Amplemarket Blog

At Amplemarket we are lucky to be working with sales teams across a wide range of industries, territories, funding stages, sizes etc... This allows us to gather thousands of data points on a daily basis and provides us with great insights about sales performance.

As a large fraction of the world is working remotely, a lot of people's days are spent jumping between video conference calls. One question that might occur when someone joins a video conference call is how much time you should wait for the other person to join. We're going to use a simplistic mathematical model for the waiting time on a 1:1 video conference call using a famous probability distribution. The problem of modeling waiting times is not new, it has been widely studied in the past particularly in areas like transportation, where it has been observed that waiting times in train and bus networks tend to follow an exponential distribution. We are going to assume that the problem of someone joining a video call is similar, from a probabilistic standpoint, to that of a train arriving at a railway station. The exponential distribution is a continuous distribution defined by the following probability density function in which t is, in this case, the waiting time before the other person joins the call and \\(\mu\\) is the mean of the distribution \\(f(t) = \frac{e^{-t/\mu}}{\mu} \text{ , $t \ge 0$} \\) We can calculate the probability that someone takes more than \\(T\\) minutes to join a call by integrating \\(f\\) \\(P(t>T)= 1 - \int\_{0}^{T}f(t) = e^{-T/\mu}\\) Now, the only thing we need to do is estimate the mean of the distribution. For that we’re going to use a sample of past calls and calculate the mean waiting time for those calls. In our case, we are also going to separate our calls in 2 types: Hiring Interviews and Sales Meetings. The average waiting time for our sample is 1.5 min for Hiring Interviews and 3 min for Sales Meetings. Based on these values we can now plot the waiting time probabilities for the 2 cases.  We can see that, for Hiring Interviews, the probability of waiting more than 5 minutes is relatively low - approximately 3% - whereas to get to the same probability on Sales Meetings we need to wait around 10 minutes. This is a simplistic model but having an idea of how much time you should wait on a video call before you can confidently say that someone is unlikely to show up can have a considerable impact on the time and productivity losses across teams and companies.  ___ *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) helps you find and get in touch with your next customers in the most efficient and personalized way possible.

Our team has been working hard to improve Amplemarket and we wanted to share some new features that you might find interesting. **"How can we ensure that our emails are delivered?"** is one of the main concerns we hear from our customers. When doing email sales and ramping up volume too quickly there's a probability that you might run into SPAM problems. You want to avoid this at all costs in order keep your deliverability as high as possible. We've been thinking a lot about this problem and recently found **two factors that have an important impact on email deliverability**: 1. Big spikes in email activity. 2. Sending out emails from an email account/domain that is just used to send sales emails. We're happy to share with you that we found solutions to both of these problems. **1. Avoid spikes in activity** The first thing you want to do is avoid spikes in your email activity - typically sending more than 400 emails in a single day (first touch + follow ups). When this happens your email provider network, such as Gmail or Outlook, will start sending your emails to SPAM due to large suspicious activity. Additionally, sending too many emails within a short timeframe increases the likelihood of multiple accounts reporting you as SPAM.  *Figure: One day of spike activity followed by poor delivery and open rates* In order to avoid spikes in activity we built **"Smart FollowUp Schedule"** that evenly distributes your emails across multiple days so you avoid sending more than 400 emails in a single day. This feature is now enabled by default so you don't need to worry about anything when you are sending your email sequences. **2. Nurture your inbox by also using it for non-sales activities** Your inbox is penalized if the only activity you do is send thousands of similar sales emails on a monthly basis. This is especially true when you setup an alias email address just for your sales efforts. Thus, it's important that you use your inbox for other activities as well, i.e. exchange emails with colleagues, signup for newsletters, etc. We created the **"Amplemarket Warm Up Network"** that automatically and seamlessly generates activity on your inbox. When you join this network emails will be automatically exchanged and archived with other members of the network to generate a baseline of non-sales activities.  *Figure: Schematic view of the Amplemarket Warm Up Network.* We noticed that the combination of these two features allows your emails to make it safe and sound to the inbox of your prospects. Good luck with sales! Feel free to share feedback with us at team@amplemarket.com.

