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Sales Strategy
How to book more meetings with prospects in 2024: The 5-step framework
Mihaela Cicvaric
November 17, 2023
October 18, 2023
|
7 min. read
Mihaela Cicvaric
LAST UPDATED
June 8, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
The difference between success and failure in outbound sales?
Your ability to book more meetings.
The more meetings you book, the more opportunities you have to present your value proposition, build relationships, and ultimately close deals.
However, the process of scheduling these crucial interactions can be a pain, from identifying high-quality prospects to crafting a compelling sales pitch.
This article provides 5 steps to improving the efficiency of your meeting booking process. This will increase the number of meetings you have and boost the overall quality of these interactions, leading to more successful sales outcomes!
5 Steps to Book More Meetings with Your Prospects
Step 1: Identify High-Quality Prospects
Before you can book more meetings, you need to identify your prospects.
This is where sales prospecting comes into play. This method involves understanding your target audience and identifying potential customers who are likely to be interested in your product or service.
The more you understand your prospects, the better you can tailor your approach to meet their needs and interests. This will not only help you book more meetings but also increase the chances of these meetings leading to successful sales.
So, how do you identify high-quality prospects?
Here are some steps and techniques to guide you:
1. Get lemlist’s Free ICP Template
The first step in defining the right people to reach out to is to create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of a company's perfect customer. It defines who benefits most from the product or service offered.
ICP considers factors like industry, company size, job roles, challenges, and behaviors. It guides marketing and sales efforts, ensuring resources target the most promising prospects.
To ensure you invest your resources only into highly qualified leads, we’ve prepared an ICP template for you!
You can speed up the process of defining your business’ ideal customer profile with lemlist free ICP generator.
All you need is your value proposition and your product or service description.
lemlist ICP generator will create for you 3 buyer personas that you can download, analyze, and use to personalize your cold outreach. Customize email copy, increase reply rates, get more LinkedIn connections, and boost your business revenue.
2. Find a Source of Your ICP Data
→ Don’t have a product-market fit (PMF)?
Look up traffic volumes on the pains you are trying to solve. You can use tools like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs to do that.
Hang out in communities or platforms such as Facebook, Reddit,Quora, Slack, Circle, Discord, etc., to see if people have the problem you’re trying to solve.
Build multiple ICPs (using the templates above) based on your assumptions. You created the business in the first place to solve a problem. Who might have this problem?
Reach out to 100 people from each ICP (aim at having 10 to 30 on the phone from each ICP) to network with them, ask them for feedback, and see if they are experiencing the problem that you are solving.
→ You have a product market fit?
Map out your existing customers. Be aware that not all of your clients are ideal clients, but it is still super useful to understand what type of customers you serve.
3. Collect and Fill Out ICP's Data
Try to cover all of the following questions (answers might be different from one ICP to another):
Company information:
[ ] What is the company's size? [ ] What is the company's industry? [ ] What is the company's revenue? [ ] What is the company's growth? [ ] What is the company's location? [ ] What is the lifetime value (LTV) of your product or service? [ ] What is their net promoter score (NPS) [ ] What tools does the company use? [ ] You can use tools like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer [ ] You can use job descriptions
People’s information:
[ ] What are their pain points? [ ] What value proposition do you have for them? [ ] Who is the end user? [ ] Who is the manager? [ ] Who is the decision maker? [ ] Why do they need you? (use their words) [ ] What are their professional goals? (e.g. increasing the company revenue by X%) [ ] What are their personal goals? (e.g. having a promotion in the next X months) [ ] What will hold them back? [ ] When do they need you? [ ] Find triggers that can help you reach out at the right time [ ] How important and urgent is the pain?
4. Prioritize Your ICPS into Tiers
Once you have completed your ideal customer profiles, order them into tiers.
→ Tier 1 will be the ICP that will bring you the most revenue, → Tier 2 will be in-between → Tier 3 will be the ICP that brings you the least revenue.
Structuring your ICPs into tiers helps you get your priorities straight and shows you where to spend most of your time.
For example, you would want to focus more on writing the email copies for the tier 1 persona since they will bring more revenue.
5. Verify Your ICPs
Check if your ICP was done properly (ICPs should have better results than non-ICPs):
Remember, identifying high-quality prospects is just the first step. Once you've identified these potential customers, you must reach out to them at the right time, with a compelling value proposition. This will be covered in the next sections of this article.
Your ICP profiles will need to be updated as your company grows and with the learnings and experiments that you do along the way.
Step 2: Spot the right time to reach out
The next step is to find the best time to reach out to your leads.
Here, you want to identify the triggers that will tell you: “Okay, this lead fits my targets, but it also seems like it’s the right timing for them to use my product or service.”
