How we Automate Outbound for sales

For a long time, inbound traffic was the cornerstone of lead generation at Albacross. Primarily driven from SEO efforts, we consistently grew our organic traffic month on month. This was the perfect complement to our low touch pricing model, where leads could sign up for a trial directly on the website without having to talk to a sales rep.

The SaaS gods were smiling fondly upon us. We were getting new sign ups every day and business was good.

However, we then decided to target SMEs (top bracket) (side note - fantastic post on the subject from Christoph Janz, from Point Nine Capital) and our focus shifted. They needed a more customized experience and so we set out to build a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs) to facilitate this new sales cycle— a sales cycle that was now longer and more complex.

While increasing organic traffic was fundamental to our inbound marketing strategy, this new direction meant that converting that traffic and booking demos was more important than ever. Afterall, a sales team is only effective when it’s busy and ours had quiet periods.

And so, we were like many other SaaS companies needing to increase demand. However, 98% of our website visitors were neither signing up for a trial nor a demo! So much opportunity left on the table to make more sales…

In addition, we also saw that organic traffic was difficult to scale, or rather, it was difficult to create a scalable process for organic traffic. Of course, there were ‘things’ we could do that most marketing experts agree would increase traffic but, ultimately we had limited control over the speed at which we’d see results and how much that would yield.

Inevitably, we couldn’t cherry pick organic traffic. Who decided to come to our website was out of our control, regardless of our ICP.

This is still true today, to an extent, but we set out to create a process in which would complement our organic traffic by automating the way we fuel our SDRs with qualified leads coming from our inbound traffic. What we stumbled upon was the perfect blend of personalization and automation. This process is quick to set up and it all flips the table; qualified leads funnel directly into your inbox instead of having to chase them down through hours of prospecting and cold calling. Autopilot.

Typically, personalization and automation are at odds with each other. The more automated you try to be, the less personal you can be. However, our own product, Albacross, solves this problem. Let us draw the curtains and show you the playbook we are using ourselves.

The process of defining our segments and enriching the data based on our ICP allowed us to be super personalized in our outreach.

For this particular campaign, we identified top level personalization data points like name and company name, then added data on number of employees, revenue, location, industry, Alexa rank and the technologies the companies were currently using. This enabled us to be highly targeted in our approach.

Of course, these are just a few of the many data points we use at Albacross. Typically, we collect a mix of demographic data like the data points listed in the first section of the table below. We then combine this with behavioral data such as level of activity, duration on site or page, number of visits and source. This gives us a better idea of buying intent and what stage they might be at in their buyer journey.

Ultimately, it’s this information that helps us deliver the the right message, to the right people, at the right time.

And the outcome of automating outbound sales?

The outcome of automating outbound sales in this way massively boosted our email open rates, click-through rates and more importantly, kept our SDR’s calendars fully booked.

The emails we sent out also acted as a proof of concept as the respondents saw first hand how we were able to automate outbound sales. We referenced this by saying ‘Albacross can identify all the potential customers that aren’t converting and initiate first contact. Just like this’.

The best part of this process is that it’s not only effective, it’s efficient. Our SDRs juggle their time between inbound and outbound leads. This is a good way of boosting and nurturing incoming leads and cuts down the time spent trawling through endless amounts of data to identify those right fit leads.

If you would like to know more about how we did or any tips about how you can do it, just let me know or book a call with one of our Platform Specialists.