Email automation is an amazing tool that allows salespeople to nurture prospects through the sales cycle. However, if used incorrectly, automated sales emails can be a relationship killer. We’ve all seen email automation used the completely wrong way– Spammy emails with paragraphs about why you should use their product or service, generic copy and pasted wording with zero customization. Unless you like emails sent at a frequency that completely clutters your inbox, read on. Below, learn my top tips to create strong, automated emails that are customized; allowing salespeople to strengthen relationships with their prospects and ultimately, acquire them as customers.

 

What is a sales sequence?

 

Sales sequences are a pre-written, customizable series of emails and task reminders. Sequences turn repetitive tasks, such as follow up reminders into simple, easy-to-launch messages. My manufacturing clients utilize sequences to follow up with prospects for a variety of reasons. Some examples of sequence use include: prospect went dark, called and left a voicemail, new connection on LinkedIn and trying to establish a relationship, or prospect requested sales information but has gone cold. During sales enablement training, we work with clients to identify common sales scenarios and develop a series of emails for each of them.

 

How to make customization easy

 

Many email platforms allow people to send automated emails. Our agency and our clients use HubSpot for their sales enablement needs. HubSpot allows you to customize the series of emails (typical 3-4 emails per sequence) so that you aren’t tasked with remembering to follow up with a prospect throughout the week. Since all the emails in the sequence are pre-written, customized and scheduled, it allows salespeople to quickly and efficiently focus on client accounts and other sales tasks, without having to worry if good prospects are falling through the cracks.

 

How to Properly Customize an Automated Sales Email

 

In order to explain how to customize automated sales emails work, I’ve created a mock template for a fictional client and a customized version. The client is a Henry, a VP of Business Development at an agrochemical equipment manufacturer, Sprouts Equipment. The client is looking to partner with a chemical blending company, Jameson Chemical.

 

Prospect Request Information Email #1 Template

Subject: The Information You Requested

Hey{{First Name}},

It was great speaking with you earlier. I enjoyed learning about INSERT COMPANY and your unique products. I found INSERT INFORMATION about you especially interesting. Below are some resources that I think you will find valuable.

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to set up a time to talk more in depth.

Best,

{{ contact.hubspot_owner_id }}

 

Prospect Requested Information Email #1 With Customization

 

Subject: The Information You Requested

Hey John,

It was great speaking with you earlier. I enjoyed learning about Jameson Chemical and your liquid and powder blending services. I found Jameson’s ability to reach 83% of the continental US with one-day shipping remarkable. Below are some resources that I think you will find valuable.

• Case Study: How Sprouts Equipment agrochemical equipment increase productivity by 10%
• Sprouts Equipment Agrochemical Equipment Brochure
• Sprouts Equipment Wins Consumers Choice Award 2018

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to set up a time to talk more in depth. I look forward to the possibility of partnering with Jameson Chemical.

Best,

Henry

 

Why This Customized Email Works

 

This sequence email works because it doesn’t appear to be a pre-written automated email. Henry mentioned information from their previous call which shows John that he values Jameson Chemical and the work they do. Instead of writing long paragraphs about why Sprouts Equipment is great, Henry gave John 3 strong pieces of content for John to read based upon his interest. The case study and award article especially showcase Sprouts Equipment’s strengths and add validity to the everything Henry has said since they were approved by a 3rd party.

 

If John does not reply to this email in the sequence, he will receive another email in 3 days with more information. If John doesn’t respond to that email, he will get another email a few days later. Many times it takes 3-4 tries to get someone to answer so the key is to not give up. As long as you’re customizing the emails and adding value, the prospect will not feel spammed.

 

Email automation is a powerful tool for salespeople to connect with prospects and optimize the sales process. Prospects will receive emails based upon their behavior, allowing sales managers to nurture prospect until they’ve indicated they are ready to buy. The key to using sales sequences is customization and allowing strong content to nurture your prospect through the sales cycle. Stumped on how to develop strong content? Check out the resources below.

• 10 Ways to Reignite Your Manufacturing Blog
• How to Get Your Stubborn Manufacturing Customers to Participate in Case Studies
• The Industrial Manufacturer’s Guide to Inbound Marketing

Content is an incredible tool to strengthen relationships with prospects and customers alike. If used effectively, content has the power to turn a prospect into a customer. Is your content moving the needle and bringing in sales qualified leads (SQLs)? A biannual content audit is essential to determine if your content marketing is impacting sales, and if not, figure out why it’s not working. Below, learn how to perform a biannual content audit and create a content strategy that boosts brand awareness, lead generation, and customer acquisition.

