FW: Cold Outreach Breakdown

Featuring OneLens

Previous posts you’ve read on Hacking Sales have been mostly covering the GTM industry, incorporating AI into sales strategy and tactics, along with frameworks and concepts to use in your day to day.

I’ve been able to get feedback from you and one piece of feedback particularly stood out from a startup AE and founder:

“It’d be great if you can show me how, instead of covering just concepts or frameworks”

Noted!

So today we’re going to do exactly that. If you’re reading this and like what you see, give this post a like, comment, or share with your network. Happy to do a series of these posts to give more real world application and takeaways for you.

If you want to get a similar perspective on what you see today, or have other feedback for what you’d like to see in future posts, shoot a note to andrew@hackingsales.xyz.

Today’s post is featuring OneLens AI - an AI assistant for customer teams that helps you get answers to questions immediately. No digging through sales enablement, Slack channels, or Notion.

Ask the question, get the answer.

Today we’ll breakdown:

• Constructing cold emails

• Building messaging on company, departments, and personas

• Useful Signals That Don’t Require a Fancy Tech Stack

• More Research

• Real World Email Example & Breakdown

Constructing Cold Emails

Credit: BowTiedSalesGuy

Worth the read but the tl:dr:

1. what’s the ask? refine it and make the ASK.
2. READ IT. If it doesn’t read right, refine.
3. keep it short and get to the point.

Building Messaging for Company, Departments and Personas

This is a really cool example because since OneLens is a young organization. This means that resources case studies, testimonials, and even ICP, are limited.

That’s okay because we’ll use ChatGPT to start building some hypotheses.

I’ve placed the full ChatGPT thread here so you can get a sense of how I’m prompting. I’ve also written about this in a previous post but if you want other resources, check out Kyle Asay’s AE frameworks.

Here’s what I ended up with:

Here are some of the emails that ChatGPT came up with:

Email to Sales and Marketing

Subject: Boost Your Sales Efforts Today!

Hi [Recipient's Name],

Ever find it frustrating when you can’t quickly access the latest sales data or marketing materials during crucial discussions? You might be using disparate systems that don't communicate well. OneLens.ai consolidates all your essential data in one place, enabling faster and more effective sales pitches. Would you like to see how this can transform your sales results?

Best, [Your Name]

You’ll probably notice that what I’m doing is pretty simple stuff. The key takeaways are things that I incorporate in my outreach and it allows me to do two things:

1. relevant content building blocks
2. not using mental horsepower to come up with content

Of course, DON’T just copy and paste. We need to refine this email further:

Useful Signals That Don’t Require a Fancy Tech Stack

Florin Tatuela breaks down signals that you can focus on which don’t require fancy or expensive tech. I won’t spill all the sauce since it’s a paid post, but link is here for reference. Particularly useful if you’re at startup with limited resources.

The tech I would use in this case is Sales Nav, focusing in on:

• Job descriptions

• Champions who changed jobs

• Fundraising

• Competitor Sites

• Closed Lost Deals

• Intent based on usage/interest - ie trials, PLG, demos (depends on your GTM motion)

All of these are easily accessible via Sales Nav. The best part, is that it’s all good enough to get you started from scratch, even if you don’t have a ton of tech behind you.

If you need a CRM, I’d recommend using either HubSpot or Apollo. Both have cost efficient plans for starting out.

Don’t overthink this - if you’re contemplating between a CRM or what your tech stack should look like at a younger company, despite having zero experience as a founder, I can definitively tell you you’re hung up on the wrong thing.

If you’re new to Hacking Sales, you can download my free course on Dominating Your Territory to quickly understand the mechanics of different GTM motions, SaaS businesses, pipeline development, and account prioritization.

More Research

Let’s dive into this a little more. One of the first things that. I thought of when I heard of this tool, and used it, was another similar company (which I also used in the past) called GetGuru.

That said, you can go to G2 or chatGPT competitors to give a direction on where to find inspiration.

