June 11, 2023
Tella for Sales Teams
Grant
Sending cold emails is rough. It's hard, time consuming, and demotivating. But if you're selling to another business it's an inevitable part of the job. Here are some things I've learned about outbound sales and ideas to improve.
Cold feet from cold emails
To get some kind of return on cold email, you usually need to be sending a lot of them. It's not uncommon for founders of early stage B2B startups to be sending 40 cold emails per day. At bigger B2B organisations Sales Development Representatives (SDRs or BDRs) are expected to send between 50 and 80 cold emails per day.
So what kind of conversion does this scale get you? Steli Efti, CEO of Close.io reckons you should be aiming for 4.5%. These are recipients who have completed the primary call-to-action of your email (e.g. booked a demo or signed up for a trial). But Guillaume Cabane, VP of Growth at Drift reckons the average response rate for cold email is closer to 1% These are recipients who've simply replied to your email. As someone new the outbound sales game, this looks bleak.
Quantity over quality?
But there's a new approach that sales teams are adopting to improve their cold email conversion. An approach that's closer to home here at Tella. It's called video prospecting. This is where a video is included in the cold email. Instead of reading through a stale email template, recipients can watch a video of the sales pitch.
So why are sales teams trying to use video? It's because they feel far more personal than just text on a screen. As Jason Dhami, SDR at Dooly put it:
"with video, you have an ability to tell a powerful, unique story. You can’t fake it; the prospect knows it’s made specifically for them."
HubSpot has a great write up on how SDRs using video saw a 4x increase in conversions compared with their other sales activities—their video/meeting conversion rate was 6.03%! But the part of the article that caught my attention most was the following:
"Be willing to forego quantity for quality. Simply put, reps can’t send as many high-quality, personalized videos as they can send high-quality, personalized emails. That said, balance the mix of your outreach so that you don’t lose out on overall activity."
Personalised video that scales
This made me wonder: could Tella help sales people scale their video-based outreach? Sales people shouldn't have to sacrifice quality as they increase their video usage. Nor should they be missing out on better conversion rates by only sending a small amount of video as part of their activities.
At Tella, we focus on two things that we think can help out sales people:
Making video creation accessible to people with no editing experience—most sales people probably aren't budding directors in their spare time
Making video content as reusable as possible, so creators rarely need to start from scratch
In the video above I show you how you can use Tella to scale your personalised video creation and dramatically cut down the time it takes to make videos for your leads. There are many other bits in Tella to help sales teams, for example including a preview GIF of your video in the email.
If you're keen on trying Tella for your sales team, sign up or drop me a line at hello@tella.tv