Personalization in Sales Outreach and Prospecting

Amy Franko is a Sales Leader, Keynote Speaker, and Author. She built a successful and lucrative B2B sales career with global tech giants IBM and Lenovo. She then took a 180° pivot into entrepreneurship in 2007, launching a training company, Impact Instruction Group. She is named as LinkedIn 2019 Top Sales Voice.

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Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[05:28] How do you see personalization and sales outreach and what do you think is the difference between cold emails that work and that doesn’t?

[09:19] Why do you think personalization works in sales outreach and what’s your take on this?

[11:20] What do you think about the misconceptions that people have about personalization? 

[05:08] What was your first video that was like? Did you stumble or were you very confident? What motivated you to start creating videos?

[20:35] How do you imagine the future of sales as businesses are becoming more Global and digital every day?

[23:36] What are the challenges you faced when you started working remotely, and how do you see a remote working now?

In-Shorts:

Question: How do you see personalization and sales outreach and what do you think is the difference between cold emails that work and that doesn’t?

Amy: So if I think about that first part of the question which is Sales Outreach and Cold Emails being an integral part of any business. Outreach is how I built my business when I started in 2007, I had exactly one client and it was a client that I had through another strategic partner. So I didn’t have any of my own direct clients. I built my business with one client at a time, with one outreach at a time. 

And to the second part of your question, I am looking to be very specific in what it is that I’m asking for looking to accomplish that next step and the conciseness and as much of a focus on their business as possible. That can be tricky if you are doing a lot of email prospecting in a day, but part of what makes personalization work is doing some homework in understanding a little bit about the person that you’re reaching out to. That’s part of personalization. So those are a few things that I’ve seen work for myself.

Question: Why do you think personalization works in sales outreach and what’s your take on this? 

Amy: When we talk about why personalization works, it’s kind of in the word. It’s person-to-person communication. It’s taken the time to, it’s not just customizing the person’s name, it’s customizing the message and showing that you have put some work into it. 

Why personalization works is that it shows you’re interested in building a relationship. You are interested in qualifying whether or not we should have a further conversation. There will be times when there’s absolutely a need for the next conversation and there will be times where it’s not qualified and you just keep in touch. 

You keep the relationship going but personalization also shows you took time and it shows that you did your homework that there might be a problem to solve together. So it’s the personalization of the message and personalization of our intent makes all the difference. 

Question: What do you think about the misconceptions that people have about personalization? 

Amy: When we talk about the misconceptions of personalization, one of them I think is that personalization can be mass-produced. Yeah, I don’t personally think that personalization can be mass-produced. Can we get efficiency with it? Can we be more effective with it? Absolutely. 

I think the other thing is that if this idea of quantity over quality, think in prospecting, there is certainly a bit of a numbers game to it. You have to put in the work you have to put in the consistent work to reach people and to build relationships. But I will pick quality over quantity any day of the week. 

Question: I think you do a lot of videos and you exude confidence in your videos. And I’m curious. What was your first video was like? Did you stumble or were you very confident? What motivated you to start creating videos? 

Amy: You know the market is moving heavily towards or has moved heavily towards video. We think about the way that we use our phones, we use our tablets whatever our devices are. 

Video is something that is we consume a lot of it and we’re going to continue to consume a lot of it. So part of my motivation was absolutely driven by wanting to try new technologies to find ways to connect and descend to share my thought leadership in the market with the current medium. So that was part of it. 

Question: How do you imagine the future of sales as businesses are becoming more Global and digital every day? What’s your take on this? 

Amy: So I think the future of sales is a lot of foundational relationship building. We are sitting in the middle of this pandemic, this crisis and hopefully starting to come out on the other side of it, but I would say what one of the things I’ve learned through. This is that building and keeping your relationships, building and keeping your network, that doesn’t change. 

We are going to continue to be faced with disruptions across the globe to your point because our work now so much of it is so Global. I mean you and I are halfway across the world from each other doing this podcast. That would not have happened, you know, probably even just a few short years ago. 

So the ability to create relationships transcends being in a physical space together and that means for those of us in outward-facing rolls or any sales role for that matter, we have to be able to blend the foundational elements of relationship building.

Question: What are the challenges you faced when you started working remotely, and how do you see a remote working now? How does it solve your challenges? 

Amy: When I think about some of the challenges of remote working that I’ve had to overcome at first I would say that it’s the challenge of productivity. It’s the challenge of maintaining relationships with your leaders, with your teams, etc., those are probably some of the early challenges that I still see but today we have the technologies to be able to maintain connectivity and just it’s up to us to really use them to make sure that we’re making the most of them.

We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Subscribe to our channel for your daily dose of quality learnings and insights into the world of sales and marketing.