2020 has been full of challenges – especially when it comes to leading a sales prospecting team.
We got fifteen SDR leaders in the B2B SaaS industry to tell the stories behind their recent pivots. In each article in this Strategic Prospecting Tips series, you’ll find real, unfiltered advice from one Sales Development Leader that’s influencing the B2B SaaS industry worldwide.
Today we’re hearing from David Sherry, Head of Sales Development EMEA at Amplitude, about running prospecting and sales messaging experiments. Let’s jump on in!
I developed a passion for SaaS long ago, with a particular focus on making EMEA a successful territory for SaaS growth. Currently, I’m leading the EMEA sales development team at Amplitude.
As a growing scaleup, our ability to land new prospect meetings and drive new opportunities at the same volume as pre-COVID times, was undoubtedly impacted. Furthermore, many of our existing customers are facing a lot of uncertainty, making some of our customer renewals more challenging than before.
Still, with the worst of this pandemic now passed (hopefully), we weathered the storm very well. We’ve had to think differently and introduce several new operational and sales development initiatives that have us set up for better success in the second half of the year.
We launched a prospecting and sales messaging task force, whose main aim is to identify what outbound efforts are/are not working in securing new meetings. This task force hypothesizes, deploys, and reviews bi-weekly experiments to identify what SDR activities are yielding positive results during this uncertain time.
Our marketing team has also done a fantastic job of launching several digital campaigns and events. In turn, our reps have multiple touchpoints to navigate prospects to and from, to strengthen their confidence in our product.
The biggest change we made was to ramp up our social selling efforts, especially LinkedIn. We also ensured that our messaging brought value & education to the prospect before asking for a meeting. To land on this strategy, we went through three phases.
First, we immediately realized that COVID-19 would more negatively impact certain verticals. We shortlisted our target industries only to those who were minimally affected.
We used experiments to find that LinkedIn messages were driving more responses than cold emails and calls.
Next, we knew that our sales messaging was unlikely to be as effective as before COVID-19 due to global uncertainty, meaning their readiness to purchase a new tool was likely to be minimal. For that reason, we deployed several experiments to identify what types of messages were yielding positive responses. And lastly, we used those experiments to find that LinkedIn messaging was driving more responses than cold emails and calls.
But in order to stand out from our competitors, we knew we had to do something different. Leveraging video messaging and voice notes, we focused on delivering hyper-personalized messages to our prospects and provided them with great content to consume during the new working norms.
While we’re still learning how best to scale this approach, it’s proving to yield strong results thus far.
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