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The Playbook A quick guide to building outbound sales

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The ComX playbook for outbound sales A collection of best practices from sales geniuses around the world

This playbook has the goal to help you kick start your outbound process. No matter if you want to introduce your product to a new region or just streamline your meeting inflow in your domestic market: This book will help you set up the systems, structures and people to get going.

We developed this book to bring our best practices, literature, tool box and hiring methods to you.

We hope you will find it useful

Best

Chris & Philipp - The ComX Founders

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Intro

The ComX playbook is designed to inspire but also get you into action.

Each chapter consists of an intro section for you to understand the area, guiding questions that you

should tackle in order to move forward and our favourite literature to support you on your journey.

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4 must reads for building B2B scalability

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How to get started ? Building reliable sales can be very overwhelming and difficult. You probably have closed deals before yourself, you have some paying clients that proof your concept but you and your team are busy with many different things, not only sales.

So what to do?

There are many different ways to kick off your sales journey. One of which is outbound, the classic way to get directly in touch with your target group and make your pitch.

But when should you even consider outbound?

#1) You have a product to sell (not services) that is expensive enough (min. 4.000 € CLV)

#2) Your value proposition is very easy for a prospect to understand

#3) You are different and you do not have 100 competitors on the market

#4) You are not trying to replace other people’s stuff

Without a structure and the right tools in place, outbound ambitions can become an expensive rabbit whole with the risk of not getting the results that you wanted.

So, if you want to go about it make sure you have a plan for the following areas:

Target Audience Tools Messaging PeopleProcess

& KPI’s

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Target Audience Tools Messaging PeopleProcess

& KPI’s

How to get started Your outbound checklist

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Target Audience Tools Messaging PeopleProcess

& KPI’s

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Target Audience Intro

Knowing your clients well will determine your future growth. Your target audience and their problems are the reason you have a business in the first place. It is the people who will buy your product, give you the feedback to improve and who will guide you towards the right solution. In order to start any sales, marketing, communications etc. you need to know who you sell to by heart.

In this section you will get an overview about: - How to build a hypothesis on your target audience and persona - How to leverage this persona into a sales and marketing plan - How to adjust to changes in your target audience with more information at your

hands

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Target Audience Some Guiding Questions

• What type of companies are your ideal customers?

• What is the problem you solve for them?

• What are they buying, where are they buying it, what are they spending? What other products might they be using?

• Who at that company is making that decision, using the product/service, or signing off?

• How does the clients’ decision process look like buying products like yours?

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Target Audience Best Practices

• Learn from your current sales - Define your current hypothesis of your target group (Persona, Company, Industry, Region)

• Be prepared to iterate. Your hypothesis will be challenged and will change constantly

• Do not get side tracked - start with maximum 3-5 hypothesises, test sufficiently, listen & learn, iterate

• Build communication processes in your learning loop to integrate learnings as fast as possible

• Start rather wide than too narrow. E.g. rather target more prospects than too little. Avoid getting false positives or negatives

• Work with top down referrals (approach people as high as possible in your target organisation)

Target Audience Supporting Literature

Books & Whitepapers Further Info

Find your ideal customer profile About how to get started with your outbound strategy. When you do not know if to start from top down or bottom up. This article gives you useful tips how to structure first outbound approaches and learn faster

Sixteen Ventures - Ideal Customer Lincoln Murphy a customer success expert gives some tips from his 10 years experience to grow SaaS businesses

Ideal customer profile Customer profile means a client not only buys your product but also creates value out of it. Three stages of discovering your customer: close the deal, create value and furthermore the client also perceives you as the reason for that.

Customer Avatar: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

A customer avatar is a tool to optimize your target marketing by helping you define your customer profile.

In "Customer Avatar" you will discover how to use Facebook's Audience Insights to define your client profile and learn exactly which products to sell and how to sell your product.

