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135%, that is the amount of meetings with a recent client that I worked with that we increased by month over month from their cold calls.
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And about 45% increase quarter over quarter in qualified meetings set from both their account executives and BDRs.
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And in this episode, what you re gonna hear is a live training of me breaking that down.
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So before we get to that, my name s Jason Bay.
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Thanks for checking out Outbound Squad.
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What I am all about with this podcast is helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers.
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So if you re a sales leader, frontline manager, working with AEs, SDRs, and you re making an outbound pivot within your org and you re prioritizing outbound more, you want AEs self-sourcing more, maybe you re moving up market, need meetings with more senior folks, breaking into new industry verticals, and you need a more proactive outbound approach, you re definitely in the right spot.
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So today what we re going to talk about
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And what I dug into, so you re going to listen to an audio excerpt of a live webinar that I did, is really unpacking a process that we went through is about a hundred account executives and BDRs.
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And what you re going to dig into here is one, we re going to talk about what I call the outbound equation.
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So it s this concept of the quality meetings and opportunities and pipeline that you want is a combination of quality and quantity.
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On the quality side of the equation, there is fit, message and delivery.
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So are the people that we are reaching out to a good fit?
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Are the accounts a good fit?
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Are we hitting them with the right message?
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And do we have the soft skills to execute on a cold call, cold email, LinkedIn message, whatever it might be?
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So we dig into fit and how to reverse engineer success and really prioritize who you re reaching out to.
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The reason why that s super important is that outbound is a ton of effort, as you know, if you re doing it.
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Why waste any amount of that effort or sweat or mental caloric expenditure on someone or a company that s an okay fit versus one that s a really good fit.
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Two, we re gonna talk about message and common mistakes that I see in cold emails, cold calls, et cetera.
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And then lastly, we re gonna talk about the delivery piece and the execution of a cold call, what that framework looks like.
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So you re gonna get a bunch of stuff from this.
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Make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow our content.
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It s Jason Bay, Outbound Squad for announcements for webinars like this in the future.
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And that s all I got.
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Without further ado, let s get to the episode.
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Today, what we re gonna talk about.
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So there s a recent customer that I worked with in the last year.
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And one of the things that we help them do, and I m going to kind of unpack how, is increase the amount of meetings that they booked from cold calls month over month by 135%.
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So we re going to talk a little bit more about that company.
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I can t talk specifically who the company was, but we can talk about some of the challenges they were having, how we addressed it, all of that kind of good stuff.
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And today my goal is to give you three things.
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So it s just me on the webinar today.
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One of the things that really helped me engage you as much as possible is if you have a question, there s a Q&A button right at the bottom of Zoom there.
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If you have a question, I would love to help answer it, especially if it s related to the content that we re covering today.
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Drop it into the Q&A.
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I m going to prompt you guys a lot through the chat.
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I m just here, like I said, by myself.
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So seeing a little bit of engagement in the chat is going to help make this more impactful for you.
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It s going to help me customize the content.
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And it s a little weird kind of talking to a screen because I can t see you guys.
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So it helps with that as well.
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OK, so we re going to dig into quickly the state of SAS sales.
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So it s pretty tough out there for most sellers right now.
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We re going to talk about why that is, some data that s really important for you to know.
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Two, we re going to talk about the case study.
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And three, the most important part where I want to spend the most amount of time is on the framework.
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So what framework did we apply to the sales team to help them
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get these really great results that we re able to get, and we re gonna get as tactical as we can with cold calling as well.
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So before we dig in, I would love to know, let me know in the chat, what s your role?
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This will help me customize, again, the content a little bit here.
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Let me know in the poll here, what s your role?
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Got a bunch of SDRs and BDRs on the call today.
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We got a bunch of account executives, it looks like, good amount of sales leaders.
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Yeah, let me know.
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Yeah, Duran, these AI assistants just blowing up the chat, dude.
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Let me know in the poll.
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Who are you?
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What s your role?
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This will help me customize the content for you guys a bit today.
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Tyler says his role is smashing quota.
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I love it, dude.
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OK, cool.
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So that s what the audience looks like today.