If you’ve done outbound sales via email you’ve probably noticed that some of your email cadences stop due to Out Of the Office (OOO) auto-responses. You are not alone, we noticed the same thing and felt there should be a better way to deal with this. Here’s what we did. ###The Problem While doing sales for Amplemarket and trying to maximize the efficiency of our process, we noticed that on average 10% of the prospects we contact at any point in time are OOO. These prospects use automated replies that cause the follow emails of our cadences to stop.  Our sales team was not happy with this and wanted to find a solution. While we respect the prospect’s OOO time, it doesn't mean that 10% of potentially interested prospects have to be lost right out of the gate. We needed to find a better way to handle the problem regarding the stopped email cadences. In order to do so, we analyzed the content of all the OOO responses and looked for patterns. After going through our entire dataset we saw that most emails had a combination of 2 things: - a return date (E.g.: "I’m on Out of office until Monday") - an alternative Point of Contact (POC) (E.g.: "I’m on Out of Office, please contact john@amplemarket.com for marketing needs"); ###The Insight The OOO messages were giving us 2 additional pieces of information that we were not using. With the return date & alternative POC we could design a workflow in which we did not lose these prospects. In fact, we believed we could have a set of automated actions that not only could prevent us from losing contact with the 10% of people that were OOO, but also reach out to new potentially interested prospects that were being mentioned in the OOO email. ###Designing the Sales Workflow We started by dividing it into 3 parts: 1. Detect an OOO response 2. Handle contacts that have a return date in their OOO message 3. Handle contacts that mention an alternative POC in their OOO message ##### 1. Detect an OOO response This part was easy because at Amplemarket we had already trained a machine learning algorithm to categorize every email we get from a prospect according to several sales specific situations such as: interested, not the right person, Out of Office etc... If you want, you can test our email classifier [here](https://www.amplemarket.com/features).  ##### 2. Handle contacts that have a return date in their OOO message After our classification engine identified an email as an OOO we needed to extract the return date. To do this, we trained a feature extraction model that was able to identify and extract any date reference in an email, such as "next Monday","this Quarter", "by the end of the month","Friday 15th" and convert it into a standardized date format MM/DD/YYYY. With this information we can pause the campaigns when we receive an OOO response and resume contact a few days after the prospect returned to the office. Here is what we used when resuming contact with a person that was OOO: ``` Hi {{first_name}}, I know that you just got back to the office and I wanted to give you a few days to go through your inbox. Did you manage to take a look at my email? ``` ##### 3. Handle contacts that have an alternative POC in their OOO message We started by looking into the content of the OOO messages with alternative POCs and found 2 types of emails being mentioned: 1. Shared Inboxes (support@, team@) - prospects usually pointed to shared inboxes for urgent situations 2. Other colleagues within the company While the shared inboxes had little value in the sales context, the second category of emails seemed promising - most prospects were pointing us to the person within the company that was taking their responsibilities while they were away (e.g. a lot VP of Sales were pointing us to a Director of Sales while they were away). With this in mind, we built a workflow that was able to recognize the emails that were present in the body of the OOO response, eliminate the ones that were shared inboxes, and finally automatically reach out to the alternative POCs that made sense. ####Email Campaign When sending out a new email campaign to the alternative POCs we let people know why we are contacting them and that we had gotten their email when reaching out to person X within their company. ``` Subject: hi {{first_name}} - contact from {{third_party_first_name}} Hi {{first_name}}, I was pointed your way when reaching out to {{third_party_first_name}}, who was Out of Office. ... ``` Here is a comparison of the initial and final workflow for the