Have you ever thought of expanding to new markets? What about the US, hmm? Plenty of opportunities, various niches, endless demand for high potentials and future leaders. Alongside the strong competition, new markets also provide motivation for companies to push development, move forward, and strive for excellence.
Wait, are you still hesitating because you haven’t hired a local sales rep? You may want to use AI solutions for recruitment to get a good grasp of applicants.
Today, due to digital technologies and tech advances resulting from the pandemic, businesses that provide online services in the B2B market can, also via virtual telephony, sell online, from any place, and at any time, like never before.
As a result, entering new markets has gotten significantly easier because now you don’t need a local “agent” to operate, prospect, and communicate with leads face-to-face on your behalf.
So, how do you enter the US market (like Fresha did) without a physical presence?
Psst… Sales outreach is what you need!
Excuse me? What is sales outreach?
Sales outreach is…your lucky ticket. Okay-okay, let’s get serious (actually, we are). One can define outreach as an outbound sales method that implies contacting and engaging prospects, primarily via cold emails and messages.
That’s why it’s the perfect tool to use for expanding to foreign markets: you’ll be establishing contact with your leads, communicating with them, and closing deals remotely.
Sounds nice. But…convince me to go for it.
You’re funny! Do we really need to convince you to use the most effective and cheap tool that makes it easy to expand to new markets and boost B2B sales remotely? Challenge accepted.
1. A low-cost tool
Running outreach campaigns is much cheaper than attracting new leads via paid ad channels (РРС, SEO, PR, etc.). All you need to pay for is a couple of services to automate your campaigns.
2. Accessible to everyone
You don’t need to be a qualified pro to set up an outreach campaign or write an email. You don’t need any advanced and sophisticated software either.
3. It brings you qualified leads
Before starting the campaign, you collect the leads to reach out to. Basically, you choose the prospects that you’re going to sell to. As for the inbound leads, it’s always a black box: you never know whether they’re highly targeted or not.
4. Again, it helps to enter new markets without a physical presence
Outreach is the most effective way of getting new clients remotely. You communicate with your leads via email or LinkedIn. No matter if you’re in Malaysia, Germany, or Finland, you can easily reach out to your American leads.
These are only a few advantages; however, that’s enough to understand that sales outreach is exactly what you need.
Thus, there’s no need to hire an American sales rep because you and your team can build a successful outreach campaign and conquer the US market entirely remotely. All you need is a couple of tools, creativity, and… a few of the tips listed below.
Step #1 Arm yourself with a solid toolkit
It’s all about technologies and automation! Make sure you have all sales and marketing tools necessary to build and run a successful outreach campaign and prevent wasting your time. These are the basic tools you need to enter the US market.
- CRM to manage your customers’ data. The market is filled with options. For example, you can try out Salesforce, Agile CRM, or Zoho CRM.
- Lead finder software (ex. Signum.ai LeadMachine, LinkedIn Sales Navigator)
- LinkedIn outreach automation tools (ProspectIn, DuxSoup)
- Tools to automate outreach campaigns
– to automate your B2B email marketing campaigns (Lemlist, GMass)
– to verify emails (Snov.io)
– to warm up your emails (MailWarm, Email Warmup by Lemlist
– how to find someone’s email address (Icy Leads) - Grammarly – we’re talking about the US market, so all of your communication in English should be flawless. This absolutely doesn’t mean you have to be a native speaker – just check the text and fix all typos and mistakes before sending the message or email. It can make all the difference between a prospect perceiving your email as a scam vs. replying with interest. Grammarly can help you with that.
Step #2 Find out who your customer is
Define your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Who is your target customer and who will you be sending emails and messages to? This is the first question to answer when building an outreach campaign. Define an ideal customer profile (ICP): describe your B2B customer in the tiniest detail. Pay attention to the industry, niche, company size, the number of employees, annual revenue, tech stack, and other info. Segment your target audience carefully: it will help to understand their needs and pains and create the right offer.
Use lead generation tools to find leads matching your ICP and collect as much data on them as possible.
Find decision makers
Even though it’s the B2B market, you’ll be reaching out to a person – a decision-maker. Investigate the company’s structure and identify those who will be responsible for making decisions related to purchasing your product or services. Who are they? What are they interested in? Analyze your previous deals and research the decision-makers’ accounts on LinkedIn and social networks to be better prepared.
Step #3 Create the right offer
Your offering should be relevant, catchy, and creative.
Relevancy
Your aim is to send emails and messages at the moment your leads need you the most. It’s all about real-time sales: you have to keep a close eye on your leads and track sales triggers – the events signalizing that a lead is highly likely to purchase your product or services if you target them right now. Monitor and analyze your website statistics and use tools to gather third-party data to catch the right moment and find the reason to initiate a dialog.
For example, we at Signum.ai use AI to identify such triggers as an open vacancy, funding raised, a comment on social media posts, etc. Then, we tailor our offer to this trigger and make our email or message timely and relevant.
Personalization
Since customers expect attention and an individual approach, you have to personalize your offering. Use variables — unique pieces of text, titles, company name, web resources, position, social media, etc. that will change depending on the lead and email.
Creativity
Make your emails and messages friendly, vivid, and catchy. Choose the right tone, use jokes, add a photo or a video… Be creative and develop non-trivial, authentic texts from your voice that your customers will want to read and reply to.
Step #4 Start a campaign
To achieve success at outreach, you have to run both LinkedIn and email campaigns. First, on LinkedIn. Then, via email. In this order only, not the other way around!
LinkedIn is a great platform to initiate a conversation with leads: you visit a profile you’re interested in and send a connection request. Face-to-face interactions follow a similar logic. Also, everyone sees that you’re not a bot or a spammer. Finally, it’s much more pleasant to text with a real person with a real face. That’s why it’s better to start with LinkedIn.
As for the email, it’s useful to get through to those who haven’t replied to LinkedIn messages. It’s kind of a second chance for you and another opportunity to investigate the offering for your leads.
Here is a brief description of what you have to do:
1. Upload your contacts database (including the list of LinkedIn profiles) to ProspectIn or any other platform and visit LinkedIn profiles (there is a special feature that allows you to do it automatically). This step is needed to mimic the natural way of establishing contact and drawing the lead’s attention to your profile.
2. Use Email Warmup by Lemlist or other services to get your inbox ready for email outreach. This step is super important to show your email provider that you’re not a robot.
3. Start a campaign on LinkedIn via ProspectIn (or the tool of your choice). Set the scenario that you prefer the most, and let the emails and follow-ups work in the background while you focus on other tasks.
4. Run the email outreach campaign via Lemlist to get through to those who didn’t react to your LinkedIn messages.
To sum up
You don’t need to hire an American salesperson to enter the US market. Neither should you necessarily be a native speaker.
All you need to do is to build an efficient sales outreach strategy: define ICP, generate hyper-targeted leads, identify decision makers, create catchy, personalized, and relevant offers, and run an outreach campaign using specific automation tools.
Why not start right now?
Good luck!
Author: Kseniia Burko, a Senior Copywriter & Editor at Signum.ai |
Signum.ai is a US-based company that develops AI-powered lead generation solutions for companies that strive to get hyper-targeted leads, take full advantage of real-time sales, and multiply revenue. Signum.ai experts also provide consultation services on sales outreach and help businesses boost their sales with a small budget.