Trada Hones in on Hot Leads with Tout

About Trada

Online advertising is a crowded, confusing industry that Trada brings sanity to. They run the first and only crowdsourced, community-based marketplace for online advertising. Clients sign up, detail their needs, and are matched with industry experts, eliminating the need for a full in-house paid search team. Their business provides an easy solution that’s ideal for mid-market and larger small businesses.

We've profiled Trada in the past to spread word about a job opening for Business Development Reps. Check it out to learn more about their team and great culture - as well as their annual scooter race! 

The problem

Trada’s messaging and lead follow-up process were systematized, but they lacked key insights into their day-to-day sales communication. Their Business Development Reps weren’t sure which leads were the most qualified to follow up with, and they also weren’t sure what communications resonated the most with prospects.

The Solution

Trada’s sales and marketing departments worked together to get Tout running for the team. Marketing created templates for sales, and sales used these in their everyday communications to A/B test and gather usage metrics. Tout’s templates save Trada time writing repetitive emails, and they ensure that messaging is consistent across the team. As a fast-growing company, new Business Development Reps can quickly get up to speed on the sales process and messaging. Trada’s sales team can now gain critical insights on a lead-by-lead basis - by knowing who opened their emails - to hone in on the most interested leads with targeted follow-up.  

Tout enables our sales team to prioritize their day. In the past we wasted time chasing leads who never opened the emails we sent them. By using Tout we can now target prospects that we are confident have opened their email. Tout also gives us insight into how quickly they are opened, how many times and what action they take after reading,"
- Chris Crawfurd, Director of Training and Sales Enablement

Bonus: ToutApp best practices from the Trada team

• Move recipients with the most clicks and views on emails to the top of the list for follow up
• Have marketing and sales work together to create and test sales email templates
• Follow up with an email or phone call when the Live Feed shows a lead viewing your email
• A/B test sales templates to see which perform the best, then use the ones with the best statistics.

Top 5 Email Mistakes You Need to Avoid

I recently sent out a BAD sales email.

Bad sales emails often go under the radar because most likely they won't result in a reply or a sale.

It's a bit easier to identify ideas around what some of our "best" emails look like based on positive responses they've led to in the past. To start writing better sales emails, it's important to take a look into what doesn't work. 

5 Email Mistakes that most likely will result in a "Delete"

1. Typos and basic grammar mistakes. When sending a sales email the impression you make is key, especially within your first communication. Typos and basic grammar mistakes = loss of credibility. The focus shifts from selling to "why is this person wasting my time with an email they didn't edit." Lesson learned from the BAD email I sent. This was the response my email resulted in: 

"...even if YOUR a pro." 

 

You still rep Tout or can I call her out on this? 

Not the type of reply I was looking for... scoring a meeting would have been better. Simple grammar mistakes, such as Your vs. You're can kill the value of a sales email instantly.

2. Mail merge fail. Similar to typos and grammar, the mail merge fail leads to automatic disregard of your email or just a good laugh. Here's an email one of our Tout developers Steven recieved: 

​Steven, Richard, As a ruby rails developer in the Bay Area, you are one of the most saught out engineers at the moment. Feels nice huh? Although with every positive, there are some negatives (you do probably get bombarded with recruiters all the time).

We are still wondering who Richard is...No one wants to read an email sent to Dave at Company A when you're name is Ryan at Company B. 

​3. A long and boring email. Everyone is busy. No one wants to read a 5 paragraph essay from you. Tweet size emails. Keep your emails down to 3 short paragraphs. 

4. Don't let marketing write your sales emails. While marketing emails may look fancy and visually appealing, they do not come off as personalized or forge building real relationships. Simply said your lead wants to know their is an actual pulse on the other end. Use Tout templates so YOU can create your own sales templates easily that look just like any email you'd send out from Outlook and Gmail.

5. No follow up. This one technically does not result in an automatic delete. How can you delete an email that hasn't even been sent? Changes are you won't recieve a reply or close a deal after sening out just one email. Strategic follow up is key using a combination of email and phone. Well, unfortunately I can't go back and "un-send" the BAD email I sent.

3 Tips for Successful Sales Emails 

1. Your subject line. The subject line is like a book cover. While, we are told never to judge a book by its cover, this does not hold true for subject lines. Subjecy lines make it or break it. A good subject line will give your email that "extra-edge" when getting noticed in your leads' busy inbox. 
2. The intro. An email intro is key. Why should your lead care? Make your intro about them. Mention a referral, boost their ego, keep it simple...just don't jump into a detailed explanation of your company.
3. Follow up. You need to follow up. Here's the catch to being successful, "Stop touching base and checking in." This is the best advice I learned from following sales influencer John Barrows. Make sure you are following up with an intent to move along the sales and have a call to action. 