1. Organize Current Content

One of the first things we do when working with our business-to-business manufacturing clients is establishing a centralized place to organize content. We call this digital archive “The Content Vault”. In it, you will find published editorial articles, unpublished blogs, white papers, landing pages, product photos, and digital collateral, all organized in an easy and simple to find place. It is essential to establish a system and maintain it. That way, no content is falling through the cracks and your salespeople and marketing team can easily access the content they need to be successful.

 

2. Determine Which Prospects Should Be Targeted By Content  

 

When writing pieces of content, it important to keep the prospect you’re targeting in mind. Generalized content doesn’t appeal to anyone. To create a sound content marketing plan, it is essential that you take the time to identify your ideal customers. This process is called creating buyer personas. Buyer personas help manufacturers identify their best prospects. A purchasing manager and a sales engineer at a mid-level manufacturing company might both be buyers of your product or service. However, both buyer personas have their own motivations and challenges. It is essential that you have content that speaks to the persona in their language and addresses their unique problems and challenges.

3.  Determine What Stage in the Buyer’s Journey The Content Fits

Once you have identified what content is suited for each buyer persona, it is important to evaluate which stage of the buyer’s journey the piece fits into. The buyer’s journey essentially refers to the steps that your ideal buyer takes in their decision. Below, I have highlighted how content can fit into certain stages of the buyer’s journey. For this example, you are a manufacturer of commercial cabinetry looking to work with “Designer Dan”, a Director of Design for Major Retail Companies (i.e. Piada, Cabela’s Dick’s Sporting Goods, etc.)

 

Awareness: Blog – How Commercial Cabinets Affects the Commercial Retail Experience

 

Consideration: White Paper – Retail Industry Design Trends Analysis

 

Decision: Case Study – How American Eagle Differentiated Itself within the Commercial Retail Space

 

When creating content for your buyer personas, aka ideal prospects, it is important to think about their buying process, not your sales process, and writing content that talks to their unique problems and challenges and answers their questions. Note that the awareness piece is a broader topic and the consideration and decision pieces get increasingly more technical. The decision stage piece of content should always be a differentiation piece about why someone should work with you instead of your competitors. Case studies are an excellent way to show prospects that you do excellent work and give 3rd party credibility to your brand. Don’t have case studies? Stumped on how to ask your customers to be interviewed for a case study? Check out our blog, How to Convince Your Stubborn Manufacturing Customers to Participate in Case Studies

4. Writing Content with SEO Strategy in Mind

 

Have a lot of pieces of content written about one specific topic? Utilize that to your advantage. Search engine optimization has changed drastically. In the past, the way to rank in search was by including specific keywords or key phrases in your content. Now, the way to rank in search is more so about the volume of content you have on a specific topic. The way to beat the search algorithm is by writing a significant amount of content on a certain topic and categorizing all the related the content together. That way, Google’s search algorithm will identify you as an expert on that topic and you will rank higher when prospects are Google searching for things related to your product or service. Check out The Biggest Change in Internet Search: How to Beat the New Keyword Algorithm for more information.

5. Filling in the Gaps

Once you’ve done an audit of your current content and organized it into a manageable system, it’s time to evaluate where the gaps are in your content and create a content plan moving forward that addresses those areas. Creating a content map is a great way to lay out your campaign strategy for the next 6 months to a year and determine the type of content necessary, graphic elements required, and where the content will be utilized. That way, your company won’t lose momentum and will be creating targeted writing that impacts lead generation and sales. Check out Why Manufacturers Need a Content Map for tips on how we design content maps with our business-to-business manufacturing clients.

This guest blog was kindly provided by Smithers Quality Assessments

The clock keeps ticking, and we keep getting closer to that now infamous due date (September 15, 2018, to be exact) for the transition of ISO 9001:2008 certifications to the updated standard of ISO 9001:2015. If you’re already certified to the former, you’re probably going through the process of determining audit dates for transition, or if you’re new to the quality management system, you may be looking at which certification body to select to help you get up to date with the latest standard. In either case, or if you’re unsure of what the best course of action will be for your organization moving forward, highlighting what’s really changed in the latest revision may help to settle uncertainty, solidify expectations, and create a clear direction.

