Zevenue - December / 2023

Hey! Welcome to monthly updates from Zevenue. I’ve started doing this to keep friends updated and share more behind-the-scenes of our work.

I’ll share updates, lessons, and growth tips as we encounter them.

What we do

Better outbound systems for startups. So many teams struggle with their sales outreach when it comes to getting the right data, approach, and results to fuel their growth. We’re here to fix that. Our clients are usually startups between pre-seed and Series A, with some that are bootstrapped.

Updates

• Wrapped our best quarter to date

• Paused campaigns for the last week of the year and focused on improving our systems

• Had our first Hack Week

Latest in Outbound

What is your objective when your sales team emails a prospect?

Most teams measure their success through sales meetings booked. 

If that comes across in your messaging though, you’ll start to write emails with pushy wording. Calls to actions like:

“Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss this.”

“Here’s my calendar link. Schedule some time to discuss this further”. 

This can work in some markets. But in a world where more people are sending emails, you need to be able to stand out. Prospects respond to you when they believe you know more about the problem than they do, see you as credible/capable enough to solve their problem, and are curious about how your solution will look. 

That’s less likely to happen when you appear desperate or overly aggressive. We’re seeing better results when we make sure that we educate, follow up, and leave a simple offer. Here is an example:

Initiatives

We’re working on two main things right now.

1) Building out our offer for startups that need a completely different approach to outbound. We will score your target market, prioritize leads that are the best fit, research and customize messaging to these prospects, then layer on our sending infrastructure on top so you can actually deliver your campaigns Don’t know exactly what to call this yet. We took on a few of these engagements in Q4 and got great results without needing to writing the full emails ourselves.

2) Implementing the projects we started during our Hack Week:

• A customGPT for writing great sales emails

• Enriching data through Clay rather than using a single data source

• LinkedIn automatons with Instantly

Content

What to expect in GTM this year: smaller SDR teams, the end of email warmup, better reply rates, and stronger efforts across multiple channels to find “what sticks”.

Feel free to forward this to any founder friends, and if you were forwarded this email, you can subscribe here to receive the next one. If you know a startup that might need help with their outbound and growth, I’d love to help!

— Yusuf