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Twain's Expanded Research for Personalized Sales Outreach 🚀

Mark Colgan

6 days ago

Discover Twain's Expanded Research feature, an AI-powered tool that goes beyond generic templates to create highly personalized sales emails and cold call scripts. It provides tailored insights, discovery questions, and talking points relevant to your specific business and target contacts, helping you cut through the noise in outbound sales.

Chapters

00:00

Intro to Twain

Introduction to Twain and its Expanded Research feature

00:13

Personalized Emails

How Twain personalizes emails better than other LLMs

00:37

Expanded Research Benefits

Benefits of Expanded Research for tailored insights

01:05

Cold Call Script

Cold call script and meeting preparation

01:35

Outbound Sales Challenges

Challenges in outbound sales and SDR onboarding

02:00

Individual Challenges

Addressing individual customer challenges

Transcript

00:00

Hey.

00:00

Hey.

00:01

So in this video I'm going to be walking through one of my favorite tools when it comes to outbound sales, and that is Twain and their recent update to the product called Expanded Research.

00:13

Now, I've always liked Twain because it has been the only product that I've used that can use AI and research to create really good personalized emails for each individual contact.

00:25

I know you've probably tried ChatGPT or Claude or some of the various other LLMs to create the cold emails for you, but you always feel that the messages are templated and they don't quite hit the mark.

00:37

Twain has always been fantastic at, creating highly personalized emails, but they've gone a step further with their, advanced, account research or expanded account research.

00:48

And why I think this is really important is that it not only gives you a bit of information about the person's background, but it also gives insights which are, tailored to your specific business, potential discovery questions, talking points, really important things like why now and why us?

01:05

And then also a high level cold call script.

01:10

Now I don't think the cold call script is going to be perfect for everybody, but it's a great starting point.

01:16

and it really helps people prepare for those calls.

01:20

it also can help an account executive prep for a meeting too.

01:23

So I'm going to go through and show you what that looks like.

01:26

I'm not going to go through the setup of Twain.

01:28

I've got previous videos of me going through those as well.

01:32

But before I do, we have to think about that.

01:35

It's even harder to cut through the noise now in outbound with so many people spamming crappy emails, a lot of people making bad cold calls as well.

01:45

and a particular challenge for specifically SDRS is that when they're new to a role as part of the onboarding process, they get to learn about the product, the features, the benefits, and also the problems that it can solve for people.

02:00

But that's very much done on a Persona or industry level.

02:04

So I might be working for a company and they tell me how my accounting software can help, independent business owners.

02:12

But the individual independent business owner has their own unique challenges, problems that they're looking to solve.

02:19

And that's what Twain can help.

02:21

It can help answer what specifically my product can help, what problem it can solve for that individual as well.

02:28

So, who's it for?

02:30

I mean, any SDR doing manual prospecting.

02:33

So this would be typically, if you have a larger deal size and a smaller total addressable market, of course there's a place for volume and outbound still.

02:41

but I think you would want to use a tool like Twain if you were targeting the mid market enterprise accounts.

02:46

and then any account executive or full cycle rep preparing for meetings or following up with prospects as well.

02:53

So I'm going to do a quick demo, I'm going to walk through the data that it shows you, and then I'm going to add in a prospect in real time.

03:01

Now for this example I'm using a company called Influe2.

03:05

I'm not working for Influe2, I'm not affiliated with them other than I've commented and created a bit of content with them.

03:11

but they are a great platform that supports with account based marketing at a contact level, of data.

03:20

but again I'm not working for them and this isn't a real campaign.

03:24

What I want to do is reach out to a chief marketing officer.

03:27

I'm going to pick a random chief marketing officer.

03:30

I'm just going to use pavilions CMOs to watch in 2025 and show you what Twain will surface.

03:36

So first of all I've got a couple preloaded in here and if I just show you what I've got set up, I've got my Persona already in and this is really key.

03:45

In Twain you can add in different Personas and the most successful companies running outbound have multiple Personas that they're targeting.

03:53

so the company and product name is influ2 and the pain points, the cost of an action, the solutions, objections, competitive advantages, the social proof is all added in here and this is the context layer that Twain will now use when it goes through and does the expanded research.

04:11

Now you can edit this as well.

04:13

This was I believe automatically generated by Twain.

04:16

I set this Persona up a little while ago now.

04:19

But you can go in and edit the Persona and add in any additional information.

04:23

If I just click here you can see that you can.

04:26

This is the job titles that I'm trying to target and then pain points I might want to put in my own pain point here.

04:32

So this is completely editable and the more context that you give it, the more information you give it, the better the output will be.

04:39

So I've got a couple of chief marketing officers here.

04:42

So what data does the research, show me?

