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How to define your Ideal Customer Profile

October 5, 2022

Understanding your company’s Ideal Customer Profile (let's call it ICP from now onwards) is an essential component of any Go-To-Market strategy. Despite this, companies often forget to define their ICP or if they do, they rush into an inaccurate draft of their ideal ICP. That's why the number one exercise I typically have new customers perform is a deep dive and breakdown of their ICP. But before we jump into any more details, you may be wondering: ### What is an Ideal Customer Profile? Ultimately, an ICP is an identification of the demographic/characteristics of the customers who are the best fit for your company. This includes size, industry, location, behaviors, situations, and many more. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zrYsW6Yh2gU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ### Why is an ICP important? One of my favorite answers when asking customers about their ICP is: *“Our ICP is anyone with a pulse.”* But that isn’t true. It is an impossible task to attempt to solve a problem for everyone out there. In fact, in the beginning, it’s actually more detrimental to target “everyone" than to focus your efforts on reaching out to those who can benefit more from your product or solution. By not having a clear picture of who your ICP is, you’ll end up acquiring customers that you provide very little solutions for and will have to spend more resources to acquire them. ### How to define your ICP? You’re probably reading this article because you are working on starting a campaign and/or you are trying to iron out an ideal customer profile to target. Well, the first step to doing so is very simple. Do you have any customers yet? If not, stay tuned. I'll have more for you. If so - start there! Go through your customer list and identify who is the happiest, who's been around the longest, or who was the easiest sales process. My favorites to take note of are the company's: * Location * Size * Industry * Department you work with * Their business model * Their customers * Problem you solve for them See if you can identify any trends, as the most common traits are found in your current ideal customer profile! Our next job is going to be how to find and meet every clone of this customer out there. If you are pre-revenue (or aren’t confident you have a core customer group), don't worry! What you are going to need to do is start running some tests on outbound campaigns. The goal of the test is to identify **what messaging or value prop resonates best with a demographic**. However, this test's main key is eliminating as many variables as possible. Make some educated guesses on one factor you want to test (for example, industries) and that you think you could help, and run the same campaign on all of them, across multiple titles. Collect responses from these campaigns and gauge the sentiment to see which group your product/service resonates better with. Now, if you’ve made it all the way through this article, here’s where I get to shamelessly plug how [Amplemarket ](https://amplemarket.com)makes this process a piece of cake. Below is my favorite campaign to run for companies looking to identify their ICP (and book some meetings during the test!). Create a list in the Amplemarket Searcher of * Companies across: * 3-4 different size ranges (I usually go 1-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500) * 2-3 preferred Industries * If you have a knowledge-based business model like consulting, use keywords to narrow it down. * With People filters including: * Director and above * Department of choice * Recently changed jobs/companies in last 3 months The “recent change” is the most important aspect when focusing your outreach as this becomes the key component of this campaign. Reaching out to recent job/company individuals in our research is one of the more successful campaigns. **If 10% of your industry’s decision-makers have changed jobs, those are the first 10% you should reach out to.** It creates the natural urgency generated from the “why” we are reaching out, as well as the “why you.” This leads to **higher open rates** and reply rates - critical for us to collect feedback from the test. 1. Create a **multi-channel sequence** (email, Linkedin, and phone) with 2-3 steps for each channel 2. Remember to **mention how you found the lead**! I usually put something along the lines of “Congrats on the new job - curious if this is a chance to review {your service or product type} - am I on the right track? 3. **Ask for a feedback** meeting rather than a sales process demo. While we do want to get leads into a sales process, we want more volume of meetings to collect this crucial feedback on the response to our offering. 4. Bonus points if you can incorporate **Liquid syntax** through the copy that changes the messaging by title, industry, department, and more. Run 100-200 leads through this sequence and review the results. Did we get responses? Were they interested? Both of these results will tell you quite a bit! Iterate on your messaging to test tweaks to see if it makes a difference, but let [Amplemarket](https://amplemarket.com) handle the rest to deliver your meetings/responses to determine which companies like your product/service the most. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I3HTmU22t88" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ### 4 Benefits from having an accurate ICP 1. **Laser-focus your [outreach](https://amplemarket.com/prospecting-and-data)**, making the most of your available resources. 2. **Decrease your CAC** (Cost per Acquisition). By optimizing your resources and reaching out to leads that are a better fit for your company, you'll be able to decrease the efforts invested in acquiring customers. 3. **Have happier customers** that are a better fit for your company. 4. **Decrease your churn rate**. It's simple, happy customers stay longer, so why not do it right from the top? In summary - finding your ideal customer profile is one of the most important first steps in any sales campaign. In my opinion, the real reason why no one is responding or booking meetings with your outbound campaigns is not the copy, but just the fact that they aren’t the right ICP. Stay scientific in how you test, be curious and creative, and happy outbounding!