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It looks like about 2 3rds of you are in a quota carrying role, and we ve got the other folks that are in enablement or leadership positions.
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So cool.
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Let s get started, you guys.
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So what I want to do here, let me show the slides again real quick.
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OK, let s do quick state of SaaS sales.
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There s a couple of things I think that are really important to know about the buying environment right now, because the buying environment really drives the outbound environment for us doing outbound.
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So in other words, when people are not buying, or they re taking longer to buy, or there is more perceived risk in buying, there s less of a likelihood that they are going to take a sales meeting.
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So there s a couple stats here that I referenced quite a bit that are super important to know.
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One, McKinsey s got a stat.
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7 out of 10 change management initiatives fail to produce the buyer s intended outcome.
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So that means for those of you on the call today, the solution that you sell, if it s part of something that creates an organization-wide change, 7 out of 10 times, that fails for the buyer.
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56% of buyers, according to Gardner, have buyer s regret when they purchase software.
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I don t know about you guys, when I saw these stats, I kind of shit myself a little bit because I was like, wow, over half of the time when the buyer buys something, they either regret it or that it is not successful in delivering the outcome that they wanted it to deliver.
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So what that s created is a couple of things that really affect how we sell.
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So purchasing has become riskier, especially in the last couple of years.
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So sales cycles have lengthened by 40% since 2020.
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So it s taking 40% longer to close the same amount of deals.
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Yeah, someone asked in the chat, where are these stats from?
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The logos are there on the stats.
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I ll send this deck to you guys afterwards.
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And this is data from the last couple of years.
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The number of stakeholders in deals has increased by 25% year over year.
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in 2023.
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Let me know in the chat, how many stakeholders do you have in your typical deal?
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If you re a BDR setting up meetings for your AE, how many stakeholders will they typically engage throughout a deal?
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If you re a leader, how many stakeholders will your rep typically engage with in a deal?
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Let me know in the chat.
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Here we get seven plus, three to seven, four to five, three plus, three,
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The scary part is there are people that have decision-making influence, oftentimes that we don t even interact with in the deal because we never find out about it.
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So we have more people involved in sales cycles, it s taking longer to close work, and you know what?
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We re also closing deals that are 22% smaller.
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So the buying environment s very tough right now.
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In terms of how this has affected Outbound,
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Let s look at a couple things.
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Salesforce has got some interesting data, both them and Bridge Group on AE self-sourcing.
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So for those of you leading account executives, for those of you that are account executives,
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What we can look at here is what s the amount of pipeline that you need to self-source and do your own outside of SDRs and marketing.
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And in the graph on the right, you can see it ranges depending on your deal size.
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An average performer there is in dark green, a top performer is in light green.
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So for example, if you have $150,000 ACV or average deal size, those reps, the top performers are typically self-sourcing close to half.
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of their pipeline through their own outbound efforts.
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This is a trend that has really picked up in the last couple of years where AEs need to really be great at self-sourcing pipeline to even hit target right now.
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Bridge groups data showed something very similar.
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Their data was around 24 to 28%.
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If you guys are looking for guidelines with the teams that I work with, which are as large as like your gongs and zooms of the world, and then as small as startups with five reps.
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If you re an account executive and you have SDR support and you get a moderate amount of marketing leads, you need to self-source probably 30 to 50% of your pipeline.
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to hit or exceed target.
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So AEs needing to do a lot more self-sourcing.
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The SDR to AE ratio.
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There s a lot of data here on the right.
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I ll kind of summarize it real quick.
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The average ratio is 2.3 AEs to every one SDR.
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So in other words, as an account executive, you may have a third of an SDR, a half to a third of an SDR s time.
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And the larger the company, the less support that you get.
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So when you look at companies with larger deal sizes and SDRs typically supporting four or five AEs versus two, let me know in the chat, what is the SDR to AE ratio at your company?
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So how many account executives will a typical SDR support?
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Duran, that s good.
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You guys are one-to-one.
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Yeah, some of you don t have SDR, zero SDR support.
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Yeah, some of you are supporting 10 to 15 account executives.
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Yeah, Nate, an SDR is a sales development rep.
