This may sound like a no-brainer but follow-up in your sales outreach is a game-changer that will help you crush your quota goals. And we’re not just saying that because we want to add more work on your plate.
We’re saying that because 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes, while 48% of salespeople never even make a single follow-up attempt (Invesp).
Simply put, the sales reps that go the extra mile to follow up with prospects, through different channels will get higher response rates leading to more meetings booked and more pipelined opened.
If you’re like most sales organizations, you use a sales engagement tool like Outreach.io or SalesLoft to help you plan out your outreach cadences to prospects including emails, social messages, social interaction, and phone calls.
If you’re an Outreach.io user, Alyce has an Outreach integration where you can add corporate gifts and follow up to your triggered actions and tasks so no leads ever fall through the cracks. If not, you can still use these prospecting list templates to structure your outreach to make sure your gift is accepted every time.
The following sequences are best practices for building a follow-up cadence after sending prospecting gifts. These are just a starting point for you and your team; we suggest reviewing your sequence at least every 3-6 months to make adjustments for your industry, ICP, and audience.
A quarterly or semi-annual review will give your team an opportunity to review the results, double down on copies or channels that work, or optimize areas of underperformance.
How To Write Persuasive Prospecting Emails to Grow Pipeline (+Templates)
Prospecting Sequence Templates To Use In B2B Gifting
Digital Gift Sequence for Warm Leads
While the world is returning to normal and employees are going back into the office, many professionals are still working from home and will be for the foreseeable future.
That doesn’t mean that your gifting should be one-and-done. You can still make sure your gift breaks through the noise of busy inboxes, Linkedin direct messages, and voicemails.
Because you don’t have to deal with shipping a gift invitation, you can send your gift as the first step in the process and leverage the rest of the steps in the sequence to direct back to the gift link in the original email.
Here’s a 17-day sequence you can use to stand out when you’re digitally gifting your hottest prospects.
Physical Gift Prospecting Sequence For Warm Leads With Research
If you are reaching out to prospects who have engaged with your marketing team’s initiatives or who are familiar with your brand in a certain way, you’ll want to include your gift later on in the sequence from digital gifts, but still higher up in the flow than if you were reaching out to a cold prospect.
If you choose to submit your prospect for research, generally warm leads are a great segment of people to do more research on.
They’re aware of your product or service and are probably considering multiple vendors if they’ve already interacted with your company in some way. A great competitive advantage is to add that personal touch to your outreach by sending a highly personal gift to your prospect. It not only helps you stand out from the other vendors they’re inevitably vetting, but also helps you craft a message that’s not just about their persona, but who they are as a person.
Sending gifts with research is a great way to appeal to the person behind the persona to bring a deal one step closer to closing.
Physical Gift Sequence for Warm Leads With No Research
If the warm prospect you’re reaching out to has already booked a meeting with your team or you’re looking to re-engage a contact you’ve lost contact with, sending a gift without research can help pick the conversation back up.
You’ll notice in this sequence that the activities are spanned out over more days than the past two prospecting sequence templates. Because this lead is warmer to you, your product, and your value, having more days in between each step is ok because there’s less urgency.
Physical Gift Sequence for Cold Leads (No Research)
If you’re reaching out to a prospect for the first time, generally it’s not a B2B gifting best practice to send a gift as the first step. The reason being – your prospect doesn’t know about your company yet! You’ll notice in this prospecting sequence template that we have the Alyce gift being sent as step number 9 in the 14 step sequence.
You’ll want to introduce yourself and break through the noise on multiple channels before you send your gift so you have a higher chance of having that gift be accepted and a meeting being booked.
You also want time to introduce yourself, your company, your value, and the problem you solve before you try to incentivize action through a gift.
Once you’ve sent the gift, however, you can then reference it in the rest of your outreach steps as you continue to educate the prospect on the other side.
Different Prospecting Sequence Templates For Different Kinds Of Prospects
Your prospects all have varying levels of awareness around your product or service. Tailoring your outreach and your gifting to complement that stage of the customer lifecycle is going to pay off because your outreach will come off as relevant, relatable, and respectful. Three R’s that help you create more personal experience with everyone you do business with.
We hope these templates help you tailor your outreach and if you’d like to download them to send to your team, download the templates here!