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Using Pulumi to deal with growing pains

September 20, 2022

**Amplemarket** has witnessed incredible growth in the last year, and a lot of it is due to the constant pace of innovation within the product. This not only reveals the great talent we hold within the engineering team, designers, and all the stakeholders contributing to the product, but it also shows the agility of our Product Engineering organization that is essential to growing the team. Even if we are more inclined towards choosing simplicity in the technology of our infrastructure, it was unavoidable to increase the complexity in a few areas to be able to operate at scale. Particularly in the area of databases. These are critical pieces of the puzzle in regards to: 1. **Elasticity** As the business grows, we need the infrastructure to store and serve all our data that is also growing, and it's critical to have ways to easily increase the storage and compute capacity of our databases. 2. **Redundancy** Running business-critical services means that it is simply not acceptable to have downtimes caused by having single points of failure. High availability is paramount for any piece of infrastructure our service depends on. 3. **Upgrades** As the software evolves we want to take advantage of the latest advances in the technologies we use, with the minimum amount of effort. It is also essential for us to make sure that any security vulnerabilities found in such software are tackled as soon as mitigations are made available. 4. **Privacy** We take our customers' data very seriously and use industry best practices to keep it secure. Encryption of data at rest is a must-have. 5. **Backups** We need to be prepared at all times. All our data needs to be backed up in multiple locations in a secure way allowing us to quickly recover from a potential failure caused by the application or our cloud provider. ## Dealing with growing pains The cloud has become a gift from heaven for engineering teams. It has helped scaling startup businesses around the globe for the last decade, thanks to how easy it is to spin up machines and host software that scales with increasing demand. However, the scrappy nature of early-stage startups means that not all cloud resources are created equally and, some cases, have required a few configuration tweaks and short-term optimizations that have led to solutions that make the previous properties hard to achieve. At Amplemarket, even if our team is characterized by it's strong ability to quickly respond and recover from incidents, we started noticing it getting harder and harder to predict future bottlenecks in the infrastructure to be able to limit or avoid any impact. There were a few reasons for this to be happening, and it was time to take action: - The infrastructure was created manually - Running Redis instances on GCE directly - Lack of monitoring of critical performance indicators - There were knowledge silos between team members - Configuration drift between environments and instances of the same service ## Automating the cloud with Pulumi When we started to evaluate options to automate our infrastructure, it was important for us that: 1. There was good support for managed GCP services 2. There was an ability to declare infrastructure as code 3. We could preview changes before being applied 4. Support for testing changes across environments 5. All changes requiring a review step with peer feedback 6. Changes applied automatically through CI pipelines There were two main platforms that stood out and meet these requirements: **Terraform**, the industry sweetheart for Infrastructure as Code from Hashicorp, and **Pulumi**, the new kid in town with some extra niceties but following a similar philosophy: *We, the user, declare the resources we need and it, the tool, will figure out the state of your cloud at any point in time and do the minimal changes required for it to match your desired final state.This way, it will abstract each individual cloud provider’s APIs giving you, the user, a lingua franca for describing your infrastructure.* ### The reasons The differentiator that Pulumi has is that instead of giving such abstraction in a proprietary and somewhat limited domain-specific language (HCL is what it is called in Terraform), its creators went on and gave you the full power of a programming language to describe your infrastructure. In fact, they give you six platforms (Node, Python, Go, .NET, Java and YAML) that are kept on an equal footing in regards to features, and allow you to pick your poison (aka programming language) to do your actual infrastructure *as code*. Now, there may be philosophical reasons to decide whether one approach or the other is better, but we went with a pragmatic one: our relatively small engineering team is made out of generalist software engineers (we don’t have dedicated infrastructure engineers yet) and writing programs in maintainable and reusable ways is what we do best. Pulumi offered us an approachable option with a small learning curve that matched our skills. It was also important for us to see how the tool has matured in the last few years since its inception and keeps a healthy pace of updates and innovations, but also how they cleverly make use of all existing open source Terraform modules and convert them to Pulumi packages, thus offering similar reach in supporting a significant number of cloud services out there. ## Rolling out a pilot with managed Redis We had to start somewhere and we decided to start with Redis because we had a maintenance burden in our most critical cluster and lacked some of the properties identified in the first section of this article: we managed its instance operating system directly and it was falling behind in updates, its setup was not highly available since we relied on disk persistency and we were reaching the memory limits of this machine. Since Redis is a managed service offered by GCP, creating a Redis cluster in Pulumi was quite straightforward. Here’s a code snippet from our codebase that handles all our Redis service creation at Amplemarket: ```tsx export function createRedis(config: RedisConfig): gcp.redis.Instance { return new gcp.redis.Instance(config.name, { name: config.name, displayName: config.name, memorySizeGb: config.memory_gb, authEnabled: true, tier: config.tier, maintenancePolicy: { weeklyMaintenanceWindows: [{ day: config.maintenance_window_day, startTime: { hours: config.maintenance_start_hours, minutes: config.maintenance_start_minutes } }] }, redisConfigs: getRedisConfig(config), redisVersion: config.redis_version }); ``` We define a `gcp.redis.Instance` and fill in its arguments from a configuration structure that can vary between different clusters while keeping some sensible and secure defaults, even enforcing security policies through code with fixed parameters like `authEnabled`. The configuration structure