OOO case  ####The Results These were the results we received from our OOO campaign compared to our regular campaign  What we saw with this new OOO workflow was a surprise even to us. The OOO campaigns generated 33% more opens and 2x more replies than the regular outbound campaign and these campaigns were going out automatically without any extra effort on our end! The implementation of these 2 features (pause/start campaigns + reaching out to the new POCs) had a substantial impact in an even more important metric - the number of monthly calls with qualified prospects, which increased a staggering 42%! Additionally, the assumption that the alternative POCs mentioned in the OOO responses could also be valid prospects was true!  ####Final Surprise! We saw firsthand that any sales rep who is not doing this is leaving lots of deals on the table. We also know that even the most disciplined rep will have trouble keeping up with this manual and tedious daily tasks: - extract the OOO emails - manually restart stopped campaigns - find out potentially good prospects in the alternative POCs - add these prospects to relevant campaigns etc. So we are happy to announce that this workflow has been integrated in the Smart Actions section of your Amplemarket dashboard and can now be used by any Amplemarket user :)  **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* *Thanks to Paul Maass, Andrew Wolfe, Joe Zaghloul, Bryan Elsesser, Robin Allenson, Brian Sorhaindo, Gustaf Rössner, Sam Yousefian, Lindsey Colferai and Nate Nordstrom for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.*

In this series of posts, we are going to analyze sales email campaigns written by some of the world's best SaaS companies. The entire collection of email campaigns can be found here: [goodsalesemails.com](http://goodsalesemails.com/?ref=blog). In this first post, we are going to analyze one of [Mixpanel’s sales email campaigns](http://goodsalesemails.com/campaigns/1bd6439bd91). We will discuss the pros and the cons of each email, what we think is well done and suggestions on how it could be improved.  *(This is the email sent from Mixpanel’s sales reps, you can find it here: http://goodsalesemails.com/campaigns/1bd6439bd91/?ref=blog)* ####What we like: * **The email is short.** People have short attention spans when it comes to emails. Short and concise emails, like this one, have higher reply rates. * **The email uses personalization.** Your sales emails should make your prospects feel special. This email uses personal information like the prospect’s first name, the name of the company and other relevant information about the company. * **The email has a clear call to action.** Adding a clear call-to-action at the end of emails has a huge impact on the reply rates. In this case, the intent is clear: “a 15-minute meeting this week”. * **The email has a value proposition.** The value proposition in this email is short, concise and straight to the point. This makes the email easy to read, and raises the curiosity of the prospect. * **The signature.** This email has a detailed signature. In order to sound human and more trustworthy, you should add a detailed signature with job title, phone number, photo and other social media links. ####What could be tested: * **Introduce yourself.** A short sentence, saying who you are, where you work and why you are reaching out will help you gain credibility, and can have an impact on your reply rates. This email does not have an introduction but the signature is self-explanatory. This type of shorter emails works best for very senior positions like VPs or C-level roles. * **Subject line.** This subject line might not stand out in a cluttered inbox. A/B testing by adding personal information like first name, company name or even job title could improve the open rate. * **Cite relevant clients.** Adding examples of relevant clients will help you gain your prospect's trust. The fact that big companies trust you to do business, will help raise their curiosity and increase your reply rates. * **Follow-up.** A sales email in a busy inbox can easily slip through the cracks. That’s why the follow-up process is so important. Use every touch point to add value with additional relevant information like case studies, testimonials, etc. Hope this helps you get some ideas on how to write a good sales emails. Stay tuned for the next analysis of an email campaign from another company! If you have ideas or suggestions feel free to email us at *team@amplemarket.com*.