04:45

As you can see the expanded research here and then this is the sequence is the email copy which is what Twain is traditionally known for.

04:53

So I've got An about section.

04:55

So about Alina, just to highlight three bullet points.

04:58

Chief marketing officer at rotorgeek.

05:00

primarily known for aligning brand amount and go to market strategies and then likely seek solutions that demonstrate how marketing activities such as content marketing, web redesigns lead to new customer acquisition.

05:11

So insights on Alina and also the company.

05:14

So these insights are mostly on the company.

05:17

we've got them here and they're pulling in external sources as well.

05:21

So G2 and also the website of the company itself.

05:25

Discovery.

05:25

questions.

05:27

So these are just suggestions.

05:28

It's pulling that information from the available data on Alina's profile.

05:33

So she's mentioned somewhere the goal for 30 growth.

05:37

At what point the manual workflows become a ceiling of reaching that goal.

05:41

Aligning on sales and marketing.

05:43

Current approach to targeting decision makers affect your ability to hit your revenue goals.

05:46

Then it's giving me some talking points.

05:48

Now again, this is where it's really important that you put in as much information about your company when you're setting up your Twain account.

05:55

So, talking points, contact level ad targeting, that's one of the key features of Influe 2.

06:02

So we target ads to specific people, not just companies, ensuring your message reaches key decision makers.

06:07

and you can see here, this would give me a great sentence or two to describe the problem that I can solve or that my product can solve in the language that a CMO at Breathe, which is the company where Alina works at.

06:23

it should resonate with her.

06:26

So you can see you need to reach HR Administration managers within SMEs to drive demo signups and free trials.

06:32

Again, that's pulling the information because breve targets HR administrators and managers within SMEs.

06:39

So I've not done any of this research as a sales rep.

06:41

I've just put it into Twain and it's given me these insights.

06:44

We've got contact level, intent signals.

06:46

So another example here, another example.

06:50

Sales empowerment with buying signals, we provide sales teams with real buyer insights, enabling more personalized and effective outreach.

06:56

So you need sales and marketing teams and you need to ensure that they're aligned for growth.

07:00

At brief, how do you currently equip your sales team with actual insights about individual buyers, interests and engagement to improve their outreach.

07:08

So as you can see, really, really good, talking points.

07:11

And again, just a starting point, you likely have your own playbooks and your own scripts that you want your sales reps to follow.

07:17

But oftentimes, your I see gaps that they don't give the specific Context to the individuals that they're reaching out to.

07:23

And that's what you can achieve with Twain.

07:26

Couple more points.

07:27

Why now?

07:28

So these are suggestions of why is it now a good time for me to reach out about Influence to Alina?

07:36

So it's pulling out that she expanded her role as group Chief Marketing Officer in July, so about six, seven months ago.

07:44

And then according to her profile she expanded that role to group cmo.

07:49

she leads the sales and marketing team.

07:52

So that's an external search.

07:56

Breathe redesigned their website as well recently to improve the user experience.

08:02

And according to the PR firm here, they use content marketing to generate leads and build authority.

08:07

So it's my product is about contact level advertising, but I need companies again, I'm pretending I work for Influence.

08:16

I need companies who have a pretty mature approach to marketing, a pretty mature approach to account based marketing.

08:22

They're running content, they're leveraging inbound, interests through their website as well.

08:27

So this is all really, really good information for me.

08:30

And then why us?

08:31

So it gives quite a detailed summary here as to why influe 2 is the right solution or potentially could be the right solution for Breathe.

08:42

So faces the challenges of aligning marketing and sales across multiple brands.

08:45

So that's because there's multiple brands within the portfolio.

08:48

Breathe, because it supports, sorry, contact level advertising that targets specific decision makers within SME account rather than just the company as a whole.

08:57

and then it also pulls through some social proof from the influence website which says Paddle, which is a well known company in SAS world, provides a useful example of a company that moved away from general lead generation to help their sales team focus on contacts who are actually engaged.

09:13

They used Influe 2.

09:15

So again it's building up this narrative, it's building up the story that's going to make me have a much better conversation with a prospect rather than me looking at a job title, looking at their website really quickly, picking up the phone and then trying to have that conversation.

09:28

So there's no way before I would be able to get all of this insights and all this research in one go.

09:34

Let me just pause here.

09:35

Let me go and add in a random, CMO, Nate.

09:40

Okay, so let's look at Nate's LinkedIn.

09:43

I'm not even gonna look at his LinkedIn here.

09:45

So I'm going to go back to Twain, I'm going to add a new lead so I can add a lead by uploading a CSV so I can do this in bulk, I can do thousands at a, but likely if you're an SDR or you're looking to evaluate using Twain, you probably aren't running the volume blade that you're going to save the usage of Twain for.

