In the world of sales, the age-old question persists: “How many sales discovery calls are too many discovery calls?”
When you’ve got KPIs to hit, that limit can seem very far away. And with the advent of sales prospecting automation tools, it’s easy to think that a full calendar means better chances at closing.
There’s no doubt that adding automation tools to your sales tech stack can increase leads. In one study, 80% of marketers saw their leads increase when using marketing automation tools.
But are more leads always better?
Here, we come to the biggest paradox in sales: that quality always beats quantity when it comes to new leads.
And when you’re targeting those juicy, high-ACV leads, you might want to put down the snazzy marketing automation tools and go old-school.
The History of Outbound Prospecting
Sales prospecting has come a long way since the early days of large-scale campaigns. It was only in the 1950s that marketers realized that consumer behavior could significantly impact sales; thus, demographic segmenting was born.
Since then, the sales process has become more aligned with marketing goals. Sellers learnt that inbound prospecting was as valuable as outbound, and could vastly increase the number of qualified leads.
Throughout all of this, one thing was key: it’s quantity over quality. Hit as many people as you can (even if they don’t exactly match your ideal customer profile), and see what sticks.
Cold outreach reigns supreme
Until the turn of the millennium, B2B lead generation was a case of outbound prospecting. Whether this was conducted via direct mail, cold calling, or email (the first email marketing campaign was conducted way back in 1978), selling was simply a case of finding your prospect’s phone number, reaching out, and persuading them to buy.
Unfortunately, frozen-cold outreach doesn’t come with fantastic odds. The average cold-calling success rate is just 2%. Every salesperson intrinsically understands there’s a fine line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance.
And so, sales prospecting gets a bad rep. Why bother cold emailing hundreds of people when you could focus on marketing to bring in those qualified leads naturally?
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It all goes digital
Salesforce was founded in 1999. By then, it was clear that sales and marketing were going digital and that companies had to make a concerted effort to align their sales prospecting methods with the marketing team.
Online advertising exploded. Email marketing took off. In 2005, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan coined the term ‘inbound marketing.’
In the age of rapidly increasing internet adoption, B2B companies realized that it wasn’t all about aggressive cold selling: it was equally valuable to educate those potential customers who weren't buying from you yet.
The Rise of Sales Automation
Between the early 90s and the late 2010s, the B2B SaaS market flooded with sales and marketing automation tools. Now, you didn’t even have to write those emails to prospects—software could create an email sequence for you.
In 2020, McKinsey reported that one-third of all sales tasks could be fully automated. It was no longer necessary for your AEs to be filling up their time with things like regular check-ins with prospects. In fact, 44% of sales reps are too busy to even attempt follow-up.
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The value of the marketing automation market is estimated to reach $13.71 billion by 2030. But where does this leave sales prospecting? Is it increasingly a case of leaving lead generation to the bots while sales professionals focus on strengthening relationships?
Or do we need a more flexible approach?
Do More Leads Equal Quality Leads?
So, now we get to the main question: is the quantity of leads better than the quality of leads? We’ll be honest, at Warmly, we’ve had our fair share of experiences with quantity over quality.
We once had 80 meetings, but most of the companies we talked to weren’t a good fit. There was no urgency or priority for them to solve the problem. You can imagine where that got us: it was like throwing a party and realizing that most of the guests were only there for the free food and didn't care about celebrating your cat’s birthday.
Spending ages talking to people who aren’t serious is wasted time. Not only does a higher quantity of leads reduce the time you can spend on each lead (you’ve got KPIs to hit! Not time to burn!), but it also reduces the chance of sufficient personalization for each lead.
Of course, this is where automation can be a help, not a hindrance—initiating conversations at the top and early middle of the sales funnel. However, according to HubSpot research, 75% of marketers believe that personalized experiences drive sales and repeat businesses.
As much as chatbots and other AI marketing automation tools are helpful for this stage of sales prospecting, they fail the personalization test. So, while they can be handy for getting those little fish onto your hook initially, automation isn’t something you want to use on a whale.
Nurturing Ideal Prospects, Not Every Prospect
Having 1,000+ qualified leads sounds like a great prospect until you realize you don’t have the manpower to reach out to every single person, let alone follow up.
We knew Warmly was guilty of prioritizing sales KPIs over nurturing specific prospects at times. So, we spoke to Brian Gerrard, sales director at Outreach, about his take on the quality vs. quantity debate.
His response? “Disqualify fast.”
There’s more to it than that, of course. His approach to outbound sales is a multi-step process of identifying ideal prospects.