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For those of you that are not maybe in the software world, in the SaaS world, an SDR is someone whose dedicated job is prospecting.
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Appointment setting.
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Yeah, so this is another trend that we re seeing too.
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And this is the client that I worked with.
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They were also dealing with something very similar.
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AEs needed to do more self-sourcing.
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They had fewer SDRs to go around.
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And it really impacts the ability of you to get the pipeline that you need in order to hit target.
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So I got one last kind of set of data for you that s really interesting.
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Um, outbound success rates.
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I don t know if you guys, for those of you that have been in the game for a little while, like outbound success rates are at an all time low right now.
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So you have a 1% chance of getting a reply to a cold email.
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That s not even a positive reply.
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80% of those are probably going to be unsubscribes or not interested.
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And according to LinkedIn, there s a 2% chance of a positive outcome from a cold call.
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I just did a sales call earlier today with a team, and that s about the success rate for their team right now.
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They need to talk with over 50 people in order to land a meeting.
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And it s just not sustainable to do that.
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So let s talk a little bit more about what to do, okay?
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So the company that I worked with, they had about 100 AEs and SDRs selling into K through 12 schools and school districts.
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They had about 25 SDRs, 75 account executives.
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The big challenge they were having was AEs were not self-sourcing.
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enough pipeline to hit quota.
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So their pipeline coverage was not big enough.
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They did not have a standardized outbound approach or playbook.
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Everyone kind of did their own thing.
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And reps were only converting one out of every 25 conversations into quality meetings.
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So what we were able to accomplish over around a two to three month period together was increasing the meetings they landed from cold calls by 135%.
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And that increased qualified meetings set 42% quarter over quarter.
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So we got really, really good outcomes
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especially from the account executives, by focusing on three things.
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So I m going to walk you through a framework.
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So what we re going to do next is I m going to walk you through what I call the outbound equation.
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That s going to be like a high level framework that you can apply at your org, or if you re a rep, you can apply to how you do outbound.
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And then that framework is going to walk through three things.
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I m going to talk about how we target and choose accounts,
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how we message those accounts.
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And then the third thing I m going to talk about is tactically, since today s webinar is on cold calling, some really tactical things on what s working with cold calling.
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If that sounds good to you, let me know in the chat.
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We re ready to go.
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You guys ready to get into the more tactical parts of the content?
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Let me know.
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No one s fallen asleep yet.
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Nothing like that.
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Let s get it on.
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All right, let s do it.
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So let me walk you through the framework.
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I have a bunch of materials that I m gonna send to you guys.
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I ll share today during the webinar so that you guys have all the frameworks and all that kind of stuff.
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Okay, so let s talk about the outbound equation.
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So if we think about outbound, there s kind of two components to outbound or sales really in general.
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And one is there is a,
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quality side of the equation, and then there is a quantity side of the equation.
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So no matter what arguments you see on LinkedIn around quality over quantity and quality versus quality, you do not have quality without quantity.
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There has to be a base level of outbound activity.
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Phone calls have to happen.
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Emails have to be sent.
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Social touches have to be sent out in order for you to even entertain the quality side.
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What we re going to focus on today is the quality side of the equation.
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So there s three parts to it.
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One is fit.
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two is message, and three is delivery.
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So fit is, who are you reaching out to?
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This is the accounts that you re reaching out to, and this is the people within those accounts that you re reaching out to.
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The biggest challenge that I see on the fit side and what this customer is dealing with was,
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They could sell into a lot of different types of schools and school districts, but there were very specific sized school districts.
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And I see this with other customers too.
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There s usually very specific industry verticals and personas where they land the best meetings, the ones that are highest likelihood to close, shortest sales cycles, largest deals, et cetera.
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And what they don t do is prioritize all of their effort on those.
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They keep scattered and they wanna be industry agnostic and reach out to everyone.
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So from a fit standpoint, what we re gonna talk about is how do we really narrow down 80-20 rule and spend all of our outbound effort on the areas where we re most likely to get great outcomes?
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What we re gonna talk about from a message standpoint, let me know in the chat, if you guys had to guess, where do most people mess up with messaging?
