(Part 2/4) Snowpal: B2B Sales — How to get started
(Part 2/4) B2B Sales at Snowpal.com
In this podcast series, we’ll take a look at some of our learnings over the past couple of months in B2B Sales. If you are new to Sales, or B2B Sales, this should help you understand some of the fundamentals (I hope!).
Go to Part 1.
Transcript
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (00:01.442)
Hey there, hope you’re doing well. This is podcast number two in the series of B2B sales podcast. So if you haven’t checked the previous one out, I highly recommend you do so because I’m gonna pick up from where I left off, right? So without further ado, let’s get jump right in. I’m gonna share my screen and we’re gonna pick up from where we left off in the previous podcast. So we drew this diagram and again, I’m not going into the details, just to jump right in and move forward here.
We went as far as mailboxes and I said, let’s talk about mailboxes in the subsequent podcast, right? So let’s talk about it a little bit. When you’re sending these emails out to your prospects, you’re gonna send them using mailboxes, right? Now, do you wanna, let’s say you have a domain, right? For your product, like our domain is snowpal.com, right? A primary domain, if you will. From at least from a B to C standpoint.
For B2B, our APIs are on multiple API hubs, AWS Marketplace being the most important of the hubs as far as we are concerned. So definitely go to aws.snowpals.com to check out our APIs, right on back ends of services and our SaaS products. Now, you don’t wanna use your primary domain for your sales emails. And here’s why. You know, your emails, whether or not the emails you send, the sales emails end up in the…
actual inboxes of your prospects is almost anyone’s guess. But on a more serious note, you have to do a number of things to make sure, not make sure, to increase the chances of those emails ending in your prospects inboxes, right? Otherwise it’s not gonna magically happen. Just remember that. It’s gonna end up in spam and other places. Now, with all the recent changes that we’re hearing without Gmail and…
outlook going to crack down on the notion of spam and other emails. Unfortunately, even reaching out to a genuine prospect for selling a product that is going to actually help them be successful is going to be a challenge, just unfortunately because of all the phishing and other related emails, I believe, as I understand it. So life is not going to get any easier, but we’ll live and learn as we go, right? So email prospecting is only one way to do it.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (02:22.658)
I don’t know if it’s gonna actually flat out die in 2024, most likely not. So we’re gonna have to live and learn and see how we should make those adjustments. But till then, I wanna do your best to make sure, to not make, again, make sure it seems like 100%. There’s no guarantees, obviously, to increase the chances of your emails landing in your prospects inboxes. How do you do that? You need to have a high email reputation. And what does it mean? What is email reputation, right? How do you build a reputation?
How do you not hurt your existing reputation? So if you took our current product, B2C products, we use transactional emails. When you sign up for service using our tool for project management and a number of other things, you need to get notified when we send you reminders based on how you’ve configured it. When someone shares content with you on the platform, you get notified either on the mobile app or on the web or on both places, depending on your priorities and your configuration.
Now, those emails need to end in your inboxes when the emails do get sent out. The emails only get sent out based on how you configured them for them to be. So it’s not all the time. Otherwise, we rely on push notifications for mobile apps and so on and so forth. But when emails do get sent out, they need to actually be, they need to end up in your inboxes. So those are transactional emails. Use.
We use the obviously the same domain, Snowpal, for those transactional emails. But you don’t want to mess with that domain when you’re sending sales emails because when you’re prospecting, as carefully as you prospect, it happens that you end up sending emails and reaching out to folks who may not have an interest in what it is that you’re offering either at this time or till eternity, unfortunately. But it’s hard to know.
