Cold outreach emails in a B2B setting is the primary method sales professionals lean on to make business connections. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made this incredibly challenging with remote work, forcing more internal and external communication to be funnelled through emails and clogging up valuable email inbox real estate. Sales professionals spend hours trying to find creative and efficient ways to get a response from their prospects via email, only to have them go unopened.

Why?

In this article we attempt to answer this question and provide real world evidence and examples of how to increase your cold outreach success in 3 easy steps.

Here’s what you can expect from this article

1. Cold outreach traps to avoid
2. 3 easy steps to start increasing your cold outreach immediately
3. An example outreach email that puts the above principles into action
4. A way to scale your personalized outreach and make selling  more actionable

Background

On November 14th, 2022 we put out a LinkedIn poll towards business professionals across the MedTech industry on what they thought led to a successful cold outreach. The poll options presented were chosen based on the most common answers from over 200+ conversations with business leaders in the MedTech industry over the past 2 years.

Results

The post reached 1,244 impressions over the course of 3 weeks. Of those, the top demographics reached were…

• Director of Business Development
• Business Development Manager
• Business Development Specialist
• Account Executive
• Founder

The question posed was…

“What factor(s) do you think lead to a successful cold outreach?”

1. Timing
2. Trust
3. Product/Service Summary
4. Other (please leave a comment below)

We found that 69% of business professionals believe that Timing is the most important factor when it comes to having a successful outreach. A surprising 13% believes that Trust is the primary factor and 19% believe that sending Product/Service Summary sheets was the most important to having a successful cold outreach.

What does this mean?

According to the results from the LinkedIn poll above, the overwhelming majority of sales professionals in the MedTech industry understand that when conducting cold outreach, it’s vital that you introduce yourself at the right time as a potential business partner to MedTech OEMs because you have one shot at making a stellar first impression.

The question then becomes, “Do we have access to the information, tools, and processes that we need in order to know when a MedTech OEM would need our help?”.

Does this sound like a familiar story to you?

1. We rely heavily on word of mouth.
2. We use contact tools but oftentimes those contacts are outdated or they don’t give us visibility into new companies we don’t yet know about.
3. We are finding it difficult to break the next layer of revenue growth with our project based business model. We default to becoming too reactive.
4. Databases are nice as an annual territory planning exercise but do little to make day-to-day sales more actionable and proactive.
5. We have a pretty good win rate, but we have a problem getting to those companies at the right time.

Well the good news is that you are not alone. Many sales leaders know that the key to a successful business partnership is in providing them the help they need,  when they need it the most. Below are some helpful cold outreach traps to avoid.

Cold outreach traps to avoid

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “sales is just a number’s game”. If you send out more outreach emails statistically you will end up getting more replies. This is the trope that most if not all legacy database providers are leaning on. The top performing sales professionals know that B2B sales is a lot more than that, especially in an industry niche like MedTech. It takes Timing, Trust, and Transparency in communication to truly increase those win rates.

The “look how big our database is tool”.

This tool plays into your fear of lacking visibility into your own market segment. You’ll hear things like we have 20,000 companies in our database and over 100+ data points related to those companies. Immediately you’re left thinking that “Wow, I only have visibility into 300 in my CRM, what am I missing out on?” 

The main issue with this trap is that it ignores the most important factor of a great cold outreach as evidenced by the poll results above, Timing. Out of these 20,000 companies…

• How many of them realistically need your product or services?
• How many are in the position to purchase your clinical services or engineering services?

Really quickly you’ll begin to realize that you are spending more time processing lists of dead companies and outdated data points than in meaningful sales conversations solving your clients needs.

Here’s some additional challenges to consider with using legacy databases.

• It’s great for high-level planning and making a great looking sales report once a year, but it’s too time consuming for prospectors and business developers to process the data and make it meaningful towards closing deals.
• You’ll most likely need to hire a full time person so process the data in the database.

The generic mass email tool.

This is your typical industry agnostic contact reveal tool. This tool is like giving you a fishing rod and saying the fish is over there, but you have no bait or any idea of when the fish was “over there”. This tool really plays into every sales person’s strength/weakness at the same time and it’s the fact that “we are lazy creatures”. We are always looking for ways to do the least amount of work and generate the most value out of it.

There are three problems with this approach.

• You only have one first impression.
• You still end up having to spend hours of research time to properly identify and qualify the right companies  to reach out to.
• It makes you feel good after you’ve crafted what you think is the perfect generic email that is going to capture the masses and  land you 30 calls a week, but only to be disappointed with the low conversion rates. This leads you to think, am I the problem? Why are my conversion rates so low? Let me try to change this outreach and make it more personal.

Value Over Volume: 3 easy steps to start increasing your cold outreach immediately

I’m not saying that there’s not a place for legacy databases or automated email campaigns but it’s not the best tool for a sales person to maximize their chances at achieving business success in a personalized niche market like MedTech. Let’s look at the three topics to consider when crafting an actionable cold email.

1. Timing: Identify a set of buying signals (Timing)
2. Trust: Seek to provide value that speaks to your service offerings
3. Advisor: Offer actionable guidance

Consider the case below

Joe from MedTech-CRO is trying to sell his clinical services to Boomerang Medical. Boomerang Medical is a women-led clinical-stage company developing a technology to advance the treatment of autoimmune diseases and raised a $15M series A financing round. Joe was on the internet and spotted this headline.

Joe could have stopped here but he knows that funding alone isn’t enough to tell if a company is at the right stage to partner with a CRO. He also found these three facts when digging further into the company’s history.

1. Boomerang will use the proceeds from the financing to advance clinical studies on neuromodulation for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, with an initial focus on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).
2. Pharoah Schnieber, COO, Boomerang Medical will be speaking at BIOMEDevice Silicon Valley 2022.
3. Boomerang Medical registered an Interventional Early Feasibility study on C/T.gov with a status of 'Not yet recruiting'

Email Example

Subject: What are you doing to ensure that your neuromodulation early feasibility study is successful?

Hi Pharoah, I read that you will be speaking at the upcoming BIOMEDevice Silicon Valley conference. Congratulations on your recent $15M Series A round, I can’t wait to hear what your plans are in the near future.

I've seen first hand that many neuromodulation companies like Boomerang Medical find it challenging to recruit the right type of patients for their clinical trials and ensure that they are capturing the right clinical data to best represent successful patient outcomes.

I’ve attached a pdf that outlines what early stage MedTech OEMs should look for in a clinical partner. Please let me know if you found this helpful.

Kind regards,

Joe

Conclusion

Successful cold outreach is difficult in a niche industry like MedTech. The drivers that contribute to successful cold outreach are timing, trust, and value add. Timing is the number one factor when it comes to a successful cold outreach. It opens up the door to allow you to build a Trusting relationship with your prospects and ultimately makes the delivery of your services more appealing.

It’s not feasible to manually conduct detailed research for every cold outreach that you do as it’s time-consuming and technically challenging. This is why we have created an AI-driven sales empowerment tool in Zapyrus to help you capture these buying signals in real time.

Let us know what you think.

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