Here’s a list of triggers that will tell you that your target audience might be interested in your product or solution:
[ ] A company is hiring [ ] Targets that change roles in the company [ ] Targets that change company [ ] The company raised funds / went IPO [ ] People that asked a question related to your value proposition in a community [ ] Uses a complementary/competitor tool [ ] Bad reviews on competitor tools/services (on sites like G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google reviews, etc.) [ ] Team growth [ ] People that follow your LinkedIn page [ ] People that follow your competitor’s LinkedIn page [ ] People who comment under your LinkedIn posts [ ] People who comment under your competitor’s LinkedIn posts [ ] People who comment under a post that talks about your value proposition [ ] People who downloaded one of your lead magnets [ ] People who registered for your events [ ] People who registered for competitor events [ ] People who registered for events that talk about your value proposition [ ] People who have the same investors [ ] Competitors of your clients [ ] Industry trends
Depending on the triggers you want to use, different tools already exist, so you don’t have to create your ones:
→ For example, you can use the Facebook ads library to see if your targets are running ads. The fact that they run ads with weak creatives can be a great trigger to use.
→ Or you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to target Heads of Sales to sell them a software solution for their Sales teams’ compensation.
Based on the ICP you created, you can add specific criteria and get really good results only by reaching out to people from your screen.
However, your goal is to maximize your likelihood of success. This means you want to identify triggers that will let you know they could be interested in your product/service now.
For this, you can use the team growth filter on Sales Nav.
The reason is that when a team grows, the company either generates more revenue or has more capital to invest in its growth. And that’s a great trigger to reach out to them now.
Once you apply the filter, you can get results like this:
Step 3: Find your prospects’ verified data
Now that you have found relevant leads, you have to collect them from LinkedIn (AKA scrape them).
Thanks to the waterfall enrichment method, Email Finder and Verifier combines the best third-party data sources to give you 40-55% more valid emails. This is the equivalent of asking 6 different providers for up-to-date leads’ information without navigating and subscribing to multiple apps.
Here’s how you can find 80%+ valid emails with lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier
Now, here it is! You have officially built an email list of qualified prospects. Next, you want to reach out to them.
Step 4: Reach Out to Your ICP
Now, let’s say you reach out to the right person at the right time, but without the right message.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to work either. You may have the best product or service in the world, but if you only talk about yourself or have a sales-y approach, you’ll push your prospect away.
Here are the top 5 tips that will help you reach out to your leads properly and get replies:
1. Write Messages That Build Relationships
→ Follow a value-packed structure
Avoid fluff sentences like “I hope you are doing okay” or similar “polite” approaches. They could sound general and make your email copy longer than it should be.
As each part of your cold email plays an important role, ensure to:
Intrigue prospects to open your email with a catchy subject line
Set the right to be for the rest of your email with a friendly greeting
Get prospects hooked to read the rest of your email with a personalized intro line
Show what’s in it for them and give them a reason to reply in the pitch
Push prospects to take action with conversation-starter CTA
End your email in a positive tone with appropriate sign-off
P.S. Discover exactly what to write in each part of your email for more replies, with dozens of examples in this free Cold-Email Structure eBook!
→ Add personalization
Personalizing your emails will make you stand out significantly and increase your reply rates. That’s why you want to show your prospect that they aren’t just a row on a CSV and that you can relate to their pain points.
No matter how many emails you send, you can automatically personalize any part of your message to grab leads' attention and build trust (e.g., intro line, pitch, CTA).
Build personalized landing pages just for your leads where you can embed your calendar and include assets or CTA
There are 3 types of information you can look into to create personalized elements:
Prospect-focused: their social media activity, events they attended, etc.
Company-focused: a new feature, job descriptions, etc.
Industry-focused: trends, best practices, regulations, etc.
Make sure to personalize each lead and limit yourself to 5 to 15 minutes per lead (or have the same personalization for multiple leads to save time). Remember that focusing on quality versus quantity will bring you more results.
→ Don’t forget the purpose of your email
Sales is about building a relationship. You don’t want to ask for a meeting from the first message. Instead, focus on validating the interest. For that, try to get a reply and start a conversation.
You also want to focus on their pains. Try to help them with a pain you identified. Ideally, you want to focus on a pain they are unaware they have, which will help them reach the metric they are responsible for in their company. This means 99% of your messages should be about your leads.
P.S. To help you get started, check out this Best Cold Email Templates eBook with 20+ cold sales, marketing, and growth email templates you can replicate in your next campaign for more meetings!
2. Follow-up On Multiple Channels
While basic campaigns rely on a single outreach method, multichannel uses a combination of channels such as email, LinkedIn, phone calls, etc.
