BEST PRACTICES
How to Create Effective Email Messaging
FoxBound Knowledge Base / Best Practices / Email Messaging
Maximize your Conversion Rates
Written by Monica Marino
Last updated on Dec 11th, 2019
Why Sell on Value?
The facts we just examined are the very reasons prompting us to explain why selling on value drivers is the only way to sell. Further, we’ll talk about how to construct outbound outreach strategy that will engage buyers.
People don’t engage with sales to buy a product or service, they engage to find a solution that can solve a business problem. This is why selling “value” works. Outbound sales reps should focus on alleviating the prospect’s pain points, rather than focusing on features and functionality.
What about selling on price?
If buyers perceive that they will gain lots of business benefits for a reasonable price, then they will perceive the business solution to be of high value. This means that buyers will be willing to pay more for a product or service compared to its alternative that provides less value. The more sales reps focus on value, the less important price becomes.
How to Communicate Value Drivers in Outbound Sales
It is important for sales reps to learn and communicate all the tangible and intangible benefits a product or service can provide. This will help reps tackle tough conversations, rejections and roadblocks effectively.
Value drivers are capabilities that adds worth. It gets potential buyers to engage out of fear of not relieving a specific pain points. More specifically, there are 4 main categories of value drivers that outbound sales teams should leverage:
1. REDUCE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP
Total cost of ownership is a phrase that defines all costs incurred from a transaction. Some organizations describe these as hard and soft costs. Others use the words direct and indirect costs. Either way, all products and services provide a mixture of both.
- Hard costs for software companies (direct): tangible attributes such as up front costs of the software, hardware, servers, storage, accessories, additional fees or taxes.
- Soft costs for software companies (indirect): intangible attributes such as data security, time spent learning to use the tool, time and overhead spend throughout the implementation process, time and overhead costs of analyzing results, and time spent maintaining software.
Value Statement: “At {Company} we’ve helped customers {improve or alleviate soft or hard costs}”
2. ACCELERATE TIME-TO-VALUE
Time to Value (TtV) is the time the time it takes to complete a task. The goal of any business is to minimize time TtV to be more productive, scale quicker, deliver faster, etc.
In outbound sales for example, time to value is all about increasing efficiency and productivity. Optimizing time to value will reduce time spent prospecting and creating personalized messaging. Decreasing TtV can affect any aspect of the sales process. The goal is to shrink the sales cycle while gaining a high value customer.
Other examples for B2B software companies include:
- Increase sales productivity (FoxBound)
- Quicker and better support (Zendesk)
- Faster and more flexible development (MongoDB)
- Increased customer engagement (Intercom)
Value Statement: “At {Company} we’ve helped customers {decrease time to value by X}.”
3. REDUCING RISK
Risk reduction or risk mitigation involves reducing the loss or the likelihood of a loss. This is a value driver that is especially important to any leadership teams. C-Level executives main job is to plan ahead and foreshadow potential setback that may hurt the vision. For sales reps that are reaching out to these personas, it’s important not to forget to leverage intangible value drivers to increase engagement.
Here are some examples:
- Sales teams use sales automation platforms to avoid the risk of not exceeding quarterly revenue targets
- Support teams use ticket tracking platforms to avoid the risk of not providing bad customer service and losing customers
- Quality assurance teams use agile testing tools to avoid the risk of publishing bad code and to avoid providing bad user experience
- Marketing teams use call tracking platforms to avoid the risk of wasting money and not optimizing marketing spend
Value Statement: “At {Company} we’ve helped customers {reduce X risk by Y}”
4. INCREASES COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Some products and services allow customers to gain a competitive advantage over competitors. These gains can come in many forms:
- Differentiation
- Superior performance
- Higher quality
- Scalability
- Innovation
- Operational effectiveness
- Adaptability
- Information advantage
Value Statement: “At {Company} we’ve helped customers {gain a Z competitive advantage}”
Our recommendations:
- Stop using cookie cutter email templates that are not personalized. Research has proven that personalization can increase reply rates drastically.
- Focus your communication towards delivering your organization’s tangible and intangible business value.
- Create email campaigns specific to each personas in order to deliver accurate value statements for the personas pain points
- Learn to deliver solutions to business problems to increase prospect engagement.
- Don’t talk about yourself or your company- prospect’s don’t care about that. Prospects want to hear how you can help solve their pain points.
