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Folks, if you re liking what you re getting from 30MPC, the number one way you can support us is by subscribing to our newsletter.
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Every week, you only get two emails.
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On Monday, you get a content rollup of everything that dropped last week, and on Fridays, I pick one topic and I personally write a deep dive on things like how to cold call, how to run a discovery call, or even how to hire an AE.
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So if you re liking what you re getting here, take two seconds, go to the show notes, you ll see a button to subscribe to our newsletter, or you can go to 30MPC.com backslash newsletter and do it there.
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We ll catch you soon.
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Cheers.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes at the President s Club.
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My name is Armand Farouk, and I m here with my co-host.
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Who are you?
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It s the dude.
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Not, I ll let you do all the nonsense on the other show.
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I don t know how you got onto this show, but I m here with my co-host today, Nick Segelski.
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Folks, we now have a couple of different co-hosts for the Leadership Show.
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Mark will be taking a series of interviews, especially where we want that CRO, that closing perspective.
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But Nick has actually been doing a ton of advisory work alongside me.
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And he also brings an awesome enterprise rep perspective to what it feels like to be on a team led by amazing leaders.
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And so, Nick, why don t you tell us today why people are listening?
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This was a phenomenal episode with a phenomenal SDR leader.
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If you want to understand how to get your SDRs, picking up the phone and cold calling on day three at your company, not necessarily selling your product, selling pizzas,
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Believe it or not, you got to listen to this one.
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If you want to understand SDR team benchmarks, understanding what, how the sequence volume, how many people should your SDRs be putting into new sequence on a regular basis, what pickup rates should look like, what conversion rates should look like.
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This is great because Ken works with a lot of different SDR teams and he understands an industry as a whole, not a specific company.
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So if you want to benchmark, listen to this one.
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And if you want to understand how to get your SDRs running one-on-ones with you and bringing items rather than you driving all of those agendas, Ken s got some really great stuff.
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And if you want to kill call reluctance, here s your hint.
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Three, two, one, pizza time.
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Today s tip to optimize your sales day is brought to you by Boomerang.
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If you get an email and the action required on that email is going to take you less than two minutes to do, do it on the spot.
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It s not worth adding it to your to-do list, having to look at the item, remember what you need to do.
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That s going to take you more than two minutes anyway, so do it on the spot, get it off your plate.
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Now, we documented our best templates and tips to help you optimize your sales day with our friends at Boomerang, and you can get that documentation for free at the link in the show notes.
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Today s prospecting tip is brought to you by Supercadence by Influ2, which helps cut through the noise of oversaturated prospecting channels.
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If you want to get your prospect s attention, you gotta do stuff a robot would never do.
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One of my favorite plays is getting warm introductions to the accounts that I m targeting via salespeople who work at that account.
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Salespeople help salespeople.
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Another approach could be using Supercadence to run SDR ads to put a face to the name.
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Now, we worked with Influ2 to put together a special toolkit on ways to humanize your outreach, which you can get for free at the link
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link in the show notes.
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Gong s going to help you run the five-minute drill at the end of all of your calls today.
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At the end of a call, pressure test the prospect with three questions.
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Number one, do you want to buy?
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If the answer is no, why set a next step at all?
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Number two, when do you want to buy?
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If it s tomorrow, we got to move fast.
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Number three, how do you buy?
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Based on the first two answers, I can now adequately decide if and how I set a next step.
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And this was stolen from the Gong 30-MPC 90-Minute Masterclass, and you can steal it too in the show notes.
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Otter AI s Otter Pilot for Sales gives you the freedom to sell on your discovery calls by taking notes for you.
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One of the best ways to deepen your discovery is to ask your prospect about the impetus behind their goals.
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So when a prospect tells me they want to advertise on more sales podcasts, I ll say, well, it s not every day that you wake up and decide you want to sponsor a podcast.
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What s causing you to even explore this in the first place?
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Now, we put together the ultimate discovery checklist with our friends at Otter AI, which you can get for free at the link in the show notes.
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Alrighty, Ken, welcome back to the show, but this time on The Leadership Show, we start every show with your top three actionable leadership takeaways.
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Let s get your three.
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Awesome.
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So my first actionable takeaway is implementing a headhunting drill into your SDR workflow.
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So really simply a headhunting drill is getting your SDRs, typically your newer SDRs, cold calling your executives internally.
