Lets Build an Account-Based Cadence – with Will All

Speaker

Will Allred is the Co-Founder and COO of Lavender, assisting sales teams write better emails, faster. Lavender is an AI email assistant that researches your prospect, confirms their email is valid, and checks if your email will land in spam. Will Allred is a UNC graduate, successful entrepreneur, and was recognized by Linkedin as a Top Sales Voice in 2021.

Quotes

“A good way to think about account based cadence is you’re running two playbooks at the same time and they feed into one another…. Each persona has its own hierarchy and waterfall, but then at the same time I’m going below the line and reaching out to individual contributors to generate information that I can bring up to the top of the waterfall.” 

Key Points

• How to successfully ‘break the ice’ with cold emails.  
• How to find success with follow up.  
• ‘Dumbing down’ your emails helps boost your reply rates by up to 50%.  
• We should reach out to prospects via email in an informal way – similar to text – to open the door for comfortable communication.  

Transcript

Demand Gen Summit – how are you? I am Will Allred and I’m thrilled to be talking to you all today about Account-Based Cadences. Now, I give a lot of advice when it comes to cold email. If you’ve followed me online, you’ve probably heard me talk about a cold email or two. Yeah, I’ve done thousands of coaching sessions, but the thing that drives me absolutely bonkers is the way that people follow up to their cold emails.

If we look at the reply rate stats, we know we’re going to have to follow up to our cold emails. And so as much as these accolades are wonderful, the thing that I want to talk about and focus on today is making sure that you follow up in a thoughtful, insightful way. And one of the key things that I’m seeing teams doing right now is they’re focusing their cadences not just around an individual, but around an account itself.

And so, what we’re going to go through today is research. So that’s account planning, but it’s also thinking through like personalization. That’s cadence design itself. So, thinking about the structure of what a cadence looks like. You know, we are well beyond the time where the agog marathon makes a lot of sense and we’re moving towards more of a sprint type model.

We’re going to talk about what makes for great email within all of that. Right. So each touchpoint across the cadence really needs to think about what the best best practices are telling them to do. And then we’re going to dove into some email frameworks that you can introduce into your cadences. And so that’s the plan. So let’s get started.

Let’s talk about research. Let’s talk about account mapping. So there’s be two things we’re going to talk about in depth right now, and that is, one, actually planning out your account by mapping out who’s an above the line buyer versus who’s below the line. And so we’ll get into that in a bit. But then we’ll also talk about this concept of personalization, not as some box to check, but really as a process.

If you’re reading this and you’re thinking through like, well, ‘accounts, like how do I hit like the total volume of accounts that actually need to get to?’ I think one of the core things we have to recognize is scale isn’t this like glamorous idea of shooting emails to thousands of potentially leads. Scale is made up of all of those individuals within. And so we have to get more thoughtful about how we approach people on the micro level. So let’s actually plan out the accounts that we’re going to go after. This is the thing that I’m seeing the best of the best teams right now doing, and that is they are looking at above the line and below the line buyers and they’re engaging them in a thoughtful manner.

So you’re above the line buyers. So the people who directly influence the purchase. Right – now your below the line buyers are the people who the above the line buyer is going to go to and say, Hey, what do you think of this? How does this make you feel? Is this something that you would use in your day to day?

Nobody wants to buy software that nobody wants to use. And so you have to recognize that there’s multiple stakeholders involved. You have to recognize you have to approach all these parties. And so when you’re thinking of above the line buyers, that’s really who’s going to be involved in your buying committee. Right. So if I’m selling into a sales org, that means I’m talking to the VP of sales.

I’m talking to maybe a director of sales development. I’m talking to a few managers. These are people above the line. These are people who are involved in the overall decision making process. It also, in this economic environment includes folks from finance and procurement and making sure that you’re aligned with priorities across the business. Now, when you move into below the line, that’s where you get into like your end users, the people who are going to be living in the product that day in, day out. And so when I think about end usage for lavender, in some cases, I do have some of those managers, but it’s really like the SDR or when I’m starting out or the R&D side of the house, right? Those individual sellers are below the line for me. Now it might be different for you, but the key is understanding both and using both within your cadence strategy.