because you’re gonna do a fair bit of reach out, whether you cast a wide net by sending it to hundreds of thousands of people, or you send to the least number of people, you’re gonna have to send to a fair number of people before you find traction, just how it works, right? So you have to be careful, because people are, you know, just like I get tens of emails, and you know, I try to be respectful and say, hey, please don’t send to me again, or unsubscribe, for instance. But there are times I get emails that have…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:44.354)
completely unrelated to the business we are in. So you end up unsubscribing to the emails, right? But the more unsubscribes that happen, the more it’s gonna hurt your reputation. The more people mark, if they mark your email as spam, it’s really bad, which is why you have to be really, really careful in making sure you only send your emails to folks you think might have an interest, right? You feel like you looked at the product, the offering, the business, the role, and then you send. And even then there might be times you are…
Marked as spam you unsubscribe you cannot help it and you can look up the percentages, right? I think about I want to say from what I understand about 15% of B2B emails and You know, you can expect to get responses on like 15% of them or something like that. It’s a very small number It’s it’s a very small number How are the 15%? Again, these are not I mean, I’m just giving you numbers that they come to mind
look up Google to find out the actual numbers, but this may or may not be completely off, but I don’t know. At least that’s my recollection of what those numbers were. 15 to 20% is when what I read was the response rate could be around that, pretty low. Now that rate will become even lower if you actually don’t prospect better. So you want to be careful as to how you prospect. That way, that number is a little bit higher than what the average or the median number is.
and not too many people are clicking unsubscribe or spam to hurt your reputation. So back to mailboxes, what are some of the things we wanna jot down here? Let’s actually put a big heading called mailbox. Oops.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (06:38.454)
boxes what are some of the let’s maybe pick I don’t know let’s pick a slightly different shape here
put some of the words that come to mind. The first thing I said was.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (07:07.399)
Let’s pick a different color, use this one elsewhere.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (07:15.822)
Okay, some of the things, email reputation. You need to certainly build this. We’ll see how we can do it. How many emails you can send, how you can increase the number of emails you send, and so on and so forth. But before that, I’m just gonna call this emails.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (07:38.71)
Maybe the right word. I guess that’s fine. Now.
Yeah.
Email reputation, the next one is gonna be mailboxes. So you’re gonna have to get a different domain, at least two domains from what I’m told to send out these sales emails, right? Per sales person, now you have a sales team that has a lot of number of sales engineers, then you probably need more mailboxes, right? At least two per sales person is what I’m understanding it, right? So you get those mailboxes.
Go to GoDaddy or one of those places to just get a couple of new domains and you purchase emails for those domains. And you start sending emails through the sales tools using those emails. You can configure the mailboxes and the sales tools that you use. How many emails should get sent out? Questions like, let me actually.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:45.262)
how many emails per day in total, how many emails per mailbox per day, how many emails.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:02.638)
per sequence per day. So you’ll have to come up with these numbers, you’re gonna have to play and figure out which ones work, what doesn’t work, what’s too few, what’s too many. So there’s a number of such decisions you’re gonna have to make, right? So let me.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:22.082)
Still works more or less okay, but there’s bugs. It has its fair share of bugs, okay. Those additions you make, you wanna start with a certain number of emails. Let’s say you started five emails a day, right? Per mailbox, and then you can increase it as you go, but you wanna wait for the email, your email reputation has to be established first, right? Before it increases, it needs to be established. I don’t know what it starts at. Probably starts at somewhere close to zero.
So you need to establish a reputation. So you create, purchase a domain, create a mailbox, send like a hundred emails, and you’re gonna be in big trouble. It’s all gonna go to spam. It ends up going to spam regardless, even when it’s a genuine email. I’ve actually typed emails, and literally typed every single line in an email and sent to people, and it’s, I’ve been told, because they respond to it after a few weeks, and someone told me, hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t see this. It was very nice and courteous of the prospect.
And I was just curious to learn what happened, right? I mean, and they told me that it landed in their spam. They coincidentally happened to notice it because they were looking for some other email and the person that asked them to look into spam and then they spotted my email and then they responded to my email, right? So that is an example of a very genuinely written complete email that was not written using a sales tool. I actually send the email from my client and still ended up in the spam.
folder, unfortunately, right? So we have to deal with it as folks who are in the business of actually selling, right? So, what, how do you, let’s talk a little bit more about email reputation, right? What are some of the words that you have to Google basically? I believe it’s SPF, DKIM, DMARC, et cetera, et cetera, right? All of these basically play a role in email authentication and establishing your email credibility.
reputation of your email. So you can look this up. There’s plenty of articles online. Folks have been really graceful enough, gracious enough to write it. So people like us, at least like me, who did not know enough about what all of this meant could actually learn from. So Google those terms and those protocols. The crux of it essentially is this, right? How does a tool or an email server determine whether it’s a legit email?
