I originally set out this week to put my learnings about email sequences into practice and build out an email sequence for a company.

But after doing some research about how the best outbound sales reps succeed I realized that the email sequence is only a small portion of the battle. So, instead of only an email sequence, I devised a complete outbound strategy.

I chose to create this strategy for an SMS marketing software called Postscript. This is my learn-out-loud process for building this outbound strategy.

Step 1: Reach out to other people in the organization

So, before I reach out to the decision-maker, I would first want to set the stage by reaching out to more entry-level people in the organization first.

I would be very strategic about this process.

Find out who the decision maker

• Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I would take an educated guess on who would be the decision-maker in the company.

Create a list of others in the organization

• I would create a list of people who work in marketing and actively use LinkedIn but aren't as senior.

Connect and interact

• Attempt to connect with these people (both the decision-maker and the others) on LinkedIn and interact with their content as much as possible.
  • This will make it more likely that they will recognize my name and be more intrigued to answer when I reach out.
  • When the time comes, if the decision-maker sees that I am interacting with the people in their company, they are more likely to respond. (Bonus points if I can use their posts to make my email more personalized to them.)

Send them an email like this

• I predict that individual contributors are more likely to respond to their emails. I would reach out to them first.

Three key tactics I used:

• Personalized it by congratulating her on her accomplishment.
• Instead of just saying, "who should I speak with about this," I went I found the person I thought it might be. This shows that I am serious about this reach-out attempt, and I did my research.
• I appealed to her credibility, by saying "as the product marketing manager." This is a lot better than simply asking, "do you have any information that could help."

Step 2: Reach out to the decision-maker