So as you start to put together your outreach to personalization and one of the things you have to recognize is personalization isn’t just something that you automate. It’s not something that you’re just checking a box on and like, I get it, you can drive some neat performance with some nice little tricks. But a lot of what I tell folks is these fads are going to go out of style.

And the authentic, more careful approach to personalization is the thing that’s going to win. So you have to recognize that personalization is not a box to check, but it’s actually about a process that you’re building. And, you know, personalized research like this works, right? If you’re thinking like, oh, I need to like do more scaled outreach, you know, note that personalized emails are getting more response, right?

The thing to recognize, too, is you can take that 2X reply and move that throughout the entire cadence itself. You can get a lot more results. One of the things that I always tell folks is when you’re thinking about personalization and you’re thinking about like, Oh, I’ll just like yank some easy attributes to pull in. That’s not what it’s about.

It’s about having a point of view on their business and having a true reason for why you’re reaching out to the individuals, whether below or above the line within this organization, right? If I’m reaching out to an SDR and I’m trying to explain why I’m looking for a piece of information from them, well, I better have a good reason.

I better understand what’s going on within that organization. Otherwise, they’re just going to reply back and say something like, Well, you know, I’m not the decision maker here. I think you need to be talking to somebody else, in which case, like you’ve kind of missed the point of why you’re reaching out below the line in the first place.

So this is key. Having a valid reason to reach out. And one of the core things that you have to recognize is where your buyers that where their mentality is at when you’re reaching out like this. So you really need a valid reason to reach out. And so one of the things that we have to put in, put into place when you’re doing that is providing context for why you’re showing up.

Right. If I’m just going through my inbox and the day to day and you reach out about like some problem that I might be facing. Right? I’m not in the right frame of reference to understand why you’re bringing it up. And so context is really important. You got to show your work for how you got there as well. And so here’s an easy framework for creating that context, and that is you start with an observation, right?

The classic example of that is I saw the following piece of information that made me believe this is where you can get into that insight. And then you tie in to that problem. Made me believe this other thing might be a challenge for you. Or, you know, usually when I see that it means X and X means that there’s a problem.

What you’re doing there is you’re creating context for why you’ve shown up today without having to say, the reason I’m reaching out is because da da da. Right. So we got context. We’ve got a really thoughtful approach for why we’re there. Now, one of the things that a lot of teams come back to me with is, well, how do I find that?

How do I know what’s going to be a good reason? And that starts with you. You have to know your stuff, right? You have to know what you do and what you provide to the market. You have to know what problems you’re solving. You need to know who’s experiencing those problems. Right? If I’m reaching out to an enablement leader and I’m talking to them about email performance, like that might not be the thing that’s top of mind for them as a problem.

But for a manager, it might be much more top of line, top of mind. So these are things you have to recognize is the problems you solve for. They’re going to differentiate by who you’re talking to. And so you have to have messaging that works across the entire organization as you design this account based cadence. The other thing you have to understand what indicates that those problems exist?

If you’re going to do your research, you need to know what you’re looking for. If you’re going to set up an account based cadenceing process, you can’t be spinning your wheels on a bunch of times, but researching you have to know what you’re looking for and you have to know where you’re going to go look for it. And so one of the other key pieces here is building a process.

Building a process for finding those indicators. Right. Where are they? How can you get to them faster? So if I pull up a VP of marketing at a Series C company and they have just gone through a round of funding like in the past three months. Yeah, that starts to set the stage for how I am going to go do my research on that individual right. It’s a different click path. I’m looking for different things in different places and I’m going to use them differently than if I’m going after. Ahead of rev ups at a publicly traded company. And yeah, the the same trigger hiring is in place, right? All of this means you need to know who you’re talking to, what you do for them, where you’re going to go, how you’re going to go there. Right. You need to know where are you going to go along the way? And then know how you’re going to use it. And so these are the two things. Get to know your stuff and know your process. The other thing that I always run into and folks are talking about this notion of scale is this idea that, well, I don’t necessarily have time.

