How we increased customer engagement via our SDR team

A few months ago, I threw my SDR team a challenge. A lot of our inbound leads were simply exiting the funnel without a reply. This was no longer acceptable, and we needed to find a way to make these ‘No Reply’ (that is what we call such MQLs in our CRM) prospects to talk to us. So, with our pens (stylus in my case) in our hands, we set out to experiment and learn how to better engage these prospects. Here is an abridged version of what we learned over the last few months.

Ditch cadences

We started an internal project called Cadence Zero. This meant, every single SDR was responsible for writing emails that were customized to the person they were trying to connect with. For example, if the prospect is a director or founder; we would browse through his LinkedIn and see if there was any recent activity we could reference. Furthermore, we would ask him/her what bought a founder to evaluate Hiver directly. Here is one such example.

Here is an extract of the response.

As part of Cadence Zero, every SDR maintained a detailed document that they shared with the team, and I helped them write customized emails whenever possible. The first few months of analyzing each prospect and then trying to customize was a little bit of a grind, but the results are undeniable. We learned as a team.

Each SDRs email document is shared with the entire team, so the team can pick up from best practices on their own. This is true collaboration in action.

There is a lot more that went into writing a personalized email for each prospect, I will be happy to share a detailed blog post on that too someday.

Old Cliché but still relevant: Go Multichannel

Relying just on emails and phone calls alone to connect with prospects is so 2000s. Our SDR team invested in LinkedIn, text messages and even WhatsApp where possible. There was very little we were not willing to do to connect with our prospects (short of stalking them, we take that stuff very seriously).

One important learning for the team was that each region has a mode of communication that works better than others. For example, we found that WhatsApp worked very well for us in the APAC region, whereas text messages are still very relevant in the US and Canadian markets.

LinkedIn worked in certain EMEA countries. Overall, a mixed outreach strategy is a must and must not be under-utilized in any circumstance. Here is one example of a SDR using Google Translate and WhatsApp in conjunction.

Don’t talk about yourself….

Our emails don’t go into a long-winded rant about how Hiver can help prospects. Instead, we share practical outcomes or case studies that are relevant to the prospect. For example, if a prospect is from the logistics industry; we would either share a case study from another customer who is already in the logistics industry or a case study that was relevant to the prospect’s field of work.

The idea is to show Hiver’s impact, instead of throwing random numbers and ROI statistics in the prospect’s face.

Sharing a live example/case study has the following benefits:

a) There is an instant ‘connect’ when a familiar name is mentioned.

b) No one likes a show off, but it’s not showing off if someone else is talking about you.

c) You get credibility.

Here is an example of one such email.

Invest in the right tool for your team

Instead of learning things the hard way, we decided to invest in a tool that would give us actionable insights. The idea was to make sure we were covering all bases in terms of language to be used, the length of the emails and above all the readability of the emails we were writing. After trialing multiple tools, we narrowed our search down to Lavender.ai.

Not only did the tool give us inputs on email length, readability on mobile devices, but it also helped us keep our emails extremely readable.

Today, we rely heavily on this technology to make sure our emails are meeting our newly raised bar.

And finally…. Never stop experimenting and learning

Are we done? Have we learnt everything there is to learn? Nope, we are always trying new things and experimenting with new emails and outreach approaches. Some of them backfire, some don’t get responses, and some get instant responses.

Oh and before I wrap this up. Here is a fun fact: We are currently trending at a response rate of 27% and hope to get it even higher in coming days.