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How to Create Better Sales Emails: Will Allred, Lavender
112 Plays2 years ago
Most emails from salespeople are terrible.
They're impersonal, irrelevant, and ineffective.
They often don't reflect a prospect's interests or needs.
Lavender wants to change that with AI-powered technology that lets salespeopole write better emails.
On this episode of Marketing Spark, Lavender co-founder Will Allred talks about why salespeople struggle with email and how they can be more successful.
We also explore the new sales landscape and the adjustments that salespeople needed to make during COVID when they couldn't meet with prospects of attend conferences.
And we talk about Lavender's use of LinkedIn and TikTok to connect with customers.
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Transcript
Challenges in Sales Outreach
00:00:06
Speaker
Most sales outreach emails are terrible. They're often impersonal and reek of desperation. There's little or no research. It feels like a high volume based activity. If you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, you hope that some of it will stick. Well, frankly, there has to be a better one. Salespeople need to take a new and different approach to outreach, an email that is more personal and relevant.
Introducing Will Allred and Lavender
00:00:33
Speaker
To better understand the sales outreach world, I'm excited to talk to Will Allred, founder of Lavender. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Hey, it's great to be here. I appreciate that. Why don't we start with the story of Lavender? Like many startups, it's a love child, which emerged from a company called Sorter in Atlanta.
00:00:53
Speaker
Who is Sorter? What was the pain that you were experiencing and what led to the decision to start Lavender? I can get some quick
Lavender's Origins and Evolution
00:01:01
Speaker
backgrounds. Lavender is a Chrome extension that helps sellers at every stage of the writing process write a better email faster. Now how we got there is sort of the interesting woven path of
00:01:17
Speaker
Interesting moments, I would say. At the time, this was 2018. I was working in a consulting firm in Atlanta, a marketing firm. I went to Acathon in Atlanta, where I met my now co-founder, William Balance, who's the CEO at Lavender. He pitched this idea of
00:01:38
Speaker
Why don't we take people's digital footprints and use that to create smarter segmentations within our marketing campaigns?
00:01:48
Speaker
Can we segment a marketing list by more than demographics or behaviors and actually try to get an understanding of why people are doing what they do so that we can be smarter about what we create and put in front of them. Really, we could personalize that entire digital experience to so much more in such a better way. There's so much great research around how people think and preference towards content imagery, et cetera. I was immediately drawn to the idea.
00:02:17
Speaker
I had been working on running campaigns for brands. And so I saw the pain of I have this superficial idea of quote, you have an idea of this like individual in a box, but you don't really see how they see. You don't know if they're introverted. You don't know if they're open to new experiences. We built that out for about two years, working with brands like Yamaha, Gravity Blankets.
00:02:43
Speaker
really helping them think smarter about how they went to market.
Pandemic Pivot and Traction
00:02:47
Speaker
One of the things that came across along the way is you're in this marketing seat to keep with the persona. We're a 22 year old paid media analyst and your job is to put these ads together. You don't know the personality science. You don't know how to do those things. We built tech that's now pretty much underlying lavender that would help you analyze the content to make sure it's going to the right
00:03:12
Speaker
prospect. Now, fast forward a little further. It's March of 2020. This whole thing happened. And all of a sudden, we start getting phone calls from all of our leads, all of our customers, basically being like, hey, we're cutting marketing budget, we're shutting this thing down.
00:03:30
Speaker
We have like a couple months of runway and we have no customers. So that's not good. What are we going to do? We didn't really know how this thing was going to weather out. We didn't know what the next trend was going to be. We were up in New York altogether at the time and Will, my co-founder.
00:03:49
Speaker
I was scrolling through TechCrunch, came across an article on LinkedIn shutting down support for Sales Navigator within Gmail, part of the Microsoft acquisition. And we were like, we've got the data connections. This could be an easy thing that we bring to the surface for people. And we could probably make some cash to hold the business over. Well, we decided to strap the content analytics in the back to give you a sense for how your email was written and how it was going to come across.
00:04:17
Speaker
a la Lavender. We started showcasing that to some folks around late May of 2020. Got some really positive feedback, stuff that we had never heard before with our prior product. We were able to start iterating on it. Over the course of that summer, we worked with some investors and advisors to start testing different markets that we could go after with this product. One of the first ones was recruiters, job seekers,
00:04:44
Speaker
customer success. We tried several different avenues and we kind of knew sales was an obvious, but we wanted to make sure.