is filled and since Typescript is type-checked from a simple YAML configuration, as the following `Pulumi.staging.yaml` shows: ```yaml ampledash-infra:redis: - name: redis-sidekiq active_defrag: true maintenance_start_hours: 8 maintenance_start_minutes: 0 maintenance_window_day: SUNDAY max_memory_policy: noeviction memory_gb: 2 redis_version: REDIS_6_X tier: BASIC ``` ### Stacks as bags of configuration Pulumi allows configuration options to be created by the environment through a structure that they call stacks. These are logically segregated sets of configurations that can be applied independently by using Pulumi CLI commands. In our case, and since we have a staging and production environment, we have created two stacks: `Pulumi.staging.yaml` and `Pulumi.production.yaml`. ```bash pulumi stack init production –copy-config-from staging ``` Once we configure Pulumi’s credentials (using a `PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN` env var) and log into our cloud provider in the shell, we can preview the creation of our cluster with `pulumi preview` and, if everything checks out, we can make it real with `pulumi up`. After a few seconds, your managed cloud infrastructure just got a new resource. Go check your GCP Console and it should be there. ### Enabling an unsupported beta feature By moving to a cloud-managed Redis service and having its lifecycle managed with Pulumi we had already achieved many of the properties that led us to this journey but one, in particular, was still a challenge: a highly available setup of Redis implies a real-time replica always running alongside the main server but, if for some unlikely reason, we would lose both of them at the same time it could mean data loss and we don’t want that. Our previous setup by relying on disk persistency - which was automatically backed up at the filesystem level, always gave us a way to recover to a previous point in time. It happens that Google's managed Redis service, supports a feature that gives us just that, called RDB snapshots: [https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/rdb-snapshots](https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/rdb-snapshots). However, at the time, this was still a beta feature from Google’s service, and no native Pulumi support existed to enable it. Given the fact that a Pulumi program is really just a Node app, we could theoretically just shell out to the corresponding `gcloud` command using the `child_process` package: ```tsx const cp = require('child_process'); // Hack to enable persistence config for RBS function updatePersistenceConfig(instance) { let region = new pulumi.Config("gcp").require("region"); const command = `gcloud beta redis instances update ${instance} --quiet --region ${region} --persistence-mode=${config.persistence_mode} --rdb-snapshot-period=${config.snapshot_period}` if (pulumi.runtime.isDryRun()) { pulumi.log.info(command); } else { cp.execSync(command); } } redis.id.apply(updatePersistenceConfig); ``` This code does a few things. Let’s review them step by step: 1. First, we declare the dependency on `child_process` in order to use execSync to shell out a command. 2. We prepare the command given an instance id and interpolate the specific persistence mode options from the configuration structure. 3. We then go ahead and apply it only when this is not a Pulumi dry run (which is what happens when `pulumi preview` is run). 4. The last line is a consequence of the async nature of Pulumi resource management, where it optimizes the runtime to do as many operations in parallel as possible. Thus, we need to create a causal relationship to only run this code once the declared redis instance is actually created and has an id output already calculated. This worked and we were able to abstract our Redis cluster creations with Pulumi, leading to a successful rollout of four new clusters in production. ### Be a good Pulumi citizen with the `local.Command` package Even if this worked, the previous code had a slight nuisance: every time we would run a `pulumi up` command to create or update any resource, even if given Pulumi’s minimal diff application of changes it meant that no Redis cluster had to change, we would always re-apply the RDB snapshot setting. This was not a big problem given its idempotent nature, but running it for every Redis cluster on every execution was causing slower runs and unnecessary noise in our cloud audit logs. As our understanding of Pulumi increased, we noticed that the local.Command package that they offer has built-in lifecycle control for resources created from shell commands. This was exactly what we wanted, given that our RDB setting was actually a sub-resource of a Redis resource that would follow the same lifecycle: we set it on cluster creation and don’t need to further change it, so running the command in tandem with the actual Pulumi-managed cluster was what we really wanted. This was fairly straightforward to pull out with the following code: ```tsx if (config.persistence_enabled) { new local.Command(`${config.name}-rdb`, { create: pulumi.interpolate`gcloud beta redis instances update ${instance.id} --quiet --region ${stackDefaultRegion} --persistence-mode=${google.redis.v1.PersistenceConfigPersistenceMode.Rdb} --rdb-snapshot-period=${config.snapshot_period} 2>&1`, delete: pulumi.interpolate`gcloud beta redis instances update ${instance.id} --quiet --region ${stackDefaultRegion} --persistence-mode=${google.redis.v1.PersistenceConfigPersistenceMode.Disabled} 2>&1` }, { parent: instance }); } ``` Voilà! Pulumi was now happy to manage our Redis beta feature for us! ## Final Thoughts From PoC in a week, to reaching production with confidence the week after, we’re super impressed by Pulumi’s focus on the developer experience and general ease of use. We have since expanded our usage of Pulumi to manage our infrastructure and have a GitHub Actions-powered workflow with automatic PR previews that is a breeze to use. We will be sharing more insights in follow-up blog posts, as the experience has been quite positive. It also allowed us to have all our infrastructure configurations in a single place and become systematic about what and how to monitor these resources in production. This approach allowed our team to become much less reactive to failures in production and move to a more proactive cloud management practice, where we: 1. Get alerted of approaching limits in the infrastructure 2. Easily test upgrades 3. Securely rollout configuration changes 4. Quickly scale up instances 5. Reuse building blocks when adding new infrastructure And by doing so, we can focus on adding new features to our product and keep empowering Sales teams across the globe. ***Note:** We're still hiring an Infrastructure Engineer, so if you found this article your type of thing, please do reach out. It may so happen you’ll be the right person to help us improve and build on top of this setup.*

