How to Use Sales Automation to Prospect Better with Rashmi Viswanath & Mario Martinez Jr., #207

The Modern Selling Podcast

When it comes to making prospecting easier, the temptation can be to turn to sales automation to reach more prospects. But, modern sellers beware – sales automation has to be implemented the right way to increase the effectiveness of prospecting.

From the sales automation best practices to automation tools to use, to the mistakes to avoid – we cover them all in this episode of the Modern Selling Podcast.

And, our expert guest, knows firsthand what goes into making sales automation work to expand sales pipelines and lead to more booked meetings.

Rashmi Viswanath, is the Director of Growth and Sales at Apollo.io where she is responsible for expanding the reach of the 150-person company. Rashmi has 10+ years of extensive sales and growth experience, generating rapid and consistent pipeline growth within mid-market and enterprise target areas. She has quickly risen through the ranks in various roles in sales automation and development, strategic sales, retention and SDR management.

Download the full conversation to hear what sales leaders need to do today to implement the most proven sales automation tools and strategies to help their sales teams hit quota – every month!

What Are Sales Automation Best Practices?

With so many sales enablement tools flooding the market every week – it can be challenging to know what to use and what really moves the needle to find and engage with higher quality leads.

I wanted to hear Rashmi’s thoughts on what she saw as the best practices B2B sellers should be following to maximize the success of any sales automation tool or strategy they deploy.

She shares, “The goal with any sales automation tool you use is to take what you’re already doing that’s working and scale it faster and more efficiently. The problem usually is that sales leaders don’t know what’s working and they inadvertently scale a broken prospecting system.”

The key to sales automation is not to make the sales rep obsolete. Instead, sales automation is designed to simply make sellers more productive at doing the same work. If there are repetitive steps that are done, then this is where sales automation can shine. But, the important thing to consider is that you must first understand your prospecting process and then look for ways to get more done, faster.

That’s where tools like FlyMSG can be really useful in scaling how you communicate with prospects to book more meetings, with less time and energy spent.

Listen into the conversation and hear how exactly sales leaders should use sales automation to enhance their outreach cadences.

What Are the Drawbacks of Sales Automation?

As I always say, “a fool with a tool, is still a fool.” And, the same thing rings true for sales automation.

Sales reps must be well trained in prospecting and then add in sales automation as a way to empower them to do their work more efficiently.

But, all too often, sales enablement leaders looking to implement sales automation in an effort to compensate for lackluster sales results. That’s why at Vengreso we follow the PVC methodology and use sales automation strategically to not cut steps out, but to make the steps flow faster.

I wanted to get Rashmi’s take on the good, the bad, and the ugly of sales automation.

Her insights are quite telling, “Automation shouldn’t replace using what we know works to get prospects to respond. When we pull in data from automation software, it’s so important to vet it before you use that data in sales outreach. Missing and misspelled names are always a dead giveaway that sales teams haven’t reviewed the data beforehand.”

Jump into this episode and listen carefully about 8 minutes in to hear the “must-avoid” mistakes of sales automation that could derail your prospecting efforts.

What Role Does Personalization Play with Sales Automation?

The short answer is: EVERYTHING!

Sales automation is a tool to help you be more efficient, but it should never replace using your brain. At Vengreso, we leverage sales automation to help us find prospects, but our sales teams still do their due diligence and find ways to personalize every interaction we make with potential customers.

Rashmi shares her view on this, “At Apollo.io we do a host of hyper-personalization techniques that help to boost our prospecting success. It comes down to knowing your buyer persona and honing in on specific things that make them unique that you can mention in your initial outreach messages.”

And, with personalization – the proof is in the data! Over the past two years of our prospecting research, we’ve found that:

• 1-2 word subject lines including your prospect’s name perform best
• Incorporating a specific personal event or interest in the copy of your sales messages improves response rates by 61%
• Using an omnichannel approach to prospecting gets better results than sticking to only one prospecting method
• Inserting a short, 30-45 second welcome video in your first sales outreach message can dramatically increase responses

The power of personalization is that you can never do ‘too much’ of it.

If your sales teams are not already investing time in looking on LinkedIn at prospect and buyer profiles before reaching out, then you could be sabotaging your results.

At Vengreso, we follow a “3x3” rule of prospecting. Our SDRs spend three minutes online, looking for three specific things unique about the prospect.

Then those items are woven into the sales message that is super personalized and speaks directly to the prospect.

We go much deeper into this and how to use sales automation and personalization to prospect and sell more! Download the episode now and listen until the end to hear exactly what’s working to move the sales needle.