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Let me know in the chat.
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Where do most people miss the mark from a messaging standpoint?
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Feature dumps?
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Length, not relevant.
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Dude, it s absolutely feature dumping and pitching.
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It s the difference between me talking about sales training versus talking about typically VPs of sales that I speak with are focused on making an outbound pivot within their organization and helping their account executives rely less on SDRs and marketing and more on self-sourcing and increasing pipeline coverage through their own efforts.
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That s me speaking through the customer voice.
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So what do other people like this prospective customer based on my current clients?
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What problems are they dealing with and what are they trying to solve versus talking about sales training, versus talking about workshops, versus talking about playbooks, right?
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So feature dumping, pitching, absolutely.
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That s the big key with messaging.
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And then the delivery is the soft skills.
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It s your ability when the customer picks up the phone, the prospective customer, it s your ability to actually execute a great cold call.
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So it s the soft skills of being able to do that on the fly, et cetera.
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So that is the general high level framework.
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What I want to do now is let s start digging into it.
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So there s some common mistakes.
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And then we re going to dig into the three parts of this strategy here.
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So common mistakes when implementing an outbound sales motion.
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What I want you guys to let me know is in the chat, if this happens at your org or you ve done this as a sales leader, let me know in the chat.
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First common mistake I see is what I call paradox of choice.
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The rep is given a set of 100, 150, 200, maybe more accounts with zero guidance on how to prioritize which accounts to go after first.
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So they simply look at the list and say, oh, this logo sounds good.
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Let me start reaching out to them.
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Or they work the list from top to bottom.
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They don t cherry pick.
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So they re left wondering, which accounts should I reach out to?
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I have all of these opportunities.
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The second thing that I see, we talked about messaging.
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The reason why messaging misses the mark, and let me know in the chat if you experienced this, marketing, nothing against marketers, I am a marketer by trade also, I spent three years as a marketing director, but marketing comes up with a sequence that they write as a team that sounds really good, and it s very markety, they give it to the reps, and the sequences are, like the reps are forced to use those sequences that don t work.
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or maybe your enablement or senior executives, like the leaders, a few people in a silo come up with messaging and they say, here s what we re going to use.
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And you have to use it.
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This is a really big common mistake that I see.
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I feel like some of you guys are maybe too afraid to drop that into the chat because this is what I see across the board.
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Let me know in the chat if any of this resonates.
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Frontline leaders.
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This is another common mistake that I see is, hey, we re going to prioritize outbound, but we re not going to provide any training for the leaders.
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So frontline leader has maybe never made cold calls before or they re expecting reps to make cold calls when they don t even like aren t that good at it or haven t done it in multiple years.
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So they don t even know how to reinforce, coach it, etc.
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And I really feel for the frontline leaders because they get such little training at the company.
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Internal champions, so not celebrating successes within your org.
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So when someone lands a meeting with a big account, there should be a Slack message sent out.
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It should be shared on all hands calls, like just lack of celebration.
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Unclear expectations.
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Let me know in the chat.
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Does anyone here have arbitrary activity metrics where, Hey, you have to make 75 dials a day and there s no rhyme or reason behind the activity or the amount.
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It s just an arbitrary number that leadership picked that it sounds really good.
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And there s unclear guidelines around what I should be doing or how I should be doing it.
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I just have to hit my activity target.
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That was drove me crazy as a rep.
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Kelsey says 80 random calls a day.
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Yeah, Kyle says, what about all of the above?
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And then weekly focus.
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If you re going to be expected to do outbound, I would expect that we get weekly training, coaching, and enablement around it.
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It s not as simple as, like if cold calling was as simple as just picking up the phone and doing it, we would all be rock stars at cold calling.
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There s a whole mindset component too.
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There s the breaking down and the tactics of doing it.
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There s coming up with really good messaging and a talk track.
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OK, so these are the common mistakes, especially if you re a leader that you want to avoid.
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Reps need very clear guidance on accounts.
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You have to supply messaging for reps, but create it with your reps, enable the frontline leaders, create internal champions, set really clear expectations and activity targets that are based in truth and reality.