Because you’re connecting on the channels your leads prefer and based on their availability, going multi-channel increases the chances of them engaging with you!
Some leads might be more active or prefer to reply on LinkedIn than email and another way around.
Here are some of the sequence steps you can add to your outreach campaign to increase your reply chances:
→ LinkedIn steps
LinkedIn profile visits: to increase the chances of prospects accepting your connection request
LinkedIn invites: to expose your personal brand and get in touch more easily
LinkedIn messages: to remind them of your message and stay on the top of their mind
👉 If you’re unsure how to break the ice, check out this article and get free messaging tips in LinkedIn Prospecting to boost your reply rates
→ Cold call: to build rapport directly with your prospects
👉 Get tips from this cold-calling guide to create personal connections with your prospects and overcome objections via cold calls
→ Other specific actions to get your leads’ attention (e.g., comment on their post, etc.)
P.S. In our multichannel masterclass, you can find exclusive strategies and templates to replicate in your next campaign and book meetings with 17-30% of your prospects!
Finally, always remember the golden rule of cold email outreach: more follow ups = more replies.
We recommend you follow up with 5 - 12 steps that add value to your prospects following these 5 rules:
You should follow up: Sending 4-8 follow-up emails can increase your reply rates without being spammy, helping you connect with busy prospects who might have missed your initial message.
Test different follow up strategies: Try reminder follow ups to stay on prospects’ minds, or value-based follow ups to gradually share information with each new email.
Time delays matter: Schedule follow ups strategically with a 2-day to 4-day gap between emails to avoid overwhelming prospects while staying on their minds.
Write high-conversion subject lines: Maintain a concise subject line consistent with the initial email for follow ups within the same sequence. For new subject lines, keep it to 1-8 words, personalize them, make them urgent, and A/B test for maximum impact.
Build relationships: To make personal connections with prospects, reference past interactions, use personalized content like images or videos, and write messages that actually sound like a human.
Whether you’re reaching out to users for feedback or to prospects for meetings, the right booking tool makes scheduling meetings effortless.
So, which tool to use to schedule meetings in 1 message and avoid losing leads to the scheduling back-and-forth?
With lemcal, you can cut friction and get 2x more meetings booked:
→ catch leads attention thanks to a personalized booking page → save hours of manual work with automated scheduling links → boost your sales efficiency thanks to lemlist integration
The best part? It takes less than 1 min to switch from another scheduling tool to lemcal!
Here are other popular tools on the market that will help you cut scheduling friction and book more meetings:
Now, let’s say all the previous conditions are met, but you don’t reach out to your prospects in their primary inbox.
If you reach out to prospects on LinkedIn but are never active there, they won’t reply. The same goes if your emails land in the spam folder. Prospects will not see your message; if they do, they won’t trust it because your email was in their spam folder.
That’s why it’s important to keep your email deliverability high.
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails right into your target's primary inbox.
It’s an important aspect of outbound Sales, and many teams overlook it. Investing time into your deliverability setup means maximizing your chances of landing in your prospects’ primary inbox, closing more deals, and growing your revenue:
Here are some of the steps to take to ensure your emails avoid spam and reach your target audience:
You can use tools like MXtoolbox, or lemlist’s preview option to do check if your setup was done properly.
[ ] Warm up as many email addresses as you need for your cold email domain or your backup domain - you can use tools like lemwarm to do that. Let these email addresses warm for at least 1 month before sending cold emails.
[ ] Keep your sending limits under 200 emails per day per email address, or use this hack to beat email sending limit.
[ ] Boost your email deliverability (lemwarm is the safest & most effective option today).
[ ] Verify all your prospect’s emails before sending your campaign(s) - no matter where you found the emails (bought a list, from a website, from a tool, or from LinkedIn). You can use tools like lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier.
[ ] Make sure that your cold emails are sent over time and not in a blast. Tools like lemlist take care of that for you.
Conclusion
From understanding your prospects to crafting a compelling sales pitch and making meaningful connections, every step is crucial to increase your chances of booking more meetings and driving sales. Remember, the goal is not just to book meetings but to create valuable interactions that lead to long-term business relationships. Preparation is an essential part of this process. By researching your prospects, setting clear objectives, and preparing and practicing your pitch, you can ensure you're ready to make the most of every meeting. And don't forget the importance of follow-ups. A timely, valuable follow-up can keep the conversation going and open the door to future meetings. Implementing these strategies will help you book more meetings and enhance your overall sales performance!
The right tool helps! To save time, have more valuable meetings and reduce no-shows, give lemcal a try!
Mihaela Cicvaric
Content Marketing Manager @ lempire | Sharing everything you need to get replies to your cold emails
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