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Multichannel sales sequence that converts leads into customers

lemlist team
Last Update
Oct 24, 2023
Reading Time
7 min.

The trick with the multichannel approach is to understand how different channels work, but also have them work as a team.

Today you'll discover a sales sequence that consists of cold emails and cold calls. Together, they work as a dynamic sales duo and we all know how powerful the right duo can be...

Remember, you don't need to choose between cold calling and cold emailing. You can use both.

Creating the perfect cold email sequence

For this article to accomplish its goal, Ilya and I decided to walk you through every step of the process.

We'll give you actual examples so you can see how it works in real life.

Let's get rolling and see if we can do this.

1- Identify your target audience

Cold emailing and calling every lead on the planet is a recipe for failure. Simply, it will do you no good.

Even though it sounds like a tactic that can be executed in a few hours, you should never jeopardize your brand like this. It's a corrupt outreach model that won't work.

Instead, you have to figure out who's your ideal client and what are their pain points. Here are a few questions you'll need to answer.

  • What's the current objective of my prospect's company?
  • What are the obstacles on their road to achieving this objective?
  • How does my product/service make my prospect's job easier?
  • Did the prospect hear about us in the past? How and where?
  • What would be the path to them purchasing our product/service?
  • What might hold them back?

👉 Here is how to find your ideal client with a template

You can also think about localizing. You’re going to have to figure out a good localization strategy to find out the preferences of your ideal clients based on region, culture, and language. Finding your ideal client, whoever they are, can be made easier by finding out where they are. Don’t just expect them to know your brand on the outset.

2- Find phone numbers and email addresses

Two pieces of info we can't email or call without. As the matter of fact, we wrote two huge guides on how to find contact information about prospects:

We tested a few tools that we liked enough to put in this article.

Find-email-address-on-LinkedIn-with-ColdCRM (1)

A database such as UpLead is probably the easiest and quickest way to find phone numbers. When doing prospecting with databases, such as UpLead or ZoomInfo, you'll get both prospects’ phone numbers & email addresses.

UpLead will cost you from $99 per month (if you choose UpLead) for 200 credits monthly.

Another interesting approach to get both info would be to use LinkedIn + Chrome extensions. Lusha is one such example.

Lusha will find you the email address and phone number so you can combine cold calls with email outreach.

3- Validate both emails & numbers

A certain percentage of the contact details you find will inevitably be invalid or old.

The situation with phones and emails is uniquely different here. When dialing a wrong number, your loss is measured in minutes wasted. However, when emailing an invalid address, the stakes are doubled as it's both your time and email reputation that's at stake.

Meaning, if you send messages to invalid emails, you increase your chances to be trapped by SPAM triggers, damage your deliverability, and, one day, ruin your reputation as a result.

How to stop that from happening? Email and phone verification.

Validate phone numbers

There are many tools that get the job done. The one that caught our eye is Phone Validator from Textmagic. All you do is input the number and push the button.

phone verification

Validate email addresses

We've written a lot about email verification tools. We've even made an experiment with the top 7 email verifiers and found a winner!

email verification

4- Integrate your cold email and cold call tools

Tons of tools to pick from in these two departments too. When you start shopping, we'd recommend keeping the following factor in the back of your brain.

Is it possible to integrate them in a painless way?

If the answer is yes, I guess you won't break ya neck switching between the two of them... as Busta Rhymes would say. (if you need a song when reading this article, go old-school).

It's time for selection. Here's ours...

  • for 💌 emailing,  lemlist (obviously 😅)
  • for 📞 cold calling , Aircall

Connecting the two is a piece of cake.

Go to the Settings -> Integrations -> and connect your Aircall.io account.

That's it. Now we can get rolling on adding calls to your outbound sales sequence.

Step #1: Add a new step to your sequence - "Phone Call":

Step #2: Once it's time to call the prospect, go to your Tasks section. Find the prospect in question and press the dial button.

lemlist cold calls

Step #3: Based on the outcome of your call, assign the right status to your lead to keep track of things.

lemlist cold calls

If you need a video to walk you through, we got you.

Here you go...

5- Create your multichannel sequence

We have our target audience, their contact details are safely stored in a CSV file, everything was verified, and our tools are properly integrated.

It's time to connect the dots and start the magic!

You're about to see a cold email sequence that Simon, our sales rep, uses to bring new users to lemlist. Here are his results...

how to increase cold email reply rate

When it comes to the step in his sequence, it's made out of two cold emails, split by a cold call in the middle.

cold email lemlist

Keep in mind that we've translated it from French, so some things might sound better in Simon's native language.

At the first glance, this is a pretty straightforward cold email template. But what's the secret behind the 40% reply rate?

  • Use LinkedIn to your advantage

If you manage to connect with your prospect on LinkedIn first or engage on each other's content, the chances of getting a reply increase drastically.