At first glance, the new standard appears different, and may even feel a little different after reviewing it for the first time. However, ISO 9001:2015 is actually very similar to its predecessor ISO 9001:2008.  In fact, if you exclude the more subtle or simple changes, there are four important changes to be found in the latest revision:

1. Processes Emphasis – The goal of this addition is to prompt organizations to really think about their processes, to define them clearly and who’s responsible for what. For example, start by asking yourself these questions: What are your processes specifically? Who will run them? How will you monitor and measure them?

2. Risk Management Concept – Every business owner, operator, or manager must consider the risk involved with many of the decision they make, or the actions they take on a regular basis. For instance: Do you bring on a new supplier? Yes or no? Should you pick up a new customer or job? Do you have the resources or organization bandwidth to provide the necessary services? Can you hire a new employee? These are all examples of risk related issues. As it pertains to the revised ISO 9001:2015 standard, it is now a requirement of the updated quality management system to start thinking about risk and as mentioned in process emphasis, start mapping it out by clearly defining it.

3. No Required Procedures – Unlike in ISO 9001:2008, the revised standard does not contain a structured set of required procedures that you must incorporate into your processes. However, that doesn’t mean that you can have none in place. Instead, the goal of this flexibility is to allow companies the authority to decide which procedures are most applicable to them, which ones to keep or get rid of, and what additional ones should be added to produce the best results.

4. Top Management Must Own its QMS – Another focus for ISO 9001:2015 is the encouragement of top management within organizations to own their quality management system. So, whether it’s the President, VP, or General Manager, the emphasis is on these roles taking a more active role in the development, implementation, measurement, and responsibility of their company’s processes, and not simply delegating it all to quality manager.

As it was mentioned earlier, the above is not an all-encompassing list of the changes or variations between ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 9001:2008, but the rest of the changes are subtler and should not overly influence your transition or audit. To learn more about the benefits of ISO 9001:2015, download Smithers Quality Assessment’s gap analysis sheet.

Manufacturers care most about finding new ways to grow, excel at product quality while still being able to take on short lead-time production runs from customers. New business models often bring the paradox of new product lines that strain existing ERP, CRM and PLM systems by the need always to improve time-to-customer performance. New products are proliferating in manufacturing today, and delivery windows are tightening. Manufacturers are turning to machine learning to improve the end-to-end performance of their operations and find a performance-based solution to this paradox.

The ten ways machine learning is revolutionizing manufacturing in 2018 include the following:

• Improving semiconductor manufacturing yields up to 30%, reducing scrap rates, and optimizing fab operations are is achievable with machine learning. Attaining up to a 30% reduction in yield detraction in semiconductor manufacturing, reducing scrap rates based on machine learning-based root-cause analysis and reducing testing costs using AI optimization are the top three areas where machine learning will improve semiconductor manufacturing. McKinsey also found that AI-enhanced predictive maintenance of industrial equipment will generate a 10% reduction in annual maintenance costs, up to a 20% downtime reduction and 25% reduction in inspection costs. Source: Smartening up with Artificial Intelligence (AI) – What’s in it for Germany and its Industrial Sector?

 

• Asset Management, Supply Chain Management, and Inventory Management are the hottest areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT adoption in manufacturing today. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and A.T. Kearney’s recent study of the future of production find that manufacturers are evaluating how combining emerging technologies including IoT, AI, and machine learning can improve asset tracking accuracy, supply chain visibility, and inventory optimization. Source: Technology and Innovation for the Future of Production: Accelerating Value Creation 

 

• Manufacturer’s adoption of machine learning and analytics to improve predictive maintenance is predicted to increase 38% in the next five years according to PwC. Analytics and MI-driven process and quality optimization are predicted to grow 35% and process visualization and automation, 34%. PwC sees the integration of analytics, APIs and big data contributing to a 31% growth rate for connected factories in the next five years. Source: Digital Factories 2020: Shaping the future of manufacturing

 

• McKinsey predicts machine learning will reduce supply chain forecasting errors by 50% and reduce lost sales by 65% with better product availability. Supply chains are the lifeblood of any manufacturing business. Machine learning is predicted to reduce costs related to transport and warehousing and supply chain administration by 5 to 10% and 25 to 40%, respectively. Due to machine learning, overall inventory reductions of 20 to 50% are possible. Source: Smartening up with Artificial Intelligence (AI) – What’s in it for Germany and its Industrial Sector?

