How to scale your warm outreach
How to scale your warm outreach
There’s a killer tool for that
With cold outreach on its last legs, it’s no wonder that more and more sales leaders are looking for more effective ways to break through the noise and connect with their target customers. Regular readers know I’m a huge proponent of solving this by using warm outreach through your extended network:
I’ve previously published my own warm outreach playbook here, coached dozens of startups how to implement warm outreach in my live cohort course on Maven and as a fractional CRO, and shared prospecting data from 200+ startups showing that warm outreach converts more meetings to opportunities than traditional cold outbound.
Today I’m excited to talk about a new tool that helps you scale your warm outreach playbook. This post covers:
A recap of the steps to put together a warm outreach playbook
The key challenges with scaling warm outreach
How to solve the scaling challenges with a relationship platform like HiFive
The steps to put together a warm outreach playbook
Define your ideal customer profile to focus on your highest value prospects. A precise ICP is essential to any prospecting strategy and even more so with warm outreach, as people don’t like to make irrelevant introductions.
Pool your team’s connections to build your extended network. Your exec team, advisors and investors each have their own networks. Pooling them in a central database creates an extended network to mine for prospects.
Find prospects who match your ideal customer profile. Search through your extended network for people who either match your ICP (aka “matches”) or who work alongside your ICP (aka “peers”).
Write engaging messaging for each prospect. 9/10 people won’t make a warm intro without context to explain what’s in it for the recipient. You still need to follow the best practices for outreach messaging.
Ask your connectors to forward your message to their contacts. Send a message to your connector, asking for the intro and include the messaging for the prospect as a forwardable note.
Get introduced and book an intro meeting. Respond as soon as you are introduced and offer up 2-3 time slots to meet.
The key challenge in scaling warm outreach is the strength of the connectors in your network
Not all startup sales leaders are blessed to have access to experienced exec team members, advisors and investors who are both well-connected with prospects and willing to help with introductions, which leaves them with the next best option; sifting through their own 2nd degree connections on Sales Navigator.
While LinkedIn excels at showing you that you are just one degree away from thousands of prospects in your ICP, it falls short in giving you the path to connecting with them. Sure, you may have a dozen mutual connections but which of them will actually come through for you?
The new way to solve this is with a relationship platform like HiFive.
Relationship platforms are an exciting new category of salestech that help sales leaders reach prospects through the right connections and collaborate on making warm introductions.
I’ve teamed up with HiFive, the leader in this category, to tell you how they’ve been solving warm outreach for startups like Sendoso, Cheq and Lantern. I’ve been working with the HiFive team for the past 6 months and been very impressed by how quickly they’ve grown, validating just how much demand there is for a viable alternative to cold outreach.
HiFive’s secret sauce is their network of Premium Connectors - executives like Scott Leese, Elizabeth Andrew, Kevin Dorsey (and me :) and dozens more who are well connected, have an incentive to make introductions and can get you in front of your ICP. You need intros to CMOs? CROs? CTOs? VPs of HR? HiFive makes it happen in a highly organic way.
Using HiFive is dead simple:
Install the HiFive Chrome extension
Browse LinkedIn for matches to your ICP
Instantly see which of HiFive’s Premium Connectors can make an intro
Write a personalized message to your prospect
Request an intro from the Premium Connector
Get introduced and book the meeting
Here’s what HiFive looks like in action:
Want to learn more?
Go to HiFive’s website to see it in action for yourself. Or hit reply and I’ll make a warm intro directly to the founders Brendon and Pete for you. See what I did there?
PS Thank you to HiFive for supporting this issue of the newsletter!
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