I can’t touch on enough accounts. Of course, I’ve got to automate these other steps. And the thing that I always tell folks is like just reuse the original personalization. If you have a good reason for reaching out to somebody, don’t be shy about reusing it. This is something you can bake into a larger cadence overall, and the entirety of the cadence can feel relevant, personalized, and follow best practices.

00:10:39:10 – 00:11:09:12So don’t just like make a really good first email and then start chucking garbage over the line. You have to recognize that it’s about reusing and recycling a lot of that original personalization so that you can continuously put good information in front of them. Because one of the core things that’s going to happen between email one, email, two, email, three, etc. is they’re not going to think about you, but you’re going to think about them a whole lot, and so recognize that reusing that original context is crucial for follow up success. Another thing that is a great piece to keep in mind is and I’ll talk about this some when I talk about cadence design is that that below the line buyer is going to give you a lot of information that you can bring above the line and crush it when you go to personalize.

Right. So here’s an easy example. It’s like Sarah mentioned, the BTR team has been struggling to personalize and touch enough accounts. That’s start to an email is way more powerful than you know, “Hi, George. I saw you’re hiring.” It’s someone they know. And it’s something that they said they’re naturally going to perk up and want to pay attention.

So know your account. You’re going to personalize the entire cadence and below the line insights are going to help drive above the line interest. So how do we put that into action? What does the cadence look like and how do we orchestrate that? So one of the things to recognize is you might not be there yet, and that’s okay.

But when I look at an organization today, I typically see they’re somewhere between the ICP cadence and the persona cadence. Very few teams I talk to are doing this account-based cadence. And so I want to talk about where you’re at and where you need to go. ICP cadence think that’s like you buy a lead list and you put them into a sequencer and then you hit go, right?

Persona cadence saying, I tend to find there’s a little bit more personalization. You’re starting to get the semblance of account based approaching, right. You know, there’s like, I need to talk to a VP over here. I need to talk to a manager over here. And, like, there might be some personalized steps. The account based cadence is really where it all comes together, and you’re using it on top of one another.

So a good way to think about account based cadence is you’re running two playbooks at the same time and they feed into one another for above the line. You’re going to waterfall information down across the seniority levels. So whether I’m talking to a VP of marketing and then going down to demand gen going down to yeah, an individual like direct response manager or if I’m talking to like VP of sales going down.

Like each persona has its own hierarchy and waterfall, but then at the same time I’m going below the line and reaching out to individual contributors to generate information that I can bring up to the top of the waterfall. That sounds complicated, but think of it like waterfalls and reporters. You’re not looking to make the below the line person, the decision maker.

They’re not going to be. You want to turn them into champions and you want to get information from them, whereas above the line you’re trying to use them that below the line interest to peak interest, but you’re also trying to recognize that like, yeah, sometimes they’re going to delegate this down and you can use that to your advantage.

So this is actually what it looks like on paper. I just kind of copy pasted the same framework for a cadence, but yeah, you reach out to the director after you reached out to the VP, the manager actually reached out to the director. And at the same time you’re running this playbook of reaching out to end users. Now, as you start to talk to those end users, you’ll get insights, right?

Like, Oh, Sarah mentioned you bring that right back up to the top and then you waterfall that information back down. And that keeps the accounts from ever needing a true like breakup. You’re just continuously trying to source a new reason for why you should be talking to this individual. So let’s get into some specific cadences, right? Because I realize, like, most cold emails aren’t getting responses as much as like I would love to say a 50% reply rate is like the average or get in there.

Right. But you know, we also have to recognize that most people are going to require a follow up and some one of the things that I’m a huge advocate for is your only goal when you’re reaching out to an individual in the inbox is to get a response. It’s not to warm them up for a call. It’s not to drive them to a meeting.

