Hey! I’m Justin 👋 

I founded Starbridge to help businesses win more government and education deals.

Welcome to the SLED Sales Brief — a newsletter for gov & edu sales leaders.

Today, I’m breaking down the three key tactics top-performing sales teams use to win more outbound.

Let’s dive in.

1.) It all starts with account scoring

We recently spoke to a company that sells transit buses to government agencies and school districts. The average transit bus lasts 12 years—meaning less than 10% of the market has a real need to buy each year.

If your product has a long lifespan, blind outbound isn’t just inefficient—it’s actively costing you deals. You waste months chasing a “top account,” only to realize they’re locked in a five-year contract with your biggest competitor.

Top-performing teams don’t guess. They build airtight account scoring models.

Here are some solid scoring factors to get started with:

Budget & annual spend – Can your prospect afford you?

Agency/Institution type - Are they a city or county? K-12 or higher ed? Technical or competency-based school?

FTEs/population – How big is the pie?

Similarity score - Do you already work with a logo similar to them? For example, another city in their state or another small, public community college?

Vended vs. non-vended – Are they already working with a competitor? Are they currently on a long-term contract or coming up for expiration soon?

A solid scoring model should use a heuristic weighting system - weighting similarity as the highest, and breaking down into several tiers of accounts, most commonly 0-3, where your reps should be calling into tier 0-1 accounts while lower tiers should be targeted with scaled, personalized cold outbound.

2.) Integrate signals that enable personalization at scale

We’ve been interviewing public sector leaders to understand what makes SLED vendors stand out. Every single one gets 30+ cold emails a week. If it’s not aligned to a top priority, it’s going in the trash.

The strongest gov & edu sellers are hyper-focused on buyer signals e.g., specific events that speed up a buyer’s journey or move them into the market.

The best part of selling to the public sector is that many buying signals can be found in public sources: new legislation, RFPs, board meetings, strategic plans, grants, and contracts.

A lot of this data is scattered across agency sites, but they’re a goldmine of priorities, funding, and upcoming initiatives. The best teams are digging in.

Here are some buying signals we hear high-performing teams use:

3.) Embed personalization tokens in your sequences

Over 50% of sales teams we talk to are doubling down on personalized outbound - and it’s paying off. At my last company (selling to higher ed), this approach boosted response rates by 20-30%.

The key to successful personalized outbound comes down to five key steps:

• Identify high-intent buyer signals (e.g., the account research described above)

• Match each signal to the right buyer type

• Write snippet variations for each signal-buyer pair

• Create a personalization token that pulls from these snippets

• Build sequences using the token for automated personalization

Here’s a strong example from one of our customers:

And this is what one of our outbound emails typically looks like:

P.S. If you want help to find & leverage these public signals, check Starbridge out

Thanks for reading!

Next week, I’ll be sharing an RFP playbook - best practices and tips to help you win more RFPs.

If you have any questions, reach out via Linkedin. My inbox is always open.

See you next week!

— Justin