Hello, I'm back with a new edition of Fresh Salmon. The B2B marketing newsletter you love.

By the way, who thought this was a looong week? 🧐

Anyway, in this week's Fresh Salmon, I share why cold email automation is dying, fundamentals of demand gen, and benchmarks for Expansion Revenue.

Let's jump right in. . . .

1) RIP Cold Email Automation

The automated sending of cold emails is becoming increasingly ineffective. 

The likelihood of achieving an authentic dialogue is almost non-existent if you are only sending mass automated emails.

Look don’t get me wrong, I have been a staunch supporter of using technology to scale cold emailing, and I have done with decent results in the past to the level very few people have done it. 

Over the course of four months in 2017, I personally sent out 15000 cold emails per week. No kidding!

The truth is, automated systems achieved the best results five years ago. All of that no longer works.

Why?

In the last five years, all of our inboxes have received a lot more emails than they used to. Today, the number of emails sent and received globally is 30% higher than it was in 2017. 

Email providers are becoming more adept at detecting bulk emails, and companies like Alphabet (Gmail) have successfully segmented emails by Primary, Promotions, and Social.

Despite this, cold email automation struggles because of a lack of creativity and authenticity. Everyone uses the same email automation tools and templates. There is an alarming lack of originality here.

Plus, personalization is very superficial since you can't personalize an email if it's sent to multiple people from different companies, and also, extracting all relevant account information is a very time consuming process.

It is my strong belief that cold email automation will end within the next few years.

The truth is, you cannot send an email that is truly personalized if it is sent to many different people in different companies.

Having said that, I don't think cold emailing is dead. As a matter of fact, I envision a major shift.

There is a strong likelihood that the world will move away from one-to-many automated communication to one-to-one or one-to-few communication in the near future.

Prospecting research will become more and more relevant. If you have more information about the person you are contacting, you can tailor your outreach more effectively.

My big prediction for the future is the evolution of a new sales role. This role will be - Prospecting Research Analyst.

This role will be a research focused person who will be responsible for gathering and mining relevant information on the target accounts, creating and optimizing the target customer's file with relevant information that the sales team will be able to leverage in prospecting to create the business case. It goes beyond just contact and firmographic information in the CRM today.  

A new tool and technology will also evolve that will allow Research Analysts to aggregate research-based account information, which will be used by them on a daily basis to create optimal target customer information files.

With this approach, the sales team will have the most reliable information at hand on target accounts. As a result, one-to-one or one-to-few cold outreach will be significantly more successful. 

How does that sound to you?

Btw, this showed up on my LinkedIn feed, and I agree with it -

2) Acquire, Repeat, and then Scale 

You can't scale B2B Demand Gen if it's not repeatable yet. It is impossible to generate repeatable demand if you haven't figured out a way to consistently capture it. 

Lots of people don’t understand the fundamentals of building the foundation of a demand generation engine.

Before thinking about scaling a channel, make sure you can generate one high intent lead from it, and make sure you can generate that one high intent lead everyday without increasing your average costs.

It takes time to get channels working. 

Remember, it’s Acquire, Repeat, and then Scale. In that specific order.

It may sound obvious, but a lot of marketers want to develop a model for implementing their 2023 goals on unproven channels.

And that doesn’t work. 

3) SaaS Expansion Revenue Benchmarks

Insight Partners who is an investor in over 600 tech companies recently published the report on the bookings mix of their portfolio companies. 

Findings from the report:

For SaaS companies earning $10-$20m ARR, expansion revenue is 38% of the total bookings by company ARR. 

The expansion revenue for companies earning $20-$50m ARR is 48% of their total bookings.

Expansion revenue represents 51% of total bookings by companies with over $100m in annual revenue.

Interesting Thing That I Read Last Week

My LinkedIn connection: John Bonini, is a gun marketer. He shared this post on LinkedIn discussing the content distribution versus the content problem. 

In all honesty, I can't agree more.

Tweet That I Noticed Last Week

I loved this tweet from McDonald’s. It is the best example of humanizing marketing.

Meme of The Week

What Do You Think?

This concludes this edition of Fresh Salmon.

I would like to hear what you thought of today's newsletter.

Also, let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Cheers,

Vivek

PS. I love you ❤️