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Here’s how we get more than 50% conversion in cold emailing

For any SaaS sales team, cold emailing is the life line of the sales funnel. For organisations like ours, with smaller ticket size deals, the cold emailing channel has to work, otherwise the CAC vs LTV balance can go for a toss.Cold Emailing

Every entrepreneur, whether in sales or not, is selling something. If you are pitching investors, you are selling a vision and a team; if you are mailing potential hires, you are pitching work environment and potential gains; if you are mailing a potential mentor, you are pitching to his altruistic or “giving back to the society” tendencies. For any cold email to work, it is essential that you understand how a conversation with a stranger on a digital platform is structured.

This sounds fairly simple doesn’t it? We have tried so many variants of cold emailing at Betaglide and the truth remains, in most cases it doesn’t work. Imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes and assess “Why would I ever be interested to read this email or even opening this email?”. There are multiple ways an email can be structured and different ways work for different people. For us, most things didn’t work but thankfully, a few did! Here’s the outline and our learning behind it and how we approached it.

  • Subject Line: This is the first line your receiver is going to see and is going to make the decision whether to open the email or not in a split second. The key here is to respect your customer’s time. S/He receives hundreds of emails every day and what makes your email so special for her/him to open it? This is the questions you should be answering in your subject line. Also, don’t make it generic or loaded with data. Email is extremely personal and you would do good to remember that. For us, subject lines like “Increase/boost your user retention”, “Decrease your churn with retention.ai” just didn’t work. We had less than 5% email open rate with such subject lines. That is pretty bad when you are trying to scout for beta users who need to trust you and your product to become an early adopter. What instead worked was “Hey John, a message from Manan”, “John – Become your app’s rockstar”. The subject line should be catchy enough to garner curiosity in the reader’s mind for her/him to decide to open the email.
  • Introduction: This is one of the most trickiest part which took us a whole bunch of experiments to crack. The first couple of lines in the email is going to decide whether the receiver reads it further or not. With most automation tools, now you can personalise emails that you send. It is a no-brainer to start with “Hey John or Hi John” instead of “Dear John”. Especially if you are selling to C level executives and product managers. This makes them immediately comfortable and as they have already seen the salutation multiple times in their regular email conversations. The next part is first few lines of the email. This took some really hard thinking to crack. Most of the times, we are eager to say something about us but that is a wrong way to look at it. The first few lines should be about the recipient of the email! Research about the person/company that you are sending the email to. Congratulate them if they recently got a promotion or if their company recently achieved a milestone. This immediately grabs her/his interest in your email and decides to read on. We find tools like Linkedin sales navigator and Rapportive ideal for such research! If you a know a better tool for this, do tell!
  • The pitch: After all, you are writing this email to sell him something. In his book, “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel explains that best sales process hardly ever looks like sales. We initially made a mistake of writing about our product and its features in this section. No one cares a penny’s worth about what your product does! Make the pitch about her/him! What are the problems that your customer is facing and how you can solve them along with a number. If you can not pitch your product in just two lines, you really need to work on it. We used to have an eight line pitch! Never worked! Talking so much about your product just seems very salesy! The point is that your pitch should not sound salesy but something that can genuinely help the recipient achieve her/his goals.  That is your pitch perfect. Remember, the purpose of the first email is to start a conversation about the problem that your customer faces and then slowly convincing her/him that you are the man to solve it!
  • Closing: This is the simplest part and most people do it right. If you are mailing directly to the person who is going to use your product, ask for a “brief time for a call”. If you are mailing founder/VP who might not be the primary user of your product, ask them to connect you to the “relevant person in the organisation.”

Email, when done right can become the cornerstone of your sales process and open the floodgates of hot leads! One might say that the approach is time consuming for you have to do research on each customer you are sending the email to. But remember, sales is about relationships and trust you build with the stakeholder. Invest that time for the clients that are essential to your growth and it is going to be worth it!

Guest blog post by Manan Shah, Retention.ai

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Global Lean Sales – Selling your software online to global markets, without field-force #PlaybookRT

Last week I was going through the startup class videos and one particular statement by Sam Altman stuck with me. He said “All successful founders are fanatics”. And YCombinator has seen a whole bunch of them. The way he puts it is very awesome, let me reproduce the statement here:

“The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product. Founders talk about being fanatical in how they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy that they use to explain the product just right. and fanatical in the way that they think about customer support. In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up Pagerduty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder’s asleep, they still get a response within an hour.Companies actually do this in the early days. Their founders feel physical pain when the product sucks and they want to wake up and fix it. They don’t ship crap, and if they do, they fix it very very quickly. And it definitely takes some level of fanaticism to build great products.”