 

• Improving demand forecast accuracy to reduce energy costs and negative price variances using machine learning uncovers price elasticity and price sensitivity as well. Honeywell is integrating AI and machine-learning algorithms into procurement, strategic sourcing and cost management. Source: Honeywell Connected Plant: Analytics and Beyond

 

• Automating inventory optimization using machine learning has improved service levels by 16% while simultaneously increasing inventory turns by 25%.AI and machine learning constraint-based algorithms and modeling are making it possible scale inventory optimization across all distribution locations, taking into account external, independent variables that affect demand and time-to-customer delivery performance. Source: Transform the manufacturing supply chain with Multi-Echelon inventory optimization

 

• Combining real-time monitoring and machine learning is optimizing shop floor operations, providing insights into machine-level loads and production schedule performance. Knowing in real-time how each machine’s load level impacts overall production schedule performance leads to better decisions managing each production run. Optimizing the best possible set of machines for a given production run is now possible using machine learning algorithms. Source: Factories of the Future: How Symbiotic Production Systems, Real-Time Production Monitoring, Edge Analytics and AI Are Making Factories Intelligent and Agile

 

• Improving the accuracy of detecting costs of performance degradation across multiple manufacturing scenarios reduces costs by 50% or more. Using real-time monitoring technologies to create accurate data sets that capture pricing, inventory velocity, and related variables gives machine learning apps what they need to determine cost behaviors across multiple manufacturing scenarios. Source: Leveraging AI for Industrial IoT

 

• A manufacturer was able to achieve a 35% reduction in test and calibration time via accurate prediction of calibration and test results using machine learning. The project’s goal was to reduce test and calibration time in the production of mobile hydraulic pumps. The methodology focused on using a series of machine learning models that would predict test outcomes and learn over time. The process workflow below was able to isolate the bottlenecks, streamlining test and calibration time in the process. Source: The Value Of Data Science Standards In Manufacturing Analytics

 

• Improving yield rates, preventative maintenance accuracy and workloads by the asset is now possible by combining machine learning and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE is a pervasively used metric in manufacturing as it combines availability, performance, and quality, defining production effectiveness. Combined with other metrics, it’s possible to find the factors that impact manufacturing performance the most and least. Integrating OEE and other datasets in machine learning models that learn quickly through iteration are one of the fastest growing areas of manufacturing intelligence and analytics today. Source: TIBCO Manufacturing Solutions

March 2^nd, 2018 was a chaotic winter workday that all Northeast Ohioans know too well.   Our city’s school district was on a 2-hour delay with heavy snow on the roads, the dog wanted to go out and play, and the driveway needed to be cleared. I quickly accepted that getting to the office that morning would also be delayed.

Once I finished my “snow day” tasks and my teen drivers were off to school, I felt like everything was falling back into place. I ran my 10 am video call from my kitchen and afterward, took a much-appreciated shower The plan was to dress quickly and drive to the office. But as we all know, in business and life, sometimes things don’t go according to plan and you have to be prepared to adapt.  I came out to find three text messages and an urgent call for help from our client, Grand River Rubber and Plastics.

The Client Crisis:

Apparently, our client further north of us got slammed with heavy snow, sleet, and ice so bad that all power and phones were knocked out for 24 hours with no relief in sight for another day. Customers’ orders were not being received or acknowledged and they had lost several shifts of production.

Despite the unfortunate act of fate and the chaos that came with it, Grand River Rubber & Plastics wanted to notify customers and colleagues of the situation as quickly as possible. Flashback one year prior to today’s snowmageddon, the company had hired us to impact lead generation via inbound marketing as well as utilizing public relations and social media. Customers were increasingly using new forms to communicate and marketing activities were generating new leads – – all being recorded and documented in their new customer relationship manager (CRM), and you guessed it, in the cloud.

The Communication Solution: The cloud came to their rescue that day. With my laptop still warmed up from my video call, I quickly accessed their HubSpot CRM online, drafted an email with pertinent information and sent to their 750+ registered contacts. Simply the urgent message and what was being done. Within the same HubSpot portal, the message was immediately posted to their company LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The Aftermath:

Fortunately, power was restored over the weekend. I updated the Grand River Rubber & Plastics social channels. The company was now able to once again access their server, the internet and update their customers directly.

Grand River Rubber & Plastics’ HubSpot platform, a CRM and inbound marketing platform in one portal, allowed our team to share the urgent message with customers quickly and efficiently across email, social media and web. Snow, sleet, and ice may have started the fight but the cloud (and inbound marketing) came to the rescue.