Improving Email Engagement
00:04:52
Speaker
It wasn't until late July, I want to say, of 2020 when Nick Bennett, I can't remember if he's still over at Alice, but he posted on LinkedIn about Lavender and all of a sudden we just saw our install take off. I mean, relative take off, right?
00:05:11
Speaker
We're like, what's going on? We all of a sudden had this realization. Salespeople love it. Salespeople love to talk about it. They love to use it. Let's lean into this. We started building what we refer to as the most helpful sales email assistant on the planet. Couple questions. One is why do you think it resonated with salespeople in particular?
00:05:34
Speaker
What were they doing wrong? What was frustrating them about using email, which is obviously was and so was a very, very powerful tool for sales. There's several trends going on that had that impact. One I would talk to is the market as a whole. So you have everybody going remote. Everyone is away from people within the office. I remember when I was at the consulting firm, I would look over my shoulder and be like, Hey, do you mind giving this email look?
00:06:03
Speaker
We no longer had that like easy in-person frictionless feedback. The other one is you have a time in which the amount of emails going out the door more than doubled.
00:06:18
Speaker
You had a lot of outbound going into people's inboxes. And as a result, the amount of response that people were getting almost got cut in half as some data that HubSpot put out. What sellers used to be able to rely on was the volume knob. They could crank the volume knob and it would just be okay. That security blanket disappeared pretty much overnight.
00:06:41
Speaker
where all of a sudden we overwhelmed our readers within the inbox and they weren't able to triage through all of that inbound. People stopped seeing as many replies. That would be number two. And then the third is really, if you think about it, how we're taught to write in school. We're not taught to write in a business email tone. No one ever says, this is the way to write an email. When you think about this important note they have to put together,
00:07:09
Speaker
You actually end up thinking about it in the wrong way because of the way you were taught to write is not the way that you should be writing in this particular instance. It's not formal. It's not comprehensive. It's in fact the opposite. Your goal should be to build curiosity and leave questions unanswered and speak as though they're a friend you haven't met yet. You've got remote, the overall volume of emails going out the door.
00:07:37
Speaker
And how we're actually taught to write those three things had a huge impact on how sellers really felt about our product. The fourth trend that was really impactful for us as we got started was sellers flock to LinkedIn to share their experiences and talk about what they were doing. We happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right product, where we just recognized pretty quick, Hey, people are talking about us on LinkedIn and we should lean into that.
00:08:08
Speaker
I was listening to a podcast, the pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. And one of the things that they mentioned was that people are spending less time in front of screens, which is a good thing. Got to get out there, got to socialize, got to see people go to concerts.
00:08:23
Speaker
go back to work in person. Scott called it being untrapped. It does spark the question about what do you think the impact is on lavender now that people can go to conferences, they can meet people for coffee and salespeople, they're busting out. They want to get out there. Salesperson does not want to be stuck in front of their computer all the time. Have you thought about what the impact might be and what's your plan to adjust to the new reality? There's two things that we looked at when that was going
00:08:52
Speaker
You know, when things were getting back to being in person, which was, let's see what happens. Having faith in the fact that our data science behind the scenes is going to track analyze for this and help us continue to provide valuable recommendations for sellers to couple of the things within our own product and design of product account for this. So one.
00:09:15
Speaker
We're the only platform on the internet that provides a mobile preview for sellers when they're putting together an email. You talk about being unplugged. Your email is eight times more likely to be read initially on a phone. That's your first impression. And we're actively tracking and monitoring
Digitalization and Sales Dynamics
00:09:31
Speaker
for that. We're putting that right in front of your face and showing it to you and being like, here, you can edit right here within this phone view and make it look exactly like you'd want it to look on their screen. The other thing that was.
00:09:42
Speaker
unexpected we didn't really think about is when you're in your inbox at the office, we have a nice little purple icon that sits in your compose window. And that's sort of like your hub for using the product. Well, we actually saw growth take off in January. And it's because people in the office would see their colleague using the tool and they'd be like, Oh, I love it. It's my personal assistant for writing emails.