Because one of the key things that I continue to run into is folks forget that they’re not thinking about you half as much as you’re thinking about them. Right. So you’re you’re going to repeat yourself. You’re going to continuously remind the reader why you’re showing up. Right. And so you see this actually show up in your cadence design.

The thing that happens with that, though, is since you’re repeating yourself, repeating yourself across like 18 touchpoints, it doesn’t really make sense anymore, right? I’m not “spray and praying.” I’m being very precise in why I’m reaching out to you across the organization. So like max is really like five emails now you can start to like play around with what’s a true cadence versus like what’s a strategic play here.

But like, my point is, it’s like you’re going to design a sprint around a region to reach out and then you’re going to architect the few touch points that follow off of that. So here’s an here’s an example of what a sprint could look like. And really, you can actually speed this up to happen all before day 15.

But I’m a particular fan of using a referral email. And so what I’ll do, maybe instead of a breakup, is like pause on sending another email and then just wait and see if I get a new piece of insight as I go throughout the organization and then bring that up to the top. But pretty simple, right? I’m starting off with a cold email, sending a thoughtful article, then following up thoughtfully, then asking if so-and-so would be a better person to talk to.

And then if it all doesn’t work, then I might try to just say, Hey, realizing timing’s just off here. Usually when XYZ is happening, they might not be interested, right? One of the things that I always will harp on is that it’s not, you know, email’s the only channel. LinkedIn is the only channel. Cold calling is dead. I don’t believe in any of that.

I believe everyone has their own preferences for channels. I think most B2B communication happens over email and so it tends to be the core thread across all of your communications. And so, yeah, all roads kind of lead to email is what I tend to think of out of this. And so this is probably the most important piece of your outreach campaign. But recognize that if you use other channels, reference back to the like the emails themselves, try to pull them back into the inbox or vice versa. Yeah. Reference facts that you called or that you’ve reached out over LinkedIn because those things help, right? If you send them a direct mail campaign. Right. Reference it – because I don’t know why you wouldn’t.

It’s just showcasing additional levels of urgency in the fact that you’re actually trying to reach out. So a few notes on cadence design here. One is, you’re going to be doing this sprints to folks above the line. You’re going to be doing this sprints to folks below the line. You know, shorter sprints are going to happen, particularly when you’re going below the line.

Right. So like for below the line, I might do a sprint that’s like a cold email, a thoughtful bump and then like a helpful article. And then maybe like if I’m really feeling crazy, I may ask for referral to another rep within their work that might need some help on cold emailing. Right. Using other channels is certainly going to help.

So maybe if I’m below the line, maybe I pull one of those frameworks and I apply it into a different channel. But my only goal across the entire cadence is not. Yeah, I send the cold email hoping I get a conversation started and then now I’m like hardcore just like telling them about the product. No, the only goal is to drive a response as I go to massage out those emails.

Because if the only goal is to generate a response, what is the thing or things that help you generate more replies? So the subject line is going to play a huge part. Simplicity. If you follow me online, you know, I talk about simplicity all the time. It is all over the place striking that right level of formality. Talk about that. Brevity, what your ask is and the fact that it’s personalized.

Right. I think we’ve kind of covered personalization, so I’ll just leave personalization at this. If you personalize your cold emails, follow ups or the cold, you’re going to get more responses, right? I am more likely to read through an email if it’s actually written to me. Right. So the other piece to recognize is the subject line is the first thing that you see.

So I’m going to just talk to these really quickly. And so when I’m writing a subject line, the first thing that I’m thinking about is I’m recognizing the way in which people read email and categories they do not read. And so if I’m putting together a cold email and I see somebody use a subject line like Will 1a2x, your positive reply rate, I’m immediately pre categorizing that as a sales message.

I know they’re trying to sell something to me. That is the worst place you could be in when you’re writing a cold email. And so what I use is something called internal camouflage, and that’s not trying to be deceptive. It’s not me saying like Q for email reports, it’s me saying template revision. What I’m trying to do is keep it boring, keep it really neutral.

