Playbook
Execute Better Outbound Sales With Factors
Execute Better Outbound Sales With Factors
B2B Sales Is Hard
B2B sales is hard. Rejection is all too common in the lives of SDRs, AEs, and sales managers. This is especially true in the case of cold outbound: an unsung sales approach that, even at its best, achieves single digit success rates. In fact, a study by Backlinko analyzed over 12 million outbound emails to find that on average, cold mails achieve a response rate of 8.5%. And positive responses? They’re fewer still.
It’s not difficult to see why. While it’s simple enough to create a list of target accounts to go after, reaching out to the right people at the right time with the right message is easier said than done…well, until now…
On average, only 4% of B2B website traffic converts. Rather than reaching out to cold accounts that may or may not be interested in your business, what if you could…
- Identify, qualify, and prioritize the remaining 96% of accounts already engaging with your brand?
- Automatically enrich target accounts with contact data and push them into your sales tools?
- Personalize your outreach based on actual account engagement as opposed to guesswork or iffy third-party intent data?
Well, you can think of Factors as another vigilant, insightful member of your sales team that empowers all of the above and more.
This playbook explores how best to leverage Factors for outbound sales. We’ll discuss the following use-cases:
- Prioritize high-intent accounts
- Stay on top of real-time engagement
- Leverage cross-channel engagement
- Automate contact enrichment
- Automate CRM population
- Automate outbound sales
But first, a little bit about our philosophy on outbound sales:
Why Intent-based Outbound Works Better
Intent-based outbound is a sales strategy that tries to make the most of existing, low hanging opportunities rather than constantly sourcing brand new ones. Using a combination of account intelligence, engagement scoring, and workflow automations, intent-based outreach seeks to identify and target anonymous, high-intent accounts that are already engaging with your brand.
Here are 3 reasons why this works better than cold outbound:
- Warm outreach, over cold outreach: The most obvious benefit with intent-based outreach is that it involves targeting accounts that have already interacted with your brand across your website, LinkedIn ad campaigns, or G2 customer reviews. Undoubtedly, reaching out to these “warm” accounts will result in improved conversion rates over cold accounts that are yet to familiarize themselves with your company.
- Focused targeting, over spray and pray tactics: Rather than casting a wide net over your total addressable market, intent-based outreach encourages focusing your sales outreach efforts on a limited set of high-intent accounts. In short, this translates to improved time & effort spent per account.
- Engagement-based personalization over generic messaging: Intent-based outreach employs firmographics (industry, size, geography, etc) and account engagement (page views, time-spent, button clicks, etc) to better personalize outbound efforts based on what target accounts care about. This results in relevant, personalized outreach, which in turn drives more conversions.
Execute Better Outbound Sales with Factors
The first step is to start with a clear definition of your ideal client profile and engagement criteria. The better this definition is, the better you can Segment target accounts and tailor sales outreach.,
Factors partners with industry-leading IP intelligence providers: 6sense and Clearbit to identify, enrich, and track anonymous accounts visiting your website. Factors also integrates with LinkedIn Ads and G2 to capture cross-channel intent signals for holistic engagement tracking. In short, this means you can create a wide range of custom Segments based on firmographics and account engagement:
To create a Segment in Factors, simply install our script onto your website and hit “New Segment” under Accounts. Then, enter the account properties (firmographics) and engagement criteria you care about. Name this list as you please, and hit “Save segment”. These segments are automatically populated as more accounts continue to visit your website. Segments act as the base upon which you can capture, score, and prioritize accounts that showcase specific qualities and intent.
Let’s explore sales use-cases to automate sales workflows for AEs, Sales Managers, and SDRs
For AEs & Sales Managers
Between picking the right targets, staying on top of engagement, assigning accounts to sales reps, and closing the big money deals, AEs and Sales Managers are responsible for a lot. Here’s how Factors helps.
1. Prioritize high-intent accounts
Needless to say, not every account engaging with your brand will necessarily make a good fit for your business. Even within the set of accounts that match your ICP criteria, not every account will be immediately ready-to-buy. Some may be pursuing the market while others may have clear buying intent.