00:10:08
Speaker
Let's talk about the sales landscape, which has dramatically changed over the past two years as sales becomes more digital and less in person. And my take is that conferences will come back. Maybe companies will approach them more strategically. It may not be a, maybe a quality game versus quantity. How do you guys see the sales landscape? How is it different and how do you think?
00:10:36
Speaker
it will dramatically stay different going forward. Well, I think we've normalized much more now to having sales teams being remote. I would say that's probably a major shift as far as the makeup of a sales team and where they are. I'm just excited that we get to lean into new experiences and give off advice and think through new challenges because you talk about going to a conference. Well,
00:11:04
Speaker
Now we've got to account for the fact that post conference follow-up emails are probably a category of email that we should either be creating content around or thinking about within our own product experience. In terms of how salespeople are operating these days, what do you think it's like to be doing sales? What are the new rules of engagement? Because obviously they're leaning into email just as they always have, but they're trying to take a smarter,
00:11:30
Speaker
more personalized, more relevant approach, given the fact that our inboxes are overflowing. Marketing automation is the Pandora's box. Once you let it out, it got in my wild. What do you think it's like to be a salesperson these days from the lavender perspective? It's, it's interesting cause I talk to a lot of sellers on daily. And I think one of the things that stands out is, you know, we have this idea in our head of the lazy sales rep who's just pushing automated messages.
00:11:59
Speaker
And when you actually look at the conversations we're having, people are, they want to do better. They want to not have poor results. The reason you see the conversation feel so automated, et cetera, is because one, you can automate and send a lot of emails. And that doesn't necessarily have to come from the majority of people to create the majority of email to the.
00:12:27
Speaker
The other piece to that is negative experience with an email is going to stick with you a whole lot more than in a different positive one, right? Most positive email experiences are fairly indifferent. Yeah. Every now and then you're like, wow, that was a great email. It's not like all the time, right? I think the goal for email should be it didn't upset them. Not necessarily that they're like, wow, that was amazing. Right? That comes with its own.
00:12:52
Speaker
slew of conversations, but I think when I talk to sellers, they're trying to get better. They're trying to figure out, okay, I know personalized emails get two times the amount of responses their automated peers. How do I do that? How do I think about that? What should I be putting down on paper? One of the interesting challenges with sales is most of these people move in from SDR to AE or to manager and they move out of the role.
00:13:16
Speaker
that skill doesn't get to continue to hone. It's just the organizations that train it back down. It's a tough time to be an SDR, but at the same time, there's never been a better time to lean into community. There's never been a better time to lean into technology tools to enable you to get better. Before we talk about Lavender and its approach to marketing, one last question about sales and just your thoughts about where do most salespeople go wrong digitally?
00:13:44
Speaker
Digital is so important these days in person meetings, but where do they stumble and undermine themselves? What are the biggest bugaboos that they run into? The biggest thing when it comes to sellers is getting out of your own head, getting out of your own shoes and putting yourself in the buyer's shoes. I see this over and over again when they're putting together an email and the mindset is, well, I need to add this piece of information about me. I need to tell them what I can do for them.
00:14:12
Speaker
They need to understand, they need to add that clarification. And in reality, this person on the other end is putting out fires, not thinking about you at all, and honestly doesn't really care about you at all. What they care about are those quote fires that I'm referencing. It's that shift of mindset of, let me try to convert them.
00:14:34
Speaker
to, let me try to converse with them about their problems. That is the biggest piece of feedback that I could give sellers is just like, stop talking about yourself.
Strategic Marketing on LinkedIn
00:14:44
Speaker
We could talk about the data, shorten emails, simplify them down, make them mobile optimized, lean into tentative tones. But if you're not talking to them about them, you're not necessarily going to find the optimal result. What people really care about is that you show up.
00:15:04
Speaker
You provide an understanding of their current scenario and you try to genuinely engage them about what's going on at their day-to-day job. I often say that customers are selfish as they have no interest in you. They're only interested in themselves and what you can do for them. But if you're not talking about their issues and their aspirations, then you're really running up a hill.