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (11:47.858)
It needs to know that it’s coming from a credible authorized sender and the email was not modified in transit. Those are some of the things that come to mind, but there’s more to this puzzle. So it tries to make those judgments saying, hey, is this a valid domain? Does snowpals.com, is it a legit company? It sure is. Do they make brilliant products? Of course, but of course, I’m just kidding. I’m not kidding that we make brilliant products. I’m just kidding that the email provider, they don’t want to find that out.
If your domain is legit, if it’s coming from a credible sender, whatever else it needs to do to satisfy the requirements of these specifications and protocols, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and so on, the better you configure these things, the higher the chances of your emails ending in those inboxes, as simple as that. Now, again, do you need to know enough about these to write a thesis? I don’t think so, right?
It took us like a couple of hours if that probably not even that to satisfy these requirements and setting up because you know, you’re a legit company selling good products established. I know you’re a good citizen as a company, right? If you know what I mean, so it takes no time to go through the process and get it done and a couple of hours later if that you’re done. That doesn’t mean just because you’re a legit company. You have an obvious, you know, you’re located in a certain place and you’re selling real things and
everything is legit about you. Does that mean reputation, email reputation is gonna start at 100%? Not really, right? Because you’re a brand new, it’s a brand new domain, it’s a brand new account, mailbox, brand new email. So you’re gonna have to build that reputation. And how do you build it? By sending emails. But the emails have to land in boxes. So send few, very, very few, two emails a day, five emails a day, right? And then you work your way through. And there are tools that help you.
warm your emails up. So if you’re Googling this, just look for a warm, warming email inboxes or something along these lines. And you can learn more about it, right? Give it time. So the email inboxes are warmed up. And so, you know, you can actually start sending sales emails. That’s how I believe you’re supposed to do it, right? Now, even though you send only, we send very few emails when we even do it.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:17.258)
Yet I’ve been told, like I mentioned the example repeatedly, that it does end in spam and spam folders. That’s the unfortunate reality. It is gonna happen. I’ve asked a lot of salespeople who I respect and they have not told me anything otherwise, right? They said, yep, you’re gonna have to account for it. So you send a bit more. So you send, say if you send a hundred emails, 15 of them or 20 of them show an interest. And then some of them show, you know, I’ve seen it multiple times because these tools give you good insights into.
when the email was opened, how many times it was opened and so on and so forth. So you figure out if there is an interest, does that prospect have an interest? Now, I don’t know how good or bad this data is that these tools are reporting, but what else can you do, right? You are the mercy of these tools. And then you figure which email template worked. In the last podcast, we talked about templates and email a little bit, right? We talked about, you know, you’re drafting emails and personalizing them.
You do A-B testing to figure out which emails resonate better with your prospects and ICPs, like ideal customer profile, your prospects, more so than some other emails, for instance. You’re going to have to make those determinations, right? What email works. And let’s actually pause for a moment and talk about how to draft those emails, right? Because that’s anything but easy. Trust me, right? Now, let me actually create one more box here.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (15:45.602)
wish they had a lot more shapes but you know what I’m gonna go with the shape I’m most gonna
just pick a different.
I believe we’ve not used, oh, we did use that color already. So I’m just gonna go with this one. Yep. Okay, now let’s talk about that verbiage, right? The language in those emails. Again, I’m talking very specifically emails here. So email language. So you have a template one, first email, right? And then let’s say you have a template two for the first email and you can do.
some A-B testing to figure out which one works. Does this one work better or does the other one work better, right? So let’s say I’m gonna…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (16:48.59)
So you write the first version of what I wrote, trust me. I explained everything about every API we have. I think we had like six at the time, now we have eight. But I explained all the six APIs. I provided links to, you know, like, you know, aws.snowpals.com to a lot of different, you know, we have live products that run on our APIs, right? So I had links to those applications, a number of different links.
couple of attachments, and the email looked pretty rich. Unfortunately, when you have attachments and these links, there’s a higher chance of them ending up in spam, in the spam folder. At least that’s what I learned. Because phishing emails tend to have these links and attachments and whatnot. So unfortunately, even genuine emails, like the ones we send out, end up being subjected to that scrutiny, and they end up in the wrong inboxes, and nobody gets to ever see it. So…
The first email was very detailed. It had all the information. Like you could know a lot about our company, but it didn’t make sense. It ran into like three paragraphs, right? My understanding is most people spend eight to 10 seconds if an email even ends up in their inbox, which again, I’ve said many a times, it may or may not, and most of the times, unfortunately, it does not. Even if it does end in their inboxes, people spend about eight to 10 seconds, I understand, as I understand reading that email.
which means how many lines are going to be able to read? Maybe three, four lines, give or take. So your email needs to pick your prospect’s interest within those first eight to 10 seconds. Now it’s very challenging. If you time eight to 10 seconds, right? Imagine, let’s even do it at real time. I don’t know. I think I might have like a timer app or something on my machine. Let me see.