- Identify the whale companies. Discard any others.
- Filter those prospects by those that fit your ICP.
- Research.
- Engage with low-level accounts at that company.
- Engage, engage, engage. Do research. Learn what they need.
- Then, target the executive decision-makers. Tell them how your solution fits their problem.
- Follow up.
Unfortunately, given the level of individual research required and the flexibility needed to engage effectively, this kind of sales prospecting isn’t something that you want to entirely rely on automation for.
So, your sales teams need to be more proactive. And to do that, they need the right data.
Harnessing the Power of Intent in Sales
This is where intent comes into play. Intent allows you to generate smarter leads, not more leads.
It’s like having a secret weapon that lets you know who’s genuinely interested in your cat's birthday and who’s just there for the free food (you want the people who care—not the gatecrashers.)
Intent data can be split into explicit and implicit. Explicit signals could be something like search queries, while implicit signals demonstrate intent less obviously, like a user spending time on your pricing page.
Using sales orchestration tools (like Warmly,) gives you the power to classify leads based on how ready and willing they are to buy at that moment.
This adds an additional dimension to your sales prospecting, where you can filter for your ICP and by how likely they are to buy, resulting in higher-quality leads. Then, refocus your AE’s efforts onto these qualifying leads.
Effective Sales Prospecting: Back to Manual
We know that there’s a place for automation in the sales pipeline, but when it comes to whale accounts that have shown intent, there’s no substitute for manual personalization.
In fact, when your AEs and SDRs aren’t tied to automation KPIs, you’ll give them much more freedom to innovate their sales strategy. In the end, sales is about instinct, not prescriptive tasks.
But what’s the secret behind implementing an efficient manual sales strategy?
Manual = more?
Brian Gerrard doesn’t disguise the fact that manual is his preferred way of selling. “Call me old,” he told us.
But it’s not just about a preference for legitimate interactions—there’s proof that manual prospecting works.
In one test, a personalized communication sales team was pitted against a 100% automated team. Naturally, the automated team contacted far more prospects, but that’s not the end of the story.
In fact, the team that conducted personalized sales outreach booked 60% more meetings than the automated team. Bespoke communication also resulted in a higher percentage of booked meetings.
Image Source: Outreach
The takeaway? Manual might take longer, but as long as you’re targeting the right prospects, the ROI is higher.
Take an example from Warmly. One of our AEs got a prospect’s attention on the 8th email of a 12-step sequence. But what if those eight emails were actually three manually-written emails? Would it have taken so long to get their attention?
Probably not.
“Warm prospecting never ends.”
Ultimately, the mantra is, ‘Warm prospecting never ends.’ With manual sales prospecting, you have to be in nurture mode for every lead, all the time.
The process starts with research, and that’s accomplished before you even get to stage one of the eight-stage refinement process outlined above. After that, you’re continually nurturing your prospect with every touchpoint.
Although ringing someone up or pinging them a DM on LinkedIn might sound like cold outreach, as long as you’ve done intent research beforehand, that customer is already warm—even if they’ve never spoken to you before.
Consequently, you can categorize every prospect as one of two things: either active or an opportunity.
An active lead is one where you’ve agreed on the next step with them. An opportunity lead, meanwhile, may not be ready to buy just yet, but you want to keep them within the sales cycle.
With opportunity leads, the hardest part isn’t converting them—they’ll do that in your own time, as your intent will tell you. The hardest part is making each and every interaction with them unique.
Step-by-Step Manual Sales Prospecting
Sure, manual prospecting takes time. But there’s no reason why your manual sales prospecting techniques can’t be as streamlined as your automation tools.
To do that, you need to identify the most effective sales prospecting tools and get more confident with turning off that auto-sequencing.
The Before Stage
Research, research, research
Everything starts with your target accounts—but identifying those can be one of the biggest challenges of sales and marketing today.
To evaluate accounts, refer to your ideal customer profile, competitor research, and those current customers with 100% net revenue retention (which we call retainable addressable market.)
Then, cross-reference these segments with potential leads to find those companies, decision-makers, and organizations that are really the best fit.
Create an account plan
If you’re letting an automated tool manage your outreach, then it might never have come to mind to create an account plan. However, your most valuable accounts deserve it.
Your plan doesn’t have to be long. Pick out the most vital information that you and your sales team need to know to prove that your solution is best. PR releases, LinkedIn posts, and recent webinars are some of the best places to find this information.
Match every piece of info you find with your target’s business objectives. If you’ve done your research right, you can usually identify one or two areas they’re evidently struggling with.