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I don t care what kind of product you sell in SaaS, you re going to have a team internally that
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is an end user of that product, and your new SCRs are going to spend a week, I recommend a week, cold calling your executives.
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Some might complain, hey, I don t have time to pick up SCR cold calls.
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Everyone s got five minutes in their day for cold calling, and they can look on their calendar, see these gaps between, and these SCRs are going to cold call the executives
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and they re going to pitch the product.
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And this does two amazing things.
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One, it gets your SEOs really quickly with high level execs who they will be calling with in their day-to-day.
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And secondly,
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It builds these connections between SDRs and executives, right?
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So eventually when they do come up for promotion, the CEO, the CRO might know the name of that SDR.
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And then lastly, it does build an awesome amount of political capital internally.
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You build a kind of awesome internal brand.
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with both your SDRs and with your executives.
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I m going to have every member of the audience cold call Nick after this episode.
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Ken, what s number two?
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All right, so number two, I call this like the law of cold calling.
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For every 100 dials an SDR makes, on average, you ll get about five to six connects, and they should be booking at least one meeting
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for every one of those 100 dials.
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So the law goes like this, every 100 dials, you should get one meeting.
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If they re not, there s a problem either in that connects or in their conversions, right?
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And there s different solutions around both of that.
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All right, bring us home.
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What do we got for number three?
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All right, number three.
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So this is a bit of a spicy take, right?
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My opinion around coaching is you can t coach someone
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who doesn t want to be coached.
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So I recommend any one-on-one you have an S here, they should bring their metrics to you.
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And I m not talking about activities, right?
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Like things like making downs, adding people to sequences, writing emails, those are table stakes.
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I m talking about having them come to you with their conversions, specifically things like what is their email reply rate?
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What is their sentiment?
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on their email replies, right?
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A lot of people talk about reply rates as being the end all be all of emails, but it s a bit of a false flag, right?
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Do they accurately track and measure their positive sentiment rate, their objections?
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How do they handle their objections?
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And then obviously the conversion rates in their phone, their connect rate, their meeting book rate.
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They should know these things, especially if they re looking for that next level in either escrow management, being in AE, CSM, or whatever.
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Armand made a little joke in between number one and number two around having the audience call me.
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And I ll be honest, it gave me a little bit of acid reflux when he was like, everyone s going to call Nick.
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Because I m like, dude, I do not have time for that.
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And so I popped a Tums while you were saying number two and number three.
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But I have to imagine that when you propose doing this headhunting thing with your executive team, they have a similar reaction to the one that I have, which is, Ken, I get it.
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You want the team calling.
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You re trying to get them motivated.
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We re really busy.
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We don t have time for this.
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Let s start with how are you positioning this to your executive team and how are you selling them on, Hey, this is something we re going to do as a company.
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Yeah, definitely.
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And I think it s a lot less selling than you think, right?
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Every CEO, every CRO sales leader understands pipeline is life, right?
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They understand that the SDR job is the tip of the spear of the go-to-market function.
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Right.
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And.
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It s innovative, right?
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A lot of executives are willing to do this, right?
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And they might say, hey, I might not have enough time for this.
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You can condense that headhunting drill from a week to a day, right?
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But every single executive, no matter what they do, has at least five minutes in their day to pick up a cold call, especially for someone internally too.
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So are you sending a Slack out to all of the execs?
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Are you like bringing this up in the weekly like exec meeting?
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How are you communicating it to them?
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What channel?
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And then what are some of the talking points you have when you pitch this to them?
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So I ve done this two ways, right?
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So the first time I did this, I didn t tell any of the executives.
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This was back when I was at Outreach.
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We got a list of all the marketing leaders
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all the sales operations and all the sales leaders.
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We listed out their cell phone numbers, we attached a point value to them, and then we onboarded a very big class of 12 new SDRs.
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We set aside a week and we secretly had the SDRs call the executives, right?
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It was very confusing.
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I got a lot of interesting slacks from leaders, right?
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But I responded to all of them the same way.
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Hey, I think the best way to train folks is internally, right?
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That hand-to-hand combat before they go and call executives, other CROs, other VPs of sales live, right?
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I did get a bit of a slap in the wrist for that one.
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So moving forward afterwards, what I did was really simple.
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I sent an email
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to all the executives, outlining this is happening.
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This is what we re going to do.
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Here s the duration.
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Let me know if you want to opt out.
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I think getting that gets them to buy in.