10:04

maybe your high intent or your high priority accounts.

10:07

I'm going to add it manually so I could connect to HubSpot, but I'm just going to add this one manually.

10:12

It very quickly finds whether Nate, is in there.

10:16

yep.

10:17

Okay, that's the right one.

10:18

Add lead.

10:21

So now it's going to start enriching, the research or sorry, I need to click research, which will cost me one credit.

10:26

So that's scanning the web.

10:28

It's going to work its magic.

10:29

If I just go back to Alina, we've covered the why us and now the last thing is the call opener.

10:34

so again this call opener isn't customized to your specific playbook.

10:39

I believe in the future Twain might allow the ability to add in your own templates here and potentially add in different research, points rather than just the about insights discovery, why now?

10:51

But as you can see, it's a pretty good starting point.

10:53

And again, I've seen a lot of organizations where they just don't have this level of playbook in place.

10:59

sales reps are almost expected to book meetings without a script, without these, key bits of research as well.

11:06

but I like the fact that it's using the context, the hypotheses, the social proof.

11:10

Social proof is really key.

11:12

especially when you're trying to cut through the noise.

11:14

People want to, people want to understand that you've worked with other companies like, and solve similar problems as well.

11:21

so that, that is in a nutshell, the Twain, expanded account research.

11:28

Now this is still enriching.

11:29

Nate, let me just jump back into Alina.

11:32

You can see here, I can actually chat with the research as well and use Twain.

11:37

so I said, when did she start her current role?

11:41

so then it gives me the fact that she joined in February 2024 4.

11:47

but then assume the expanded group CMO.

11:50

I haven't tried this but, how big is the marketing team?

11:57

I don't know whether this is going to give me the answer.

12:00

but it might, it might go off and search.

12:03

So total company size of 51 to 200 employees.

12:05

But they don't have a specific, data point for marketing team.

12:09

So that's okay.

12:10

But Alina leads a combined team of marketing, partner marketing and Sales specialist, focus on SME growth.

12:17

Sure.

12:18

So again I can now ask additional data points and research here which might be useful for me in my conversation.

12:25

So that's giving me the answer here.

12:28

So if I just go to Nate and I can see now that we've got all of the information about Nate.

12:34

So summary.

12:35

Three key points about Nate's career insights.

12:39

They offer a smart send solution discovery questions.

12:43

You recently took on the role as the CR role at 8:00am which is the name of the company.

12:47

how do you plan to unify your sales and marketing efforts to ensure marketing contributes directly to revenue goals, especially in a small growing company?

12:55

Talking points here.

12:56

So it's pulling through the core product features but then giving specific examples that would help me in the conversation I'd have with this prospect which is Nate.

13:08

Another example here.

13:09

For a company like ATM where you've recently taken on both sales and marketing, providing the specific impact of marketing activities on pipeline and revenue is vital.

13:16

What methods have you used to attribute contact level engagement to close deals?

13:20

Again this is not meant to be a word for word script but it just helps you navigate the conversation that you have with prospects when you're on the call.

13:28

And as I mentioned at the beginning a lot of BDRs or SDRs when they are especially new to the role, they go through a lot of training about the product, they go through a lot of training about the industry that they serve but they don't yet have the insights about having the conversation with the individuals that they're selling to.

13:47

So this can be a really really great shortcut for people for SDRs to upskill much quicker and reduce the ramp time it takes for them to be booking meetings.

13:58

So I think it's a fantastic tool.

14:00

As you can see it's done that it took a couple of minutes to, to do that research.

14:02

What you could essentially do is upload a list, step away for 10, 15 minutes, grab a coffee and then come back to it to see the research.

14:10

you can see how you could use this for pre meeting as well.

14:15

So that's my hands on walkthrough of Twain's expanded account research.

14:20

Always been a fan of Twain.

14:22

it'll be really interesting to see how this works with the Clay API.

14:26

I know that Mo, the founder, has been talking about that recently.

14:30

Perhaps I'll record a video in the future.

14:32

I'm sure there'll be a little bit more flexibility in terms of the cool scripts and the research steps.

14:38

As well.

14:39

but I think it's a great product to help finally solve that knowledge gap, especially for new SDRs, when they're expected to do so much with, so little context, especially when they first begin.

14:52

So, if you have any questions about Twain, I wouldn't say I'm a power user, but I know it pretty well.

14:57

Happy to answer those.

14:58

And Mo's very, very responsive.

15:00

If, you were to reach out to him, probably LinkedIn would be the best place.

15:03

That's it for me.

15:04

Let me know if you give this a go.

15:06

I'm pretty sure there's a trial where you can test this out for yourself as well, but yeah, it's fantastic.

15:10

Cheer.