I’m not using command verbs. I’m not using things like better or struggling. Right? Not trying to go positive, not trying to go negative. I’m also keeping it super sure there’s no question marks. There’s no first name tokens. I want it to feel like an email that might have come from your boss. And so that’s it. Super simple. And it’s got a focus on like a to that a task or a to do list item.

Okay, let’s assume you get the email opens. The number one reason that you’re not getting a response is your messaging is too complicated. And so there’s a few things that make for that. The first is the way that we actually score complexity. It’s a reading grade level. 70% of emails are written at or beyond a 10th grade reading level.

This is just like held true. Right now, the best emails are somewhere between a third to fifth grade reading level. Now I tell people this and then they read an email that’s at an 11th grade reading level and I tell them, Why do you use that word? Why is sentence so long? And their response is like, ‘Oh, well, I want to sound smart.’

And this bleeds into formality a good bit. But one of the things you have to recognize is you sounding smart isn’t actually smart, and you’re going to get 50% more replies if you get that email down from a 10th grade reading level to a fifth grade reading level. And so some of the core things that are driving that, but the core thing that’s driving that is the number of syllables across the words you’re using, the sentences you’re using, and the paragraphs that you’re writing.

Right. And so we have to recognize that we need to cut a lot of the jargon out. Right? So topic of like email visibility might be really easy for me to talk about, right? Like, oh, ‘Lavender gives in-box visibility across your different teams.’ Sounds really cool, right? Great marketing lingo, terrible email, language. Instead, what I should be saying instead of visibility is break it down into what it actually means and say we.

You can see what works across your emails.’ That’s it. That’s what I actually intend to mean when it comes to, like, life for our clients. And so thinking about that, thinking about that in every aspect of writing, those big words hurt your chance of getting a response. The other thing is the long sentences. So an easy tip there is try to avoid commas in your writing. It’ll feel really weird the first time you do it, but the thing that I always will tell folks is like it makes it easier to skim, makes it easier to read really fast. Not fast point speaks to the need for brevity. Right now, the best emails are between 25 and 50 words. The reason for that is because the average amount of time that someone is going to spend reading your message is 10 seconds.

The average person can only read about 40 words in 10 seconds. So if they read the whole thing, they understand the whole thing. They’re more likely to engage with the whole thing. And so that all the other pieces are more about like how you’re putting the information out there. This is really like structural of just like keep it short and keep it simple. You know, personalization can buy you a little time, can take you out to about like 75 words tops. But we still see reply rates fall off afterwards. And so one of the things that I always tell folks is like our desire to get it all out there. Save it for a follow up. Right. We have time. We have time to let the story build upon itself, knowing that if we go long, we’re hurting our chances of getting a response.

Okay. Formality. This is actually a really simple thing. So that pre categorization that a lot of readers do, if you come across very formal and stuffy, people will assume you’re more junior than you are. That is just a fact. It’s just a fact. And that is most C-level folks are emailing at a very informal level. And so what we see is this like balancing act in between work best where what you send should feel not like you’re reaching out to an old friend.

You might be pretty casual with an old friend, but like you’re reaching out to a friend of a friend or the way that you might text a prospect is probably that good way to describe it, right? You’re not going to like text somebody in the super formal way, but at the same time, you’re not going to like texture prospect, like Yelp. It’s like it’s that nice like hybrid in between the ask. So I tell folks this yeah the ask is pretty simple. It’s not about booking the meeting. It’s about generating the response. Your goal is to not drive a conversion. It’s to drive a conversation. And so focus on easy to answer questions. So don’t make it open ended, but don’t make it something they have to leave their inbox to answer.

Right? Finding time. That means they have to go to their calendar. Yeah. Telling me some sort of metric within their system. That means they have to go check a dashboard. Right? Just make it easy on somebody and then for the close versus an open ended. The easiest way to think about this is I say, Hey, where do you want to go grab dinner tonight?