Read the full talk here (later)

2014-10-18 15.23.57

This statement came alive for me yesterday when I met Pallav Nadhani, the founder of FusionCharts. As he walked us through how he built his company and sharing his experiences and wonderful insights in building his company, his fanaticism was apparent. I am sure everyone who was there, wanted some of it to rub on to them. Even though it was a “RoundTable”, I think Pallav had more experience than a lot of us and pretty much carried the group. He shared some very cool insights, with real life examples and actionable suggestions.

There were 11 of us, all selling business-to-business (B2B) products in the range of $1000 – $75,000, some online, some offline, most on a subscription model, some early stage, a few past the validation stage. Almost half of the founders depended on high touch sales and half had products that were Do-it-yourself. Here is a summary of the meetup:

Pallav’s Story

Pallav shared his story on how he started the company when he was 16, to get some pocket money. He made a charting widget for himself and then wrote an article about it, which became popular. Then one thing led to another and he now runs a company that publishes 90+ types of charts has 23,000 customers and 70 people. Some of the things that he focused from very early on was:

  1. Reduce all friction for the user who is evaluating the product.
  2. He promised his users that they would get their money back if they could not build the first chart in 15 minutes. That helped him simplify the on-boarding process and make it very easy for his users.
  3. He was a one person company for a long time and handled everything from developing the product, documenting it to doing customer support.

Documentation

Pallav’s father is an author of 15 books on accounting and that gave him a strong foundation to document his product very well. This was particularly important since his target audience was developers who needed good documentation to use the product.

  1. Pallav himself wrote 3000 to 4000 pages of documentation and still reviews every word that is added by his team.
  2. Documenting the product gave him key insights as a user and helped him refine and debug the product.
  3. Every time someone asks a question. His team is forced to answer using a public document. This made sure that the same question did not get asked again and also created a good knowledge base for his product.
  4. He learned from his father on how to structure documentation (with headings, sub-headings etc) so that the reader can quickly find out the relevant sections to read.

There is another interesting anecdote. jQuery was a late entrant to javascript libraries and according to its creator John Resig, it was because it was the first one that was properly documented.

Marketing and First Impressions

Pallav’s hypothesis is that all sales / conversions are driven by “Fear” or “Greed” and products must highlight these in their marketing copy, specially the headling. He even asked all of us the rephrase the core message of our product to appeal to one of these emotions. I had strong reservations on whether this was correct and if this lead too to much focus on top of the sales funnel (new visitors). Either way, the group seemed convinced. While I thought it went went with Pallav’s aggressive and “switched-on” approach, I have my doubts if it works for all kinds of products. Products have the personalities of their founders embedded in them, and I feel its best to stick with the approach that goes best with the philosophy of the product and the creator.

Pallav also referred Kevin Hale’s analogy of building a customer relationship like a marriage and how the first visit of a customer on the website is like dating. For more on this, I would recommend Kevin Hale’s enlightening talks on the matter (later!).

Some other interesting points that were discussed were:

  1. Classify your traffic into different personas. For Fusion Chart, it is the Developer, Product Manager and Designer.
  2. Deeply understand each persona. Appreciate that they are overloaded with information and identify openings in their daily routines where you can reach them.
  3. For security startups, a weekly roundup of major reported breaches worked well when sent at 8.30 in the morning.
  4. Online marketing has evolved from “carpet bombing” to “sniper”. Audience have to be segmented and messages have to be finely targeted.
  5. It is important to reach the users main Inbox and not the promotions box. So keep the mail personal and do not add an unsubscribe link.
  6. Pallav showed how he used WebEngage for conducting surveys on their visitors and how he tested his hypothesis. For example, his survey would ask if a visitor intends to pay for the product on offer or select an open source alternative. Based on the feedback, Pallav said he would change the marketing copy.
  7. He also used VWO for A/B testing and showed us an example on which one of “HTML5 Charting” or “Javascript Charting” resonated more for the user.
  8. Asking feedback from customers who had evaluated a product was also important. A simple email with the subject “5 minutes of your time for 5 questions” gives Pallav great customer insight.
  9. He said he tests all kinds of hypotheses and keeps experimenting on the message. Examples:
    1. Do users like a simple or complex layout
    2. How many fields should a form have
    3. What colour a button should have

