About This Episode

Personalization is all the rage these days.

Personalize your messages and you’ll get higher open rates. But there are two guys preaching that relevance may be even more important to consider in your outbound ops.

Ben Salzman and Kyle Williams run Dogpatch Advisors where they help companies increase revenue through outbound ops and data-driven sales techniques.

What Is Outbound Ops?

You can think of outbound ops as a function within your organization that acts as a clearinghouse and centralized function for sourcing, managing, and normalizing large volumes of data related to outbound. This allows SDRs and others in the individual contributor role to stand on the shoulders of that data work to drive higher relevance and value for prospects.

In other words, they use this centralized data to make their outreach as relevant as possible for the person receiving it.

What Ben and Kyle have found is an explosion of raw data in the past couple of years, which most companies were simply not set up to consume and take advantage of. They wanted to bridge that gap by helping these companies build a function that would allow them to take advantage of this raw data. To put it to good use in new ways.  

The trend right now is about personalizing and “being human” but what people often mean is being relevant, which data helps achieve tremendously.

How do you figure out how to be relevant?

After spending so many years in front of customers as operators, Ben and Kyle felt uniquely equipped in the sales function. So what they do for most companies that want to be more relevant is start by looking at their account executives and CEO. They have the company look to their best AE and the CEO to see what they would do to prepare for the first call.

They then pull that information or data forward in the sales cycle to be used in outbound. What they’re looking for are the aha moments that are created for prospects and where the highest points of leverage are throughout the sales cycle. The goal is to capture the essence of that so they’re able to collect very specific data points that you can’t buy from anyone else because they’re unique to you.

Another thing they teach their clients to do is visual prospecting. There is just too much information and context trying to be crammed into one email these days, often times causing you to lose the prospect. While forgetting that an image is worth 1,000 words.

Visual prospecting is dynamically tailored imagery that goes to a specific prospect; essentially putting their world into the message. How do you do that?

Visual Prospecting Best Practices

1. Don’t overproduce the visual

If it looks like something a designer spent 10 hours on, you break the whole narrative. People are suspicious of things that look too produced.

The bar should be either a “time-strapped designer” level or an “enterprising account executive who had thirty minutes in powerpoint.” That’s the quality you’re looking for.

2. Components of familiarity

Add content that they would be familiar with. That could be things like their logo, website colors, photos of the sales rep, etc. This is what buys you those 15-30 seconds of them inspecting your message. Make the context and the content specific to them.

3. Simplicity

The message you include needs to be simple. It can’t have a 14-step workflow; it should be 2-4 elements that lead to a single point.

With these components, the outreach becomes so much more thoughtful. Your prospects will appreciate the time you spent to make it. But what they don’t know is Ben and Kyle have figured out how to do this at scale.

This amount of relevance and personalization would take a lot of time to do individually for the hundreds of prospects on your list. While it still takes some time to create this outbound message, Ben and Kyle have created the infrastructure to produce this across multiple companies at once.

As long as it’s relevant, your prospects don’t mind if you’re creating these at scale. It’s helpful, and that’s all that matters in the end. Relevance is increasingly more important than just proving a human was involved in the creation of the message. Not only does this create a more relevant message, it creates a more easily digestible message.

Get back to the basics. Try visual prospecting in your next outbound and let us know how it changes the responses you get.

This post is based on a podcast interview with Ben Salzman and Kyle Williams of Dogpatch Advisors. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast.

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