Why Most Startup Sales Teams Are Inefficient (And How To Improve Yours)
Ask any startup what their greatest challenge is, and chances are sales is at the top of the list. But, oddly enough, the hard part isn’t always making the sale once you’re on a call—the hard pieces are all the other inefficiencies in the sales process.
Having worked with more than a dozen startup sales teams, I’ve observed a few core inefficiencies time and time again, especially when it comes to cold email. Teams grapple with these challenges thinking they’re par for the course when in reality, there’s a better way.
Let me explain.
The current state of cold emailing
Let’s address what exactly the most common inefficiency bogging down startup sales teams is. It’s really more of a misconception of what’s possible.
From my experience, most sales teams default to one of the following outbound strategies:
1:Many: They send generic or, at best, barely customized emails en masse, better known as the classic “spray and pray” method.
1:1: They send highly customized emails, but at a very low volume because such customization requires intensive manual effort.
Teams either have to make a tradeoff on quantity or quality. And no matter which route they choose, startups bring on more salespeople to further scale their efforts.
This is the traditional model for sales growth: adding more people despite their high costs—hiring, benefits, salary, taxes—and lack of consistency.
Introducing a better, more cost-effective approach to sales
Here’s a strong opinion you wouldn’t have heard 10 years ago:
SDRs shouldn’t be sending emails (for the most part).
With OpenAI, data scrapers, webhooks, and the ability to manage multiple inboxes from a single control center, we’ve got more tools at our disposal than ever before.
That opens the door for taking a programmatic approach to cold email, which is exactly what we do at Aurora. Unlike the traditional quantity-versus-quality dichotomy, this approach leverages AI to generate and send personalized emails at scale.
To give you an idea of what that might look like, here are some examples:
Instead of relying on salespeople to source leads the old-fashioned way, you could use a visitor tracking tool to find out who’s landing on your site, even if they never provide their information. And there are many other ways to automate lead sourcing: automated Googling, live LinkedIn data, News APIs, tools like Clay, and more.
When it comes to email personalization, the world is your oyster. You could scrape LinkedIn to find out people’s titles and locations. Or you could scrape company websites for their mission, pricing, and open roles. Or, more creative still, you could scrape the web to find out about what your prospect’s customers think about them vs. what they think about your prospect’s competitors. Whatever the case, you can quickly find all the specific details worth referencing in an email—and do this at scale.
Finally, you could schedule these customized messages to go out at specific times. Trigger them based on high-intent signals, like when someone spends a prolonged amount of time on your site. Or automate them based on broader firmographic events, like when a company raises a new round of funding or opens up a role related to the problem you solve.
To be clear, no automation platform can totally replace your sales team. And if you don’t have the groundwork for success in the first place, like strong product-market fit or manual outreach recipes that work, no software solution can turn your sales around.
But if you’re already seeing meaningful traction with your product and it’s just a matter of overcoming your worst inefficiencies, shifting to this programmatic model can make a difference. Since you’ll only need to hire closers, you’ll have lower acquisition costs overall, even after factoring in tech spend. The result is a predictable, automated sales engine and faster growth for your startup in the long run.
Why aren’t more startups already doing this?
Many startups are already sold on email automation; it’s a no-brainer. Getting these systems in place requires some operational work, but that’s not the biggest challenge preventing success. It’s managing them alongside email deliverability, the science of how to get emails to land in someone’s inbox rather than their spam folder.
Sender reputation, authentication protocols, and SMTP validation—these terms probably don’t mean much when you’re focused on the big picture of outbound strategy. Deliverability is where you get into all the granular details of sending and receiving emails, and understanding it requires more technical know-how than the average marketer or salesperson comes equipped with.
In fact, nearly half the startups that approach me don't have a solid email infrastructure in place. Things like their DNS, DMARC, and SPF records aren’t set up, meaning an inordinate amount of their emails never make it to their recipients’ inboxes. They get blocked or land in spam folders instead.
The worst part is this can happen without your team even being aware. If you’re not paying close attention to your email metrics, or if you confuse delivery for deliverability, you may very well be caught in a vicious cycle. As your emails reach fewer people, the lack of engagement hurts future deliverability, meaning more emails land in spam.
Without a solid grasp of email deliverability then, all your automations could be for nothing.
Email automation is nothing without solid inbox placement
Unlike other things you can set and forget, you need to keep a steady pulse on deliverability. Whether that’s with an in-house expert or a dedicated partner like Aurora, someone should be able to tweak and realign your outbound strategy on an ongoing basis.
Part of this is because as much good as automation offers, it can also wreak havoc if in the wrong hands. One misstep in email scheduling or personalization, for example, could mean thousands of recipients flagging your message as spam—a big hit to your deliverability and thus, future email performance.
Yes, this management is tedious. But combined with a fine-tuned sales machine, the upside to mastering email deliverability is tremendous.
Startups in this position become less reliant on venture funding. Their sales headcount and acquisition costs drop, giving them room to offer more competitive prices. And since sales and marketing spend lowers, companies can also invest more in their product.
Get more from your sales
Choosing between quality and quantity should no longer be your sales team’s biggest dilemma. Nor should you have to hire more SDRs just to move the needle.
At Aurora, we help startups scale their most successful outbound recipes. We do this by building a programmatic outbound sales engine made of AI- and data-driven systems and backed by our technical deliverability expertise.
Want to systematize your strategy? Reach out so we can help bring your sales to the next level.