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Target Audience

Process & KPI’s Tools Messaging People

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IntroProcess & KPI’s

In order to manage your sales team you need to understand how to measure. Your processes and the KPIs you set for yourself will help you hold course and not to get distracted by all the things that are popping up in your day to day. Without defined and documented processes and KPIs you will end up navigating wrong, getting into discussions about minor details with your team and will not be able to reach your goals.

In this section we will provide you with: - the most important KPIs for the beginning of your sales set up - the basic processes you should think about when starting up - the actions you need to have in place and worked out in order to get started

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Process & KPI’s Some Guiding Questions

• How long does it currently take to close a deal?

• What are the current stages you are using in your CRM system?

• Who takes care of what stage?

• How much is your technical staff involved in sales?

• Where do your current meetings and demos originate?

• How many demos do you currently have per week / month?

• How many leads do you get in touch with currently per week / month?

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Process & KPI’s

Best Practices

Send Cold Emails

Work Responses

Call Conversations

Demos/Appointments

New Opportunities

Closed Deals

10 - 20%

25%

1000 People Contacted

Conversation Rates

100 - 200

50

50%25

50%13

75%7

This is an example of a sales funnel with conversion rates we have mapped at ComX, the goal for you is to map each activities and how many people it takes to get one sales at the end

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Process & KPI’s

Best PracticesStatistics beat opinions. What ever you do and decide, do it based on a sample size of tests that allows you to draw accurate conclusions

Depending on your market, target group and deal size, the next figures might vary.

• Email Templates: confirm email template quality with at least 500 send out emails

• Calls: Confirm your best pitch with at least 100 pitches over the first 3 months

• Demos: design the perfect demo for your product by not less than 50-100 demos

• Price negotiations: learn at least from 20 lost or closed deals where your client gets the real value out of your product

Supporting LiteratureBooks & Whitepapers Further Info

How to build a sales process from scratch The goal of this guide from Sales Hacker is to give SMB entrepreneurs and SMB sales leaders a step-by-step guide to creating a sales process from scratch

How to establish your perfect sales process This video from Hubspot is about sales people who do not use a sales process lack a clear picture of whether or not they are improving on a daily basis

How a sales process could look like Hubspot gives furthermore a clear overview of different sales methodologies and the advantages when using them

The death of the sales funnel Lenati describes how the buying experiences in B2B sales have changed and describes a customer-centric, dynamic selling approach.

Differences between enterprise sales and smb sales

Article from Sales hacker about the main differences between large enterprise and SMB sales with insightful tips that affect your sales funnel

Process & KPI’s

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ToolsTarget Audience Messaging PeopleProcess

& KPI’s

IntroTools

We are living in a very fortunate era. Setting up sales and marketing has never been that easy and affordable. But there are a lot of tools out there and choosing the right ones for you is crucial in order not to waste money and keep operations as smooth as possible. As a founder there is no magic trick and many things still need work. However there are a lot of sales tools that can make your life easier

In this section you will get an overview about: - identifying in which areas which kind of tool makes sense - what areas should be covered by tools in the sales process and which ones should not - price points of tools along the sales funnel, pro’s and con’s

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Some Guiding QuestionsTools

• What is the current ways and methods to demo your product?

• Do you visit your clients in person or do you rather employ the phone or screen sharing?

• What would be the ideal device for making calls? Cellphone? Phone system?

• Where do your contacts come from today?

• How do you track emails, calls, follow ups, sales today?

• What numbers/KPIs do you need per month/quarter/year for you and your board to navigate?

• What people are involved into a full sales cycle: Meeting booking, closing, pre sales and after sales support? C M

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Best PracticesTools

Lead Gen Tool

Communication Tool

CRM

Prospect

Lead

Opportunity

In this part of the playbook we want to introduce to most common tools that are needed to build your sales outbound

What the perfect tool should contain Integration into your browser

Email Pattern recognition Verification of email patterns

What the perfect tool should containIntuitive Email Workflow

Integration to CRM Integrated VOIP Calling Option

Tracking of KPI’s (Email Opens, Success Rates etc.)

