3 Ways Sales Pros Can Achieve Personalization at Scale

It’s easy to see why personalization at scale is such an intriguing concept for both marketers and salespeople. Nearly half of B2B decision makers don’t respond to sales professionals who don’t personalize their messages. But creating personalized messages takes time, so we could all get used to clicking “send” just once and making every recipient of our list feel special and, more importantly, inclined to take the desired action.

Here’s the problem: Technology has allowed us to achieve better personalization at scale but our prospects are smart, discerning people. They can usually (and easily) tell a mass-“personalized” message that includes their name and company from a truly personal, crafted message that more accurately and deeply captures the context of their situation. Here are three ways today’s sales pros can scale their personalization efforts without losing that personal touch.

1. Standardize Your Research Process

Delivering unique, relevant insights is among the most effective ways to personalize your outreach. By standardizing a few of your best research tricks, you can arrive at wise observations in less time. That makes it possible to send a greater number of personalized messages wrapped around researched insights that separate you from the competition.

Assess your top processes for digging up timely information and research and figure out how to make short work of them. Perhaps it’s a matter of setting up notifications on LinkedIn, Google Alerts, or Buzzsumo. Or perhaps it’s about setting aside time each day for new activities like social selling on Quora.

2. Create Outreach Templates

It may seem counterintuitive to create templates for reuse when the aim is to get personal. But the reality is that you can share many of the same insights and recommendations with multiple prospects. Or you can re-use effective opening lines and CTAs in your outreach, filling in the rest with the prospect-specific insights you discovered. The template is a way to modularize what you say so you can reduce the time you spend rewriting.  

For example, perhaps you want to share an interesting report finding with prospects that are in a certain role in a specific industry. The template could summarize the findings while you add personal details that explain their relevance to the recipient. Or perhaps you always start your outreach with the same brief opening line and finish with a line or two that nicely sums up your value proposition. You can then focus on customizing the middle of the template to demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to understand the recipient’s situation. This is in stark contrast to simply plugging a few nouns into a Mad Libs-style template, which most prospects see right through.

Just make sure you don’t end up sending this: 

3. Engage the Entire Buying Committee

When you’re selling a complex (or expensive) solution, you need to establish multiple relationships within an account. While it may seem overwhelming to engage more than one decision maker in a single company, you can streamline your efforts to get personal by tapping into this multi-threaded access.

For one, you can leverage your strong relationships at the organization to gain introductions and access to insights about everyone on the buying committee. This is a big opportunity to find out the priorities of these other members and who is – and isn’t – motivated to make a change. Knowing this will help you personalize your outreach to everyone you need to influence.

Want more ideas for putting personalized selling to work? Download our eBook: How Personalized Selling Unlocks Competitive Advantage.