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And you ve got to make it a weekly focus.
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It s just like working out.
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Awesome.
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Steven does weekly call reviews, daily objection rebuttals.
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More of us should be working for Steven, it sounds like.
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So, okay, let s start getting tactical.
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So let me know in the chat.
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I want to segue into the targeting piece.
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So just to kind of step back a bit, the outbound equation, remember, is targeting, messaging, and then delivery and execution.
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So that s the cold calling stuff we re going to talk about.
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We re going to focus first on the targeting piece, okay?
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So let me know in the chat.
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I m gonna give you guys a really good exercise in this section.
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How many times will you reach out to a cold prospect before moving on?
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Let me know that number in the chat.
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Kelsey says 13 to 15, eight to 10, Rebecca says.
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Until they answer, Taylor says.
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Until they answer or block you.
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Lon, Arlene, hope I m pronouncing your name correctly, 12 to 20, 15 to 20 touches.
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until I get blocked.
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Okay.
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22 Lewis says we got some freaking troopers in here.
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Okay.
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So the latest data from Orem and bridge group
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and Bridge Groups is actually from 2022, so it s almost two years old now by this point.
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All of the data shows you that it takes somewhere between three and 15 touches, and it s closer to 12 to 15 touches right now to get a meeting.
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The reason why I share this is that outbound is extremely hard and labor intensive.
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It s a shit ton of effort.
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It is a ton of effort to pick up the phone and call the same person repeatedly, and then to do that multiple times throughout the week, across hundreds of prospects, across an entire quarter.
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It is an extreme amount of labor.
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So the idea here is it s somewhere between 12 and 15, Louis, it depends on the segment.
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So choose wisely on where to spend your efforts.
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One of the best things I was taught in sales was you want your pipeline to look more like a martini glass.
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So instead of a pipeline where you just treat everyone with the same amount of effort, what we re gonna do on the right there is we want our pipeline to look like a martini glass.
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We wanna say, hey, all these people that I could reach out to in these accounts, let s go shrink it down and let s go super deep on fewer accounts.
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I ll send the slides out to you guys afterwards, Mike.
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The data, 12 to 15 touches is about average, 12 to 15 plus.
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So the strategy that I want to teach you guys right now is reverse engineering
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your success, okay?
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So the tactic here, and I m gonna give you guys a worksheet to be able to do this that I ll share afterwards, but I m gonna demo and kind of show you this today, is either do this across your entire sales org, if you re a sales leader, or as a rep, you can analyze your closed one deals.
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What we re gonna do is we re gonna look at the last six months of deals that we ve closed, and we re gonna look for patterns.
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So I m gonna show you, I m gonna show you an example of what I m gonna share with you today.
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So you guys are all going to get this worksheet.
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I m going to share it at the end, just so it s not distracting for you.
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So you guys are going to get access to this.
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It s got our targeting, messaging.
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It s got all the fun stuff I m going to teach you guys today.
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Talk tracks, sales math.
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It s got a cold call scorecard in here.
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There s a bunch of cool stuff in here.
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So everything we talked about here, that data points here, what we want to do here is reverse engineer recent wins.
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And let me actually
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Let me pull up mine real quick.
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And that way, I actually have a real example to show you guys.
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Give me just a second.
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And let me make sure there isn t anything on this document that I should be hiding here.
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Okay, here we go.
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Let me show you.
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So here s a filled out version of what I just showed you.
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So what I did earlier this year is I did an analysis of my last 35-ish closed one deals.
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And what I looked at is kind of the normal stuff you might typically look at.
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What was the niche?
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What was the industry?
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Who are the investors?
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Like the size of sales team, employee count, et cetera.
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But what started to get really interesting
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was when I actually dug into the meetings, okay?
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And I know what you guys are thinking, if you re not a spreadsheet or numbers person, this exercise, do this like a couple times a year, maybe once every six months.
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And this is going to help you refine who you re reaching out to, because the last thing I want you to do is waste a bunch of time reaching out to a company that doesn t quite fit your ICP.
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And yes, I ll share this template with you guys so that you have it.
