The Ultimate Cold E-Mail Case Study

We just audited a 6 week cold email campaign that targeted 600 prospects, used SalesFolk for messaging and ran via PersistIQ. Here's how it went.

We saw a problem with how we were doing cold emails at Ambition. Our approach consisted of two methods: Devote time to researching and crafting a tailored message, or save time and blast out a series of impersonal touches.

Neither approach felt scalable, so we decided to try something new. We reached out to Heather Morgan, the founder of SalesFolk and the fine people at PersistIQ to help us create a smart drip campaign with targeted, precision-tested value messaging.

Value Messaging

Great value messaging requires empathy, and we've spent the last 15 years depersonalizing just about every level of the sales process -- transitioning from cold calls to cold emails, from manually-typed emails to automated blaster campaigns, and from in-person prospect meetings to faceless web demos.

This is a matter of biological fact. And it's time to reverse engineer things. The technology isn't the problem; it's the way Sales Teams are using it.

Heather Morgan, Principal of SalesFolk and Guest Author and contributor to the sequel of Predictable Revenue, specializes in engineering testable, targeted value messaging for cold email campaigns. We called upon her to help us discover the best approaches to crossing the chasm with our prospective customers.

E-Mail Automation

We wanted to make our email outreach as efficient, scalable and specific to each of our customer's needs as possible. We called upon Pouyan Salehi of PersistIQ to help us setup a smart, A/B drip campaign with 8 touch-points for each prospect.

We had a list of 578 prospects that we wanted to reach. We automated our outreach to test not just the best value messaging, but the best dates and times to reach our prospects, setting each email for a different date and time during the week.

Audit of a Cold-Email Campaign

We completed our campaigns in December 2014. Let me clarify that these campaigns do not comprise the entirety of our sales efforts, but just a small portion. We went after people that we felt were targeted prospects who looked, smelled, and felt like our most successful current customers.

Here's a thousand-foot picture of our campaign results below:

Click image to enlarge.

Over the rest of the month, we'll be digging into these results and showing what worked, what did not work, and what we learned from these four campaigns.

Here's a preview of part of the data set we'll be keying in on.

Click images to enlarge.

To add further context to our own insights, the fine people at Datanyze -- one of the fastest-growing SaaS industry members in our space --- have agreed to compare notes on a recent campaign that their SDRs ran using Outreach.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be unveiling as much of our internal data as we can to to help you understand what worked, the adaptations we plan to make going forward, and the overall takeaways we gleaned from our campaigns.

Cold email outreach does not have to be one-size-fits-all. Nor does it have to be expensive. The technology is out there to enable smart, tailored, and efficient prospecting, at relatively minimal cost.

Ambition: The Sales Management & Motivation Platform

Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs sales departments, data sources, and performance metrics on one system.

Ambition's drag-and-drop interface lets non-technical sales leaders build custom metrics, scorecards, SPIFs, team sales contests, reports, and TVs for cold email and call campaigns.

Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams. Hear from our customers below.

Watch Testimonials:

1. FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations . 
2. Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
3. Outreach: Mark Kosoglow. Vice-President of Sales.
4. Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
5. Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.

Watch Product Walkthroughs:

1. ChowNow. Led by Vice-President of Sales, Drew Woodcock.
2. Outreach. Led by Sales Development Manager, Alex Lynn.
3. AMX Logistics. Led by Executive Vice-President ,Jared Moore.

Read Case Studies:

1. Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics. 
2. Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
3. Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
4. Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.

Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.