In this post, we present our error-proof method for generating at-bats for the sales team. Think of this as a checklist to ensure you’re tackling these five key areas. Heads up, this requires work up-front and thoughtful strategy. For those who are our clients, this is the flow of our onboarding and weekly revenue engine meetings.
1. Total Addressable Market (TAM), Beyond Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
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How large is your TAM?
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For example, 5k accounts
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How many members of the buying team per account?
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For example, 5-10 members
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What is the total reach?
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For example, 25k+ people
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How much of it do you own?
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For example, 10k people
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What is the account saturation percentage? Do you own a healthy percentage of contacts for each account in relation to their size?
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For example, 2% account saturation for an enterprise company with 1000+ employees or 50% account saturation for a small business with 10 employees. Account saturation refers to the number of contacts you have out of the total number of company employees.
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2. Thorough & Holistic Sequence Strategy
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What is the average number of touches to the first meeting booked?
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How many steps are in your sequences? If your sequences are five touches but your conversion jumps after seven touches, you may be quitting too soon.
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What kind of messaging and positioning in your sequences converts prospects?
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Are the messages short or long? Do they focus on pain points or solutions? When launching a GTM campaign with new targeting, you’d be a fool to treat them all prospects the same and expect the same results. Our most successful clients have very different template styles for their different target personas.
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Are you throttling and launching sequences more than once? Are you recycling contacts or retrying them?
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After your first attempt, let your contacts rest for a period of time. Then, auto enroll them in a referral sequence and let them rest again, and then enroll them in a second sales sequence with a different strategy than the first. This sounds complicated, but with a simple workflow, your recycling and retrying can be automated.
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Are you prioritizing your launches based on top converting personas, industries, or engagers?
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If your best pipeline comes from SaaS companies, prioritize that industry early in quarter. Then perhaps engagers of the other industries next.
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- Are you monitoring your deliverability, i.e. the domain health and inbox placement?
- Your process should include warming up domains, managing inboxes, and labeling every response—and I mean, every response. You should also identify potential bounce risks upfront to protect your domain as you throttle up.
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How are you incorporating demand generation?
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Contacts who engage with marketing content should immediately be launched into a follow up sequence. You should also launch marketing engagers in order of priority (think key personas). Your content should focus on serving, not selling.
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Are you following up on leads?
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Prospecting isn’t one and done. Sometimes it takes multiple engagements to get a meeting on the books, especially if the timing is off. Set re-engagement dates and be sure to return to them.
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3. Sales Execution
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What touchpoints do you have inside the deal pipeline?
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We suggest following up five times before giving up on ghosted deals.
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What are your expectations for scaling? Have you considered your domain health, send ability, and TAM?
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New inboxes must be warmed up and ramped up slowly. This can look like sending to 50 prospects per day, then 100, then 200, and so on. Monitoring bounce rates and deliverability is the foundation for a successful campaign. In addition, how much of your TAM do you have left to engage with?
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Do you have stop-checks in place while scaling to ensure your strategy is the most effective?
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Consider which persona has the highest lead to meeting conversion rate, the largest deals, or moves through the pipeline the fastest. Once you identify the most effective campaigns, you can double down on what’s working so you get the quickest and highest ROI from your campaigns.
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4. Marketing Influence
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What kind of campaign engagement helps bring a prospect from MQL to a deal?
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Does a certain topic, or channel, or asset drive more urgency to the initial meeting?
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What kind of campaign engagement helps accelerate pipeline and close deals? For more information on this, check out our blog, How to Effectively Create & Distribute Content that Enables the Pipeline.
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Pre-meeting marketing engagement (TOFU)
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Campaign engagement during the sales process (MOFU/BOFU)
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Do your prospects need to be nurtured by marketing while they’re being prospected by sales? Or is nurture more impactful once the sales relationship has begun?
5. Measuring Meetings into the Pipeline
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What sequences sourced the highest pipeline value/most deals?
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What CTA? What template structure? What sender? What time?
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What personas/industries sourced the highest pipeline value/most deals?
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What’s the average number of touches (email exchanges, calls, meetings, social) to acquire a real opportunity?
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How long does it take from enrolling a lead into their first sequence to creating a qualified opportunity and to closing the deal?
Book More Meetings with Automation and our Strategic Approach
This checklist is a foundation that can help you plan the most effective roadmap for converting leads to closed won deals. Without it, your team may be flying blind with a shotgun approach, not knowing which efforts yield the best results. No matter where you acquire leads, this type of program can feed your pipeline while giving your reps the most at-bats and leadership the visibility needed to make scaling decisions.
To learn more or chat with the team at AK Operations, book some time here to connect.