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It gives them space to opt out, obviously, but it makes part of their natural flow.
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And we did this like on a regular quarterly cadence, both at Outreach and at Versailles.
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Folks, what a lot of people don t realize with SDRs is they hear SDRs talking in buzzword or jargon or in things that people, they just don t even sound like the problems that a prospect has.
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And the reason for that is if you look at where an SDRs come from,
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They ve usually come fresh out of school or from a completely different industry, and they don t even get to demo the product or talk to customers.
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They get to fire off emails and get 99% rejections.
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And the 1% of people that say yes
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They don t even get to go and handle those deals.
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And so when you give your SDRs the ability to talk to a quote-unquote friendly prospect, who after the call will tell them, hey, when you called yourself a single source of truth, I had no idea what you meant.
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Now they can actually start to learn from an industry insider, the language of their prospects.
1
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So Ken, my question for you is, are there other ways you re using your internal executives?
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Have you done like fireside chats?
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How do you teach your SDRs to speak the language of the prospects when they re not the ones who are actually running the sales calls?
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We d have weekly trainings and we d have different guests within the executive team, right?
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But the problem with these sessions, like every week, they turn into kind of like mindset or like really high level strategy sessions where maybe a CEO of a technical product is going to talk about new updates that the S years frankly don t know and don t care about.
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So usually what we did was we get revenue leaders, right?
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The VP of sales, the CRO, a couple of sales directors, sales managers come in weekly.
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and do objection handling drills, right?
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Or let them know about deals progressing that were SDR sourced, the objections coming, right?
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Very tactical things that they could apply to their day to day.
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I remember when I was at Carta, I was running the SDR team there and Carta sells to CFOs, controllers, accounting people.
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And so we went through the whole finance team, and for a quarter, we had our CFO come in and do a fireside chat, we had an accountant come in and do a fireside chat, and they would actually show us, here s how we manage Carta s cap table using Carta.
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And then we would ask them like, okay, tell us about the problems that you actually had.
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And these SDRs would compare that.
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We would pull up the language in their emails relative to what the CFO were saying.
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And they were completely different.
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And it completely changed the way that we wrote a lot of our emails.
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So I love what you re talking about with getting execs involved.
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It also has an ancillary of educating your team on
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the language of the prospects.
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Let s talk about the general premise of motivating your team to dial or getting over call reluctance, because I know you have some big strategies around that.
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Other than this exact dialing piece, how do you get an SCR who s first starting off the job over call reluctance?
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So Sam Nelson and I, we coined this pizza pie challenge, right?
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We ve done this with new SCRs, experienced SCRs, with Harvard MBAs, right?
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But it s a really fun thing we do.
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So essentially during onboarding, you get SDRs who are freshmen college who are making a shift, right?
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And you get them a lead list.
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And I typically recommend getting small companies.
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We made the mistake once of selling to local companies.
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And after a while, we got some angry callbacks, right?
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About getting sold pizza every month, but essentially SMBs nearby.
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Every SDR will get about a hundred of these companies with cell phone numbers, right?
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And for an hour on their third day of onboarding.
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We wouldn t tell them anything about it.
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We d hand out the script and tell them, all right, you re gonna call as a pizza consultant, as a Domino s or Pizza Hut lover, and try to sell a cheese or pepperoni pizza, right?
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And everyone would be like, what the hell?
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Is this a joke?
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What are you talking about?
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Fun fact, so we did this like six years ago.
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A pizza back then was like 10 bucks.
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Now, because of inflation, it s about 20 bucks, right?
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But the end result is always the same.
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We d stand up and we d tell them, hey, if you can t sell,
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a $10 or $20 pizza, how are you expected to sell a $20,000, $100,000 piece of software, right?
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And to get the lesson, they start dialing, they start getting connects, and they laugh a little bit.
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And the best reps, okay, the best reps would handle these objections very creatively.
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A lot of people would ask, is this a joke?
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And they d handle it like, no, this is not, I m just a really big pizza aficionado.
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Or some people would even say, hey, I m gonna die.
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Awesome!
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We ve got gluten-free options available, right?
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And we actually deliver pizzas.
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I got my credit card marked as a fraud once because I delivered so many pizzas online.
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And the SDRs love this and they realize, okay, I can do this.
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It instills that confidence in them, right?
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And this is primarily from your SDRs.
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I ve got another thing I do with more tenured SDRs.
