How a Data-Driven Outreach Sequence Generated a Winning Sales Playbook

This post is brought to you by Sendoso Director of Customer Lifecycle Marketing Zackary Alspaugh and is part of a series where we share strategies, experiments, and honest results from running our own programs using Sendoso.

When it comes to sales engagement, there’s nothing worse than an increasingly desperate-sounding string of emails. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make your sequences stand out by testing multiple channels, messages, and send types.

Whether you use Outreach, Salesloft, Groove, Xant, or any other sales engagement platform, you can leverage data to deliver the most engaging touchpoints over a certain amount of time. At Sendoso, we’ve found that our sweet spot for Outreach sequences is about 12-15 touches over a 22-day period.

Let’s dive into a real-world Outreach sequence used by Sendoso’s SDRs.

The Strategy

The first step for creating an enterprise ABM 1:1 program was defining our audience. We used Sendoso’s 6sense integration to pull intent sources and find the best contacts for high-touch, personalized engagement, which resulted in a Tier 1 segment of 250 highly engaged contacts. 6sense also enables us to trigger sends based on intent, behavior, and AI data, so our SDRs reach contacts in the right place at the right time.

Next, we had to determine the channel or send for each of our touchpoints. I highly recommend using the built-in A/B testing functionality in Outreach and other sales engagement platforms. This allows you to test different types of sends — from eGift cards to physical gifts to LinkedIn messages — to understand what resonates.

After almost a month of testing, we created a 12-touch sequence featuring a mix of email and LinkedIn messages, phone calls, content, and physical sends.

The first three touches include an email highlighting Sendoso’s impressive G2 reviews, followed by a LinkedIn InMail and a phone call. The next set of touchpoints is a physical send of a donut decorating kit from The Doughnut Club (using our AC feature) with an email follow-up and a LinkedIn InMail.

In the third set of touchpoints, contacts received Sendoso’s value props on all channels, followed by a phone call, and a Sendoso case study sent on all channels. Finally, the last three touchpoints are what we call “Hail Mary” sends which are generally higher value sends like an ember mug or a branded wine tumbler, accompanied by email follow-up, and another LinkedIn bump.

In order to stand out in today’s crowded market, sales teams should go beyond email and spruce up their sequences with physical sends, eGifts, and ROI-focused content. These personalized touches are great for any stage of the sales journey — from warming up cold leads to pushing in-flight deals across the finish line.

The Takeaway

An Outreach sequence is not a random series of touchpoints. Sales teams today need to take a data-driven approach at each step — from defining the right target audience to A/B testing send types and timing.

This helps reps understand which sends and messages resonate with specific segments and personas, so they can discard plays that don’t work, and build repeatable processes around those that are successful. With a tried-and-true engagement sequence, you’re on your way to creating a winning sales playbook that scales.

Schedule a demo today to learn how to use Sendoso in your outreach to stick out in inboxes and rise above the digital noise.