In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact steps I follow to personalize my outreach. These steps will help you understand where you can find personalization elements, how to link them to your prospects, and how to turn them into triggers.
If you follow these steps, you’ll get more replies, and you’ll book more meetings as a result.
Let’s dive in:
Before diving into personalizing your outreach, make sure you know why you’re reaching out. If you’re prospecting with the goal of selling something, you won’t get much replies. Instead, focus on understanding the type of companies you’d like to contact (Ideal Customer Companies), as well as the type of individual inside of these companies (Ideal Customer Title). I recommend building an ICP Matrix to do so:
When you’re done with the ICP Matrix, you need to understand the exact problems your prospects are trying to solve. You won’t close deals if what you sell doesn’t solve a specific problem for your prospects.
To help you do that, make sure you know their:
You can use a Problem Canva:
PS: The ICP Matrix and the Problem Canva are two frameworks that are part of my Prospecting Engine. Give it a try if you want to build a solid, sustainable prospecting system.
Now that you know who you’re going after, and what problems they are trying to solve, you can start looking for personalization elements on their LinkedIn profiles. Their are 3 main places where you can find these elements.
For example, this About Section contains a ton of useful information I can use to personalize my outreach (the prospect is saying a lot about her job, what she’s doing everyday, and she also shares two personal websites).
Here’s a post from this same prospect, where she mentions why she replied to a prospecting message. It’s filled with golden nuggets if you’re trying to book messages with her:
Finally, (and this will be the most common), Rita is engaging with content on LinkedIn, in the form of reactions or comments. For example, she liked this post from Florin Tatulea about a simple and specific outbound message. I can use her reactions as a trigger to start a conversation:
If you can’t find any useful personalization element on the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects, you can switch to looking into the public information about their companies. For a public company, browsing their 10-K report is an excellent way to understand their key initiatives.
Another great tactic is to look for webinars/podcasts where a member of the leadership team has been invited. By listening to these webinars or podcasts, you may get a better idea of the initiatives of the executives, which will trickle down to the rest of the company.
For example, if the CEO of Mixmax is talking about blending freemium and sales-driven strategies, you can mention how it will impact the job of Rita. As a Content Marketing Manager, she may have contradictory goals (getting signups vs booking demos for the sales team), and this can be a great personalization element.
You now have all the elements you need to write a personalized prospecting message. Here’s how you can do it:
For example, if you’re using the post Rita did about the best email she received, this would look like that:
“Rita, saw your recent post about the best email you’ve ever received.
Curious to know how shooting a 3-min video for each prospect impacts the productivity of your reps.
I may have a few ideas to get them to shoot videos at scale. (Hint: It involves AI)
Worth a peek?”
And this is how you can personalize your outreach:
Don’t forget to check my Prospecting Engine if you want to build a solid, healthy prospecting system.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Thibaut Souyris
P.S. When you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:
→ (NEW) Enroll in The Prospecting Engine
→ (NEW) Need to train your team or invite me as a speaker? Book a call here
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