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I wanted to just ask you something about the newer SDRs.
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You said you didn t give them a ton of context on this.
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What basic skills had you gotten down with them?
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Had you taught them how to open a cold call?
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Had you taught them any objection handling principles?
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Were you just giving them a script and saying, hey, you re going to say this word for word?
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What did you make sure that they knew and what were you okay with them learning on the fly or on the job?
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So the day before we give them the call script, you know, I know script can be a bit of a loader, the call framework that the other SCRs would use, right?
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And we d encourage them to spend some time role-playing with other people internally, or, you know, in some cases, like memorizing the framework.
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Right.
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And so the next day, the SCRs would come in having spent a lot of time, probably very anxious to do role plays.
1
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Right.
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But before we d even do role plays internally, we d get them into this drill, right?
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Because the number one problem we see with new SDRs is call reliance, right?
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So if you can kill that, you can teach them how to sell complicated ERP software or whatever it is yourself.
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Can you talk about the setup of this?
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Where are you getting the phone numbers?
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Which prospects?
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And yeah, like, how do you actually do this?
1
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Definitely.
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So I ve done this two ways, right?
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The second way is probably more simpler, but I m going to talk to you about the first way
1
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And it was pretty straight.
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So as an outreach, we found a list of disqualified accounts within our CRM that were in the SMB, like less than 100 employees, right?
1
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We tagged all of them.
1
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And then we create a call task within outreach and assign them to the new SDRs, right?
1
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And the SDRs got these prospects within these small businesses in Seattle, and they call them every month.
1
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The problem from that, and I hope you take away from this, I would probably not recommend doing that because we did that for several onboarding classes and we got some complaints from some people saying, Hey, like every month I get a call from someone trying to sell me a cheese pizza.
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Like I don t like pizza, stop doing this.
1
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What I would recommend is getting lead lists from like Zoom Info, Lead IQ.
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of companies all over, again, SMB tier companies, calling the executive assistant, the CEO, or the owner, really, of a chiropractic studio or a law practice.
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Getting those into an Excel list, printing them out, and having each SCR have approximately 75 to 100.
1
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And they want to call them when it s the prospect s lunchtime.
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So this is what gets people picking up the phones in the first place.
1
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Now that the key to nailing prospecting is to do it every week, do it every day, do it consistently, do it in the morning.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can you talk about A, the activity benchmarks that you hold your team accountable to?
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And B, how do you make sure that those things are consistent?
1
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Activities.
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Those are like table stakes, right?
1
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It really depends on the industry, but generally as a goodwill as them,
1
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An SDR should have a healthy pipeline of anywhere from 300 to 400 people active in sequence, right?
1
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Anything below that, it s too little, and they re not adding enough people, aka not prospecting enough daily.
1
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Anything more than that, then their targeting is probably off, right?
1
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The second thing I m looking at is the activity of calls.
1
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100 calls a day equals one meeting booked, right?
1
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But really, outside of that, I really care about conversions, right?
1
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So in my last role at Purcell,
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I built out the SDR team.
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I had a couple of SDR managers underneath me.
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I trusted my SDR management team to get the SDRs to their activity benchmarks.
1
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But holistically, I m looking at conversions per rep and per team.
1
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If they re getting a connect rate below 4% to 5%, that means they re not recycling their numbers in Outreach, in SalesLoft, in Apollo.
1
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And this is a really interesting actionable tip.
1
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Most major sales engagement providers in the space, they just recycle phone numbers.
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Same with other dialers in the space, like Nooks, Orib.
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I d recommend every month, purchase a new phone number in your SCP, and then call your cell phone.
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See if it comes up marked as spam.
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Most of the time, it will.
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And you re going to probably spend 20 to 30 minutes, honestly, buying new phone numbers, deleting them.
1
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But once you do that, you re set for about a couple
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months, right?
2
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And that s probably the best time investment an SCR can make in terms of cold call.
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The phone carriers monitor phone numbers and will flag numbers that are associated with spam or scam dialing or have these crazy volumes of calls.
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And so it s possible that you purchase a bad number that when, even though you ve never dialed from it before,
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it will show up for a prospect as spam, scam likely.
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SPEAKER_01
And obviously, the pickup rates on that are much lower.
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And so what you re recommending you do is, if you re a sales leader, you should be regularly buying new numbers and testing those numbers to see, is this one of these tainted numbers that I just purchased?