The attendees at PlaybookRTContent Marketing

We spent a whole bunch of time discussing and sharing great insights on Content Marketing. Sahil Parikh of BrightPod.com shared his experiences in content marketing. He has built a product for the marketing community and started a blog with the purpose of reaching out to this community. It took him six months of building the blog before he saw some returns. He has hired two content writers and produces 3 to 4 blog posts a week. He shared that aggressive content marketing teams target producing one post a day. He also reached out to Indian authors on popular blogs like ZDNet and TheNextWeb and pitched the Indian product angle that got him attention. Sandeep Todi of Emportant.com shared that he bumped into a content writer for SiteHR, a popular HR portal and is how working with her to build content for his product.

Content marketing seemed like a favorite of strategy of a Lean Sales team but again it boils down to execution. It is very hard to product high quality content and as more and more people start getting good at it, the bar keeps on increasing.

Some content ideas / anecdotes shared were:

  1. Interview / Talk Show Series: Publish interviews with customers and thought leaders in the domain
  2. Use big brands in your blog posts. Examples from Fusion Charts:
    1. How Unilever / Walmart / P&G uses data visualization
  3. Act on industry events:
    1. Security Breaches
    2. Flipkart Billion Day flop
    3. Home Depot breach
  4. “News Jacking” – Connect popular news items to your product.
    1. GangamStyle in numbers
    2. Infographics on FIFA World Cup
    3. 10 infographics on Fitness Apps
  5. Put customer logos on your site, content unless the customer objects. Don’t mention it in your contract or it will trigger a red flag.
  6. Allow your site content to be reproduced.
  7. Curate, collate good content from other site and credit the original author.
  8. Get quotes from industry influencers, the will also ReTweet your content.
  9. Speed is of essence. Create great content quicly (yeah right!).
  10. Publish whitepapers. They are popular with higher management.

Sales Funnel

Pallav walked us through the various parts of the sales funnel.

[From his slides]

  1. Awareness (ads, blog, event, word-of-mouth…)
  2. Initial Visit
    1. Different channels / different ROI
    2. Best channels = low cost, high ROI
  3. Engagement
    1. Trial, case study, whitepaper, anything that could give you email AND other information
  4. Nurturing
    1. Mix of product, marketing and sales
    2. Sales job: get the customer on the call and do aggressive follow up
  5. Closing
    1. Handover from sales to client success.
    2. Repeat business through subscriptions, up-sells or cross-sells.

Pricing

There was a very heated discussion on pricing. Pallav was of the mainstream industry opinion that price is a reflection of value. The higher the price, the better the quality of customers and revenue. There was a discussion on discounts and how in high touch sales, discounts are a bane. Here Pallav shared that adding artificial constraints to negotiate. For example, you can extend the support by 3 months instead of giving a discount, or increase the number of servers etc.

Open Source

There was some resistance and suspicion from the group in discussing this and understandably so because of the nature of the software products business that depends on Intellectual Property Rights. We did touch upon this briefly and why based on our (ERPNext) experience we see open source as a great way to not only reach out a new generation of users but also believe in an alternative way of doing business.

2014-10-18 15.24.15Conclusion

It was great to learn from Pallav, and we thank him for sharing so many suggestions and learnings. Also a big thanks to him for openly sharing specific insights and walking us through an A/B test or testing an hypothesis. This is also a great initiative by Avinash Raghava and iSPIRT, the think-tank/lobby group for Software Products to bring together entrepreneurs so that they can share tips and build networks. It would have been a bit better if there was more unstructured time so that there would be better interaction between the group, to build deeper relationships between the founders. Also a big thank you to FreeCharge.in for hosting the event and providing lunch.

Finally what really matters is execution. For me the biggest takeaway was that the product is a reflection of the creator / founder and it was important that the founders are obsessed with each detail of the product and its quality and also work with the energy that is required to do so much work. For that it is important that they see success early on as Pallav did and the once they are on to something they make sure that they do not lose it.

Specifically, for me it reminded me that its time to go back to fixing the documentation!

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India as a Product Nation is in good hands – Insights from the Lean Sales Roundtable

The fate of the future of India as a product nation is in the hands of 20 somethings and 30 somethings.  Whether it is sheer luck or sheer brilliance or sheet hard work, or all three I don’t know, but what I do know is that the future of India as a product nation is in good hands.

