Are you part of a sales team and want to learn new ways to approach clients in a remote way? This blog is for you then! In this first series from the Outreach Ops department, we share how we've been generating new strategies when COVID-19 impacted our 2020 sales plans. Keep reading!
Here at MagmaLabs, we're always in the latest trends when it comes to lead generation: that's why we like to call ourselves Outreach Kickstarters.
Adapting to change
In the second quarter of the year, when the COVID-19 pandemic terribly impacted our sales strategies, we started to look at new ways to generate and fill our pipeline in an indoor environment.
Due to federal shutdowns, we were not able to either host or attend events and face-to-face meetings! At this point, all our sales planning was doomed to fail. As a consequence, the cost of planning our 2020 sales strategies became a negative expense. But, change is inevitable not only in life but in business too. So, we had to adapt.
But: How we adapt to unprecedented change??
What do you do when the sh** hits the fan? Obviously, that question was hard at first. But then, we started thinking creatively on how we were going to meet our Sales Quota for 2020 and still meet our brand penetration goals around the globe without any additional budget!
First of all, we needed to find the problem. It wasn’t hard. It was actually very clear: How are we going to sell and generate leads remotely if there’s no more real-world networking?
Ok, we had find the problem. Now, we needed to find a structured solution. Through a series of steps, we carefully created a short strategic timeline:
1. Generate 2. Engage 3. Convert
Sounds easy, right? But let me tell you that it took us a little bit of time to reorganize all our sales strategies of the year and nicely took the best of each of the SDRs (Sales Development Representatives).
Our new Sales Strategie
First, let me introduce you our outreach team, composed of three key badass sales specialists 😉:
The Researcher: In charge of Lead Sourcing in online directories, social media, and specialized websites. Then, filtering and list building with potential partners and clients.
The Engager: Lead capture in our Customer Relationship Management (CRM), directing cold emailing campaigns and engaging with the client before the first introductory meeting.
The Closer: Leading the client to negotiation, relationship building, and closing. Basically a person with enough expertise to guide the client to the “YES!”.
As mentioned before, we were trying to attract more clients and create more relationships around the globe with competitive rates and top tech talent. That’s why, as a team, we worked together and came up with the following chart of steps of a:
Successful Client’s Journey
As a note: step 7 can be a bit tricky, that’s the reason why our target market was divided into two different groups:
- The first group is called “Staff Augmentation”, it means that MagmaLabs provides different kinds of resources to certain companies in need of an extra hand in software development.
- And, the second one is for “New Products”. That is to say, to develop and release a new product into the market for existing companies or startups.
Our results
We started to use AI in order to engage our audience from the beginning of the mentioned process. Usually, we do that with a targeted subject line on our cold email campaign. The subject line is written according to their geographic location because it is not the same to reach a North American CEO than a German one.
Additionally, we reached them via phone call. A nice thing about it is that we’ve had a lot of calls with great folks all the way from Ukraine, India, Portugal, to South America, where we have met amazing friends from Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Argentina.
Another result is that after a couple of months doing A/B testing with different templates and subject lines, our conversion rate ended at 7.8% which is huge! Also, we signed a lot of amazing partnerships with companies from very diverse cultures, and even our CTO was able to host a European webinar.
Sum up
As said before, we are constantly adapting to customer needs and trends. For sure it is always a learning path, but of course, with all the knowledge acquired, creativity arises!
Change is inevitable. That's why we must adapt to no die. Stay tuned because soon we will release our very own blog series from the Outreach Department, detailing each of the steps in this journey!
Thanks for reading!!
@SFernandaRojaso, VP Outreach Operations at MagmaLabs