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SPEAKER_01
My question for you is,
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If you buy a bad number, are you reaching out to who you bought it for from and saying, Hey, I need a refund on this.
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SPEAKER_01
I m wondering if that s going to get expensive buying a bunch of new numbers all the time.
2
SPEAKER_02
It does get expensive, but it s really a dollar per each cell phone you purchase.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
And then when you look at the ROI of getting a new cell phone number to increase connect rates, to increase meetings, increase revenue, like the ROI is just plain.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s very clear from there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Are you managing this for your team or are you having them manage the purchasing and testing of new numbers?
2
SPEAKER_02
Every month, I require my team on the first day of the month to purchase three new area codes.
2
SPEAKER_02
One for the West Coast, 415, the SF Bay Area has the highest connect rates we ve seen.
2
SPEAKER_02
Second, somewhere in Austin, sometimes Chicago, it really depends, but really anywhere in Central.
2
SPEAKER_02
And then lastly, on the East Coast, either New York or Florida.
2
SPEAKER_00
What are the pros and cons of using a parallel dialer?
2
SPEAKER_00
And for those who don t know, a parallel dialer, such as Oram, for example, or Nooks is another one, is a software that allows you to basically dial multiple phone numbers at the same time.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve got a bit of a spicy take at this, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
So back in my day, and I hate to bring up that old cliche, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But about six years ago when I was in SCR, I was making $300 a day.
2
SPEAKER_02
And my average workday was still like an SCR now, eight hours a day, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And within that eight hours a day, I was making 300 calls.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was reaching out to 10 to 20 accounts.
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SPEAKER_02
in a personalized way.
2
SPEAKER_02
I wasn t just blasting out phone number, phone dials.
2
SPEAKER_02
I think the pros of a dialer, and they re all the rage, it helps with that connect rate issue that a lot of SCRs face.
2
SPEAKER_02
One of the cons though, is that anytime I talk to an SCR leader, we compare KPIs, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
All right, what are your KPIs?
2
SPEAKER_02
How many people do you add to sequence?
2
SPEAKER_02
How many dials do you make?
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, you use a dialer, cool.
2
SPEAKER_02
But the number one question SCR leaders have is, what do my reps do all day?
2
SPEAKER_02
So you got eight hours in a day, nine to five, let s say, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
You got one hour of training, internal meetings, all that good stuff, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
So you got seven hours left to prospect.
2
SPEAKER_02
You can feasibly, without a dialer, make about a hundred calls in an hour if no one picks up.
2
SPEAKER_02
If someone picks up with you, maybe it s an hour and a half, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But with a dialer, you can blast out hundreds of calls in the space of an hour and get pretty good connect.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what do you do in that five hours you have left, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, you research accounts, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And that s like this kind of abyss, this black box of researching accounts and STRs kind of get stuck in.
2
SPEAKER_02
My recommendation is if you buy a dialer, you ve got to increase your KPIs.
2
SPEAKER_02
If you don t, your SDRs aren t as productive as they could be.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to ask you about that, Ken, because that black box seems very scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
I remember looking at SDR calendars before, and some folks, they re very regimented.
2
SPEAKER_01
They put their time blocks on their calendar, and you think you have a sense of how they re spending that time if they actually follow the blocks.
2
SPEAKER_01
How much guidance are you giving your team on how they should be structuring their day and spending their time?
2
SPEAKER_01
And how accountable are you holding them to your structure to how you think an SDR should run a day versus giving them more flex in terms of what they do, how they do it, et cetera?
2
SPEAKER_02
So flexibility is earned.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not given, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
I know it s a bit of a spicy take, but SCR, they re really cutting your teeth.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re getting into sales, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
You can work hard or you can work smart.
2
SPEAKER_02
Ideally, you do both, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
My recommendation for SCRs has always been within the prime like calling hours from 10 to 2 generally, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
You should be doing your highest revenue generating activities, aka making phone calls, responding to emails, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Outside of that, you do things that don t necessarily generate ROI on that same day.
2
SPEAKER_02
researching accounts, writing emails, all that good stuff, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But what I encourage STRs to do, and this is a weird take as well too, I m a big fan of CrossFit, okay?
2
SPEAKER_02
So CrossFit has this concept called workouts of the day, super high intensity, a very short 10 to 15 minute bursts, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
So I ll do competitions with SCRs, either with myself or with my SCR managers.