I mean, let’s do a real life thing, right? So I’m gonna say 10 seconds here.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (19:02.466)
I guess my tool doesn’t let me enter like that. Okay, I’m gonna do a 10 second thing, right? Let’s see how this thing works. I’m gonna start the timer. The count of three, I’m gonna count down from three. When you hit zero, I’m gonna start pretending like I’m the email, right? I’m gonna read this out and it might be a fun exercise.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (19:26.814)
Oops, let me, let me, okay. Three, two, one, go. Hey Krish, we are an API company that provides back-ends as services to help your team reduce time to market on your apps. And that’s it, I’m already past. I was looking at that, I would have said that better than I did, except I was looking at the time all along, right? So let’s try it one more time. Three, two,
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (19:54.854)
One, go. Hey, Krish, we provide APIs and back-end services to help teams reduce time to market for their applications. I’m already at the ninth second, right? One more time, since the time was here, I’m a bit conscious, my apologies, but that was like 10 seconds. That is, and it took me 10 seconds, but when you’re reading it, I give, you know, it’s gonna be a little bit faster. You can actually read faster than, you know, I can speak that.
So I think I reckon you can read like three sentences maybe, right? I don’t know, depending on the length of the sentence, right? Maybe, maybe 30 words, if I have to put a number to it, not more than that. That’s what I’m trying to make an impression here, right? You got all of like 30, 35 words to make that impact. Uh, and you think that’s a lot of words. I suggest you just type it and then you realize how it’s not that many words. Uh, even if you’re not someone like I, who actually is pretty verbose, as you can tell, uh, it’s, it still takes a lot of effort.
So the first email was very, very long. It had actually eight paragraphs, right? So let me write it down here. Let me put a line.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (21:05.624)
The first email
had about four to five paragraphs. You can imagine what the size was. Obviously that didn’t make sense. And I learned, we learned it the hard way. Then in the second email, we made it like two paragraphs. You thought, okay, you know what? We reduced the length of the paragraphs. I would say two smaller paragraphs, right? That didn’t seem too bad. I mean, how bad can it be? It’s two paragraphs after all, right? But as it turned out,
That was one too many as well. The paragraphs were like four lines, five lines long. So fast forward many, many iterations later. I think it took us like about an eight hour session straight out to come up with nth version where this is not, may not be the perfect version, right? You don’t have to keep going, but the version as we are at today. So let me give it a number. Let’s call it the 30th version or something, right? The current version, the current version.
has about like 100 words maybe, give or a hundred words-ish. I think that’s what I suspect it has. And to get to that point, it was a challenge, right? It was a big, big challenge because you wanna express what you have, what your company does truthfully, honestly, to the extent that it does it today. But you also want to pick the curiosity of your reader. It needs to be interesting, it shouldn’t be boring.
but it should also express what you’re trying to express. So when you put a combination of all of them, and it should work on mobile and on your desktop client, because there are emails we had where we had a signature with our QR code, like one QR code, or I don’t know, like one screen attachment. It was not visible on a standard iPhone size, right? So we had to actually reduce, I had to reduce the length of the email so that QR codes would also be visible. Not that they had to be, but it just looked prettier if they were visible.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (23:03.074)
So we had to make all those adjustments and ultimately arrived at this beautiful current version, which tomorrow I might think needs to be, we might think needs to be tweaked, which is an ongoing effort, right? But ultimately we arrived at one which we like as of the time of this recording. As a team, we actually like that particular email, the way it’s drafted, it’s specific. It talks about API, it talks about the value add we bring to the table.