How to follow up from a sales email

Did my lead or prospect get my email? This is the biggest question often faced even after spending the time to write an awesome sales email.

• Use ToutApp's Live Feed to see when your email is opened, clicked or when your lead is on slide 5 of your sales deck. Now you can spend you time following up with the most engaged people with a timed call or email. 
• We oftentimes forget about the leads or contacts we email and never respond. Maybe a lead you're scheduling a meeting with. Emails get lost, pushed aside, and forgotten just like snail mail. Most likely these people may be interested, opening your email multiple times, clickng on the links in your email to learn more and never take the next steps to reply. 
• Use Tout templates. Make it easy for yourself to follow up by creating templates. 

Sales emails are tough - let's face it. Spend time selling, not wasting time wondering if Richard and Steven read your email. 

Inc.com Lets Entrepreneurs Feel less Lonely with ToutApp

Our featured Team of the Week entry comes from the Inc. Business Owner Council. Every week or so, we'll profile a different user group who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.

We are under the auspices of INC. Magazine, which decided that many of the INC. 500/5000 CEOs and business owners needed more than just an informative magazine. So they decided to create regional business owner councils around the country to support these entrepreneurs with their goals. We meet monthly and offer peer support in a confidential setting and offer enhanced access to INC. Magazine and other members around the country. We address the common theme of "lonely at the top"!

ToutApp's take: Entrepreneurs are building the future of technology, and they're working in a fast-pacedworld where the landscape changes constantly. Inc helps bring sanity and community to the process of starting a company, which is filled with pressure. Lately, too, we've seen some devastating losses from entrepreneurs who took their own lives because of depression and anxiety. Inc.com's Business Owner Council aims to create a community for these people, and they use ToutApp to help build and manage it.

With ToutApp, we love that we are not just able to send out numerous emails but we also get to see how effective each email is and who clicks through for further info.

ToutApp allows Inc to spend time contacting truly interested prospects and keep them in the loop. The Inc team are also able to share templates with co-workers in the various regions - a real time saver. They can also use Tout's analytics to determine which templates are more successful than others when reaching out to business owners. Through communication tools like ToutApp, the Inc Business Owner's Council helps unite entrepreneurs across the United States - and we're proud to support them!

Toutapp Helps Lawgical Increase Engagement

Our featured Team of the Week entry comes from Lawgical. Every week or so, we'll profile a different user group who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.

About Lawgical

Lawgical is an online marketing company that serves select legal niches. We have a number of brands such as ServeNow, PInow, AboutBail, and the Legal Talk Network that are recognized as industry leading networks for the legal communities that they serve. Our activities range from building our networks to actively promoting the products.

How Lawgical uses ToutApp

ToutApp is an incredibly useful tool for outreach and sales productivity. We use it throughout our marketing and sales departments to create and enhance engagement with clients and leads.

An example of how we've used ToutApp is in communications with governmental agencies for marketing projects. The responsiveness of agencies and their bureaucracies can vary greatly. So being able to view whether they opened or clicked on our emails has guided our communications, especially for when and how we follow up. As a result, we've increased the number of responses to our requests and gotten much better project results.

Beyond just tracking, the ability to create and use templates within ToutApp has helped us routinize and refine certain processes to make them faster and more efficient.

ToutApp Conquers the Legal World

Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Adam Rosenblum, Principal Attorney at The Rosenblum Law Firm. Every week or so, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.

I'm the principal attorney at The Rosenblum Law Firm, which focuses on traffic violations and criminal defense in New York and New Jersey. Our website at http://www.ticketdefenselaw.com has over 300 pages of unique content related to traffic violations. We also run http://newyorkspeedingfines.com, an interactive site that educates individuals about the consequences of traffic violations. Our monthly newsletter contains information from our websites, including http://rosenblumlawfirm.com, and goes out to thousands of subscribers to give them information on a broad range of legal topics.

ToutApp has been an invaluable tool for a number of reasons.

Our firm gets a significant volume of potential client leads each month. In addition, many of our current clients are looking for information we provide via email. ToutApp allows us to create templates so that we do not have to write the same emails over and over and track the effectiveness of the templates. Many of our emails include links, and ToutApp also lets us know whether or not people are clicking on them. We also love Tout's campaign feature, which allows us to have a template automatically send a follow-up email. This feature allows us to continue to provide our clients and potential clients information without having to send the emails manually.