00:15:31
Speaker
Like a lot of companies with really cool technology, Lavender comes out, you've got a product, and I would love to get into the strategic approach to marketing. Did you have a plan of attack where you just mostly focused on product and getting a little bit of traction and then something happened like a Nick Bennett, who's an influencer on LinkedIn, or
00:15:52
Speaker
Did you have a roadmap that said, we're going to use this channel and this channel and we're going to see if we can leverage them as well as we can? I am a huge proponent of this book, Traction. And one of the things that it emphasizes over and over and over again is the idea of power laws.
00:16:13
Speaker
You've got a power law distribution. That means basically 80% of your results will come from 20% of your actions. And so as you set up test experiments, it's okay, this week we're going to try these three channels. And we're just going to go all out on them, see if we get any traction there and let's see what happens. We've tried things. We've gone reached out to news publications. We've gone and we've tried email marketing. We've tried.
00:16:40
Speaker
retargeting ads, we've tried all these different things. And when you see something like Nick Bennett posting on LinkedIn and seeing that engagement happen real time. So, okay, that's the next experiment. Let's go all in on that. And you think about it. Most of our results are directly tied to LinkedIn right now. And so now we're starting to diversify out from that into other channels. But that's still at the core of the strategy.
00:17:09
Speaker
Let's take a step back, got this product and like many storms, we got to get the word out. We got to market this thing. What was step one for lavender? Step one for lavender is thought about from the end users perspective, the person scrolling on LinkedIn and trying to do their day job while sitting at home for the fifth month in a row. And it's what are they here for? What could we do that would be helpful? And.
00:17:39
Speaker
helpful is really the word that kind of describes it all. Cause it's just lean into being useful generator of content, ideas, et cetera. Cause we, we'd seen other brands do this and have success. Gong's notorious for putting out those reports on, you know, what to say and what not to say in a call and all of this, that and the other. And so we've got that data too. Why don't we lean into that?
00:18:00
Speaker
Why don't we do it because we're a team of four people? Why don't we do it with a personal flair of, you know, we're literally trying to assist you in writing that email. The question I wanted to ask you a lot of B2B brands, B2B SaaS brands look at LinkedIn and they recognize that this is where a lot of the action is happening right now. A lot of the influencers and some decision makers are spending a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to identify new possibilities and opportunities.
00:18:27
Speaker
But there are two ways to play the game. There's personal and there's company.
00:18:32
Speaker
What's the lavender approach? Because you have a big presence on LinkedIn, a big personal presence. You've built a personal brand, but at the same time, a lot of companies don't do a lot with their company pages. It's almost like they go through the motions with the company page. The exceptions are companies like Gong and Lemonade. What's been the lavender approach? Is it a bit of a balancing act? And what's the difference between what you do on your personal profile for what you do on the company page? For the longest time, we ignored the company page as part of our strategy.
00:19:01
Speaker
We leaned into where the algorithm sat and we said, okay, LinkedIn doesn't care about company pages. They care about personal brands. We just leaned into it. Now as a byproduct, people started following the company. I think we're over some 6,500 company followers at this point. Now we've started to play around with putting some content out and really making it personal. We're not trying to make it feel like a corporation is publishing a PR report. It's cheeky stuff like, Hey, take the commas out of your writing.
00:19:32
Speaker
If I was talking to another brand about how to approach that, it would be... It's actually funny you ask this, because I literally just got a text from a friend who works at another company, and they're trying to get into LinkedIn. It's a much bigger company than a, quote, baby brand. He was asking me about LinkedIn groups, and I was like, that is a forgotten feature. If I had to give advice to another brand, it's one, it's gonna take some time and effort. There was a wonderful paper that compared
00:19:59
Speaker
social networks and blockchains. And if you think about it, if you're early to Twitter, if you're early to LinkedIn, if you're early to TikTok, it's a lot easier to gain social currency.
00:20:16
Speaker
and like early days of Bitcoin. It was a lot cheaper to mine Bitcoin and gain capital.
Exploring TikTok for Marketing
00:20:22
Speaker
Now that the noise has gotten more populated, it's harder to gain that traction. And so what are the tips that I have when it comes to that? Lean into the fact that other folks have that capital. Use the comment section. Crazy concept that no one seems to understand. I'll just post. By posting, I'll see my engagement rise. Well,
00:20:45
Speaker
Anytime I see my engagement fall, I know that I need to go out and start commenting some more, and then I see it go back up. It's pretty simple.