What the perfect tool should containIntuitive Email Workflow

Integration to CRM Integrated VOIP Calling Option

Tracking of KPI’s (Email Opens, Success Rates etc.) C M

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Prospecting Systems

Tool Name Cost Pro’s Cons

LinkedIn sales navigator 79$ p. user p. monthdirectly contacting and building lead lists using LinkedIns massive data base of people. High accuracy of data and high reach. Good company and employee overview

Social selling has been proved to be not efficient as a stand alone approach. It became very spammy which reduces replies

Hunter.io pay per requested email: from free to 320 $ per month

Great technology for testing email patterns and quality. Free to try out Large data base of companies and their email domains

Hunter was recently banned from LinkedIn. Without a name and title list its hard to find the right email. Its great for mail testing, has certain flaws for finding people

Headreach From 49$ per month to 139$ per month

Moderate data base on all companies and their employees. Most likely using LinkedIn data base. Moderate cost to get started

Its a very new tool and might disappear. LinkedIn is currently hunting down all vendors that use their data base illegally. It might disappear soon as many others have

prospect.io from 99$ p. user p. month to 899$ p. user p. month

Moderate data base on all companies and their employees. Messaging included Most likely using LinkedIn data base. Moderate cost to get started

Credits pricing usually gets very costly when ramping up. Hard to control onces emails and prospecting gets to a level of 50 per week.

Datanyze Standard: starting at $600/mo. Pro: starting at $1200/

mo.

Uncover, research, and connect with the right prospects and companies at the right time. Import your target people and company pro les with one click right into other outbound tools to speed up your process and create better alignment.

Sometimes the data inside of Datanyze is not always current. When reaching out to companies they will mention that they were just testing a tool, not fully using it.

Tools

Outbound Systems

Tool Name Cost Pro’s Cons

HubspotFrom 46 € p. user p. month

for Hubspt sales pro Not including marketing

modules

Seamless UI, user friendly and easy to set up Campaigning and email scheduling works well. Calling and follow ups included

Great solution for established sales teams. However reporting comes at 200 $ extra per month.

Salesloft from 75 $ p. user p. monthEasy set up of cadences and follow up workflows. Very well usable for A/B testing and early market penetration. Seamless integration to Salesforce

The solution can become quite expensive if an organisation has multiple sales reps who all need to be equip with Salesforce and Salesloft

outbound.ioFrom 149 $ p. month

Pricing adjusts to how many people get contacted

Fully automated workflows and testing. Great statistics and overview. Easy set up with little integration work needed

Limited integration and very pricy just for testing. As soon as you scale the efforts it becomes too expensive

growlabs.io300$ for 3 seats minimum base fee, 2,500$ for 1000

contacts per monthGood interface and easy use. First leads can be engaged within hours

Can get fast very expensive, especially high investment & cost for additional contacts.

reply.io 300$ monthly including 5 sales team members

easy to use and very simple user interface. Perfect for creating your email & follow up workflows

Does not include any prospecting services. Data have to be included separately

comx.ioFlat fee of 1000$ for

unlimited contacts, positive reply fee of 75$

Includes prospecting service, proven email templates for markets and industries and supports in gettin f

This solution is very flexible and easy with results in a less deep integration for companies with 1000+ sales people

Tools

Tool Name Cost Pro’s Cons

SalesforceBasic 25 € p. user p. month

Business 75 € p. user p. month Growth 125 € p. user o. month

• The most extensive tool out there • Integrations with all mayor marketing

automation systems • In Growth segment extremely

customisable • Custom reporting capabilities

• very heavy system • adds cost very quickly • gets heavy extremely quickly • not known to be user friendly