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The Growth ABC, Level 3 | Amplemarket

August 29, 2022

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sQtfP7R7Y4k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> What are people in sales, growth, startups, and marketing teams talking about? Leads, prospects, contacts, opportunities, accounts, and clients are all terms for the same thing in different stages. I know confusing. Keeping up with the terminology can be challenging, and that's why we created this ABC spinoff that will help you relax, have a laugh and learn some new words you can put into practice today with your colleagues. But if you are new to this blog and you haven't heard about the previous [Level 1](https://blog.amplemarket.com/the-growth-abc-amplemarket/) and [Level 2](https://blog.amplemarket.com/the-growth-abc-level-2/) Growth ABC's , go and get caught up before dive into this blog. Let's go! **A - Account** An account is a synonym for a customer profile. A space where the client’s information is recorded and tracked to understand their individual needs and preferences better. In some cases, you can hear your peers talking about an account as a client. **B - Bad leads** These are people who either got in contact with you or you contacted them but do not match your customer profile. These are also called low-qualified leads or unqualified leads (depending on your criteria). **C - Commission** The fee or percentage of a sale that salespeople get paid after closing a deal. The commission can vary from company to company, industry to industry, and sometimes from job category to job category. **D - Discount, Discovery, Dialer** A discount is a special lower price made to a client of closing the sale. Clients love a good ol’ discount. A discovery call is the first call that a salesperson or an SDR makes to a potential lead to identify if they are qualified and ready to move on through the sales pipeline or not. The dialer is a computer software, application, or electronic device that automates the process of making phone calls. **E - EOD, EOW, EOM, EOQ & EOY** These acronyms refer to End Of X. For example End Of The Day (EOD), End Of The Week (EOW), End Of the Month (EOM), and so on. **F - Forecast** It is the prediction or calculation of a trend or event likely to occur in the future based on qualitative, quantitative, and historical data as well as emergent but relevant factors. Forecasts can be used to predict future sales, and future revenue, or to identify future opportunities. **G - GOAT** Stands for Greatest Of All Time **H - Hard sell** This was a sales tactic popular in certain industries in which the salesperson instead of understanding and addressing the prospect's objections would challenge them. It’s an aggressive approach to sales that is no longer popular, however, some niches still find this strategy a great way to generate pressure and close more deals. **I - Inbound Sales** The process, method, or transaction wherein purchases occur as a result of customers directly approaching, engaging, and embracing your brand. These are usually led by marketing strategies where the brand is positioned to match the prospect's needs and to lead these initiate themselves the sales process. **J - Judo Business Strategy** This business strategy, it’s based on the principle of utilizing it is designed to give smaller companies an advantage by using their nimbleness and ability to respond more quickly to market changes as a competitive advantage. **K - KPIs** It stands for Key Performance Indicators, basically guiding numbers that indicate the performance of a team, a project, or even an organization. **L - Leverage** Something you use in order to get something else that you want. For example, you could use all the work, time, and successes you’ve had over the course of a year to ask for a pay rise. **M - Multichannel Sequence** This means that the sequence of actions that are designed to get in touch with a potential client happens throughout more than 2 channels. For example, you may plan to connect with someone on Linkedin, send them a personal message, and then send them an email, after that you’d like to give them a call and schedule a follow-up email right after. These sequences target prospects in different channels, hence they are multichannel sequences. **N - Needs Assessment** Is the process of analyzing a system, person, function, or organization to determine what the entity lacks to achieve a desired state or outcome. Normally, throughout this process, you identify and classify specific needs and their level of importance. **O - Opportunities** These usually refer to SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) and indicate that a prospect has a higher likelihood of opting in, subscribing, or making a purchase based on a set of criteria. **P - Product-Led Sales** This means that the product is the main source of attraction for new leads. **Q - QBR** Quarterly Business Reviews or QBR explores the impact of the business’s product or service on the customer. The sales QBR focuses on sales performance and the forecast. Sales managers reconnect with sales development reps (SDRs) to better understand what worked last quarter, and what didn’t, and how to set up the next quarter for success. **R - RFP** Is the acronym for Request for Proposal. **S - SLA** A service level agreement or SLA is the outlining of the responsibilities and work assigned within the growth efforts to sales and marketing. This promotes accountability, alignment, and better coordination to achieve common goals within both teams. **T - Triggers** These are a set of signals or occurrences that meet certain criteria to be considered an opportunity to make a sale. **U - Upselling** Upselling is the action of increasing the purchase of a client by offering a higher valued product or additional service/products. This increases the profitability in the acquisition of a client and may also open the opportunity for a client to buy a product or service that they weren't previously aware of. **V - Value proposition** Is a statement or message that encapsulates the reasons — such as benefits and unique attributes — consumers would want to patronize a brand or purchase a product. **W - Weighted Pipeline** An in-depth interpretation of the sales pipeline, where leads are valued according to the step they're in within the sales process. **X - X-Mark Signature** If an individual is not able to fully sign under their name a legal document, an X signature may be conducted under the testimony of a person in lieu. **Y - Yield** To yield means to produce benefits out of something else. When you produce revenue in a company you are yielding your efforts. **Z - Zero-Cost Strategy** This is a strategy that did not cost you a cent, and can still make profits. These are great ways to A/B test hypotheses and test products or services without having to put a monetary investment behind them. As you learn all these terms you'll be able to communicate more effectively with your team, clients and fellow peers in the industry. This vocabulary is always evolving and although you'll have a pretty good base from our Growth ABC's, there are always new strategies, activations, or actions that lead us to the new way of doing sales.