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So what I realized, though, is there was a very prominent pattern in not only who I was meeting with, but in particular, the situation that they were in.
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So Stan, ICP is Ideal Client Profile.
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So ideal client profile is out of all of the companies that I could be working with.
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So for me, software companies are my ideal client profile.
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I could help recruiters.
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I could help marketing agencies.
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I could help companies that sell consulting services, but SaaS, that is my ideal client profile.
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That s where I m going to win the most deals.
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My messaging is really geared towards these people.
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I know how to speak the language, et cetera.
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Okay.
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So look at the common situation though.
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AEs need to self-source.
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They re going outbound for the first time.
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They need to build a playbook.
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Relying too much on inbound and marketing.
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Low quota attainment.
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Rolling an outbound motion out from scratch.
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Just launched an outbound team.
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AEs need to self-source.
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You guys get this?
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Like there s very prominent patterns that I saw in all of the deals that I closed.
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One, and there were very prominent types of companies and sizes of sales team and company, right?
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Sarah says, my OCD is satisfied looking at this chart.
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So, and then I looked at, well, what business priority?
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So for you account executives, what business priority was this attached to?
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Why did they decide to change?
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And then ultimately, why did they decide to hire me?
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What I got from this was an ICP like this.
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Hey, the A type companies for me, these are the companies.
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They re this size.
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They have this size of sales team.
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They re in software.
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They re like these companies right here.
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The B fits, which are also good fits for me.
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They have a smaller sales team.
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The things that they need are a little bit different.
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And then we have non-SaaS.
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I still work with non-SaaS clients.
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I just don t proactively prospect to them.
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They ll come in bad.
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And then I have on the persona level, here is my ideal persona and fit.
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and all of that.
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So the first thing that I recommend that you guys do before you start thinking about tweaking your messaging and your top tracks and writing new email templates and oh pick up the phone and start prospecting is let s do what Abraham Lincoln I think it was recommended and that was you know if I had four hours to cut down a tree I d spend three and a half hours sharpening the ax so to speak.
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The
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measure twice, cut once.
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Correct me if I m wrong, you guys.
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I think that was Abraham Lincoln s quote.
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It s him or one of the old presidents.
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I don t think it was Albert Einstein, maybe.
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So reverse engineer your wins.
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Really do like an analysis on where you win, where you lose, and what you want to get from that is where do I need to double down?
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And then what do I need to avoid and ignore?
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Okay.
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Before we move to the next piece, I m gonna send you guys this template at the end of the call.
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I m gonna share it with you.
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You don t need to Venmo me.
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I think that was a joke, Olson.
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What do you guys think that you would get from this exercise?
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Let me know in the chat.
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If you reverse engineered your last six months of deals that you ve worked to find patterns, how do you think that would help you?
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Let me know in the chat.
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And for you sales leaders and enablement leaders on the call,
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Doing this across your entire sales org is gonna allow you to provide really good guidance to your reps on how to prioritize their accounts.
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Yeah, we d build an ICP.
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Yeah, we d be way more targeted, more efficient.
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Yeah, shorter sales cycle.
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Yeah, Canon says it s like having a map versus just driving aimlessly.
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Claire, so asked a great question.
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What about newbie AEs within the company?
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What you want to get is work with your ops or your sales leader, if it s a small company, and see if you can get a list in Salesforce of all of the closed one deals.
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And you can do an analysis on like all of the deals that reps have closed in the last six months.
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Or you could do this exercise with a few other reps if you want as well.
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Yeah, better pipeline management, I think is going to be a really big one for you account executives.
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Close losting, if that s the right way to say it, a deal early is just as good as winning a deal.
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Knowing what not to pursue and finding that out early is just as valuable as winning a deal.
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Fail fast, Lewis.
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Exactly.
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Okay.
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Let me get the slides back up.
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We re going to dig into part two.
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we re going to dig into the messaging piece.
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So now that we ve talked fit in ICP, and the idea here is let s reverse engineer where we ve had success.
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So in other words, our future effort from an outbound standpoint will be determined by our past successes.
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We are going to emulate where we have had the most success.