Oh, right. It freeze. You panic. So instead of asking it that way, ask, hey, do you want to go to this restaurant or this restaurant or Hey, how does Chinese food sound tonight? Right. You’re setting somebody up with less thinking to do. Now, let’s talk about the actual emails that go into your cadence, because all of these frameworks can use those best practices and apply them real time.

So we’re putting together this example spread, right? We’ve got a cold email, we’ve got these neutral insights. What is that? Let’s figure out what they actually are so that you’re not flying blind and you’re putting together a cadence. So first touch, this is my go to. This is my favorite cold email of all time. It is so simple to execute.

It works like a charm. It’s not something that really goes out of style because the framework itself, you can change how you reference certain things, right? Like the classic is I saw that. I thought, right. Instead of saying I saw an observation, you just say, hey, it looks like you might be given that that that dot right. Just switch it up how you reference the original thing.

In this example I use “I saw” but I also talked to a couple of things within the simple example and that is it is short and it is simple. So George, I saw your hiring for last year. I imagine you’re thinking about how they’ll ramp. Usually our customers focus on phones, but email results lag. We help, we’re helping reps at San Jose ramp faster.

They continue improving with our inbox assistant worth a chat. I got a lot of information across 50 words fifth grade reading level. It’s that simple. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. There’s some tricks that I used to get it down to that fifth grade reading level. There’s some tricks that I used to make it squeeze into this like, perfect formula, and that is I broke up all of the sentences right? Every single line here could have been its own sentence, but I made sure it read choppy because the choppy sentence is easier to scan and understand on the fly. And so that’s really where it comes back to. Just like making this easy even broke out, but creating more visual emphasis on the problem that I’m trying to talk to you.

But this is a really simple short email and it works. So we send that we’re going to follow up. Right, and I’ll talk about bump emails in a second. But one of the things that I really like to do and hasn’t generate a lot of response, it’ll get good clicks. There is follow up with a neutral insight. And so your marketing team is probably like cringing when I go over this email.

But one of the things that you’re going to do is you’re not going to use any of your assets. Instead, you’re going to start by showing them you’re going neutral, you’re finding it third party resource, and that’s what you’re sending. Then you’re going to reuse your personalization. You explain what the article’s all about and why they should be paying attention to it, and then nod back to the original cold email and the context for why they should be reaching out to you.

Right. So one thing that I always like to note is I’m just assuming that you’re threading your emails. So I’ll pause and I’ll say, if you’re not threading your emails throughout your emails, if you send me a cold email on its own that says, Hey, just following up on my last note, I’m not going to go looking for your last note, so make sure they’re attached.

Really simple. 99.9% of cadencing tools allow you to reply to the original message, and so just make sure you’re doing it neutral and say, here’s an example. I said, George, do you read out Rich’s blog given your likely ramping reps right now? Thought you’d find it interesting nod back to the original context right there. Hiring the VP of Sales Dev segment wrote about how she scaled her team to a $3.2 billion acquisition.

So that’s the context for it, right? Here’s the thing that gets you excited to go read it. They did this without using canned templates. Well, what did they use? Right. Check it out and you’ll find out. By the way, any thoughts on my last note? All of a sudden now I’ve reengaged you in a way that’s way more thoughtful than just saying thoughts.

But I’ve done it also where like, I’ve given something in order to get something back. And so you might not get a response from this, but what you find is the reply rate to everything else within the cadence actually goes up as a byproduct. So a thoughtful bump. Don’t just say thoughts, right? It’s there’s way more thoughtful way to say thoughts and that is provide context with the bump. And you can flip this by the way. So George giving your going the sales team I thought this be worth a discussion did you have any feedback on my last note right. The other way you could say that is, George, did you have feedback on the last note, given your growing sales team? I thought this would be worth the discussion.

Flip them, try them both ways. This thoughtful bump is way better than just bump, sum and easy thing to put into action. Now, one thing that I get a lot of flak for is like there’s not a lot of context to what you do, right? So I like to add a clarification email and that is, you know, restate the context, provide a little bit more clarity on what we do, explain why that’s relevant, and then bring it back for a conversation, right?

