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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
Once you’ve got your deck nailed, the next step is going to be driving opportunities to present it to potential clients. And the precursor to that will be emails and phone calls. So having some basic templates there will be helpful.
A set of basic emails that handles inbound inquiries, and can be used for targeted outreach, is a key piece of your sales materials.
As with your deck, these emails will be medium-specific encapsulations of your narrative, whose end goal is to drive recipients to an online or offline presentation and demo. And as with your deck, these can start at the most basic and extend from there as your messaging gets more specific.
We’ll start with the idea of outbound outreach. While inbound leads (that you heavily qualify) are the highest-quality source of potential deals, it’s unlikely when you’re first starting out that you’ll have inbound demand of any merit before you start doing outbound.
To start, you simply need a couple of outreach templates that you’ll use to contact decision-makers to whom you want to present your solution. The benefit of prospecting (again, we’ll get into this more in another chapter) is that you are able to select prospects that have the business pain characteristics that your solution addresses. (Remember the people and businesses we talked about when building your narrative? These are those folks.) So conveniently, when you’re writing these templates, you can be very specific in assuming that readers have the pain points that you’re solving and, moreover, talk to them plainly about their business pains and your solution.
As you read the following email templates, you should recognize parts of the master narrative: the problem and who has it (the recipient!), the differences between existing solutions and yours, and proof points of superiority. You’ll note the subject lines are often customized— there’s information in there to show the prospect that this message was specifically made for him or her—and include qualification information (for example, “Hiring Ruby devs? That is NOT easy.”). You’ll also see that the templates include click targets, which are hyperlinks pointing to pieces of collateral (I like YouTube demo videos in particular) that draw clicks from the prospect. These are important not just because they can provide more context and persuasion, but because, with the sort of email instrumentation you’ll have implemented, they will allow you to see which prospects are clicking and thus demonstrating interest in what you have to say. And they don’t have to be just text links. You can embed a screenshot of a slide or—one of my favorites—a thumbnail of a demo video that’s hyperlinked to the source to drive click-through for more compelling information. Email templates should also include links to your website. This helps with the click-target question, but also allows the prospect to see more and potentially come inbound as a demo request through your inbound lead capture.
You’ll also note that these sample templates are very specific about what the solution addresses and take pains to demonstrate to the prospect that research was done to confirm that he or she has those business pains. In TalentBin’s case, that’s hiring technical talent. These emails don’t talk about social recruiting. They don’t talk about recruiting in general. They don’t talk about interviewing. They talk about the pain points of finding and recruiting technical talent and potential solutions to those problems. And the messaging continually comes back to the prospect’s point of view. Prospects don’t care about you. They care about them. So as with your narrative and slides, prioritize the prospects’ point of view; even as you present information about your solution, ground it in how it helps them.
importantThe best templates do all of this in a plainspoken, dare I say fun, way that speaks to the prospect candidly, authoritatively, and as a peer. They avoid meaningless jargon-speak and unnecessarily business-y communication patterns. Same with over-involved designs; the templates should be 100% text, avoiding marketing images—with the exception of screenshots and slides, if you like. But avoid high-sheen logos and such. It makes your outreach look like a robot sent it, like there’s no qualification behind it and it’s therefore inapplicable spam rather than highly targeted consultative outreach. Don’t let your emails get mistaken for that other rubbish.
You’ll notice that there are strong calls to action at the conclusion of each email, asking to set up a one-on-one interaction (whether via telepresence à la Join.me or Zoom, or face-to-face). That is the ultimate goal of this outreach: to drive to a synchronous presentation and discussion of the prospect’s business pains and your solution—a demo, in the vernacular.
Below are a few examples of cold-outreach emails.
Source: TalentBin
Source: TalentBin
Source: TalentBin
Source: TalentBin
Lastly, when you build these templates, you want to build them with a concept that they’ll eventually be dripped out over time in a multi-week cadence. So think about how you can split your message into more than one email, as this has a number of benefits.
exampleYour first email could be short and sweet to get attention with a big ROI metric callout, your next email could have fuller detail about major messaging buckets of your solution, and then incremental emails could zoom in on each of those messaging buckets. In TalentBin’s case, that could have been a first general email, a follow-up email that’s focused on superior candidate search results, a follow-up email that’s focused on better qualification information through social activity, another on better response rates through better contact information like personal emails, another on automation and time savings with drip marketing, and then one on customer success stories.
I wrote an example drip email series for a Sales Operations salon that I run, which has the same call to action—“Join this group”—but approaches it with different value propositions along the way.
In Prospecting, we talk about how in your prospecting efforts, when you identify an account and the relevant decision-making contacts internally, you may be able to identify a professional contact of yours that is a LinkedIn connection of the target contact, or at very least, works in the same organization as them. This can be a very effective means of engagement, but it takes a little bit of extra footwork than pure compelling argumentation, as a social component and social graces are involved.