I attended a Lean Sales Playbook for about 3 and a half hours.  I had no idea how the time flew as  Pallav Nadhani (fusioncharts.com), Varun Shoor (kayako.com), Paras Chopra (wingify.com) shared from their companies’ experiences.  The attendees got a great insight from these three founders on how to make sales and marketing efforts pay.  Every talk was littered with “what works and gets customers in the door” versus just some sales and marketing theory.

The team intensely discussed generating MQL, SQLs, role of marketing, role of sales, organization setup, hiring, compensation, etc..

The insights below are from Pallav, Varun and Paras – however, for purposes of confidentiality it does not state which company has done what specifically.  The below insights could have worked at one or multiple of these start up organization:

Leadership

  • The founder is the first sales person
  • “Founders must obsess about things that they want their teams to obsess about”.  One of the founders believes in Content Marketing and has written 180 articles himself.  Another founder is a strong believer in leading sales, and the third in building quality software himself.

Getting your first few customers

  • “Marketing is about finding channels that give volumes / returns relative to cost of the channel.”
  • What worked for initial sales was to work on “influencers”.  Identifying experts on various in-depth forums and working on them as initial customers.
  • Product is not different from “sales”.  The problem of sales comes only when the products’ value is not known – when the team doesn’t even know if the product should exist or not on this planet.  Do customers really require it?

 

Managing the Sales Funnel

  • The start-ups give a lot of focus to containing “churn”.
  • Converting site hits is monitored in a very rigorous manner by all founders.
  • Once the free trial starts, the impression formed in the first 2 minutes is critical.  Customers should not get a whole lot of options.  Its  a minimal set of 1 or 2 options so that making decisions on how to proceed is a no-brainer.
  • Its difficult for the customer to give large commitment at once – so try to get their commitment in small steps … and then get them truly engaged with the product.
  • Sales and trial requests are managed rigorously.  There are both automated and manual communications that go to potential customers.

Marketing

  • The marketing team has used among other initiatives –   SEO, Content Marketing and word of mouth.  Content Marketing has been used very effectively.  The articles have to be well written and the product has to be pitched subtly so that its value is understood and appreciated.
  • For SaaS software, the sales person is more of a “sales enabler” rather than an outright “sales” person.  Marketing and the Product do most of the work.  “Sales enablers” need to describe product features and not really sell.
  • One of the organization’s target market is the CMO organization, even though the person reached most times is an executive or a manager in that organization.  A lot of importance is given to reaching the users who will actually use the products – and not just the IT organization.
  • Drip marketing is also used effectively.  Information of a customer is collected in many ways.  E.g., you don’t ask the customer which industry they are from, but collect information on which demos they want to see and try to figure out the industry.
  • Offline conferences are more expensive.  One of these startups went for it only in their 7th year.

Building a Brand

  • Building trust and credibility with customers is crucial.  Its critical to have a website that speaks in the language of target customers (in the US and in UK).  Websites targeted at Indian customers and those targeted at US customers can be very different.  A lot of time is spent in identifying these differences and ensuring the website is culturally accurate.
  • All success stories are tracked and converted to case studies.  Potential customers are able to view success stories that are relevant to them and are from their industry.
  • Ensuring top class support, ensures that the brand continues to grow and strengthen.
  • Execution Excellence builds a brand.  Even though these are start ups, what really works for them is creation of internal Knowledge Banks.  EVERY mistake or gap a customer reports goes back into the Knowledge Bank and everyone gets trained.

Talent and Hiring

  • Ensure you are hiring good people, especially in Sales and Marketing.  When hiring at senior levels, e.g., a VP of Sales its important to know if he is working out or not right at the word start.  Taking 6 months to a year to figure out that he is “not working out” is a huge loss to a start up.
  • Get creative about hiring the talent needed.  One of these startups have used expats that have returned to India from various countries and do not want to leave their home state.    So, the recruitment team ensures that they hire Australian expats to support the Australia customers and UK expats to support the UK customers, etc.

It was enthralling to see the energy and wisdom in this young team.

Even as I left, a list of topics went up on the board.  Sales compensation was the top one and there were a few others.  Am sure the active discussion lasted for another couple of hours.

I left invigorated and excited.  Is there a way for these young, smart product companies and their founders to inspire and spawn a product culture in India?  Yes, I think there is and I for one am a believer.