00:20:55
Speaker
The other platform that I wanted to ask you about, and this came out of a conversation I had with Will Aiken from Salesloft, is the use of TikTok. When I asked him whether there were anybody else out there who was B2B SaaS people who were using TikTok, he mentioned a handful of people, including yourself. What has been your TikTok journey? Were you originally using it for fun like everybody else and watching your dance videos, or did you see it as a,
00:21:26
Speaker
viable marketing channel. And what did you learn so far from using TikTok? So a couple of things. One, I cannot claim to have used TikTok before using it for work. It was really one of those things where I dragged my feet on it for probably too long. The reason I started with TikTok was pretty simple. And it was, I was looking at my feed on LinkedIn and I was seeing what stood out to me.
00:21:53
Speaker
And Will Aiken over at Salesfeed stood out above and beyond because he's putting together creative, fun videos. Nick Capozzi, for example, over at Demostech, he's putting together these wonderfully engaging videos. Nick Capozzi, for example, his following's not massive, but his engagement rate's insane. You talk to anyone who knows Nick Capozzi. I love Nick. And part of the, the lasting power of video is it's actually memorable. It sticks with you. When I was thinking about TikTok.
00:22:22
Speaker
Actually worked with the both of those pretty closely, getting advice from them on how they're doing video, how they're thinking about it. And I was like, okay, let's start doing the same thing that we did with LinkedIn. Post helpful content, be of service to those that we're trying to serve. With that, we've seen some pretty good engagement.
00:22:41
Speaker
Can't say I've figured out TikTok by any stretch. I think the only thing that we figured out is subject line content does well there, but I more prefer it for posting it to other platforms, posting it to LinkedIn, for example, where I go to one of our advisors, Morgan Ingram has a event in Atlanta, more social than SaaS. And I show up there and somebody walks up and says, Hey, I've seen your TikToks before. Cool.
00:23:08
Speaker
That's surprising. You think about what that does for a brand as it makes one, a bit more personable and approachable, but two, it brings a little bit further recognition beyond just your little profile picture. Pre-TikTok, I'd be terrified to change my profile picture because how are you going to recognize me within your feet other than my name? I do find TikTok interesting. I'm on TikTok, I'm making some very
00:23:35
Speaker
bad videos right now, but I'm experimenting. You know, I'm getting in there and seeing what works and what doesn't and this have to over time improve. The one thing I sense from a B2B SaaS marketing perspective is a lot of marketers are looking at LinkedIn and sensing that there's, I don't know if there's LinkedIn fatigue or maybe it's the shiny object syndrome is that there's a tendency to look beyond and TikTok seems to be that new shiny toy that we want to play with.
00:24:06
Speaker
It's a little different. And I think what it comes back to is TikTok is easier to gain traction on with less work. Whereas companies when they think about something like LinkedIn, now the game is more similar to an SEO strategy where it's just something you need to be consistent with.
Contacting Lavender and Product Insights
00:24:25
Speaker
Otherwise you won't see the results. This has been a great conversation. Final question would be, where can people learn about you and Lavender?
00:24:34
Speaker
If they're looking to connect with me, I always push them to my LinkedIn. They can always email me as will.alred at trilavender.com. Outside of that, those would be the two places that I would tell them to go. You can go to the website lavender.com. And one final question about lavender pricing, how people use it. You said it's a Chrome extension, provide a mechanics before we sign off. Anyone can go in and install the product for free.
00:25:01
Speaker
There's a free tier, but it comes with a free trial as well. So you can try out all the premium aspects of the product. There's three tiers to the product. You could be on a team plan of one or a million, and that includes all of our integrations. It provides like.
00:25:20
Speaker
access to beta functionality, things like our lavender anywhere tool, where you can use it anywhere across the web, or you've got our pro plan, just an unlimited access to our tool sets and features doesn't come with all the integrations. And then our free tier, which doesn't have things like.
00:25:35
Speaker
mobile preview. You don't get as many profile lookups per month when you're trying to personalize an email to somebody. Well, thanks, Will. And thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help baby SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn.