Build My Pitch cold email workshop: Account and prospect research edition

Reaching your full potential as a SaaS sales organization is only possible when you master cold email outreach.

At LeadIQ, we’re all about helping teams like yours supercharge prospecting efforts. In addition to serving up cold email tips on a regular basis, we host webinars from time to time that focus specifically on what you can do to create more compelling cold email pitches.

Recently, Sean Murray, director of sales development at LeadIQ, continued this series with another installment, Build my pitch cold email workshop: Account and prospect research edition, that featured some of our friends from Nextiva: 

• Allie Kaiser, senior director of XDR and automation,
• Ariane Hatfield, manager of outbound XDRs, and
• Sean Callahan-Dinish, business development manager.

Read on for some of the key takeaways on effective sales prospecting research and how you can use the resulting data to improve cold email personalization — and achieve better business outcomes because of it.

What are the layers of personalization & where should you start your research?

Before diving in, Sean kicked off the webinar with a brief overview of the three different ways sales reps can personalize outreach:

1. Individual personalization, or customizing outreach in a way that caters to the recipient’s specific interests, needs, and experiences;
   
   
2. Company personalization, which involves referencing the unique characteristics, challenges, and goals of the organization; and
   
   
3. Industry personalization, or crafting messages in a way that addresses the specific trends, opportunities, and challenges the target’s industry faces.

Now that we’ve got the basics of what you should be looking for when conducting cold email research, let’s turn our attention to some of the specific tips our expert panel shared during the webinar. 

Cold email tips from Allie Kaiser

• Stick to individual-level personalization. While you can certainly craft personalized pitches on the company and industry level, Allie advises against it. “I would try to hit the person level every single time,” Allie says. “We care about ourselves and what we’re doing and how other people can help us accomplish our tasks. If you can connect to the person, I think that is the strongest and best way to try to gain some attention from our prospects.”

• Study a prospect’s career page. Every company has at least a slightly different way of operating. To get more precise with your outreach, Allie suggests going to each prospect’s career page and learning as much as you can. “Look at the job descriptions,” she says. “You’re going to learn about naming conventions, who they report to, what their responsibilities are. We know that titles are nuanced, right? So that gives you a little bit of a breadcrumb trail to figure out the right person to knock it out of the park.”

• Keep your fingers on the pulse of current events. To make personalization easier, Allie suggests reading investor reports and using good old-fashioned Google searches to keep tabs on recent developments. “If [a prospect is] in the middle of a sequence and then some announcement comes up, it gives you something new to talk about,” she explains.

Cold email tips from Ariane Hatfield

• Know who you’re reaching out to. The deeper you understand the prospect, the industry they work in, and the challenges impacting their persona, the easier it will be to personalize messaging effectively. “If you understand what matters to your persona and understand what they’re responsible for, then you can tie in a 10-K report, public blog, public news into a relevant message,” Ariana says.

• Prioritize your outreach. In the world of cold outreach, not every account deserves the same attention, so prioritize your outreach accordingly. “If this is your top creme de la creme account, you’re probably going to spend a little bit more time getting to know the folks that have a seat at the decision-making table and what matters to them,” Ariane says.

• Use tools like ChatGPT to accelerate research. Don’t have enough time to read a 10-K report cover to cover? Don’t sweat it. Download assets like that, upload them into tools like ChatGPT, and prompt the AI to summarize it based on the risks the company faces along with their current goals. All of a sudden, you have the data you need — just in a fraction of the time. “Learn how to prompt ChatGPT so you can get rapid results and help you tailor that messaging,” she explains.

Cold email tips from Sean Callahan-Dinish

• Figure out what’s impacting your prospect right now. The way Sean sees it, reps need to do everything they can to understand what’s impacting their prospects’ lives and craft messaging that leverages those challenges and pains. “Everybody knows about the CrowdStrike incident,” Sean says. “So, how can you incorporate that? Because that affected millions of people.” 

• Manage your time wisely. As reps know too well, there are only so many hours in the day. That being the case, the best SaaS sales teams are experts at time management. “It’s being smart about your time throughout the day, leveraging those automated tasks when you can to save yourself a little bit of time,” he says. “Maybe there’s more personalization for the important decision-makers at the company and then a little more automation for some of those lower-level people.” 

• Leverage clues in closed-won opportunities. Your closed-won opportunities might be a treasure trove of helpful information, so check them out. “What were some of their pain points?” Sean says. “You can loop those in. Hey, I helped X, Y, and Z company. It looks like they’re in a similar market as you. They really found a lot of value. Would you be open to a conversation about how we can help your company?”

Cold email tips from Sean Murray

• Be a human. To succeed with cold outreach, remember that you aren’t a robot. “I think outreach is all about humanizing it,” Sean explains. “We’re behind a computer. But if you can make that outreach sound more human and connect on a person-to-person level, you’re going to see a higher response rate, you’re going to see more pipeline generated.” 

• Be timely. To increase the chances your personalized outreach resonates, Sean encourages reps to make sure their messaging is timely. Reminiscing about the 1996 Olympics probably won’t have as much impact as talking about the current games in Paris, for example. “It has to be something that’s happening at that moment or relative of that time space that you’re reaching out to that specific prospect,” Sean continues.

• Know your ideal customer profile inside and out. According to Sean, the best thing reps can do is have a clear understanding of your ICP. “I think this by far is the most important part of messaging,” he says. “If you don’t understand who your customers are, what their challenges might be, how they might be doing things today, what their current state might be, you’re going to really struggle to craft relevant personalized messages.” 

Ready to knock cold outreach out of the park?

Cold outreach is hard. Personalization makes it easier.

To learn more about how you can use sales prospect research to personalize cold outreach, captivate your audience, and ultimately win more business, check out the conversation in its entirety by watching the video above.