PipedriveSilver 10 € p. user p. month Gold 24 € p. user p. month

Platinum 63 € p. user o. month

• very easy to set up and start quickly plug and play

• great user interface and sales funnel support

•

• limited automation features • limited account features and

opportunity overviews • basic reporting

ProsperworksBasic 19 € p. user p. month

Business 40 € p. user p. month Growth 119 € p. user o. month

• Easy email and communication tracking through gmail

• Add prospects straight from your email accounts

• Integrations are behind some of the more established systems

• Reporting is easy-to-use, but a bit limiting compared to a Salesforce as well

Hubspot Free if you don't use any other of their features

• Basic functionality to get started • Overviews on contacts and lead funnels

• Limited functionality that might force you into their other pricy products

close.ioBasic 65 $ p. user p. month

Business 110 $ p. user p. month Growth 165 $p. user o. month

• Easy set up, great UI • Supporting email and call workflows well • Integration of VOIP and Automdialers

• Limited custom set up of sales funnel

• Weak reporting features • Not integrating with many

systems

CRM SystemsTools

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Target Audience Tools PeopleProcess

& KPI’s Messaging

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Messaging Intro

You only have one chance to make a good first impression. The message about your company, your product and your brand is your tool to get your target group interested in your product and to be trusted in the long run. No matter if you work with email marketing, cold calling or content marketing - you need to get the message straight you want to put out there.

In this section you will get an overview on: - what message for outbound 2.0 work and why - what to watch out for when deciding on the message of your company - what messaging leads to a meaningful interaction with your target audience

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Messaging Some Guiding Questions

• What is the most burning issue for your target persona?

• What is your target persona interested in?

• What is the size of the organisation you target?

• Is your target group rather masculine or feminine?

• What is the best business case your clients had with your product?

• What is your target group busy with other than the area your product covers?

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Messaging Best Practices

Hints for cold email reach out

Keep Your Sales Email Short & Sweet Always Include a Call to Action

Do not Be Afraid to Give Deadlines Use New Technology to your Advantage

Personalise Your Damn Sales Emails!

Source Saleshacker

In the following section we want to share some of the templates with you that have created valuable sales meetings for our clients.

We would like to introduce you to

- an opening email to get in touch for the first time - our best performing pitch email to introduce your product and book a meeting

Both of them have been tested by our clients around the world 100s thousands of times.

Messaging Best Practices

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No one likes to be interrupted with what they are doing. It is way more polite to be given the chance to decide yourself if you like to engage into a sales talk, review material or get a meeting.

We therefore recommend to start with an introduction email, where YOU DO NOT PITCH.

Formats can include: - asking for feedback - asking for the right person in the organisation

Messaging The introduction email

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Subject: Can you point me in the right direction at {{COMPANY}}?

Dear {{FIRST_NAME}},

Can you point me in the right direction? I am looking for the person at {{COMPANY}} responsible for Sales and Marketing.

I would like to exchange about trends in Automation and Artificial Intelligence in these areas.

Thank you in advance and best regards,

Messaging The introduction email

30 - 50% Open Rate

8 - 15% Reply Rate

1 - 2% Meeting

Rate

Example

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Messaging

The Intro – Do not blow it here. The subject and the first few sentences have to be an attention grabber. It is the difference between getting opened versus getting ignored or blocked.

The Value Proposition – Main point of your email. Keep it focused on value, and solving a problem for your prospect. Why should they care about you? If there is a clear and concise benefit to the

prospect, you will get a response. If not, you are dead to them.

Call to Action – Goes without saying, this is the crucial point where you tell the recipient exactly what you want them to do. As you would expect, this can make or break everything.

Referrals - this is the strongest trust builder in an cold email. ComX usually works a lot with referrals in organisations.

The Pitch Email

Hi {{FIRST_NAME}},

{{SNIPPET_3}} forwarded me your answer being responsible for Internationalisation and Sales at {{COMPANY}}. I would like to introduce ComX and also understand your scaling methods.