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The Growth ABC, Level 2 | Amplemarket

July 28, 2022

If you want to understand startup growth, you need to learn the ABCs. Last month we shared the fundamental vocabulary needed to kickstart your startup growth journey without getting lost in logistics and jargon. But that was only the beginning my young padawan. In this blog, you'll find The Growth ABC Level 2. The vocabulary you need to level up your sales & marketing game in the B2B industry. And if you are already an experienced player in this field, you'll find this the perfect tool to send to your team to make sure you're all speaking the same language. Without further ado... <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RV0BQmXnT-g?controls=0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> **ABC - Always Be Closing** Always Be Closing (ABC) is a strategy popularized in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross,” where a demanding corporate representative pressures a group of real estate agents, telling them to sell more property; otherwise, they’d be fired. But ABC is not only executed as in this extreme movie scenario. Many sales teams adopted this strategy and adapted it to their own requirements with the bottom line of always being on the lookout for new prospects, pitching products/services, and ultimately closing deals. **B - B2B & B2C** B2B refers to Business selling to Business, and B2C, Business to Customers. **C - Closing Ratio** If you sent out 20 proposals this month, and 5 of those ended up buying your product or service, your closing ratio is 25%. It’s the number that indicates how many deals were closed from the total sent in a given period. **D - Discovery call, Deal-flow** A discovery call is pretty much what its name indicates: a call to meet your prospect, learn and discover more about their needs, pain points, expectations, and overall situation. When does this happen? Right after, your prospect indicated that’s interested in learning more about what you need to say, and usually, this happens after a cold email or a cold call. It’s the first step in the sales qualification process. Your deal flow is the movement of potential customers across your sales funnel, from prospect to customer. You can visualize, manage and customize your deal flow from your sales platform and/or CRM. **E - Escalations** *Customer Success Managers rolling their eyes* Escalation is the term that refers to the requirement of moving a case with a customer to a higher-authority agent or manager. When does this happen? When the person dealing with the customer’s situation cannot solve the client’s need. **F - Flywheel** The flywheel is the infographic representing a circular sales process and a popular growth strategy. This mindset places the customer at the center and enforces that the sales process must continue even after closing the deal. **G - Go-to-Market Strategy** Is the plan or road map designed to strategize marketing and sales efforts to put on the map a new (or rebranded) product or service. This usually includes optimized outbound efforts, creative inbound strategies, marketing optimizations, and retention strategies. **H - Hyper-personalization** Hyper-personalization is the process of using AI and data to produce highly curated content relevant to the end consumer. Hyper-personalization allows teams to automate time-consuming tasks without compromising the quality of the communication process. **I - Ideal Customer Profile** The Ideal Customer Profile, also known as ICP, is the thorough description of your optimal customer with the objective of learning and identifying your potential customer’s patterns and behaviors and thus curating a tailored approach to their needs. **J - January Effect** The January Effect is a popular theory that refers to the perceived seasonal tendency for some actions taken during this month. For example, the January Effect is theorized to influence the stock market price. **K - Key Accounts** Key accounts are the group of clients that generate significantly more profits for a company. Key Accounts are precious to the company, and they are usually assigned a team or an account manager to ensure that the customer is always well taken care of. **L - Lead scoring, Land and expand** A lead scoring system is a way to pre-qualify leads through a general ranking system that identifies whether a lead is worth investing efforts in at that given time or not. This ranking system considers different aspects that indicate the lead’s warmth, and it’s a way for salespeople to prioritize their pipelines. Land and Expand is the term used to explain that a sales rep must first bring a customer (to Land) and then continue generating more revenue (to expand). **M - Mid-market** Mid-Market is the term that refers to companies within a market that are between small companies and large multinational enterprises. **N - NPS** NPS means Net Promoter Score, and it’s a customer satisfaction metric. It measures on a scale from 0-10 how satisfied your customers are and to which level they would promote your Business to others. This is a great metric to understand your customers and provide a relevant service that increases their loyalty to your product/service. **O - Objections** Objections are doubts, opposite opinions, or statements against what the salesperson is presenting to a prospect. Sales team work on understanding patterns in prospect’s objections to be able to assess their concerns and overcome these hurdles. **P - Prospect, Paint Point, Profit margin** A prospect is a sales term to identify a person or a business with the qualities to be a potential customer. Pain points are the areas that the prospect would like to improve or currently represent a problem to them. The profit margin is the profitability ratio that measures a business’s potential ability or efficiency to yield financial gain (i.e., profits) after all relevant expenses and costs have been deducted. **Q - Qualified Lead** A qualified lead is a term given to a prospect with the characteristics of a person/business ready to buy your product/service. Before naming a potential customer a qualified lead, this one was called a prospect, and it was only after the sales or marketing team assessed how inclined is this prospect to buy that it was moved to a qualified lead. **R - Revenue** The amount of money a business generates during a period of time. The revenue equals the sales of the company. **S - Sales pipeline coverage** Sales pipeline coverage is the metric that identifies how full the sales pipeline is compared to the quota you want to achieve at the end of a given period of time. Managers and sales reps can have better visibility of their growth and design strategies to improve this ratio. **T - Total Available Market** Refers to the total revenue potential for a specific product or service, including its future market imprint. **U - Unicorn** Unicorn is a term used to describe a startup company valued at over $1 Billion. It’s also a mythical animal represented by a horse with a curled horn projected from its forehead. **V - Value chain** The value chain is the group of the steps taken by a company to create value in their product or services. Fundamentally is the process of creating products that are ready to be introduced into a market. The steps can vary from market to market and product to product (or service). **W - Warm Call** When a salesperson contacts a prospect that has been already in contact with their company previously. It may be that the prospect was not ready to buy before and was hoping to be in a different scenario later, or it may be that it was a referral from someone else. **X - X-factor** The X Factor is a popular TV music competition show. It’s also that key aspect that gives you a significant competitive advantage. **Y - Year to Date** Year to date is the period of time comprised between the beginning of this year (or fiscal year) and today. This information can be helpful for competitor and trend analyses. **Z - Zone of Resistance** It’s a reflective action to sales pressure. Humans perceive pressure as a threat, so they shut down. When a salesperson approaches a prospect without understanding the prospect’s availability, the latter usually reacts negatively, entering the Zone of resistance. There are a lot of words to learn in this blog and sales talk can be tricky and intimidating, but understanding this jargon will help you hold more effective conversations with your sales team. However, most importantly, if you are not in that position yet, this ABC will help guide the way towards getting that job!

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Why is Hyper-Personalization Important? 5 Key Factors to Improve your Sales Performance.