So pretty simple. You’re reframing the original cold email and that as, hey, given you’re growing the sales team, I thought coaching might be top of mind. You’re just being more direct this time around. I thought I should clarify. We’ve built a sales email coach, it sits right inside their inbox. High growth teams get great results and peace of mind.

You get a much better sense of what reps they’re sending without hovering over their shoulder. I think this could help your team, right? So this email works really well within the concert of like the rest of the cadence because how you’ve continuously approached them has been about trying to start conversation, right? And so by the time you bring this up, it’s like, Hey, I’ve really tried to start dialog with you. This is me trying to explain why I’m so excited to start this conversation with you, but it helps crescendo that story of why you’re reaching out right now. They don’t respond to that. It’s probably because either your timing’s off or they’re the wrong person, right? So this is where we kick start the waterfall, and that is you start with who you want to talk to next, and then you explain why you want to talk to them.

So hey, would x person be a better person to talk to about email coaching? You know, she likely manages tech from your careers page, right? Somewhat researched it but what that does is it sets off the waterfall flow where you can start the next cold email straight to this person and you can say, ‘Hey, did George forward you my note. I reached out because of the following reason.’

Right now, all of a sudden I’ve sick. I set off the waterfall cadence where either yeah, George has already forwarded this note along. George replied and said Yes, that would be a better person to talk to. Or George hasn’t replied. But I can at least use George’s name after sending a bunch of thoughtful notes to George and say ‘Hey did George forward my notes.’

Right. It’s not too crazy. But what ends up happening from this is by referencing George at the start there you get a lot of like I’ve asked like, wait, what George say. Right and then you at least get some mid funnel, some mid waterfall engagement as a byproduct of using that strategy. Okay. So you get that referral, you bring that up.

Well, how do you breakup? Right. And I’m actually a big fan of breakup emails. This might be surprising to your because I think a lot of breakup emails are really, really corny. Yeah, I don’t necessarily believe that you’re actually breaking up because in reality, what a breakup is, is it’s you saying bye for now. And so it’s something along the lines of George, I reached out a few times.

Yeah, you could even say, ‘George, I reached out to a few folks across the organization. Given your hiring so many reps, I thought our email system could help. I’m going to chalk it up to my timing being wrong. Let me know if I’m wrong, but I’ll stop my outreach for now.’ It’s all you have to say. And then in the meantime, you’re reaching out below the line.

You’re reaching out to those individual contributors to try to find problems that they don’t see, that you can surface and bring to the top, and then you can start a new threat with, oh, Sarah mentioned that your team is struggling with scaling personalization. Right? And then all of a sudden now I have a new reason for why I’m reaching out.

I’m getting much more narrow and specific with my goal and my intention for what I’m trying to talk to them about. But what I’m doing there is I’m focusing at the account level and I’m yeah, resuscitating these leads with information from within the organization. So, if my third party research didn’t do it, hopefully my first party research that came from the actual organization.

Well, now that’s your cadence, right? It’s all focused around a reason for being there. And just like focus on making sure all those emails are hitting on those best practices, right? None of those emails are extremely long. They’re all very focused on driving a conversation and not trying to give away the farm on everything that you do. Because as soon as you give them everything that they might need to know, there’s no reason for them to follow up and reach back out to you.

But the real key here is how you use that across the organization and how you resuscitate your account using below the line research and then take that back above the line. Okay, so hopefully I enjoyed this is a fun session to put together. I’ve been seeing some great teams do some really unique and interesting things in this space, and so hopefully this presentation sparks you to want to approach accounts a little bit more thoughtfully.

But if you ever have any questions, here’s a few different ways that you can reach out to me. I am always happy to talk through these things, whether it’s through by supporting my product, or whether it’s over email, or whether it’s a LinkedIn DM. Just hit me up. I am always happy to be helpful, but until next time I’m Will Allred and I really appreciate you all hanging out to talk about Account-Based Cadence.