A herbal-supplement brand: the decision-makers who ignored the phone replied by email

The situation, the work, the outcome

What the engagement actually looked like

Colby Swan has been in the business space, mainly marketing, for 25 plus years, most of it in marketing leadership and most of that on the digital side in retail, with some time on the operational side as well. He cut his teeth at a Fortune 500 company and then moved into private-equity-owned and privately held businesses. The engagement described here was for a herbal-supplement brand selling its products into retail stores, which is under NDA and is not named.

The first comparison point was internal. The company's SDR process was very internally driven: a person on staff doing the outreach, executing a certain number of calls, 75 to 100 a day, trying to set up appointments with the key decision-makers in the market they were attacking. That process was pretty ineffective, and the feeling was that the whole cold calling atmosphere had moved on without them.

So two outsourcing routes were tested side by side. The first was to keep the same calling motion but buy better data, better lists and a team that would not go stale the way the internal one had. The second was to change the channel entirely and reach the same decision-makers by cold email.

The buyer settled it. This is a very fragmented business. In his words: “A lot of individual store owners who did not respond favorably to the phone call.” They do, however, like and respond well to messaging, because a message lets them answer in their own time and puts them more in control of the conversation. Calling the main store number got whoever happened to be working, a note to chase someone down on Thursday, and a follow-up task in the CRM.

Data was the other half of it. The company had been subscribing to lists that were old and outdated, with nothing in real time, or relying on the limited scale of a single BDR combing Google, picking a state today and an area tomorrow, and tracking it all manually. It was very slow.

The moment it clicked, in his telling, was about pace rather than volume. He describes getting in a hurry earlier in his career and making bad decisions because the point was to start fast rather than to understand what the work was for. Here the strategic listening sessions came first, and the output was a written, well-organized primary, secondary and tertiary plan he could review at his own leisure, give feedback on, and agree to before launch.

Day to day, questions and objections coming back from replies were answered in a shared channel within a few minutes, which is what turned positive replies into sales opportunities. Once the formula was correct, the program could grow at scale.

Asked for the single most valuable part, he picks the quality of the prospect over the volume of conversations: an actual decision-maker replying first-hand, asking to see samples or for a 15-minute conversation, which facilitated a far faster two-way exchange than chasing a store manager by phone.

His closing argument is aimed at companies still running territories, driving between stores and paying mileage to get a brand ambassador through the door. In one of the toughest markets out there to outreach, email got to the decision-maker for less.

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