Find alignment in your sales deck
Now it’s time to bring all that information together in a powerful sales deck.
Naturally, your value proposition is crucial to your deck. But if you can’t explain where your solution fits into your prospect’s existing workflow, you may as well give up now.
As part of your sales deck, particularly for mid-funnel prospects, build a flow chart that explicitly outlines how you'll make their work easier.
Sometimes, you might not be able to build this kind of flow chart right away with the information that you have. Maybe it takes 1-2 calls with lower-end accounts to gather the information. But when you do have it, it makes your pitch significantly stronger.
Initiating Outreach with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
One of the most valuable tools for B2B salespeople is undoubtedly LinkedIn Sales Navigator. According to Brian Gerrard, this is the missing piece for many sales professionals.
LinkedIn reports that sellers using Sales Navigator create 15% more sales pipeline and 42% larger deal sizes.
It’s also a great tool when implementing manual sales processes into your prospecting.
Building account lists
Your first step with Sales Navigator is building the right account lists. To do this, identify a target company in Sales Navigator and pull out which functions you want to target at that company.
Ideally, you want to target decision-makers at the company in question, though perhaps you’ve identified managers as relevant B2B buyers for your market.
Once you’ve got a list of target accounts, you can create a custom list.
Image Source: Brian Gerrard
Effective nurturing
If you’ve done your research right—into buyer intent signals, product fit, and the correct target accounts—then it should be enough to get you in the door. This is exactly what we mean by ‘warm prospecting never ends’: with enough research, your cold prospect becomes a warm lead in the middle of the sales process.
And now that you’ve got your Sales Navigator list, it’s time to start the outreach.
Identifying outreach opportunities
There are 875 million members on LinkedIn, but just 16% of US members are daily active users (DAU). To streamline your outreach, you want to target just those accounts in your customer leads list that have recently posted on LinkedIn.
Within Sales Navigator, you’ll now have the option to open a recently posted update by any of your leads and interact with it. Or, go straight for a message.
Image Source: Brian Gerrard
To manage this manual outreach, create custom tasks for your SDRs or AEs in your CRM based on each prospect. The aim of this is to make each interaction with the lead personalized according to their recent updates—not an auto-sequence that might just be personalized to a set of accounts at each organization.
Long-term prospecting
When you’re aiming for high quality over high quantity, you’re naturally going to spend more time with each prospect. This allows you to really craft each touchpoint to be entirely personalized.
But say you know you need to follow up with a lead. How do you know which channel to use? Ultimately, in a personalized sales prospecting process, you’re going to have to tailor every single interaction based on what you know about that prospect and your relationship with them.
So, if someone hasn’t reached out in a while, don’t waste time with another unanswered email—go straight for a phone call.
If they’ve been pretty responsive in the past, maybe you go for another LinkedIn DM.
Or—remember that one-page flow chart we made? Now could be the time to reach out over email and remind your prospect that you exist and you’re here to solve their problem.
As Brian Gerrard notes, if that prospect is an MQL—they have the budget, and they have the intent—then hit them as much as you can, respectfully.
And when you hit them, do it with personalization. A multi-step email sequence generator isn’t clever enough (yet) to gather information during the sequence—for example, if your target company has started a new project. Only you can reach out with a “Hope it’s going well with [X]!”
High-Quality Leads + Effective Manual Outreach = Long-Term Success
In this era of changing B2B buyer behavior and the influx in social selling, you can’t expect a fully-automated sales prospecting plan to get results. Today, buyers want more independence in the decision-making process. Bluntly, they’re fed up with cold calls.
At the same time, there is a place for automation in your sales process. When you want to A/B test at the top of the funnel, hitting 100 people rather than 10 people in the same amount of time is preferable.
But when it comes to those bigger accounts—the ones you really want to be closing deals with—personalized interactions can easily make a difference.
Combine high-quality visitor and intent data with a targeted and personalized sales strategy, and you’ve got yourself a strategy that will optimize your entire sales prospecting process.
How Warmly Can Help You Identify The Right Sales Prospects
While quantity has its place in sales, it’s the quality that truly matters. So, a successful sales prospecting process depends on finding the right balance—knowing when to focus on quantity and when to shift the focus to quality.
Unfortunately, high-quality leads are only as good as the data you’re collecting. If you can’t get accurate data, the chance of converting leads is slim.
Using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly can help consolidate your sales process. Find the right accounts (with intent) more quickly, and get notifications when a human AE needs to be looped into the sales process for personalization.
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