Hey Sales RX'ers,

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Who else lost their marbles after reading Outreach's mass email about spam guidelines for 2024? Could this be the end of cold email success rates? Does writing the "perfect" cold email even need to be a priority any longer?
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Frankly, we at The Sales Doctor are overjoyed. Here's why.

Many folks (especially during the rise of remote work) turned to cold email as a new way to reach prospects. This happened because thanks to robocalls, numbers were now popping up as "scam likely", prospects were less keen to answer numbers that weren't saved in their contacts, mobile phone data was harder to find and the office line wasn't as successful as it once was.

That said, thanks to tools that performed AI email copywriting with surface-level account & persona research in tandem with prospecting automation, cold outreach via copy has become much of the same. It also gave sellers the opportunity to avoid making cold calls.

Then we had the folks talking about how to fix email deliverability and supplement your efforts by purchasing more domains and warming up inboxes. This just felt like more of the same, and a lot of hard work when...you could just make a cold call.

It's true that cold calls convert to opportunities at a low rate. But the problem is, does your org even know how much lower your cold email opp conversion rates are? The issue at hand isn't which channel works best, it's about how to help each channel perform at its best.

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So how do you avoid the SPAM filter?

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Make More Cold Calls...DUH

It's no secret that cold call reluctance is a real battle. Especially when you have an SDR/BDR org relying on doing one of the most awkward but foundational parts of selling. This is why plenty of organizations are moving to more full-cycle selling, especially if their product is less than a 60-day sales cycle.

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If your team is going to shift to more cold calling we recommend the following:

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Make sure to have the right tech - it goes without saying that tools like Kixie help sales teams spend less time waiting on the phone for someone to answer the phone and more time connecting with prospects.

With seamless integrations into your tech stack, Kixie can ultimately become your all-in-one sales engagement outreach solution. They have been a great partner to us, and if you haven't checked them out yet, click the link in the masthead for a free 10-day fully loaded trial.

Above the tech you implement, you should have the right people to promote the process. Unfortunately, we try to bend the process to our people and their skill level.

If you don't have the right level of skill or the right people, you should work to rectify that to create the process you need in order to be successful. Don't skimp on your process because you're not enabled internally.

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Frameworks, Scripts, and Rebuttal Cards are a must - It's not about making your sellers sound like robots, but providing them the right path to prompting prospects for the answers they need.

It's just human nature that we tend to turn things into interrogation instead of a conversation, and your sales resources should ensure your sellers are performing the latter. If not, then a rewrite is due.

Avoid creating a "box-checking exercise", but coach your sellers on how to critically think alongside your prospect to create a path to the right time and way to ask the questions you need the answers to.

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Data-Driven Leadership - 60% of the workforce will be comprised of Millennials and GenZ by 2025. We are already near 50%. Your mom-and-pop leadership model of the '80s and '90s doesn't work anymore.

By leveraging data to get a fast track to where sellers need the most coaching, you create an exponential opportunity for return. Recognize behaviors first, and outcomes second, but the outcomes should indicate where you should start. The devil is in the details, and patterns preach process.

This is one of the foundational principles of the leadership workshops, SKOs, and Keynotes The Sales Doctor delivers to companies, and always happy to share the curriculum with you and your team.

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We hope that everyone had a terrific Thanksgiving, and we aren't here to play Debbie Downer for anyone. However, there is a lot of fear-mongering going on right now thanks to this email deliverability scare.

If you're afraid of your emails reaching spam, go back to basics with cold calling, open up new channels of prospecting like LinkedIn, and don't wait for your cold email tech specs to be perfect before generating qualified pipeline.

For more great insights on going outbound, go to our resource page to see all of our cold outbound resources like our common objection handling guide and our Sales RX Sequence Guide.

Time to get prescriptive ya'll 🩺