In this example, Simon segmented prospects who didn't respond and leveraged this sentence as a light intro.

He didn't send all 220 connection requests or emails on the same day though. It was spread across a week. Because sending fewer emails gives you more time to do research properly and ramp up your reply rate.

  • Customize messages to sound more human

Although it's a pretty straightforward email, the second paragraph includes something that's unique to the prospect. That way, Simon demonstrates he invested time in getting to know the prospect before landing in their inbox.

Then, his call-to-action feels like a cool invitation to talk sales and their plans, rather than Simon asking for a demo meeting where he would talk about lemlist.

Once a prospect replies and shares information around their objectives, Simon can personalize his approach further.

  • Insights from research

A beautiful move Simon did here was to go to Welcome To The Jungle job board and understand what prospects are currently expanding their sales teams and what were the objectives they listed.

Knowing that, it didn't matter if Simon was exchanging emails or talking on the phone. He already had the framework through which he can navigate the conversation.

The second step is to call a prospect if they don't reply to the first email.

And thanks to the smooth lemlist<>Aircall.io integration, Simon cold calls the prospects in just a few clicks.

aircall lemlist

Everything is organized in one clean interface, along with how many times did this specific person opened an email or what links did they click on.

Had a cool chat with Simon around his cold calling game and he shared some fire advice I'm gonna pass to you.

  • The call always goes in the middle of the sequence for maximum impact
  • Simon stays in the zone by listing all the numbers before he starts dialing. That way, he doesn't allow himself to do anything that keeps his mind away from the phone and manages to average 20 calls in an hour
  • The goal of a call is to book a Zoom meeting
  • Calls are done in under two minutes
  • The intro line he uses is based on the pattern interrupt strategy.  
"I totally understand you're busy, all I need is 24 seconds to explain my point. Do you have 24 seconds?"
  • Simon also likes to make a reference to the previous step - "I emailed you two days ago..." and never lets too much time pass between steps. Even if we're talking about the time between the call and Zoom meeting. Two-day space is the maximum
  • Next, he quickly pitches lemlist with a sentence that addresses the main pain point and asks the prospect about their current process

Any useful info Simon digs up on this call (e.g. overview of their process), he inputs it fast in Notes section in lemlist.

This intel is later used to prepare Zoom meetings and to improve sales operations overall.

Aircall also has a solid article around 6 best practices for cold calling.

The final step is the follow-up email in case Simon didn't reach the person by cold calling. It gets delivered if a prospect didn't reply on LinkedIn, first email, or cold call. Here's the template.

As you can see, it's a reminder with a twist that references the previous step.

The goal is to squeeze in additional replies from people who were just too busy and forgot to reply before, among other reasons.

The email itself starts off with an {{icebreaker}} tag.

What the hell is that?

It's a unique sentence that's customized for every lead individually. What happens is, in your CSV file, you add a column called icebreaker. For every prospect, you write a unique intro.

I call this Tiramisu strategy. With just a little bit of research, you'll be amazed by how many details you can pick that you can later leverage here.

Finally, Simon's twist comes in the form of a personalized video thumbnail. It consists of multiple things:

  • Simon's image so people can see the real person
  • Dynamic text with {{firstName}} tag
  • LinkedIn profile pick of the person
  • Company logo in the bottom left corner
  • Play button

If you need a quick tutorial on how to create this, we got you.

It's just an irresistible offer to click + a cool way for Simon to introduce himself and deliver the ask in the video form.

Once prospects click, they get taken to the twist number two - dynamic landing page.

Personalization doesn't stop, because now the prospect lands on a custom page that's tailored for him. No other person will see a page like this.

Here's an example...

dynamic landing page

This page consists of:

  • Video
  • Unique text on the right that you can edit however you want
  • Simon's Calendly to decrease booking friction

This is one of the finest ways to book meetings and be different in a very noisy world of cold email outreach.

Bottom line

Besides Simon being the man, this is a great outbound sales sequence because it shows you how multichannel approach can make a big difference on your conversion rate.

51% of replies brought in hot leads. Meaning, 51 people were highly interested in what Simon had to show to them.

Also, if you "multichannel" like this, all the steps in your sales cadence are working together.

In Simon's case, LinkedIn helps segment users into buckets: 1) Relationships established and 2) No connection yet. This helps you write personalized cold call emails addressing each segment accordingly.

The research stage reveals sales ambitions of different prospects which helps Simon prepare every step.

Overview of their process he gets on a cold call helps identify the focus point for the Zoom meeting.

Connecting the dots is what this is about. And the sooner you start, the more data you'll have to optimize your process. It won't be perfect from day one, but it will become unstoppable as you go.

Release the Kraken!

Much love,

lemlist team
Your source of actionable outreach tips and strategies that will help you get replies and grow your business.

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