If you want to keep improving your product, it’s not enough to just sell the same thing for longer. You need a constant stream of new ideas and improvements.
If you’re hiring and training new salespeople, the old team will no longer be motivated.
If you target people who were interested but never made a purchase, then you can pull leads and big wins from your existing database.
We’ve found that this is called the Recycling Conversion Sequence. It helped our team improve their conversion rate by 5%!
Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?
LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.
Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following:
- A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
- Who have more than 10 employees
- That spend money on Adwords
- Who use Hubspot
- Who currently have job openings for marketing help
- With the role of HR Manager
- That has only been in this role for less than 1 year
The Origin of the Re Cycle Sales Sequence
The pandemic was in full swing, and we were running out of resources. We needed a way to get a few more deals completed with what we had left.
We had to come up with an idea, so we contacted people who took demos six or more months ago but declined at the time and haven’t heard from us in four months.
We should have started the Recycle campaign much earlier, but this is where it began for us.
The Salesforce instance we have makes it easy for us to figure out who these people are. We use events as a type of object, and the date is coded by this event’s type so if they’re still a lead (and not converted into contact), then we know that they’ve been on demos but never turned them in.
We added a buffer of four months to the date last contacted so that we could be sure if they were no longer working on it.
Once we had the list, we exported them from Salesforce and added them to Outreach. Once you have your candidate lists compiled, export these names out of Salesforce before importing them into Outreach where they’ll go through an automated sequence
Setting Up the Recycling Conversion System
We wanted the sequence to feel personalized, so we had our AEs run it instead of SDRs, because they have a relationship with prospects and usually meet them already.
We wanted to start by saying, Hey! We talked a few months ago. Where are you at now?
The campaign was so successful that we even created a custom field for the prospect’s date of the last demo with us to use in our outreach.
Ive been trying to remember a meeting I had about Sisu over a year ago.
In Salesforce, we used a formula to calculate the value of every field. Once that was done, we transferred those values over to Outreach as an email merge field.
Our outreach seemed more personalized because of the opening line.
Starting the Recycling Conversation
I’m not sure if I prefer to start sequences with a call or an email.
I like email because it’s the fastest way to find someone in large groups. It saves everyone some effort.
It’s different when you’re talking to someone face-to-face. I think there is a level of respect from one salesperson to another, but on the phone, it feels more like they are your customer.
We had to be careful with how much time was being taken up by these sequences. We decided that it would work best if the sequence started out with two auto emails before moving on to one call.
Our sequence was as follows:
One of the first things you do when looking for a job is send out an email to introduce yourself and set up a meeting.
I want to point out the 11% reply rate and 91% open rate on this email subject, “Reconnecting.” It looks like I made a good choice not to add coffee to the offer.
The next step is to schedule the second email two days after the first. This will be a follow-up email, so it’s important that this one is fun and personalised.
We increased the number of responses to our email by 5% with this one.
- The first three touches with the prospect did most of our job for us, so we just send one more email on day four.
- Day seven: If they havent responded to the voicemail, it’s time for a manual email. This email is more heavily researched and personalized than before. Make sure this research is easily accessible so reps can reference it in their future steps.
- On day eight, we should move to a different channel. We will start by connecting with them on LinkedIn and reminding them that we exist.
- Day nine: We make another call.
- If they dont respond after the first time, we contact them again in a week and give one final email.
We made sure to customize the introduction in every email, which increased open rates by at least 80%.
There were not many negative responses to the survey.
We got a lot of responses from people who said they weren’t quite ready for the job. We also received an equal number of replies that were interested in being removed from our list.
The Results
We sequenced 127 leads.
Of those 127, we booked ten demos. Ten of the people came back for a future demo or to purchase something so far.
If this campaign is successful, it could be a 5% boost to our demo close rates.
Well, be doing this forever moving forward.
As soon as a lead meets our criteria (6+ months since the last time they demoed and 4+ months since their last contact), we kick them into the campaign, which means that 5% more of those leads will convert.
Do it Much Better Than We Did
Ive been working on this for a while, but I think it can be improved.
Here’s how you can make the experience even better for your team than it was for ours.
This is a great idea. We should have done this from the beginning. Theres really no reason not to try it.
Capture as much data from your leads. Once they take a demo, get as many details about them as you can.
Social media can also be a great way to boost this campaign even more.
Consider it for enterprise deals. They’re a lot more complicated, but I think the sales process would be different.
Experiment with SDRs. They are usually more motivated to book calls, but you can’t let this come at the expense of personalization.
Start Recycling Conversion Now
You should never assume that just because they said no once, the answer will always be no.
Maybe your product was missing a key feature back then.
Back then, your team might not have been able to succeed in the way they wanted.
This sequence is really easy to do, and it doesn’t require much extra investment. So start recycling things like this, because your pipeline might be full with opportunities that are starting to go stale.
Need Help Automating Your Sales Prospecting Process?
LeadFuze gives you all the data you need to find ideal leads, including full contact information.
Go through a variety of filters to zero in on the leads you want to reach. This is crazy specific, but you could find all the people that match the following:
- A company in the Financial Services or Banking industry
- Who have more than 10 employees
- That spend money on Adwords
- Who use Hubspot
- Who currently have job openings for marketing help
- With the role of HR Manager
- That has only been in this role for less than 1 year