Women in Sales Blog

We all know the feeling.

I reached out to someone the other day after seeing that they requested a trial. 

Don't believe what every sales trainer tells you. Most sales training, sales advice, etc say the same thing about prospecting. They all tell (at least used to tell sales reps) to just send out templated emails and use template scripts in the prospecting process. 

As a sales person I have to keep myself sane. To keep myself sane I have to do strange things to get through to my prospects. If I do the same thing every day, day in and day out I will bore myself to death. I will become a bored sales rep who hates her job. 

Every sales rep needs a little motivation every once and awhile. Some days you might get to work ready to rock and ready to prospect hard. There might be other days where you are feeling like you are in a slump and don't feel like you can make the dials. Everyone feels those feelings and it is completely normal. You would have to be an animal to feel 100% everyday.

I would definitely consider myself a modern sales rep. I talk about sales reps needing to be "more human" and "more real" to be a good sales rep today.

Sales Reps typically have access to things that can help them to do their jobs "easier." I am not sure that easier means better though with sales prospecting. If you are a sales rep and part of your day is calling out to inbound or cold leads you are likely leaving voicemails if they don't pick up and sending emails. There are ways that you can make your response rate of your email sends better. It is called being more HUMAN. Don't let the world of email templates take over your world. Creating your own sales ready email templates just takes using your brain. 

Stick to rules. 

Every sales rep prospects the same way.

If you want to stand out from the pack of other sales people contacting your prospect then you need to push yourself to come up with new and different ways to stand out. Most sales reps will call, leave voicemails and send emails. A lot of times they don't actually think about what they are saying or doing so it comes off canned and spammy. Most likely they are using scripts and using templates for emails so the person on the receiving end doesn't feel like you care. 

I started thinking about ways that I could get people in email or in social media to respond to me. I wanted a way where I could be seen as different from all the other sales reps reaching out but also be helpful. I say similar things in most my outreach. Putting that information into a landing page could help me see higher conversions on my outreach but also let me write more specific, targeted emails without taking up that space in the email body. Shorter emails get more responses. These are the things that I think a sales rep can put in their prospecting landing page so they don't have to say this in the email. 

• What your company does and why they should care
• What you do at your company  and why they should care 
• I go after the same types of companies at HubSpot that all have similar problems and reasons why I am reaching out to them. If you have a similar way of working leads and figuring out which leads you should actually work then this type of prospecting landing page should work. 

I write custom emails, I don't use templates and I don't say the same thing to everyone about why I think what we do could be timely or relevant. So I really, really want them to read what I am saying in my outreach but sometimes they open the email, sometimes they don't. I wanted to up my chances of the prospect actually reading something if and when they did open the email. That way when I wrote that email I could really customize the content and context of the email based off of my research and not about telling them what I do and what HubSpot is. 

I decided that I would test out a customized landing page where I could use it in my prospecting to see if it would help me convert more opportunities in the amount of time that I have to prospect each day.

After just one day of doing this I wanted to share my results with you. I think they are pretty darn good and was really proud of what this simple effort has done for my prospecting process. I think it could help a lot of other people out there who want to get more innovative in how they reach out to their leads. 

These are my results of my personalized landing page. I am going to call these types of landing pages prospecting landing pages. I am not sure how many I sent out in my emails today but I know that it was probably around 10. So as you can see below I have had 12 views of my page and 2 submissions to the landing page! I thought this was a great return and it looks like I am on to something with this concept of Prospecting landing pages. 

Here is what I did that you could copy in your own process to get higher conversion rates from your prospecting efforts by using prospecting landing pages. 

1. Think about your buyer persona and what the typical prospect looks like that you are going after in your prospecting.

• If you are doing smart prospecting where you have done research on your leads and are working those leads for a reason then you should start to see a trend of the types of leads you are working. This should help you come up with the type of persona you are selling to or prospecting so you can create content on a landing page that would spark their interest.

Questions you should ask yourself to come up with the content for the landing page:

• What are you saying in your prospecting emails and vmails that could be supplemented or helped with the content and context of your landing page.
• Will the content of the landing page help you to convey your message to lots of people you are prospecting. 
• Make sure you are explaining who you are , what you do, and why you are reaching out to these people. If those are things you are consistently saying in your outreach why not put it on the landing page so you don't have to take up that space in an email.

The less you write in an email, the more concise you make it and therefore, the better chance you have of getting someone to read it. Using a landing page in your communication will help you to get your message across faster and in a different way than the prospect is used to. 

2. Create the landing page with these things in mind to know what type of content you should have on the page. 

• Make sure that your landing page is hosted on your company website and has the same look and feel. 
• Make sure that the lead can get back to your home page to learn more about your company after they read it. 

• Act like a human and talk like how you talk. Don't use marketing jargon and don't have your marketing team come up with the content. Ask your marketing team to help you get a template up so you can create what content you would like to have on the page. If you use your own voice it will come across to the prospect that you are human and actually care about them. 

3. Structure for the landing page should look like this.

• Who you are and why you are reaching out. Should look similar to the above example from my personalized sales landing page. 
• Explain that you did research on their company and have reasons why you think what you do could be timely and relevant to their goals you have read about. 
• Tell them the types of things you would do on an exploratory call if they were to take one. The whole point of your emails and communication with this landing page is to get them to convert through the form on the landing page so make it easy to understand what you are asking of them and what would happen if they did want to talk to you.
• Make sure that you have a short form on the site. I just asked for first name, last name, email, company, and have one form field that says "what can I help you with."

You can see my personalized landing page that I am using now in my sales process below. 

Now that you have the idea of what to put in the landing page you need to start using it in your prospecting. The goal of my prospecting landing page is to be able to get someone to convert on our website into a lead. The reasons for this are:

• So I can get higher connect rates with my leads in my database so that I can turn those leads into opportunities faster than I could without using them.
• Gives me as a sales rep a way to get leads to convert so I can start tracking them with lead intelligence through our marketing software. 
• Allows me to quickly reach out to the lead or prospect after they fill out the page.

So how am I using it in my outreach?

Instead of just emailing everyone the same generic things and having to write this long drawn out email I can now just link to my page so the prospect can quickly see if they want to talk to me. If they do they can fill out the form and we can schedule a call together.

Here is an example of how I have used it in my emails.

People are always sharing articles about how to do "social prospecting" with me. People are asking me what I do when prospecting to involve social media so I thought I would share my process with you.