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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

• Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)

• Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services

• Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients

• Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma

Lately at Succession we have been chatting a lot about how we should be closing our emails.

The most important part of a cold email is undoubtedly the Call To Action (CTA from here on out) but yet so often as a seller we think of it as an afterthought, something that's not too important and just go ahead and ask for 30 minutes of a stranger's time. 

Unfortunately by asking for a meeting straight off the bat there is a good chance you are alienating a big part of your list and only truly targeting the 5% who are actually in the market for your solution right now. 

But by shifting to more clever, value-driven CTAs there is a good chance that you can increase reply rates and let your message resonate more strongly with a larger percentage of your list. 

So once you have your lead list ready, emails validated, high quality research and personalisation done for each lead it is now time to put the cherry on top of an excellent campaign and start including value first CTAs in your cold outbound. 

An Offer and a CTA ain't the same thing.

Here is the distinction in one line. The CTA is the outcome you want, the meeting, the demo, the delicious pipeline that comes at the end of months of hard prospecting.

The offer is the thing you hand the prospect to earn the first yes. Most reps only ever write the ask and forget the offer entirely and that is exactly why so much outbound fails.

But the bad (and sad) news is that most people don't even call their mothers for 30 minutes, let alone some sales rep who wants to sell them the latest AI drug discovery platform or lab management system. 

So as reps it is important to remember that we are not only salespeople but also educators, supporters and givers. 

So the golden rule here is make the first yes easy, as easy as possible. Instead of taking up someone's precious time make them an offer they can't refuse (I'm sorry I couldn't resist). 

Offer them an educational piece, a video or something personalised to a problem their business might be facing and more importantly, personalised to a problem that you can solve.

Look at this: 

Just reply yes and I'll send it over. 

Vs 

Let's get 30 minutes on the calendar to discuss this. 

I know which one I would be more inclined to respond to. 

We actually have the numbers on this. Across 24 recent Succession campaigns, low-friction questions pulled a 2.54% reply rate against 1.87% for meeting or call requests, that’s a 36% lift. 

True Value-Driven 

As to what we should actually include in our offer there are a few different ways that we can look at this. The easiest way is to break it down into 3 levels. 

Level 1: 

Entry level, still much better than just asking for a meeting and throwing your slide deck at someone but still leaves some room to be desired. 

Think here of something like offering a generic case study, webinar or application notes that can be found on your company website.

It may be useful but it still doesn't show the prospect that we really care about their business. But this is definitely moving in the right direction, we have instantly reduced friction and opened up the range of our response from people currently in the market to people who are thinking about changing their current solution in the next 12 months.

Level 2:

Now we are moving up the ranks, I am talking real personalisation. Putting together a genuine piece of content that is tailored to this person's business or problem. 

This can be something like: "Hey I analysed what candidates currently have in the pipeline and wanted to send over a breakdown of the organoids we have that are most applicable to what you are working on?" 

See there, can't you just feel the love. It's specific and therefore much more likely to build some credibility with the person on the other end and separate you from all the other spammers out there. 

Level 3:

The creme de la creme, and this one is only for the accounts you would really hate to lose to a competitor.

This is where you stop giving away thinking and start giving away something that actually costs you. Level 2 costs you an afternoon of research. Level 3 costs you real money, and that is exactly why it lands. Anyone can send a tailored email. Almost nobody will put their own product on the table before the prospect has committed to anything.

If you sell cells or reagents that might be a free vial of the exact line they are working with, or a bottle of media to trial in their own lab. You are not describing what working together looks like, you are letting them feel it. It does not scale, which is the whole point, so you save it for the handful of accounts worth that kind of bet.

Just Say Yes

Remember the goal of that first email isn't to close the deal or book the meeting. It is simply just to get a foot, or sometimes even a toe in the door and start the conversation. 

If you can reframe your idea of what success looks like from book a meeting with this person to provide genuine value to this person and start a conversation it can help improve the overall success of all of your outbound campaigns. 

Build it backwards

Here's an interesting idea you can try to put into action the next time you think about launching a new outbound campaign. 

Why not start with the CTA and build the campaign in reverse? Instead of starting with the list start with a value-driven offer from the beginning and work backwards. 

Build your company and people list with this in mind, who will care the most about and get the most value from what I want to offer. 

Base the copy of your campaign on hinting towards the potential problem thread your offering aims to address. 

The trick is that the offer sets the filter. Once you know what you are giving away, the list writes itself, because you are only chasing the people it was built for. Say the offer is a first look at how you would handle the scale-up for their lead antibody. That points you straight at companies whose lead candidate has just cleared Phase 1, the moment demand for clinical supply jumps and the manufacturing scramble starts.

You cannot hand a stranger a finished plan when you do not know their titre, their cell line or their timelines, so you do not pretend to. You send a rough first cut off what is public and let the conversation sharpen it. Something like, I saw [candidate] cleared Phase 1 earlier this year, here is how we would think about the scale-up. Happy to put together the full roadmap if you can share a bit more information. 

Call to Action 

I hope that this content has given you a fresh perspective and even some new ideas on how to spice up your CTAs and hopefully increase the success of your campaigns as well as start delivering more value from the get go to your potential customers. 

If you liked what you read and want to learn more please book a 1 hour discovery session with us to learn more.

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