Go-to-market mavericks: Melissa Adamo on brand exposure, outbound best practices, and more [video]
This is the series where we talk to GTM trendsetters about the strategies and tactics they use to drive results.
We recently talked to Melissa Adamo, Director of Sales Development at Seismic, about all things omnichannel outbound as part of our recent event: Leaning into omnichannel prospecting.
Here are three of the top takeaways from that conversation (check out the full recording above).
1. Approach sales with a marketing mindset
Modern selling happens across multiple touchpoints—emails, phone calls, LinkedIn engagements.
It's tempting to measure the effectiveness of each channel based on conversion rate alone, but Melissa doesn’t see it that way.
In her opinion, each interaction is also an opportunity to drive awareness of you and your offering.
“You see a bunch of Super Bowl ads,” Melissa said. “You might see one for Lay’s potato chips. You're not leaving in the middle of the Super Bowl—you're not missing the halftime show to go out and buy a bag of Lay’s potato chips. But next time you go to the store, you might be hungry for a bag of potato chips. And because you saw that ad so many different times or even just one time, you're more likely to reach for that bag.”
In other words: Just because an email doesn’t lead to a meeting booked doesn’t mean it can’t serve a purpose.
“By the time you find them on a different channel, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's voicemail, whether it's cold call, they're going to have more awareness, and they're likely to be a little bit more receptive to having that conversation with you, as long as your email was targeted and specific with an ask,” Melissa said.
2. Make every character count
Prospect attention is arguably sellers’ least available—and therefore most valuable—resource.
That’s why Melissa works so hard to make sure reps don’t squander it.
“The first two things that people see [in an email] are your subject line and probably those first eight to 10 words that you're sending out,” Melissa said. “So you want to make sure that your subject line is catchy, and that your first eight to 10 words are not just a, ‘Hi, how are you?’ Because if that is the case, they're probably not going to open it, so it won't become that channel of exposure.”
In fact, the shorter and sweeter your subject line, the better. Full sentences are a no-no, according to Melissa.
It’s also important not to push features and functionalities. Problems solved and goals achieved—all tied to real business priorities—are what count.
“If we just push features and we don't really make it matter to the prospect, why would they care?” Melissa said. “I say this all the time to my team, ‘Why does it matter to them? Why does it matter to this person specifically? Why does it matter now?’ Because if you can't make it matter, if you can't make what you're selling matter to your prospect, they're not going to take time out of their busy day to meet with us."
This is why account research is crucial.
Annual revenue, capital raised, industry trends, competitive landscape—it all helps you build a hypothesis for where your product fits in and craft more targeted messaging.
RoomieAI™Common Room’s RoomieAI—a suite of AI-powered tools specially designed for go-to-market teams—allows you to augment your day-to-day workflows to boost productivity. This makes it easy to summarize account research in an instant, create LLM-generated outbound snippets based on every available signal, and much more.
Person-level research is also key to making sure you’re reaching out with relevance. If Melissa doesn’t know much about an individual contact, she’ll focus more on the account as a whole and its industry. But whenever possible, she tries to get that person-level context and use it to personalize accordingly.
Person360™Common Room’s Person360 feature allows you to automatically collect, deanonymize, enrich, and match signals to a unified profile for individuals and organizations. This makes it easy to connect with the people and companies behind buying signals with full context.
There’s no doubt that good research takes time upfront, but it pays dividends on the back end.
“Once you craft that message, it's a little bit more scalable as you complete outreach to all the personas within the account,” Melissa said.
3. Get personal on LinkedIn
Multichannel outreach sequences aren’t just about maximizing brand exposure. They also help reps reach buyers where they are.
“There are so many different channels that you can leverage to reach out to a prospect, whether it's text, whether it's call, email, voicemail, LinkedIn, but we don't know which ones our prospects prefer, right?” Melissa said. “They're not going to tell us. They're not going to put it on a billboard. And so we have to make a well-educated guess as to how to meet our prospects where they're at.”
But LinkedIn is different from other channels. It puts a face to a name. It’s more intimate. And reps that take a more personal approach on this channel will stand out.
“VPs, directors, people that SDRs are reaching out to get so many emails and cold calls every single day,” Melissa said. “But they don't get a lot of LinkedIn video messages. They don't get a lot of LinkedIn voice notes, which is why LinkedIn is becoming a much more prominent channel for my team to use, because we're being different.”
Social selling doesn’t start and stop with a message, either. Melissa recommends building rapport with prospects by reacting to and commenting on their LinkedIn posts.
Of course, it’s worth making sure the juice is worth the squeeze before you dedicate too much time to LinkedIn prospecting.
“If somebody's not active on LinkedIn, if their last post was four years ago, that's probably not the best prospect to reach out to,” Melissa said. “But if you are connected with somebody on LinkedIn, you can see how often they're actively engaging with other people's content, with other people's posts, how often they're posting themselves. And so I would really leverage that as a leading indicator of whether you should be doing outreach or not to this person.”
These are just some of the takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Adamo.
Watch the recording for the full story.
And stay tuned for the next edition of Go-to-market mavericks!
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