Change the Game With Conversations
Tags: Lead Generation, Sales, Marketing, Conversational Marketing, Conversations

For sales and marketing teams, conversations are gold.

The more convos you can have, the better you understand your customers, and ultimately win more of their trust & business. Even if your product has a 7-figure price tag or is a $10/month subscription, conversations with people provide rapport, feedback, and trust.

The difficulty with conversations is that until recently, conversations haven’t been scalable! It takes a lot of time to chase prospects, engage and follow up, set meetings, and chat. Replicate this across thousands of people, add in the complexity of managing these contacts, and you have a whirlwind of a mess!

Fortunately, there are now tools like ScaleRep that harness the power of conversations into your marketing and sales funnels. In working with our users, we’ve surfaced 4 guidelines in leveraging the power of conversations to further enhance your prospecting pipeline:

1. Multi-Channel Conversations

Of course, you know you should be reaching your target market across several channels, but take that a step further to initiate conversations across multiple channels. It’s one thing for people to see a dozen ads on the web, and another for someone from your company to reach out directly and ask if they need assistance.

Our data shows outreach that initiates conversation and includes 1 more channel in addition to a direct email yields an average 2.5X larger response rate that cold email outreach. ScaleRep does this through utilizing voicemail and text (when appropriate) to augment email outreach and to and ask them if they need help.

Outreach that initiates conversation and includes at least 1 more channel in addition to a direct email yields an average 2.5X larger response rate.

2. Following Up With Referrals and Auto-Replies

If you’re in sales, your inbox is probably filled with leads that have auto-replied or responded saying they’re not the right person to engage with.

The vast majority of orgs don’t follow up with these messages, but they frequently present the best opportunities to engage with prospects.

Engaging with leads that left an auto-reply and leads that were referred yield a reply rate of 26%–40%. That’s a 6–10x better reply rate than a standard cold outreach campaign.

We’ve found that welcoming back people after they’re out-of-office as well as asking for referrals (and reaching out to those referred leads!) is a great way to converse and engage with more people.

Here’s a representation of what ScaleRep’s auto-reply and referral mining looks like — We’ve found these tactics to yield a 6–10X better reply rate than cold outreach.

3. Reply Handling

Most teams miss the best opportunities to engage with prospects when they reply — either because they are busy, it’s not immediately actionable, it’s a negative reply, or it gets lost among the dozens of other sales inquiries.

You should try to reply to as many interactions as possible and follow up with timely responses. As members of the marketing and sales community, we know this is a must, but it falls on the wayside of the list of priorities.

ScaleRep has users define responses to common replies in order to initiate further conversations and to make sure leads don’t fall through the cracks. Each reply is catered to engage prospects in a genuine back-and-forth to bring up opportunities to share your product.

A few examples of replies we’ve generated templates for can be seen below.