spam trigger words such as free, no risk, or opportunity.
• Serve the prospect more than you sell them. Explain how you’re a resource to them and can genuinely help a pain they likely have.
• Don’t overuse HubSpot’s personalization tokens, but always use <First Name>.
• Neatly and consistently format your body copy.

Case Study: Increasing the Velocity and Impact of Our Client’s Sales Sequences to Book More Meetings

We recently had a client who had a large total addressable market (TAM) but was maxed out on sending capacity. That meant that although they had plenty of leads to contact and were booking meetings consistently, the client was missing out on meeting opportunities because they weren’t moving contacts through our program as efficiently as possible.

We dove into the client’s data and saw that of the 67 meetings booked in the first 45 days of AK Ops’ engagement with them, 54 meetings were booked on Email Sends 1 and 2. That’s 80% of the total meetings! If prospects wanted to meet with our client, they were booking soon after our client engaged them through sales sequences.

To increase the velocity of their sales sequences—and ultimately increase meetings booked—we trimmed each of our HubSpot sales sequences from 5 emails to 3 emails. This allowed for an additional sending capacity of over 60%, which led to booking an additional 54 meetings through sales sequences in the following 15 days. 

Book More Meetings with Automation and our Strategic Approach

Our mission is to make sales more collaborative, data-driven, and scalable. When sales organizations are built around healthy processes, rep-enabled campaigns, and monitored KPIs, our top funnel program produces consistent sales opportunities—ultimately building more pipeline with better conversion rates. After weeks of pivots and continuous improvement, the AK Program performs almost completely on autopilot, requiring only ongoing management and fresh campaigns that sustain companies forever.