In lesson #7 - "Deliver, Support, and Customer Success" - we are going to discuss what you need to do to retain customers. In order to retain customers and maintain your growth, you need to keep your churn rate low (typical values for SaaS startups are between 5-7% annually). In order to accomplish this you need to: > **1. Deliver** - give your customers the best possible experience > **2. Support** - care about your customer and give amazing customer support > **3. Customer Success** - happy customers will help you close new customers #### 1. Deliver Do everything you can to deliver the best possible product/experience. Your main priority should be making your new customers as happy as possible by delivering what you promised in the previous steps of your sales process. Some best practices are: * **Have a good and detailed onboarding process** in place. Your customers are not familiar with your product, provide the 3 most important tips that they should use to get the most out of it. * **Align your incentives and your customers' expectations.** Help your customers define what “success” looks like and help them achieve it. * **Collect feedback regularly.** You should touch base on a weekly basis to make sure your customer feels like you are involved in the project and working hard to meet the objectives. * **Be available**, amicable and care about your customers' success. #### 2. Support Customers value human relationships, especially when they are reaching out to ask for help. Set up a customer support process that feels personalized and human. Your team should have information about a customer's history with your service, stats, results, and other relevant information. Make sure you have this information well organized and easily accessible. You should diversify the number of platforms your customers can use to reach out to you: live chat, email, social media, phone etc... You have to be where your customers are. This might sound difficult to manage, but there are some tricks that can ease the process of providing support. Divide the problems into two categories - the "self-solvable problems" and the more "complex problems" that need a more hands-on approach to be solved. * **Self-solvable problems:** you should have **a FAQ section** - a collection of the most common questions regarding your product/service with the appropriate answers. * **Complex problems:** you must have a direct channel where you can have a conversation with your clients - a live chat, SMS, email support - backed up with a CRM where you can retrieve your clients' history. #### 3. Customer Success The cost of retaining existing customers is lower than the cost of acquiring new ones. Satisfied customers are loyal, and loyal customers not only buy on repeat but also refer your services to their friends. You should invest in keeping your customer satisfaction at its maximum. You should create a safe channel for your customers to express what they feel and think of your product/service. The most common way of doing this is by creating a customer satisfaction survey in order to gain insights into your weaknesses and strengths. Feedback - be it good or bad - is a valuable asset: * **Bad feedback can be seen as an opportunity to improve** your product and show your customers that you care about them. * Good feedback can be used to create testimonials that can help with brand awareness and lead generation. **Good reviews are great to improve conversions**. The other upside of customer success surveys is the fact that the customers like to feel that their opinion counts and that they are being heard. So this type of surveys contributes to your customer satisfaction and helps build customer trust. One of the most common Customer Surveys is the [Net Promoter Score (NPS)](https://www.netpromoter.com/). The NPS measures not only customer satisfaction but also customer loyalty and it helps you segment your responses into three categories: **Detractors**, **Neutrals** and **Promoters**. Your NPS is calculated by NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors. Use these results to boost your customer retention and increase your promoters percentage. Once you identify your **Promoters** you can: * Ask them if they know anyone else that could be interested in working with you. * Identify relevant connections on LinkedIn and ask them for introductions. A good customer success process will produce net-negative churn because your existing customers will help you drive growth. ###### Summing up: - You need to align expectations with reality and deliver exactly what you said you would. - Customer satisfaction is a reflection of how customers feel towards your product, service and brand and it is usually measured through surveys. - The feedback is usually the source of new ideas to improve your business and testimonials that may feed your communication and lead generation efforts. - A good customer success process will help reduce churn and drive new inbound leads thanks to customer referrals. In the next lessons, we are going to discuss referrals. Stay tuned for the next lesson: Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing!