At ComX, we help companies like Videobeat, Nosco or Passendo to significantly improve lead generation and internationalisation, and I believe we can do the same for {{COMPANY}}.

In a nutshell, ComX is a platform that allows you to get in contact with thousands of potential clients and with help of artificial intelligence to prioritise those who are interested. ComX provides you data as well as an intelligent platform to scale your business and same time reducing the cost of sales.

With this method we managed the danish SaaS company Nosco to double their customer base within 1,5 years.

Don't take my word for it, discover it yourself here .

I would also like to learn more about Sales and Lead Generation at {{COMPANY}} and present you a concept. Do you have a few minutes for a talk this week? Feel free to book a time slot at this link .

Best,

MessagingExample

The pitch Email

50 - 70% Open Rate

20 - 30% Reply Rate

2 - 4% Meeting

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Some secretsMessaging

7 Email Secrets

1. Include multiple recipients 2. Subject line length doesn’t matter 3. Bad keywords cost you meetings

4. You are sending emails at the wrong time (we will get back to this point) 5. IF they do not reply today, they (probably) won’t

6. You are not following up enough 7. Testing can improve templates replies > 10x

Bonus: Increase call connection rate by 34% by calling when you see an email open

Best Practices

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Messaging Best Practices Persistence & Timing

This study from Havard Business Review about calling shows statistics when its best to contact leads. Whats the key insights? Try sending mails before or after working hours not to clog up in email inboxes, same time stay persistent.

Have up until 5 follow up steps after your pitch emails to get a 90% reply rate.

Source HBR

Messaging Supporting LiteratureBooks & Whitepapers Further Info

Predictable Revenues part 3, page 80 Aaron Ross explains why no one is spending to cold emails anymore and gives tips how to improve open and reply rates

How to write the perfect sales email This article from Sales Hacker provides some of the best cold email outreach tips and show you how to write the perfect sales email.

Is it possible to send personalized emails on a scale? Furthermore Sales Hacker gives some tips how to personalize Email Templates even more.

7 Email Secrets that drive your sales forward A slide deck from Yesware that summarizes their best working email templates that fill their sales people’s inbox.

The Best Time to Call Prospects, Based on Data From 100,000 Calls Statistics about when to best reach out and how persistent you have to be to get more leads

Cold Email Hacks Best Practices about cold emails and how to differ from millions other emails in your leads inbox

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PeopleTarget Audience Tools MessagingProcess

& KPI’s

Intro People

You will not be able to scale your business yourself. At some point you will need help and to chose the right people for your commercial operations will be the key factor on your success or failure. You will need to decide what the structures are you want to hire people for as well as find the candidates for your market, your product and the phase your company is in.

In this section you will get an overview on: - what the common mistakes are when looking for sales people in the start up phase - how to identify your own and your sales peoples role in the process - what tasks you should delegate and what to do yourself - what candidates you should take a look at in order to find your target market fit and scale

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People

• Who has been closing the deals in your company today?

• How much complexity and depth lies in your product or in the industry you target?

• What is the first impression you like to make for your company (are you a senior expert or are you young innovative and hip?)

• What does your team consist of today? (Are you engineers or a marketing team/Are you mostly male or female?)

• What are the concrete tasks you like your people to take over? (Meeting booking, closing, attending fairs, work on your communication, take over marketing)

Some Guiding Questions

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Best PracticesPeople

Hiring great sales people

Especially in early stages look for people who have the emotional and mental blueprint of a great startup hustler. This kind of person typically does not want to be a salesperson, though. They usually have other goals and aspirations in life.

These are the key questions you need to ask yourself:

• Do they have hustler DNA? Are they willing to do what it takes?

• Do they have an entrepreneurial spirit?

• Are they self-driven and ambitious?

• Are they competitive and do they enjoy a good challenge?

• Do they enjoy communicating and interacting with others?