July 18, 2022

Cold emailing is a powerful way to connect with potential customers and convert them into paying customers. However, many businesses make the mistake of sending generic, unpersonalized emails that end up getting ignored or marked as spam. In fact, Return Path's 2020 Deliverability Benchmark Report discovered that an average of 8 percent of all commercial emails in the United States wind up as spam. Chances that someone will look for your email in Spam and not have trust issues are very low, and definitely not a good start for an aspiring fruitful commercial relationship. But what’s more, even if your email makes it through the Spam trap, the average response rate of cold emails is still a number that needs some work. Cold email response rates can vary greatly from around 2-5% for some sales emails to 25% or even over 50%. Cold emailing is the sales tool with the highest ROI, and the truth is that it has been heavily misused in the past with techniques like “Spray and Pray”. But a laser-focused outreach can not only secure a place in your prospect's inbox but also increase the certainty that your prospect will reply to your email. The key to success? **Quality over quantity**, and there are several ways you can increase the quality of your outreach; One of them is hyper-personalizing your outbound sequences. In this blog post, we will review why **Hyper-personalization is a key factor to increase your cold-emailing conversion rates** and we will give some tips and resources to put that into practice today! ## What is Hyper-personalization? When someone thinks of the concept of ‘personalization’, they generally think of adding in the prospects’ first and last names. But personalization is so much more. When personalizing your outreach the objective is to be **relevant to your prospect** and that entails, not only knowing your target’s name and last name, but also understanding their likes, dislikes, pain points, current situation, and potential future moves. By having an understanding of these data points you are able to build hyper-personalized outbound strategies that create a more relevant connection with your prospect. A common misconception of hyper-personalization is that it starts when you’re crafting an email and that it’s just half of the picture. Hyper-personalization **starts when you are [defining your lists of prospects](https://amplemarket.com/prospecting-and-data).** You most likely have an ICP, Ideal Customer Profile*. However, within your ICP, you will probably have people with similar interests, or job titles, companies they work for, previous universities they’ve been to, or even previous events they’ve attended. These are decisive pieces of information that will give you the bandwidth to approach your prospects with an argument that will actually resonate with them, and fundamentally, be relevant in time and matter. ***(*If you don't know who's your ICP we recommend you to read our [Lesson#2 of the Series "Outbound for Beginners" where we talk about Prospecting and Lead Generation](https://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting/))* Up until now it sounds pretty logical but you’ll be wondering, how can you find this data and how can you use it to hyper-personalize your outreach. ![](http://d1qwk50pizc2ia.cloudfront.net/2022/07/Group-1289--1-.png) ## How can I find information about my prospect? From web scrapers to enormous databases, data is available for mostly everyone that seeks it. But the question is how can you find quality data and a tool that allows you to easily navigate through it. Amplemarket partners with dozens of different data providers to provide the most extensive and accurate business database in the world. On top of dozens of other filters, you can search prospects based on the conferences they have attended, the specific ads they have interacted with or the topics they have been talking about on LinkedIn. ## How can I hyper-personalize my email sequences? If you're familiar with shortcut tags like {{first_name}} or {{job title}} to personalize your emails, then you already know something about Liquid syntax. It's the templating language used to automate the personalization workflow. What you may not know about Liquid syntax is that you can also use it to predetermine what data is selected and how it is displayed. By dictating simple statements of programming logic such as “if” > “then”, the possibilities of customization multiply, giving you the opportunity of tailor-made sequences that are congruent and timely. Additionally, prospects will know that you’ve done your homework and gone the extra mile to grab their attention. At the end of the day, a good first-touch email will entice your prospect’s curiosity while a bad one can even get you marked as spam. Choosing to be relevant will set the tone of the future conversation and will showcase your professionalism in your outbound approach. