Ask HN: Do you review your sales messages?
The web is filled with countless articles/books about cold calling and cold emailing. They cover pretty much everything but there's nothing on sales review processes. Especially cold emailing. Why?
When you do outbound, do you find templates and just run with them until they stop working or do you tweak them often? If you do, how do you keep track of the changes? How do you ensure you're following best practices for converting/closing?
So here's some questions for you sales folks:
- do you do any kind of call script/email template auditing or reviews? If not, why not? - does your team perhaps try to stick to a framework or adhere to a checklist or list of heuristics when creating new templates? - is there anything your team wishes for in terms of perfecting script and template efficiency?
I ask because I'm unsure if I should continue building a tool that will help teams do exactly this... internal peer reviews for outbound sales. Something like a "Github Pull Requests for outbound sales messaging". The aim is to allow yourself or colleagues to evaluate messages against a list of sales and communication heuristics, custom as well as from a library of best practices.
Lead gen is hard. Acquisition is hard. Retention is hard. Given that, I'd posit that communicating with prospects that have zero context about you (which they may have if you're cold selling), using spontaneously written emails or boilerplate templates is just throwing away revenue.
I think this is honestly the case with every sales team. People sell and some people buy. The conversion rates are always tiny due to an endless list of factors (poor segmenting, wrong recipients etc) but I can guarantee you some of those factors include miscommunication and silly copy mistakes and perceptual inefficiencies. Hence my interest in building my tool.
What are your thoughts?