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We re gonna emulate where our organization has the most success.
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If I m a sales leader, I want my reps hunting and going after accounts that best represent where we ve had the most success.
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That s step number one.
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Step number two is messaging.
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So once we ve dialed in our ICP, let s talk about messaging.
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So over,
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Okay, let me know in the chat, what percentage of the cold call should you spend talking versus the prospect?
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Let me know in the chat, what do you think?
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We re all over the place.
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Yeah, 20%, 20, 80, 50%.
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Someone said 80%.
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So this stat s gonna surprise a lot of you.
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So Gong s got some data around this.
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Around 90,000 cold calls that they looked at, and you know what they found in successful cold calls?
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Ones that landed meetings, the rep talked a little bit more than the prospect.
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The rep talked more than the prospect in the successful cold calls.
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We ll talk about why this is in just a second.
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Jolt Effect.
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I don t know if anyone s read the Jolt Effect.
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It s the latest in the Challenger series.
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So what was really cool about Challenger is post COVID, they got to analyze a lot of sales calls because post COVID, most sales calls were virtual.
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They were happening on Zoom, Teams, and WebEx, and they analyzed millions of sales calls, and they found that in closed one deals, the rep talked 58% of the time.
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On closed loss deals, the rep spoke 52% of the time.
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So in closed one deals, the rep actually talked more than the prospect more of the time.
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Now talk time as a, an indicator alone is not going to determine whether or not you re successful.
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My point in sharing this is it s not about talking less than the prospect.
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It s about talking about yourself less.
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So let that sink in for a second.
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It s not talking.
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less than the prospect, it s about talking about yourself less.
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It is the content of what you re talking about that is more important than the actual amount that you are talking.
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So what you wanna do from a messaging standpoint, Mike, this is not only in the intro call, this is in the cold call especially.
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And we ll talk about what that looks like, okay?
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So you want to leverage what s called self-disclosure principle.
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So self-disclosure principle works like this.
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I, uh, I m actually between therapists right now, but I had a therapist that worked with Sam for a couple of years.
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Um, big fan of therapy, by the way.
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And Sam, besides my wife, Sarah knows everything about what s going on in my life.
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Like besides my wife, Sarah, he s like number two in terms of knowing everything that is going on, like intimately in my life.
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Yet I know nothing about Sam.
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I knew that Sam had moved from Portland, Oregon to somewhere in Wisconsin.
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I think he had two kids and a wife and that s it.
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That s all I know about Sam.
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Yet I felt really, really close to Sam because I had opened up and shared a lot about myself to him.
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So self-disclosure principle, the way that this works in sales is if I can get the prospect to open up and share things about themselves,
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That builds rapport, trust, and credibility.
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It s not about talking really well to them.
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It s about what you talk about.
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So the objective here from a messaging standpoint is we want to meet the buyer in their world first.
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And the best way to win over a prospective customer is not by having the world s greatest pitch.
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It s about articulating their world as good or better than they can.
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Articulating their world better than they can, that takes years of experience to be able to do that.
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But in three to six months, you can articulate a prospect s world, you can learn how to do that pretty quickly.
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Right?
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So the goal, it s not about having the best pitch, it s about articulating their world back to them.
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I m gonna give you a couple of examples of what this looks like and sounds like, okay?
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So you wanna do what s called moving from product voice to customer voice.
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Zoom Info does such a great job of training this internally.
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I actually learned it from those guys at Zoom Info.
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So the difference is something that looks like this.
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Let me know in the chat.
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When a prospect asks you, who are you with?
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Or what do you guys do?
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How do you answer that on a cold call?
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Type it out for me in the chat.
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Let s take a couple seconds to do that.
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Prospect says, oh yeah, who are you with?
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What do you guys do?
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What do you say in the chat?
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Be more specific.
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For those of you guys putting in XYZ, what do you say?
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Jeff.
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OK, all kinds of answers in here.
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Yeah, all kinds of stuff in here.
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So I m going to give you guys an example.
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So it s fast Anders.
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Okay.
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So I redacted the client name here.
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I m going to give you guys an example of someone that sells a solution to DevOps teams.