In this case, your initial outreach will be to the intermediary, asking them if they’d be willing to forward something along to the target. An email template detailing to them who you’re trying to engage, why you think that they might know them (always authenticate this, because sometimes LinkedIn connections can mean not a lot!), why you want to engage the target in question, and why you think it would be valuable to the target. This is the part that tells the potential introducer whether it will be worth their time to assist you—as in, will they be a bringer of compelling information, or just helping an annoying gadfly? They are a lightweight gatekeeper who has split allegiances—some to you and some to the other contact. So you want to show them how there is social benefit to them as an introducer—a great way here is to include some sort of specialness, like maybe it’s a closed beta and no one else knows about it, and you prospected the target especially.
If they’re willing to help you, send them an easy-to-forward email template with all the relevant information detailed in, customized to the target contact, along with the rationale as to why you thought they’d be really excited to hear more. Don’t ask the introducer to email introduce you directly, as you want the other side to opt in to engaging rather than being dropped blindly into their lap. And don’t rely on the introducer to execute the outreach on their own, since she doesn’t know much about your pitch and argument. You simply want her to be in charge of passing your message along, with commentary about your great qualities. Your email should have parts of your pitch in it, like the templates above, because it’s going to be making your argument for you when your introducer forwards it along—it’s a call to action for the target to respond back to you directly if they’re interested in hearing more. Send that to your introducer, making sure to instrument it with an email-tracking pixel (for example, Mixmax, Yesware, HubSpot Sidekick, or others), so you can see when your introducer forwards it and it gets opened (or not). Set a reminder to yourself to follow up directly with the target if you don’t hear back (once your introducer has sent this first email along, they’re out of the loop.) At this point, you can just treat the target like a standard cold outreach target, but with the added social context benefit of that initial warm introduction. And of course when the target gets back to you, make sure to thank the introducer!
As with your slides, you should approach these email templates with an iterative mindset. As your solution extends, you’ll extend them. In fact, as you add slides, you can often add a correlating outreach email, maybe even with a screenshot of the slide embedded! As you find permutations in your customer base, you can fork off templates that are specific to sub-genres of your customers. As with your slides, you should keep email templates in some sort of repository—which can be as simple as a Google Document or, eventually, a more complicated content management system, like Yesware, SalesLoft, or some other email-prospecting tool.
While targeted email outreach for appointment setting is one of the most scalable means by which to put your message in front of qualified prospects, you’ll likely be getting on the phone—either dealing with inbound calls (perhaps engendered by your outbound emailing!) or doing out-and-out cold-calling.
While there’s little chance that a phone call will directly follow a script, having at least some bulleting in place can be helpful to ensure that you’re nailing your messaging points. Again, these should be a reformatting of your core narrative, designed to be delivered in thirty to ninety seconds. This is not the kind of phone script that you’ll have when you get to 10+ sales reps; instead, it’s some guideposts to help you when you get on the phone and are trying to drive to a demo.
Below are some appointment-setting phone scripts from a company named HIRABL, which makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies. These are for a product that helps agencies know when candidates that they’ve submitted to clients may have been hired, even though the client hasn’t reported it.
Source: HIRABL
The following is a more involved call script for TalentBin, which encapsulates more of the sales narrative than the succinct ones above. It is unlikely that all of the information in this script would be utilized in a given call, but having the information available to the caller can be helpful.
Source: TalentBin
When we built this next script, we also included some reaction permutations to help guide the next steps of the call:
Source: TalentBin
Next, we have some example voicemail scripts to elicit callbacks. As covered in Prospect Outreach and Demo Appointment Setting, voice mails should generally be paired with emails; while listening to a voicemail can be easy (especially in the age of transcription to email), prospects will rarely return messages. Better to think of them as audio emails. However, an email that is paired with a voicemail that has piqued a prospect’s interest is ripe for a reply.
Source: TalentBin
We’ll talk more about the actual process of giving a combined sales presentation and demo later. But before we get into the blocking and tackling of presentation and demo, it’s good to have a concept of the content you want to demonstrate when your prospects agree to a formal sales presentation.
As with the other materials discussed, this should be done with a mind toward your narrative. And because a live demo will typically come after you’ve shared some initial slides from your sales deck, follow the framing you presented in your deck. Your demo will reiterate much of it, but with much better context, customization, and visuality.
What is that framing? Well, as with your sales deck, it’s the bucketing of key use cases and the features that enable them. Ideally, you should already have those use cases identified, as they are likely referred to in your sales deck. But think about the combination of most common, most important, and most impressive use cases your solution enables. Then rank them, such that you start with the most important and most compelling ones—because you never know when a demo will have to end early! Beyond that, I like to think of a demo as telling the story of how your solution is used, again starting with major pain points.