You can check out the site and you’ll probably find customers with similar use cases. Go to solutions > Sales and land on this page. You’ll notice there is a lot of great language here that will probably resonate with your prospect in this specific use case.

A few things come to mind:

• Read the Case Studies and use that language

• Notice companies like Shopify and Branch

• Expand your lead pool by finding similar companies to these profiles

From here, you can set up a .csv or manually upload those companies into your Sales Nav workflow.

From there you can toggle between things like:

• who changed jobs recently

• who was a past customer

• job alerts to get fresh descriptions - which probably contains language that org is focused on or developing internally

All very low hanging fruit.

If you want to keep a tab on job postings - read a few descriptions of these target companies that fall into departments or personas based on the matrix above. Then go to LI Jobs > preferences > alerts to keep a pulse on any new headcount.

One of the other key takeaways is the language being used on the site:

All of this looks solid to incorporate into outreach eh? :)

Real World Email Example & Breakdown

Now we’ve got some solid material to work with and allows us to refine the initial output from ChatGPT. Let’s break down what this would look like for a VP of Sales.

Subject: OneLens

You can add a FW: or RE: at the beginning if you’d like, that has helped me with open rates. I sometimes add a specific initiative as well, since we’re going broad, your company is just fine.

Hi [Recipient's Name],

I typically don’t start off with this, the first sentence of an email is the most important. As soon as I see “Hey name” - my gut tells me this is a sales email.

Keep it brief. The most important line of any email isn’t the title, it’s the first sentence of your email.

Ever find it frustrating when you can’t quickly access the latest sales data or marketing materials during crucial discussions? You might be using disparate systems that don't communicate well. OneLens.ai consolidates all your essential data in one place, enabling faster and more effective sales pitches. Would you like to see how this can transform your sales results?

Now this hits on some of the challenges that someone using OneLens might run into, even for sales!

The problem here is that we’re looking at reaching out to a VP of Sales. So better to think - what are their challenges or concerns?

It’s most likely around things like - ramp time, having accurate information like battle cards or common FAQ’s so reps can quickly address questions on customer calls and get back to discovery.

Best, [Your Name]

Here’s what this final output might look like (Version A & B) :

Version A:

Title: OneLens

One of the most frustrating aspects of scaling a sales organization is ensuring that all your reps have what they need to be fully ramped and producing after you’ve made a new hire, [name].

With more pressure than ever on GTM teams, we’re supporting sales leaders like yourself who are struggling with:

• Efficient ramp times so that your new hires are in front of customer and producing

• Coaching new hires in a scalable way, making sure they have all the tools and feedback they need to be effective on calls and in sales cycles

• Reducing time spent on research either on competitors or [their company name]’s most up to date collateral for customer use cases

Worth a chat?

Version B:

Title: OneLens

Scaling a sales organization can be challenging, [name].

Ensuring that new hires are fully ramped up and productive as quickly as possible can often be time consuming and frustrating. We support sales leaders that often struggle with:

• Efficient ramp times to get new hires in front of customers quickly

• Scalable coaching to equip new hires with the right tools and feedback

• Minimizing time spent on research for competitor insights and up-to-date collateral

Worth a chat to share how we’ve helped other VP of Sales remove these challenges?

Notice that the second version is much more efficient. I took the initial version, rewrote myself, the refined in ChatGPT. I can continue building on this with the pains of other personas in the sales org. Particularly if an organization is hiring.

It’s a little bit of upfront work but now that you have the building blocks you can A/B test and continue to put this out in the market until you see what works best for you. You can take this a step further and build our your own custom GPT to use as a repository for content and help you repurpose new content for outbound messaging.

Hope this helps and if there’s anything else you want me to build upon in this example, or something you’re struggling with around messaging - shoot a note to andrew@hackingsales.xyz or sign up to get access to free resources or book a call with me!

As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week.

-Andrew K