Guest Author: Josh Blank
Josh previously led top-performing SDR teams at Celonis and is now a co-founder at Otto. Otto seeks to improve cold outreach by providing the most advanced and effective email generation and personalization on the market. Otto pulls data from the web to personalize cold emails at scale and book more meetings.
The How and Why of Account Research
Researching accounts as an SDR is a vitally important part of the role, however, there are several traps SDRs often fall into when doing account research. When done incorrectly, account research can lead to analysis paralysis, and ultimately hurt your chances of maxing out your quota. When executed correctly, account research improves messaging, makes your outreach more relevant, and improves the likelihood of a response. This then improves conversation rates and can help you book more calls with less effort. The key is to do just enough research to increase your chances of conversion, without spending your day aimlessly combing through unimportant facts.
This guide will help outline some of the strategies you can use to make research an asset, and not a liability.
1. Understand the information you need
The first step when researching accounts is to understand the type of information you can use to your advantage. This will help you stay on task and prevent you from wasting time. While the type of information that’s most relevant to you will vary based on industry, market, and segment, it’s important to understand the type of information your prospects will care about.
If you’re selling technology that helps enterprise companies cut costs, you’ll probably want to head straight to a source to find the company’s financials. Conversely, if you’re selling marketing software to middle-market companies and start-ups, you’ll want to look for recent funding announcements, press releases, or testimonials. The better you become at defining the information you need, the more effectively you’ll be able to find the information your prospects care about.
2. Do the Research
Once you’ve defined the type of information that is most likely to help improve your conversion rates, it’s time to start conducting the research. Where you find the best research will vary across industry, vertical, and market. Below is a list of sources for you to begin your research.
- Craft.co
- Investor slides
- Techcrunch
- Press releases
- Company Linkedin pages
- G2 and other review sites
- Financial Documents
- Career Pages
- Owler
- Interviews with employees
- Company blog posts
The key to successful research is to find the information most likely to elicit a positive response and then move on. In the beginning, this may prove to be more difficult. Your focus should be on training your eyes and brain to find the information most relevant to your prospects. Look for information that directly affects the role of the person you’re reaching out to. ONce you’ve found the information you need to improve your messaging, it’s time to use that information in your outreach.
3. Use the information
The purpose of conducting account research is to improve your messaging, targeting, and conversion rates. The most difficult part of that process is actually using the research to drive the outcome you wish to achieve. Luckily, using account research can become a repeatable part of your outreach process. It’s important not to overthink what you’re going to say by only using the research that you need. Below are examples of account research that can be effectively leveraged.
Cold Call Example
“Hey Jim, This is {{your name}} at {{company}}. The reason I’m reaching out is that I noticed {{relevant piece of information}} while taking a look at {{their company}}.”
Example: “Hey Jim, This is Josh with Otto. I was reading your blog post about email being the toughest channel for salespeople to master and wanted to reach out.”
This first line of this cold call hooks the prospect by demonstrating that you’ve done the research on their company and understand the potential challenges the company is facing. At the least, you’ve done enough to stand out from the other cold calls that prospects will receive that week.
The next step in this process is to give your elevator pitch and then specify how your product can fix that problem.
“Our company {{elevator pitch}}. For those who are focused on {{improvement based on research}} our technology allows you to {{result and how your solution will fix that specific problem}}.”
Example: “Otto uses data to understand which sales template would be most effective for a prospect and then uses information on the web to personalize that email giving it the greatest chance of success. This is the technology that can help your team crack outbound prospecting over email as you mentioned in your blog post”
The key here is demonstrating how the product will directly drive the results that the prospect cares about. If the prospect understands that you understand how this will impact their business directly, it automatically gives you credibility. That credibility is often the difference between booking the call and not.
Cold Email Example
The strategy for leveraging research in an email is similar to that in a cold call. And the pitfalls are the same, if not more pronounced, because you have more time to overthink your messaging. Below is an example of how your account research can be used in a cold email.
Hey {{first Name}}
Noticed that {{critical piece of information from your research}} and wanted to reach out.
Example: “Hey Sarah – Noticed that Otto was hiring developers online to help augment your in-house development team and wanted to reach out quickly.”
Again, in this example, we’re using the first line of this email to stand out and hook the reader.
And the next line is similar as well.
{{elevator pitch}}. For companies who are focused on {{improvement based on research}}, we allow you to {{result and how your solution will fix that specific problem}}.
Example: Otto uses data to understand which sales template would be most effective for a prospect and then uses information on the web to personalize that email giving it the greatest chance of success. For companies who are focused on scaling after being robbed by a rogue group of criminals, we allow you to generate more revenue while keeping costs low by automating the process of generating effective cold emails.
The second line directly relays to the prospect, how our product is going to solve their problem. The prospect needs to know what you do but more importantly what they get.
The strategy for leveraging research in an email is similar to that in a cold call. And the pitfalls are the same if not more pronounced because you have more time to overthink your messaging. Below is an example of how your account research can be used in a cold email.
Hey {{first Name}}
Noticed that {{critical piece of information from your research}} and wanted to reach out.
Example: “Hey Sarah – Noticed that Otto was hiring developers online to help augment your in-house development team and wanted to reach out quickly.”
Again, in this example, we’re using the first line of this email to stand out and hook the reader.
And the next line is similar as well.
{{elevator pitch}}. For companies who are focused on {{improvement based on research}}, we allow you to {{result and how your solution will fix that specific problem}}.
Example: “Otto uses data to understand which sales template would be most effective for a prospect and then uses information on the web to personalize that email giving it the greatest chance of success. For companies who are focused on scaling after being robbed by a rogue group of criminals, we allow you to generate more revenue while keeping costs low by automating the process of generating effective cold emails.”
The second line directly relays to the prospect, how our product is going to solve their problem. The prospect needs to know what you do but more importantly what they get.
Conclusion
The templates for the cold email and cold call are very similar with one important difference. The email template needs to be as succinct as possible. While you have the attention of the prospect on the phone, half the job of writing a cold email is to even get it opened. Keeping the email in this format and focusing on the length is vital to ensuring the research you’ve done is utilized effectively.
Done correctly, account research can make your life easier by increasing conversion rates and improving the overall experience for your prospects. The key is to become efficient at finding and leveraging that information while avoiding over researching and wasting time. If you’re able to do those two things, the numbers will be stacked in your favor.
If you spend too much time researching, you won’t make enough calls or send enough emails to hit your number.
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