By creating the right set of Segment lists, AEs and Sales Managers can achieve visibility into high-fit accounts engaging with your brand. You can further filter these accounts down to target accounts by qualifying intent using configurable, cross-channel accounts scoring rules:
This way, you’ll be left with a list of high-intent, high-fit target accounts to prioritize over generic, cold accounts. These accounts may be automatically assigned to the right SDR based on industry, geography, size, intent, etc. As we’ll see in the next section, these accounts can then be pushed directly into your CRM so all your target accounts may be unified under one roof.
2. Automate alerts & CRM updates
Once you have your target accounts in place, as an AE/Sales Manger, you’ll want to stay on top of them. Factors integrates with Slack, Teams to push real-time alerts when target accounts are live on your website. These alerts may either be routed to a specific account owner, or to the larger sales channel.
This way, you’ll know when target accounts or leads are live on high-intent pages, and reach out quickly to convert the deal. In addition to this, you may also push relevant target accounts, along with their firmographics and engagement data straight into your CRM via Webhooks. Learn more here.
For SDRs
Between researching target accounts, enriching contact data, updating CRMs, and executing cross-channel outreach sequences — a lot is expected of SDRs. Here’s how Factors helps with all of this.
1. Research target accounts
As previously mentioned, Factors identifies and enriches anonymous accounts engaging with your brand with dozens of firmographics and engagement metrics. You can learn all about the nature of these accounts including their industry, source, LinkedIn interactions, website engagement and more. Simply click on an account you care about to find a bird’s eye view of its entire customer journey.
Familiarize yourself with the account by answering questions like:
- Is this an early-stage start up? A mid-market company? Or a large-scale enterprise?
- What industry and geography do they function in?
- What are these accounts engaging with? Can I infer their pain-points or use cases?
Researching this firmographic data and engagement timeline is valuable when it comes to understanding winning customer journeys and personalizing sales outreach based on an account’s historical interactions with your brand.
2. Update accounts & contacts in your CRM
Rather than manually vetting each account and updating the CRM, Factors enables sales folk to regularly push the right accounts into the right CRM lists. These target account lists will be updated on a daily basis within your CRM, automatically. No tedious clutter or time-consuming data handling.
But wait — there’s more.
At the end of the day, as an SDR, you’re targeting people within these target accounts. You need contact data on each account. To service this requirement, Factors connects with contact database platforms like Apollo via Webhooks to automatically enrich target accounts with relevant contact data (titles, phone numbers, emails) — and pushes this data straight into your CRM as well. Schedule a demo to learn how to automate these workflows and more with Factors
In short, as an SDR, you could open up your computer at the start of your day and immediately have a list of fresh target accounts and relevant contacts within those accounts to go after. Remember, you’ll also be backed by the engagement and insight data collected in the Research stage to really drive outbound.
Next, let’s explore how to automate outbound itself.
3. Automate outbound!
In addition to pushing enriched target accounts and contact data into your CRM, Factors supports outbound automations so, for example, you can automatically activate a mail sequence to a relevant person from a target account when they meet a specific engagement criteria.
Learn more about how to set up outbound automations via webhooks here.
And there you have it! Through a combination of account intelligence, account scoring, and workflow automations, Factors can effectively act as an extra member of your sales team. Before we leave you, here are a few best practices we’ve discovered working with 200+ high-growth sales teams
Best Practices
- Leverage the latest intent signals: There should be a difference in approach when targeting an account that last interacted with your brand two quarters ago versus an account that engaged with your brand last week. Ideally, prioritize accounts with the most recent engagement as it’s generally far easier to convert accounts when you’re on top of their minds.
- Be the early bird, get the work: A research study by HBR found that contact buyers quickly dramatically improves the odds of conversion. Try and reach out to prospects as soon as they make contact to drive conversions. This is where real-time alerts and automated outbound can be a game-changer.
- Be relevant, be helpful: One of the reasons intent-based outreach outperforms cold outbound is that with the former, you actually know what your target accounts care about. Track account engagement via cross-channel timelines and personalize outreach based on an account’s touchpoints to deliver a relevant, memorable experience.
- Fire on all fronts: In order to find success with outbound, it’s essential to thread outreach across multiple channels and stages of the customer journey. The same email message that resonates with the bottom of the funnel lead is unlikely to resonate with the top of the funnel leads on LinkedIn. Keep experimenting with channels and positions to identify what clicks when, & where. This is where tactics like integrated/sequential outbound can have a big impact on conversions.
