My Choice For Outbound Sales Technology

Yesterday I ran through a thought I had about approaching cold email to prospective customers a little differently.  All joking aside, there really is a ton to be said for the power of the Permission Economy.   

We don’t live in a world where people can readily jump up and say “Hey, buy my widget”.  Technology has lowered the barrier to entry in almost every category of business and consumers are wise to many of the sleezy tactics, particularly in online businesses.  

So assuming that we have to raise the bar of our business operations, but still want to reach potential new customers, 3 things have to happen simultaneously: 

1. You must be efficient about your time, because much more of it will be spent on softer touch, confidence building activities 
2. You will need to touch each customer a lot more often, many times adding value to their business before you can justify asking for something in return
3. You have to be able to measure, track, and adjust the results of all of these activities over time.  

These themes apply to any aspect of your business,  but because I’m knee deep in developing a solid, repeatable, and scalable outbound sales platform via email that’s what I want to talk about today.   

There are a lot of tools that will help you achieve each of the items above.  You could look at a CRM, but that’s really for existing customers or at least solid leads.  Email marketing tools are an option too, but again those should be for those who are already opted in to your email campaigns.  

Instead, the tool of choice for me is Yesware.  

Yesware is a tool that allows you to do a lot of things that come in handy when you’re sending a lot of emails and need to keep track of open rates, clicks, send mass merged email blasts, and generally keep your outbound efforts aligned.   It does all of this from within Gmail, which is the email platform that I prefer just because I’m so familiar with it from my personal Gmail usage.  

There are other tools out there like Sendbloom and Toutapp, but I’ve found that for my purposes Yesware does everything I need it to do, and doesn’t get in the way otherwise.  

Yesware is free for a trial period and then somethjng like $20/mo afterwards.  It’s worth that just for the mail merge part of it.  

Building on top of Yesware with a tool like a CRM is great once your leads go from cold to warm, but to get started there’s no sense in complicating things, particularly if you’re just starting out.  

Wrap up 

What’s your technology and structure approach to outbound sales via email?  I’m always looking to improve and would love to hear from you in the comments below.