2
SPEAKER_02
We ll pick an account and within 10 to 15 minutes, they should find at least three to five prospects to send emails to.
2
SPEAKER_02
If they re not finding those, they re having issues with targeting, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And if you can improve that ability to find people quickly, you can really have drastic impacts on their pipeline.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you talk about if someone is having a hard time finding accounts quickly, how would you coach that?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, there s a Boolean you can actually implement in a LinkedIn sales map that includes titles and previous companies or customers that they came from.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I found the best way to coach that is really to get SCRs to shadow you.
2
SPEAKER_02
So every day, usually in the mornings, eight to nine, I have an hour carved out to prospecting shadow sessions.
2
SPEAKER_02
Every single day over the last six years, I ve made cold calls.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve sent emails, I ve prospected, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And I get my reps to shadow me, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And at this point, it looks like I have ADHD.
2
SPEAKER_02
I go down all these weird rabbit holes.
2
SPEAKER_02
I pull out all these random things and ask myself, what the hell are you doing?
2
SPEAKER_02
But the very end, I m able to pull out five stakeholders very quickly, very efficiently, and have a very tactical value prop that I can use to target them.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so they learn through osmosis.
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SPEAKER_02
We re not on in the office anymore, so they can shadow me.
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SPEAKER_02
And I think that s like the best way for them to learn quickly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Dude, those working sessions are critical for SDRs, especially if you ve not worked on a sales floor before.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want you to imagine that first day on the job where all you ve used is Microsoft Word and now you open this weird thing called a CRM.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somehow you need to get all of these people from a CRM
2
SPEAKER_00
into a sales engagement platform to fire off a thousand emails.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you need to click this button inside platform to make the calls.
2
SPEAKER_00
And somehow then the replies get route.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s so confusing.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s so many tools.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you got to research information from 17 different places and you can run as many slide deck trainings as you want.
2
SPEAKER_00
But this is one of those things that you need to do side by side.
2
SPEAKER_00
So easily the most effective thing you can do is I booked it from four to six and I was like four to six.
2
SPEAKER_00
is race me to find research accounts as quickly as possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
And people will be shocked when they see someone do it quickly, how fast you can go through this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Ken, there s a classic scenario, two SDRs, both hitting activity benchmarks.
2
SPEAKER_00
One is not making quota.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where do you start?
2
SPEAKER_02
That s an interesting question, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Activities are important, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But I think conversions are even more important, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
If someone isn t hitting quota, the first thing to look at is, do you have the necessary volume?
2
SPEAKER_02
Most of the times, most SDRs who are missing quota are actually above their KPIs.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s really in conversions where they struggle.
2
SPEAKER_02
I know there s three channels, like LinkedIn being that third, but it s not necessarily
2
SPEAKER_02
applicable to all companies.
2
SPEAKER_02
So really I m looking at email, I m looking at calls, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And then within those two, I m looking at, all right, what is your email reply rate holistically over the last six months?
2
SPEAKER_02
Over the last couple of years, email reply rates have tanked, but generally having about a three to 4% email reply rate is healthy.
2
SPEAKER_02
Then we click into email reply rate.
2
SPEAKER_02
Now within email reply rate, what is your sentiment of replies?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because if you have a bunch of replies telling you to F off or take me off your list, that s not great.
2
SPEAKER_02
We can still work with that, mind you.
2
SPEAKER_02
But we re looking at positive sentiment and objections.
2
SPEAKER_02
Objections specifically.
2
SPEAKER_02
Now here s something really interesting.
2
SPEAKER_02
So most SEPs will classify email replies as positive sentiment or objection sentiment or opt-outs, referrals, etc.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s very hard to increase positive sentiment.
2
SPEAKER_02
A lot of SCR leaders get stuck in oh, how do I increase my positive sentiment for my SCR from 20% to 25% Quite frankly Some SCRs are very good emails and some aren t right instead.
2
SPEAKER_02
You want to focus on objections Okay, and within objections, they re gonna buck it down into four or five main buckets not interested There s not much you can do that.
2
SPEAKER_02
But then there s things like hey, I don t have budget
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not the right time.
2
SPEAKER_02
I m not the right person.
2
SPEAKER_02
And you want to measure how fast your SDRs are taking action on these objection sentiments, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
So if you get 10 replies and five of them are objections,
3
SPEAKER_00
The SCR should be calling everyone ASAP, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Even if they say, take me off your list, I m not interested.
