With so much competition and noise in the sales profession, personalization is key in the modern sales era. It’s the best way to break through the endless stream of generic messages from other sellers and make meaningful connections with your prospects
Put yourself in the buyer’s seat for a minute; if you receive an email from a seller and they strike up a conversation about a common interest you both share or they compliment a recent announcement about your company, it’s likely that you will respond to their email since they have pinpointed something important to you. Sparking this sort of engaging conversation creates more than just the basic seller-to-buyer dynamic. A business relationship can actually begin to grow. With that potential reward, bringing this personalized rapport to your own potential customers should be a no-brainer.
But providing that relevance takes time. It’s hard to find applicable information and cater it specifically to your prospect. For sales reps striving to meet end of the month, quarter, and annual quotas, a race against the clock is in effect and time becomes a prized possession. When you’re caught in that sort of time crunch a duel begins with personalization versus time battling it out as your top priority.
Fortunately, modern sales engagement platforms, like Salesloft, recognize that these two elements should be compatible, not competing for your attention. Here are a few comprehensive tips on how to continually personalize emails to your prospects without the cost of time.
Create Persona-Based Templates
Email templates are often positioned as the antithesis to good personalization. They can be a great way to maximize your time since generic emails are already prepared for you. But personalization doesn’t have to go completely by the wayside within a template email.
For starters, you can create and label templates based on your buyer persona. For example, sometimes you may be reaching out to someone in a management position while other times you’ll be reaching out to a CEO. It’s easy to see how your tone and content will differ for each persona. Creating a template, or series of templates, with that tailored content already created, can save a lot of time without sacrificing relevance and personalization.
Use Email Snippets
While they are an effective tool, one of the shortcomings of templates is that, no matter how much you personalize the messaging for your personas, you’ll never be able to get every word of an entire email just right for each prospect. Sometimes you want to add or tweak just one or two particular parts of an email. Add a specific case study here or a relevant feature description there. For personalization, as with nearly everything, the devil is in the details.
As we’ve mentioned before, it is those details that matter the most, but they take up the most time. Without the proper tools, personalizing on this detailed level requires you to copy and paste from either your last email, a different document, calendar invite, or wherever you last had the information. Fortunately, sales enablement tools like Salesloft can take care of this manual process for you with Snippets. Instead of searching for that information or typing out the same sentences, you can select a previously created Snippet of that content and insert it into your email with a single click. With Snippets, you simply select the exact bit of content you need, insert it into your email or template, and hit send. Easy, efficient, and personal!
Pull Insights from Integrations
While templates and snippets deliver core content containing personal touches in a short amount of time, a little additional research can go a long way when engaging a prospect. You could scour search engines for company information and take a look at a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, but time is of the essence here.
Sales engagement platforms like Salesloft have made it a priority to integrate with companies like Crystal and Owler to give you even more valuable information at your fingertips. With Crystal, you can learn a prospect’s DISC personality profile along with the best ways to email that person. For example, you can see whether or not a person likes emojis in an email or if they prefer more links and data. Owler delivers up-to-date company news, funding announcements, blog posts, and more, giving you quick, specific insights that could also help you target your sale.
Personalization and efficiency do not have to be mutually exclusive. By putting these personalized applications into place you will spend less time pulling up information and more time actively communicated with your potential buyer.
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