In order to improve the performance of your email campaigns, it is important to be data-driven. When you are sending email campaigns be proactive and run A/B tests constantly, there is always something new to be tested. First of all, you need to **define what you are going to test. Some variables we usually test are:** * Subject line * Body of the email * Value proposition * Call-to-action * Images * Examples of clients * Audience * Time of the Day * Day of the week * Job title * Industry For each one of these variables there is a metric you should track: * **Open Rate** - measures the percentage of people that opened your email. If you are A/B testing subject lines, the metric you should track is the open rate of your emails. * **Reply Rate** - measures the percentage of people that replied to your email. You should track this metric in case you are A/B testing changes to the body of your email (i.e. value proposition, call-to-action, examples of clients, etc.) or your audience. * **Conversion Rate** - measures the percentage of people that converted to a given goal (i.e. scheduling a call, signing up for a free trial, clicking on a link, etc...). The variables that have more impact on this metric are the call-to-action, the audience, job title and industry. Once you decide what you want to A/B test it is important to define the sample size for your test. You can use this online calculator to help you calculate the sample size automatically: [Sample Size Calculator](https://www.optimizely.com/sample-size-calculator/?conversion=25&effect=30&significance=90). This will help you understand how many emails you need to send in order to find the hypothesis that is performing better. Suppose you are testing two different calls-to-action, the metric you should be tracking is the reply rate. You should define: * **Metric (Baseline)** - the reply rate of your email campaigns. * **Minimum detectable effect** - the minimum detectable effect corresponds to the relative difference between the reply rates for the two different calls-to-action you are testing. Once you choose the variable to test, the metric to measure and the sample size, the next step is to create a strategy. Best practices are: * **Change only one variable at a time.** If you are testing a new call-to-action and a new value proposition at the same time you won’t be able to decouple the effects your results. To avoid not being able to tell which variable is responsible for a certain outcome, you should only test one variable at a time. * **Split your leads into equal batches when testing a new variable.** When running A/B tests, you should never focus all of your efforts on one single assumption. If you have a baseline approach then you should run your tests against that approach. If you don't have a baseline then you should test different assumptions simultaneously. To decide which hypothesis is performing best, the difference in the metric that you are measuring needs to be at least equal to the minimum detectable effect. If you can’t achieve a significant difference, then you can’t say for sure that one is better than the other. When that happens you should keep iterating and test new assumptions. Let's take a look at the example below. After you decide to test two different calls-to-action, with a **baseline of 35%** (the average reply rate of your email campaigns), **a minimum detectable effect of 30%**, and a **statistical significance of 95%**, your sample size needs to be 170. This means you have to send 170 emails for each call-to-action and analyze the results. After testing both calls-to-action, imagine that this was the result of your test:  As you can see, the call-to-action 2 had a higher reply rate than the call-to-action 1. Since we set our minimum detectable effect at 30% of our baseline (35%), it means the increment between the two calls-to-action exceeded the stipulated value. ##### Summary In order to run successful A/B tests, you need to **clearly define your goals** (i.e. the metrics you want to test), **decide what you are going to measure** and **create different scenarios to test**. Analyze your results and keep iterating. Make A/B testing a recurring practice in order to improve the performance of your email campaigns.

In lesson #6 - "Closing!" - we are going to discuss the art of closing a deal. If you have read our previous lessons, by now you should have warm prospects that want to buy your product. Your goal now is to move them to the last step of your sales funnel and convert them into paying customers. > We are going to discuss the **three most important steps in closing a deal: the Virtual Close, the Contract, and the Signature**. <br/> #### 1. The Virtual Close It is important to walk your prospects through a virtual close before you share your contract agreement with them. A virtual close is a description of all the steps that are going to happen before they become a customer. One of the most important steps is to identify all the decision makers involved in the purchase of your product. This will help you anticipate and handle objections. You will also be able to discover major red flags that could slow the deal or prevent it from happening, like problems with their legal department, procurement, etc... By walking your prospects through the necessary steps you will have a better understanding of their timeline and avoid any confusion that might arise during this process. Map the entire journey! It’s important to gain your prospect’s trust so you should strive to be earnest, truthful and helpful all along the way. Some good questions to ask during the virtual close are: - What's your decision-making process like? - Who are the decision makers involved in the purchasing process? - What other options are you considering? - What is your budget? - What will it take to win your business? - What would be the timeline to adopt XYZ? An interesting read if you want to