3
SPEAKER_00
Fun fact, I had an SCR who got one of the meanest replies I ve seen, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Where the prospect took the time out to roast them, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I told the SCR, hey, call the prospect.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s very uncomfortable.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s scary.
3
SPEAKER_00
I want you to call them, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And they asked me why, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
This guy is his main, he s not ever going to take a meeting with us.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I told him this, you have nothing to lose by calling someone who tells you no.
3
SPEAKER_00
In fact, you have everything to gain.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you can turn one of your a hundred no s one into a yes, you get one more yes than you originally would have.
3
SPEAKER_00
How quickly they can action that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then if your team is calling them or sending emails.
3
SPEAKER_00
objection sentiment within emails.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then within calls, I think we touched upon this earlier, their meeting book rate on the phone and that connect rate specifically on the phone, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Meeting book rate, everyone knows you can do things like role-playing with your SDRs daily.
3
SPEAKER_00
That obviously really helps.
3
SPEAKER_00
But connect rate is this, everyone, it s something that everyone s accepted as a matter of fact, this last couple of years.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, connect rates will always be lower.
3
SPEAKER_00
1%, 2% is normal.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
3
SPEAKER_02
Change your phone numbers.
3
SPEAKER_02
Recycle.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can one place that I ve also seen really commonly a mistake is targeting.
3
SPEAKER_02
So activity is the same.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I m like, they re connecting reasonably well, like their emails are getting opened.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I look at the replies, I m like, they re sending the same emails.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m like, why aren t any of these positive?
3
SPEAKER_02
And I m like, wait, it s because they re literally reaching out to the wrong ICP.
3
SPEAKER_02
Like it s the wrong type of account or the wrong person.
3
SPEAKER_02
How do you figure that out?
3
SPEAKER_02
Because I always found that one was one that took me hours to get to.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can go into a prospect active in sequence or in cadence, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you can almost view cadences or sequences as an SDRs pipeline, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you can see what s real and what s not within that, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of it, though, does come to enablement.
3
SPEAKER_00
Giving new or existing SDRs a very simple, here are the titles, the 10 titles we sell them to, here are the two verticals we sell them to.
3
SPEAKER_00
But audit, and it s just a pain in the butt, every month you ve got to audit their sequences active.
3
SPEAKER_02
I wish we had more time, but this is hands down best SDR leadership interview we ve ever heard.
3
SPEAKER_02
Ken, we have to move to the final question.
3
SPEAKER_02
There were many good habits of SDR leaders that we discussed here.
3
SPEAKER_02
Now it s time to talk about a bad one.
3
SPEAKER_02
So if there was one bad habit that every SDR leader should break, what would that be?
3
SPEAKER_00
SCR leaders often complain they don t have enough time.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re doing all these internal meetings and I got this great piece of advice from one of my old VPs and he said, Hey Ken, do you feel burnt out?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you feel stressed?
3
SPEAKER_00
I was like, yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got so many meetings.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got meetings with marketing about MQL conversions in our EMEA team of two SCRs X, Y, Z.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got this new product launch coming up here.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got to build some campaigns around that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most of the meetings you have are noise.
3
SPEAKER_00
Keep the one thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I realized at the end of the day, any SEO leaders, their main job is to coach their SCRs.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most of the time, SEO leaders don t spend enough time coaching reps.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re spending time forecasting, reporting, which is valuable, mind you, but you get so far away removed from that.
3
SPEAKER_00
that you lack that one main goal of your job, which is to coach your freaking reps.
3
SPEAKER_00
Prospect every day, coach them every single day.
3
SPEAKER_00
It might not benefit you today or tomorrow, but I guarantee you in a couple of months time it will.
3
SPEAKER_02
Ken, amazing show.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everyone hang on for a 60 second recap coming up soon.
3
SPEAKER_01
Today s prospecting tip is brought to you by Woodpecker.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you re sending a sales email, you generally want to avoid putting punctuation in the subject line.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you ve got an exclamation point, it makes it seem like you re shouting at them, look at this amazing offer!
3
SPEAKER_01
And a question mark just smells salesy, so avoid punctuation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, if you want to steal my full sales cadence from my friends at Woodpecker, there s a link in the show notes for you to go get it and try it for free.
3
SPEAKER_02
Today s tactic to triple your connect rate is brought to you by rocket reach, who provides data that lets you reach out to the right person at the right account at the right time.