• Do they have a high tolerance for pain? Can they handle rejection well?

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What a senior sales person will ask for:

• More and higher quality sales materials • Expensive steak dinners • A “slight” tweak to your product, an added feature, a different UX (Charlie knows what will make prospects buy because of all the

conversations he’s having, so of course you should listen to him.) • A redesigned website • A better drip campaign • A new piece of sales or marketing software (“Yes, $15,000 looks like a lot, but that’s just the price of doing business, trust me on this.”) • Hiring an outsourced lead generation company • Spending $60,000 on AdWords • Feeding a unicorn with magic barley on full moon nights

Same time deals will take longer to close, important learnings in the beginning are not transferred to the founder and lost and a massive amount of cash is burned. The problem with the believe that the senior sales person will solve all your sales related problems because everyone wants to believe it.

KEEP CLOSING DEALS YOURSELF

People Best PracticesEveryone wants to believe it - the senior sales hire that will destroy your startup

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People

The 5 biggest risks when hiring salespeople for your startup

#1: Losing touch with your customers #2: Not being able to judge sales performance #3: Hiring a salesperson can screw up your culture #4: Hiring the wrong kind of sales personality #5: Hiring sales leadership too soon

Best Practices

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PeopleTeam Structure - The Island

You have done sales already yourself and there is a product market fit.

In this model, every sales rep is essentially responsible for each step of the sales process on their own. They have to generate leads by themselves, qualify them, and close them. Reps within this framework tend to be more aggressive. They have got their elbows out in fierce competition—not just with the larger market, but their own teams as well.

Pros: • Very little managerial oversight required on a one-on-one basis • Good for simple sales processes, like a one or two call-to-close product

Cons:

• Creates a very aggressive sales environment • You have much less control over how your brand is represented in the market, because it’s highly dependent upon

each individual rep’s style. • Because everyone does everything, it is difficult to keep track of key sales metrics and benchmarks

The island model isn’t great for most startups—it is too aggressive, and too competitive—but there are always exceptions. It typically suits companies that work in established markets, with high levels of competition. The island model works best for low complexity, high-transaction sales processes. Sometimes, simplest is best.

Best Practices

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People

The assembly line drove the Industrial Revolution, and built Ford’s famous Model T. It essentially specialised the labor force, and sequentially arranged production processes for max efficiency.

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs): Also commonly referred to as Qualifiers/Prospectors. SDRs reach out to prospects and qualify them by asking questions that focus on customer needs, and identify the decision-making process.

Account Executives (AEs): Responsible for closing the deal. They call up qualified leads, give demos, manage objections, move the deal forward, and ultimately try to close the deal.

Customer Success team: Once a deal is closed, new customers are passed on to this team. They are focused on account management and keeping customers happy, increasing lifetime value (LTV) for each customer. They also help up sell customers to higher plans.

Most startups will find that some form of the assembly line will work best for them. It is great for reducing the complexity of your sales cycle, increasing sales efficiency, and scaling your team. Your sales cycle is probably relatively complex. The power of the assembly line sales model lies in creating a reliable and repeatable process for nurturing leads. In doing so, it takes your funnel and transforms it into a revenue powerhouse as you build your business to scale.

Team Structure - The assembly lineBest Practices

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Supporting LiteratureBooks & Whitepapers Further Info

The Sales Hiring Playbook This book is a sales hiring bible and a must read before starting to hire sales people or to build a sales team.

How To Build An Inside Sales Team From Scratch

Tipps, tricks and tweaks how to build a sales team, what to watch out for and insights about best Practices from Sales Hacker

People

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“Keep your sales pipeline full with prospecting.

Always have more people to see than time to see them”

- Brian Tracy

Thank you for reading

Philipp Ströhemann - CoFounder philipp@comx.io

+45 52 75 27 92

Christoph Erler - CoFounder christoph@comx.io

+45 31 19 59 88

Questions? Reach out anytime