It speaks to why we’re doing it, why the product would make a significant difference to the success of our prospects. All of them within a hundred word draft. And also it needs to be interesting. What if it says all of this, but it’s boring and it’s laborious, I mean, nobody’s gonna want to read. There needs to be an element of attraction to those words and to how they present themselves.
That’s what it is, right? So you try out, do A-B testing, figure out which emails work, which ones don’t work. And also let me tell you, a given email that works in a particular geography and up to a particular demographic, to a particular group of people in society that work in a certain industry, may not work at all for somebody else who’s in a different industry in different part of the world. So if you drafted that one perfectly beautiful email and thought your job was done.
I’m sorry, my friend, it’s not done, right? We have multiple products in our ecosystem. We have APIs, we have web apps, mobile apps, Snowpal education. There’s a number of different things with courses. We sell a number of different things, which means all our emails have to look different from each other. They have to look different from each other, yet they have to make that impression within the first couple of lines. So that’s enough about, I think that’s a fair bit about emails.
creating those emails, creating those templates, associating those templates with sequences, and then trying out doing this A-B testing to figure out which one works, which doesn’t work. And then you can have a base template version, but then before you send it, after you’ve done the due diligence of that prospect, you can make adjustments to the emails so it speaks to that language, right? Now, if I got an email that said, that was very generically worded, I’m probably not gonna react to it.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (25:26.634)
If it adds some references to me and our company, I’m gonna give it a second look. But what if it went further? It, you know, that the actual sender had dug a little bit deeper, understood our EPIs, the value I had brought to the table, and then asked a more specific question, or popped a question or got me thinking, then there’s a much higher chance of me responding to that, you know, salesperson, and hit reply, for instance, right? So that’s where we wanna get to.
But that’s not an easy, you have to cross the bridges. It’s actually, it takes a while to get there. And I don’t think you ever get there really, because the time moment you get there, some things may have changed the market, could have changed the dynamics, could have changed, OpenAI has changed all our lives, right? So all of those things are gonna play a role. Plus, maybe it worked for a group of prospects, maybe it doesn’t work for another group. And now you try to figure why.
You cannot tell any differences, meaning they are situated in the same part of the world. They are in the same kind of business. So it should work, should have worked for this group of this cohort as well. But then it did not. So then you have to go and try to do that research, you know, try to ask why maybe, maybe they are not in the business that you think they are in, or maybe they were. We worded the emails was good for, you know, it helped you connect with some people and not everybody.
Who knows what the answer is, but you know, it depends on the problem, depends on your reach, or depends on the tool, depends on a plethora of factors. So it’s up to us, each one of us, to figure out what works, what doesn’t, in the context of what it is that we’re selling, and then make those adjustments, right? The short of it is no matter how many tools there are, there is still a human element. The tools obviously help us be more productive, do less of what we don’t have to do, which makes a lot of sense, right? They give us more reach, more scalability.
but there is still two people using the same tool, reaching out to the same prospect, I’m gonna find that the results are different actually because they bring the human element into the picture and that nobody can take that away from any of us. At least that’s what I believe. So you’re gonna have to live and learn and hopefully we all learn sooner than later, right? That’s me talking about prospecting in the context of tools, sales tools and.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (27:51.582)
And we’ve got as far as mailboxes and emails and email reputation, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. I didn’t talk much about setting up these records, the DNS records, but again, if you look up the examples, it’s reasonably straightforward, right? Depending on which DNS provider you’re using, you can go there, their UI and user interface is gonna look a little different, but then you’re gonna do what you need to do to ensure that these are set up. And once you set them up once,
You may have to revisit to make some adjustments because things always change, but I reckon you don’t have to do it all that frequently and you can focus your energies on finding the right prospects and going after your ICP. I think we are close to the half hour mark here. This might be a good place to pause this podcast and we’ll pick up, we’ll talk more in the subsequent ones. What other tools should we be using?
Email is one way to do it. What other ways can we possibly do the notion of prospecting? What works? What doesn’t work? How do you use these other tools that I’m going to talk about in the subsequent podcast? There’s plenty more to discuss here and we will take it slowly, but surely we’ll just move along. Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.
Go to Part 3.
Snowpal’s Products:
Backends as Services on AWS Marketplace
Mobile Apps on App Store and Play Store
Education Platform for Learners and Course Creators