3
SPEAKER_02
Every time you re reaching out to an account, pull down the contacts again.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I know it sucks, but the average tech tenure is two years, which means 50% of the workforce turns over every year.
3
SPEAKER_02
So look up the account, pull anyone who was hired and scratch anyone who was left.
3
SPEAKER_02
And one way you can pull verified and accurate data is with Rocketreach.
3
SPEAKER_02
So if you like this, check out their toolkit on 8 ways to triple your cold call connects in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_01
The best way to drive your pipeline forward is to, every single day, pull up a list of all of your open opportunities and look at each opportunity by stage and think, what can I do today that will increase my likelihood of winning this deal?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s how you keep your ops moving forward in between meetings that you have on the calendar.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, we documented five cheat codes that can help you cut your sales cycle in half with Pipedrive.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a link in the show notes to steal them.
3
SPEAKER_02
your ZoomInfo actionable insight tactic is called Jane s Moving Up.
3
SPEAKER_02
Why?
3
SPEAKER_02
Because that s the email subject line you ll use when you get a real-time notice that your prospect, Jane, just got promoted.
3
SPEAKER_02
From there, in the email, explain how ZoomInfo helps rising sales leaders win their first 90 days on the job by highlighting coaching opportunities or supporting a team-wide prospecting push.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you can try out this trigger-based email template for prospect promotion and four other scenarios inspired by ZoomInfo s go-to-market plays, link in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_02
All right, Nick, it is time for a two by two recap email.
3
SPEAKER_02
What are your two?
3
SPEAKER_01
Number one, do the headhunting executive drill where your SDRs call your executives during gaps in their calendar, but give your execs a heads up via an email and explain, hey, this is what we re doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Here s why we re doing this.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you don t want to be part of this exercise, you can opt out by replying to this email.
3
SPEAKER_01
Number two, your SDRs should generally have between 300 and 400 prospects actively in sequence at any given time.
3
SPEAKER_02
Number three, the hidden kiss of death is the spam dial.
3
SPEAKER_02
Do your team a favor and have some process to make sure that their numbers are not getting marked as spam.
3
SPEAKER_02
So every time you buy a new number, make sure you test it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then lastly, number four, if someone is having slow workflow,
3
SPEAKER_02
Do not give them a bunch of slides or Google Doc tutorials.
3
SPEAKER_02
Sit next to them and have them work alongside you in a working session.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I promise their mind will be blown as to how much faster they can research accounts.
3
SPEAKER_02
Alrighty, Nick, how can people help us out here?
3
SPEAKER_01
All right, so Ken works really closely with Sam Nelson.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Ken and Sam have put together what is called the Agogi Sequence, which is a best practice sequence structure that really your SDRs should probably be using because it s probably better than what they put together themselves or even what your team has put together.
3
SPEAKER_01
They work with a ton of teams and they have best practices around sequence structure.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we worked with Sam and Ken to document the Ogoji sequence, and there is a link in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you want to go steal it and make it your own, please, we want to see you book more meetings and sell more deals.
3
SPEAKER_01
Go check it out.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ll see you next week on the show.
3
SPEAKER_01
Today s prospecting tip is brought to you by Supercadence by Influ2, which helps cut through the noise of oversaturated prospecting channels.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you want to get your prospect s attention, you gotta do stuff a robot would never do.
3
SPEAKER_01
One of my favorite plays is getting warm introductions to the accounts that I m targeting via salespeople who work at that account.
3
SPEAKER_01
Salespeople help salespeople.
3
SPEAKER_01
Another approach could be using Supercadence to run SDR ads to put a face to the name.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, we worked with Influ2 to put together a special toolkit on ways to humanize your outreach, which you can get for free at the link in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_02
Gong s going to help you run the five minute drill at the end of all of your calls today.
3
SPEAKER_02
At the end of a call, pressure test the prospect with three questions.
3
SPEAKER_02
Number one, do you want to buy?
3
SPEAKER_02
If the answer is no, why set a next step at all?
3
SPEAKER_02
Number two, when do you want to buy?
3
SPEAKER_02
If it s tomorrow, we got to move fast.
3
SPEAKER_02
Number three, how do you buy?
3
SPEAKER_02
Based on the first two answers, I can now adequately decide if and how I set a next step.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this was stolen from the Gong 30 MPC 90 Minute Masterclass, and you can steal it too in the show notes.