Sales

Quick poll:

💀 Cold calling is deader than the Dodo.

💪 Cold calling is alive and kicking.

🧟 If cold calling is dead, I need a badge that says “Zombie Team Leader” cause my sales reps are still smiling and dialing like there’s no tomorrow.

Cold calling is, of course, far from dead, but it certainly ain’t getting any easier. Nobody likes being interrupted at the best of times, and today’s prospects are so overwhelmed that all they want is to hang up and get back to their to-do list asap. 

Ask the wrong questions and they’ll shut the conversation down faster than you can say “Can I interest you in a demo?”

Keeping them on the line long enough to share your vision of the bright future that awaits them (and, more importantly, book the next meeting) requires asking open-ended sales prospecting questions to keep the conversation going. And unless you possess the conversational skills of David Letterman, you’ll need to have a few prepared in advance.

We checked out what leading sales influencers are saying about cold calling, and the techniques they use to get prospects to open up

Over 3 billion emails were sent daily last year*. 

That’s a communication tsunami. 

If that stat leaves you feeling overwhelmed, imagine how your prospects feel, drowning in their overflowing inbox each morning as your sales email bobs about among the flotsam of their ever-growing to-do list. 

Standing out from the inbox crowd these days means ramping up your game when it comes to writing sales prospecting email subject lines.

Time was, lines like “Sales inquiry” or “Request for a meeting” might have actually landed you a meeting 😱. Now, anything too salesy will get you cast into the 7th level of inbox hell (the spam folder) faster than you can say “Got 15 minutes to talk this week?” 

At Mixmax, we have to admit to having a slight advantage: We sell to salespeople, so our prospects know where we’re coming from. But that doesn’t mean our hard-working sales reps don’t rack their brains daily to come up with engaging subject lines.  

To give them (and you) a helping hand, we reached out to sales influencers and prepared a lifesaving list of the best cold email subject lines for sales prospecting that should help boost your email open rates.

Sales prospecting and lead generation are both designed to fill your sales pipeline with potential customers. But they’re not the same thing.

So what’s the difference? 

Good question.  

Talk to a lot of people and you’ll end up more confused than before, as they’re often used interchangeably. 

It’s important to get it right, though, as the right process for your company depends on your product, customer base, stage of growth, and more. 

Get it wrong and you could be wasting valuable time and resources. 

We asked our top prospectors to clear up the differences between sales prospecting vs lead generation.

New prospects are skittish creatures. Approach them in the wrong way and they’ll take off faster than a gazelle who’s spied a lion at the watering hole.

And who can blame them? In today’s hyper-connected world where everyone is being prospected 24/7, time and attention are fast becoming more valuable commodities than gold. 

At Mixmax, we sell to sales professionals, so they’re on to us even before our magnificent manes come into view. That’s why we’re always looking for sales prospecting techniques to put us ahead of the game. 

We reached out to top sales influencers and chased down our own hardworking SDRs to learn how they gear up for prospecting success. 

Read on to find out how to stay ahead of the prospecting pack.

Question: Would you apply for this job?

Wanted: Highly resilient individual to perform thankless, repetitive tasks. 

Must have:

• The tenacity of a worker ant.
• The drive of a Ferrari.
• Skin of a rhinoceros.
• Overdeveloped chin (to take rejection on).
• Ability to walk through fire and emerge unscathed.

Tempted?

Us either.

Yet that’s what SDRs face daily when prospecting. It takes a special individual to tackle the many sales prospecting challenges involved in tracking down suitable prospects, performing cold outreach, and building pipeline.

And do it all at scale. With a smile on their face.

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople, so we feel your prospecting pain. We asked our top sellers and reached out to sales influencers to get the tips, tricks, and tools they use to overcome common prospecting challenges.

Come with us if you want to become a quota-crushing productivity beast..

Building a healthy sales pipeline starts with effective prospecting. And that, done right, takes a lot of time and effort.

If you’re still manually researching potential customers and checking contact details you might as well be trotting around in a pony and trap while your competitors zip by in flying cars.

To make matters worse, with everyone stepping up their tech game, investing in a few stand-alone sales prospecting tools, and crossing your fingers just won’t cut it anymore.  

What you need is a killer tech stack that works together to supercharge your prospecting efforts and steer you out of the dark ages and into the 21st century.