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DfPNPAqYoSY?controls=0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ## Why is Hyper-personalization so important? Let’s say you received a couple of letters at home. Your dog gets excited every time you get some mail. But you get even more excited when one of them has your name on and it’s about a new pet shop that opened in your neighborhood. The other one looks like general informative mail. Wouldn’t that letter have a higher chance to be opened and read than the general one? Personalized emails immediately stand out, they are far more enticing in nature as compared to impersonal emails. It also shows that the sender carefully prepared their message and looked for a relevant way to connect with you. They were able to understand your needs and they approached you in a pertinent way. However, hyper-personalization is not only about your first impression and the open rate. Is about optimizing your resources and identifying where to put your sales efforts to get the most out of your work. Essentially it's about using the resources available to work in a more efficient and ## Should I hyper-personalize every email? Hyper-personalizing each cold email would not serve the purpose of automating your outreach. But this does not mean that you can’t personalize a genuine approach according to the lead’s qualification profile. What would this mean? You can use a lead scoring system that can help you identify the matching degree of your prospect with your previously generated ICP and then assign an email sequence that matches the score's confidence level. Leads are scored based on their size, job title, or activities and then ranked with a number that indicates how close they are to your ICP. This score may be used to help prioritize the process of managing leads. The idea behind lead scoring is that you'll get a sense of whether or not the prospect should be added to a more detailed and crafted sequence or whether you need to assign them a more pre-qualifying email. It won't always work perfectly, but it will help point you in the right direction when writing personalized messages. ## 5 tips to seamlessly hyper-personalize your emails - **Choose a tool that can provide a hyper-personalized multichannel approach.** Focus more time on building your playbook and let [tools like Amplemarket do the hyper-personalization](https://amplemarket.com/hyper-personalization) automatically for every single lead and forget about generic emails. You will get better open rates. - **Be relevant and keep your first emails concise and straight to the point.** When you cold email someone you should keep in mind that your prospects did not request your emails. Make your prospects feel special, show them that you took the time to research them and their company. - **Personalize your Subject line.** The first thing you see when you receive emails is the subject line and a snippet of the first sentence of the email. - **Write a compelling first sentence and be concise and personal in the way you start your emails.** The first sentence of your emails is really important because they will have an impact on both your open and your reply rates. Tailor your emails to the person you are reaching out to, i.e. you should have a different approach for C-level vs. Managers. - **Leave the fluff at home.** Create a bridge to connect your intro topic to the reason you are approaching them, expose your value proposition accordingly, and end with a call to action. ### Takeaway Wondering where to start? Check out our free resources where you'll find tips and templates to create your own hyper-personalized approach today. * **[Good Sales emails ](https://goodsalesemails.com/)** The platform to learn how some of the best companies are doing sales, by directly looking at their email campaigns. * **[First Touch Guide](https://amplemarket.com/academy?resource=6993daa7-eefc-4aed-9cc9-47fb20a9f3d9)** A complete guide to the first touch in sales with guidelines, examples, and templates ready to use. Hyper-personalization is what allows you to connect to your lead, which eventually transforms into a relationship built on trust between you and your client. **[Book a demo ](https://amplemarket.com/demo?source=hyper-personalization)and take a competitive edge on your sales today!**

