Selling Strategies that Will Rock Your World featuring Apollo’s Rashmi Viswanath

Knowing how to stand out and communicate with your B2B buyers to book more sales meetings is the difference between sales success and coming up short.

In a recent Vengreso webinar, Apollo’s Director of Growth and industry expert, Rashmi Viswanath, lets sellers in on what’s cutting through the noise, how to properly leverage sales tools, and what you or your sales team can do to get more eager “hellos!”.

In this blog, we’ll cover Rashmi’s strategy-rich webinar appearance. You’ll learn:

1. The do’s and don’ts of sales automation – how to use it to organize processes and what not to do to turn prospects away
2. The right way to personalize your sales messages to get prospects to say yes
3. The proven formula to ask for sales referrals and get red hot leads from your existing customers

So, don’t stop here! Learn modern sales strategies from Apollo’s sales leaders that you can start using to immediately generate leads and move deals forward.

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1. The do’s and don’ts of sales automation

“Sales is something that really requires you to keep your hands in the game,” Rashmi says, “it’s such an activity-focused function that some of the biggest challenges for salespeople is keeping on top of everything they’ve got.”

Whether you’ve been in sales for 30 years or 30 days, you know that Rashmi hits the nail on its head.

Sales requires you to manage a lot of tasks.

Which is why sales automation is the modern salesperson’s best friend…

Sales automation is the process of using artificial intelligence tools to carry out sales tasks that are normally done manually. It frees up sales reps from admin tasks and allows them to spend their time on high-value activities that drive revenue, build relationships, and prioritize the customer experience.

Improve sales processes with automation

One of the biggest benefits of sales automation, Rashmi says, is the ability it gives you to expand the scale of a successful sales strategy.

“Sales automation [can] elevate anything that’s working for you and scale it up so that the impact of it isn’t just at a one-person level, but across an entire organization.”

Standardizing organizational processes is no easy feat, but sales automation technology can make all the difference.

Rashmi says that sales automation is especially helpful when you invest the time to thoroughly set up your sales automation system. An effective sales automation sequence is carefully calculated and well-designed; this involves planning and outlining your desired outcomes, validating your data points, and creating detailed personas.

Avoid this common sales automation mistake

On the same note, one of the more common sales automation mistakes is not putting in the time and effort to properly build out automation sequences.

If you forget to put details in place like defining specific criteria to exclude recipients from outreach or the proper “triggers” for follow-ups, you could end up sending irrelevant or duplicate information to a contact.

“And there’s nothing more damaging than that,” Rashmi says, “If you’re appearing inept…you’ve lost the battle before you’ve even started.”

2. How to optimize outbound sales messaging

The webinar’s second category of sales strategies revolve around sales messaging. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Capture attention with multi-channel messaging

In her interview, Rashmi discusses how our digitalized world is altering people’s attention spans, and the way that we communicate with buyers needs to respond to these changes.

“People are engaging with each other in all kinds of channels”, she says, “our attention spans are not just living in our [email] inboxes. We’re seeing great improvements in phone and social selling because of people spending much more of their time on their phones”.

Modern sellers need to develop a multi-channel sales approach. Try experimenting with selling over social media like LinkedIn or even leveraging video prospecting. It not only validates your presence and genuineness but it is a great way to stand out in the eyes of your buyer.

Book more meetings with hyper-personalization

Rashmi says what all salespeople know to be true, “To really earn somebody’s attention and time, personalization is a key component.”

From LinkedIn profiles and social media posts to background information and personal attributes, find what makes someone tick…and leverage it!

Even if you can’t personalize to the individual, you need to figure out a way to personalize to their persona. What are their goals? Their pain points and business problems? Who do they talk to? What do they care about?

Rashmi encourages people to find ways to marry sales automation with personalization efforts.

“You can use automation to trigger actions that reach out to people when they’ve taken steps within [the sales funnel] that indicate to you that they are ready for the next step,” she says.

Automation can be personalized to a prospect or user’s sales activity, their trial duration (if applicable), web activity, recent searches, etc.

For example, in Apollo you can have sales sequences that, when a specific action is taken by the prospect (aka a trigger set up in Apollo) is performed by a target account, you can have personalized actions ready to go based on relevant behavior points.

Here’s an example of what your personalized Apollo sales sequence might look like:

Try it yourself for free!

3. Generate more leads with great sales referral strategies

“Referrals are a good way to use your relationships to sort of reduce the friction [with leads] and get a foot in the door,” Rashmi says, “[it] gives you a better chance for an appointment.”

People you ask for referrals can be anyone you have some level of professional relationship with such as connections in your organization, investors, advisors, mentors, or peers.

She goes on to give a few quick tips for referral generation:

• Be 100% confident that the company or account is qualified to give you a referral. The person you are asking for a referral needs to feel the pain point that your solution solves.
• You need to be very clear about why this is a valuable opportunity for anyone that the person may refer to you. Share a good strong “snipper” about exactly what value that person will gain.
• Share a quick blurb with them about who you are and what you do. That way you aren’t relying on the contact’s choice of words to describe the opportunity.
• Make sure that your referrer feels that, when they refer you, it reflects well on themselves. A referral to you should strengthen the relationship between the person making the referral and the person receiving it.
• Update the referrer on how the conversation went with who they referred. Give them the satisfaction that their referral helped!

Closing Thoughts

At Apollo, we are proud to say that our leadership is determined to drive and inspire the future of sales, at every opportunity.

With Rashmi’s key insights, you are ready to start incorporating fresh, game-changing selling strategies today!

And don’t forget to follow Apollo on LinkedIn and Twitter, so you’ll never miss out on new sales insights.