We sell to sales professionals in fast-growth environments, so we know how important it is to have reliable data and insights at your fingertips. So we asked our top salespeople what tech they use to stay one step ahead.

Related post: 20 Best Sales Automation Tools to Give Your Reps Superpowers

During the gold rush, miners spent days, lifetimes, sifting through piles of dirt searching for nuggets of gold. It was time-consuming, backbreaking, dangerous work.

Sound familiar? 

Ok, modern sales prospecting isn’t dangerous, but it has plenty in common with its namesake. Like sifting through piles of information to identify potential customers, which, done at scale, takes a lot of time and effort. 

To make matters worse, other prospectors are constantly encroaching on your patch and prospects are so saturated that even 30 seconds of their attention is like gold dust. 

We feel your pain. You see, at Mixmax, we sell to salespeople (yeah, that’s as tough as it sounds). 

The good news is, adopting sales prospecting best practices and investing in the right tech can make you a more efficient and effective prospector and help boost revenue. 

Related post: Customer Success and Sales: Your Next Dream Team

We asked our top salespeople for their top quota-crushing tips. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll be fully equipped with all the tools you need to supercharge your prospecting efforts. 

Pick up your pickaxe and let’s get to it.

You’re hot on the trail of a juicy lead, so you send them an email packed with useful info. Everything they could ever want to know about your company and product. 

Then, you wait to hear back. 

And wait, and wait, and…

Nothing. 

Crickets.

What could possibly have gone wrong? 

Well, for a start, one-off emails alone are very unlikely to get a response. These days, competing for a prospect’s valuable time and attention takes a well-organized military-style campaign involving multiple channels and exquisite timing. 

Fortunately, sales email sequence tools make it easy for you to put one together.  

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople, so we know exactly what you need. We asked our reps to share their secrets about how to write sales email sequences and achieve your goals faster. 

Kind folk that they are, they even threw in some sales email sequence examples you can steal. 

Let’s get started. 

We don’t need to tell you remote working is here to stay. In a recent Gallup survey, nine in 10 remote workers want to maintain remote work to some degree. 

The types of workers making this transition? Salespeople. As sales teams transition between working in the office and working at home, companies must launch new initiatives to help sales reps be successful in this new permanent way of working.

With fewer face-to-face interactions, like in-person meetings or watercooler check-ins, it’s vital to create a plan that keeps the sales department connected in an ultra-flexible working environment. Below are five tips to guide sales teams during the transition.

We’ve all been there. You spend hours crafting the perfect email, send it out into the ether, and…

Tumbleweed.

You’re too busy to follow up immediately, and by the time you get around to it your lead has gone so cold you need a blowtorch to thaw it out.

Learning to write email sequences is key to minimizing this pain. Sequences allow everyone from SDRs to AEs to CSMs to take a more structured, effective approach to generating demand, building pipeline, deal management, success, renewals, and expansion.

At Mixmax, it’s our mission to empower our users to start multiple fruitful conversations with prospects and customers. And keep them going.

Think about it – would you rather go to a restaurant that all of your friends highly recommended and you read its positive reviews online or the one that’s always empty when you pass by?

Even if you haven’t thought of it that way, social proof impacts our decisions, from picking a restaurant to deciding which software you’re going to choose for your team.

The principle is clear enough, but what does it mean, and how does social proof increase sales?

B2B sales ain’t what they used to be, and that’s a good thing.

Omnichannel is the new normal, and buyers expect to be engaged when and where it suits them by sellers who are available 24/7 to help solve their problems.

It’s a lot for mere mortals to keep up with. Thank goodness we can now clone sales reps!

No? In that case, you’ll need another way to give them selling superpowers while we wait for the future to arrive.

B2B sales automation has the power to make your reps more productive and effective, which is good news for your bottom line. You need to get it right though. Cloning successful sales plays and messaging is all well and good, but if you’ve ever felt trapped in an endless feedback loop trying to get past a chatbot gatekeeper, you’ll know artificial isn’t always the intelligent choice.

Robots hit it out of the park when it comes to tasks (normal) humans run a mile from, like admin, data entry, and analytics. But humans leave them standing when it comes to the kind of long-term nurturing required for B2B sales.

That’s why top-performing sales organizations are those that successfully marry people and tech to great effect.

We’re your matchmakers of choice when it comes to B2B sales automation, having helped numerous B2B companies successfully automate sales and become more human.