5 Reasons to Spend Time and Money on 1 to 1 B2B Prospecting

1 to 1 B2B email marketing, originally made known as a process to EMM through Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue and later through Kyle Porter’s SalesLoft SDR community continues to thrive despite being nearly a decade old. Why? Because context is and always has been king.

We eat our own cooking here at EMM, using our B2B data as a demand generation tool. 1 to 1 email continues to be one of our highest ROI marketing channels. It’s thoughtful, respectful of the prospects time, generates great leads, is perfect for XaaS or any recurring revenue product and is relatively easy to execute.

1. Thoughtful

Which means contextual. Great one to one starts with selecting companies that fit the niche you serve where your firm is the best in the world. Using EMM as an example, we can’t ever compete as a “list provider” but we can excel at solving data problems for marketing services companies. Target on business fit thoughtfully and you’ll almost never get rude responses.

2. Time efficient

One to one is the opposite of a weekly or monthly newsletter. This content was specifically selected by a real human as a natural business fit or you wouldn’t even be sending an email and calling. The commitment to finding real business fit based on initial research can’t be overstated.

3. Generates great leads

Many of your prospects, especially the ones that won’t even need prompting from a phone call to act, have self-selected. And your team carefully curated the business fit before outreach. Meetings are sticky with a much higher hold and close rate than an inbound lead. They require less “hard closers” because deals make sense.

4. Perfect for selling XaaS

5. Easy to execute

The proliferation of tools and availability of good quality b2b marketing data have made it easy for the average, untrained but bright new executive to set quality meetings and increase product knowledge. Your list to get started is this easy: An email inbox, some short and sweet creative, a follow up management schedule, an initial database to curate and a calendar to book calls to.

As a skeptical marketer, we read things like “5 – 7% response rate” and think, “Yea, right”. Well listen up, skeptical marketers. Every Marketing or Sales Director who starts and sticks with 1 to 1 wishes they started it a year earlier.

Get some data, be thoughtful, have a consistent and succinct value proposition for the problem you solve. Please feel free to contact Every Market Media if you’re interested in learning more about our data that can be used for 1 to 1 B2B prospecting, receiving a sample file or would like us to run some counts for you.

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Happy Demand Generation!

SHHHH IT’S A SECRET! INSIDER TIPS ON HOW TO BEST PICK YOUR B2B EMAIL PROSPECT LIST

This week at EMM we have been in great spirits because of the surprisingly good weather in Chicago, and have decided to let you in on some of our insider tips about how to pick your B2B email prospect list. Firstly it’s best to start your journey into the world of B2B data by targeting which companies you’re going to prospect before you select job titles or functions. This is because it gives you more potential ways to be referred internally. Allow us to explain. We’ll use our product, email data, as an example. Let’s say we think the best target title for our prospecting is “database manager”. Here’s the problem with using that as your start point for picking a list:

1. It’s a much smaller list than one that involves other executives
2. If the executive you target does not respond, you’re stuck without a response or a potential way to talk to the right contact within the correct organization
3. The companies these executives and titles are found at may not represent a good fit with what you are offering
4. The prospect is less likely to respond since you have not been referred by anyone they like, know or trust

Next let’s say we agree that we need to create a list of target organizations first based on whether or not the organization fits our ideal customer profile. Said another way, does the organization look like an organization that can consume our product in a beneficial way?

If so, we then select that list of target organizations that includes companies that we can CLEARLY SEE THE BUSINESS FIT with. From that company name list, we search within our tool and pull out a few executives at these companies who we will use for initial outreach. The benefits of this approach are:

1. You’ll have a few executives who are not necessarily the right target to execute a decision relating to selling your product, but who can refer you to the right person internally who handles those decisions.
2. You’ll know those companies make decisions about your product because you selected them based on a business fit.
3. Executives can respond directly if it is in their area of responsibility, if not they can refer you to the correct contact (only if your messaging is correct and includes asking for a referral)
4. The end contact is more likely to respond after a warm internal referral
5. If no one responds, you can select more executives to target for warm referral / response

Since our marketing executives have started to first target companies as opposed to job titles, we’ve seen positive response rates increase from 1% to 5%.

We’re booking meetings in a scalable, long term way because we can always find more companies that we can do business with, but we can’t always find a fresh list of “database managers”. In summary, pick companies first, fill in with contacts second, adjust your messaging to include asking for referrals if the person you reach is not the decision maker and watch your positive response rates climb.

To speak with one of our data experts and get training in our self-serve system, contact us. Or if you would like us to run a free no obligation count for our B2B database visit us here.