excel at the art of selling to other people: http://blog.amplemarket.com/book-summary-how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people <br/> #### 2. The Contract Now that your prospect knows exactly what to expect it’s your turn to send them your contract agreement. Some important rules for designing and sharing a contract are: **Create a template:** Create a contract template that you can refine and re-use over time. You should mention the conditions of your contract during the virtual close, they should be clear and easy to understand. Keep your contracts straightforward and short, ideally less than 5 pages. Y Combinator has a good collection of startup documents including a sales template agreement: https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/#sales **Legal check:** As you start having bigger customers their legal requirements will get tougher. If one of your prospects has a thorough legal procedure, and you experience resistance from legal or procurement, you can give examples of big customers that accepted your terms. As you refine your contract template, you will sign bigger customers and build trust in new prospects. **Signature:** You should remove all barriers and make it as easy as possible for your prospects to sign your contracts. They shouldn’t have to go through the hassle of printing, signing scanning and emailing the documents. Use an e-sign service like [HelloSign](http://hellosign.com) or [DocuSign](http://docusign.com), that will allow you to share a contract that your prospects can sign electronically. <br/> #### 3. The Signature After you send the contract, some of your prospects might turn silent and become unresponsive. Your prospects have other priorities and there are a lot of reasons for this to happen so do not assume anything. As a best practice remember to follow up via email and if they don’t reply you can pick up the phone and call them. Be patient and persistent and you will eventually turn them into a customer. Don't pressure or rush your prospects. You should avoid: - Pressing prospects to act right away - Creating a false sense of urgency - Refusing to give prospects time to think about your offer - Demanding immediate responses In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: **Deliver and Support, Customer Success** <br/> Here is the outline of this series: 1. [The Sales Process](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process) 2. [Lead Generation, Prospecting](http://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting) 3. [Outreach, Cold emailing](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outreach-cold-emailing) 4. [Follow-up, Always Follow-up!](http://blog.amplemarket.com/follow-up-always-follow-up) 5. [Sales Calls and Lead Qualification](blog.amplemarket.com/sales-calls-and-lead-qualification/) 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! [Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket/?ref=blog) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/17940980/?ref=blog).* *[Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.*

One can easily believe that a subject line is just a small part of an email, and underestimate its value when compared to the rest of the content. Truth is that the subject line and the first sentence of your email are the most important factors influencing your open rates. In this blog post, we will share guidelines to write effective subject lines. Here are our favorite tips: #####Tip #1: Don’t be salesy. The ultimate goal of a sales email is to start a conversation. You should sound professional and trustworthy. Avoid salesy expressions like “CLICK HERE TO GET A DISCOUNT” or ‘“BEST OFFER” as they might send you directly to the spam folder. #####Tip #2: Personalize. Personalization is very important, it will differentiate you from your competitors. A subject line with your name always catches your attention, so using your prospect’s name and other company information will show the recipient that you know who they are, what they do and why they might need your product. Put yourself in their shoes and write something you would like to read. #####Tip #3: Keep it short and concise. Be upfront, don’t deceive or overpromise because it will hurt your credibility. Choose simple words, your subject line should be short and concise. #####Tip #4: Be coherent and upfront. Your subject line should reflect the content of your email. Write your email first and then create a coherent subject line. If you are selling, asking for feedback, or offering a free trial, say it clearly on the subject line so the prospects don’t feel like you’re tricking them. Don’t overpromise or use vague wording. #####Tip #5: Use your creativity. It is a common behavior to search the web for good subject lines and end-up using the same as everyone else. If you receive 10 emails a day with the same subject line, would you open them? Neither will your prospects. Be creative and original. You can use humor or famous quotes that relate to the content of your email. #####Tip #6: Arouse their curiosity. Creating a little suspense won’t hurt. Arouse your prospect's curiosity and interest and make them want to open your email and read it. Asking questions usually works well. #####Tip #7: Choose action verbs A cold email should have a call to action. That action can be a simple reply, scheduling a call or a sign up. Build that idea in the prospect’s mind from the first moment. > Examples of good subject lines: (Consider you are John from Amplemarket reaching out to Ben from XYZ) > * *Ben, greetings from John* > * *John (Amplemarket) for Ben (XYZ)* > * *Amplemarket, the AI sales assistant for XYZ* > * *Ben, is XYZ in need of an AI sales assistant?* The most important takeaway is that you can have the best email campaign but if you use the wrong subject line you won’t get your email opened. So invest a lot on it, A/B test to make sure what works for you!