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The People Behind Amplemarket's Product.

July 6, 2022

The Product world is fascinating. It requires a combination of different skills that synchronize to bring to the user a successful and useful product. From design, to understanding customer experience, and even managing complex projects and people - it takes the joined forces of a team with great talent to push forward these projects. We are **revolutionizing how people do sales**, and without a solid Product team, we wouldn’t be where our company is today! But, what do product design and management look like at [Amplemarket](https://amplemarket.com/)? We talked with: Diogo Rendeiro, Head of Product; Ana Lourenço, Product Designer; Inês Dias, Product Designer and Joana Amores, our recently joined Product Manager, to learn more about their day-to-day responsibilities and what it takes to be successful in this role. ### What does your day-to-day look like? > “As Product Designers, we pass our day today creating solutions that will be helpful and very intuitive to our users. We must develop creative ways of having a great product that differentiates us from the rest.” ” says Inês. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Odz-bvmFEgU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ### How would you describe the Product team’s culture at Amplemarket? > “If I had to describe the product team’s culture at Amplemarket in one word, it would be iteration. We are all about speed, being open with each other, and challenging each other every day so that we can always progress while testing ideas,” said Diogo. The Product team launches new features, products, and updates every week, ensuring that our customers are always equipped with the cutting-edge solution in the market. For Ana, the team > “is just the best.” > “We love collaborating with all the teams. I think we are super focused on what we are doing, but things can also get fun, and I just love that. We can sit together and have a serious conversation, writing down some key action points and brainstorming about the product. At the same time, we can also joke around, and I think that’s really great.” <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ykF-a6gkVPY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ### How would you define the Amplemarket product? > “Amplemarket's products are unique. They have a lot of features, and they are very customer-focused. We take a lot into account our user’s needs. We try to study what would be the best experience for them and design the product accordingly. I think that makes the product unique .” said Inês. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hchApEZ8S_k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> Working at **Amplemarket** means working on something inspiring: **the future of sales**. Joana Amores recently joined the product team and she said: > "If I had to describe this team in one word it would be Inspiring. They are all so talented, hard-working, laser-focused, and on point, and that's for me truly an inspiration to grow and do better." She also added: > "We’re a fun, young, talented, and hard-working team, and we’re all collectively working together to define what are the best frameworks and processes to enable a great product management culture. This is happening right now. I can’t think of a better reason to join a company". Are you ready to lead the future of sales? We’re looking for Product Owners and Designers who can help us create more exciting tools. Check out our [Careers page](https://amplemarket.com/careers), and apply now!

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