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So DevOps, for those of you that are not in the engineering world or sell to engineers, DevOps is basically sales enablement, but for engineers, their number one job is to make a software engineer s job easier and to remove roadblocks and just let them do the coding thing.
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So here s an example of what you could say if you re at that company.
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You could say, oh yeah, at ABC company, we help you catalog, measure, and improve your software.
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Our internal developer portal helps your team ship fast without risking your software standards.
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It s not terrible, but it s super salesy.
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Like it s hard for me if I m in DevOps to see myself and what you just shared.
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I can t see myself and it s a lot of like what you do.
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The prospect doesn t really want to know what your product does when they ask you this question when they ask you what you do.
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It is not a literal question of what does it do?
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How does it work?
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That s what a demo is for.
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What they want to know is.
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Like, who do you work with and how do you help?
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And that s going to sound something more like this.
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Hey, great question, Prospect.
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I was actually speaking with a few DevOps teams the other day, and the number one thing that we hear is that they have a lot of practices and standards for how they develop applications, but having everyone follow the same process is nearly impossible with all the manual work, naming structures, and tools they need to access.
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How, if at all, does that resonate with you?
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What do you guys see as the difference?
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between the what you see on the left product voice versus customer voice on the right.
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What s the big difference?
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And more importantly, how do you think the prospect, how do you think it resonates with the prospect to hear what s on the right versus the left?
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Yeah, it s all about them.
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It s relating, it s more personal versus a pitch.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it gets them to think of it.
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You know, am I dealing with this too?
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Yeah, it s less scripted.
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The one on the right uses the customer s language.
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This is literally word for word when I was working with this client, this is word for word what I heard a prospect say on a sales call.
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Like this is the number one thing that people have problems with.
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So the first kind of big thing that I want you to do once you ve figured out targeting is we re going to build what s called a messaging matrix.
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We ve got about 20 minutes left here.
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We re doing pretty good on time.
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So you re going to build a messaging matrix.
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And what you re going to do is gather in a document what your prospects care about the most, how they get the job done,
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and the problems that get in the way.
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And that is the language that you are going to use to inform your cold calling talk track.
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So when I make this shift with companies, this is like the big aha moment right here is, oh, I don t have to get really good at pitching my stuff because that feels kind of yucky.
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And if we re being honest, most prospects don t respond that well to it anyways.
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I have to get really good at explaining from the customer s point of view,
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like the problem that they have that we solve for.
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And I have to speak in their language.
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There s less pressure when you ask someone how something resonates versus pitching them to get a yes or no answer.
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Okay.
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So what I want to do is I want to show you in this document what that actually looks like.
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Okay.
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So
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Second part of the document, and again, I m going to share this with you guys in the chat before we take off.
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So we got the targeting piece, the messaging piece next.
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So everything that we talked about is summarized here.
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You want to build what s called a messaging matrix.
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So this is for a different company that sells into K through 12 education.
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So their customer, their prospect is a director of curriculum and education.
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And look at this.
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What we said was, hey, what are their priorities?
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So in other words, if they had a whiteboard here and had their goals listed out for the year, what would be on that list?
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And you know what wouldn t be on that list?
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Learning software.
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classroom software, like none of that stuff is on that priority list.
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The things that they want to accomplish that their solution can help with is on that list.
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So it was unfinished learning, student engagement, and teacher buy-in.
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Those are the three things that they figure out.
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Every prospect they talk to, there s a theme around one or more of these priorities.
4
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And then what we did is we said, hey, with unfinished learning,
4
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If we re trying to improve test scores because they re down because of COVID, let s say, and we ve been in a virtual learning environment, what are they using right now?
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, they might be using an assessment solution, or they might just be relying on state tests and creating a pacing plan.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, what s the problem with that?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s inconsistent data.
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SPEAKER_00
It makes it too late to take action.
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It s lagging, right, versus being proactive.
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We get surprised at the end of the year.
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And what we really want is we want consistent data that drives the direction that we need to improve the learning outcomes and we want to reach our learning targets and increase our graduation rates.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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And here s a way that we could kind of talk about that.
4
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So the next thing that you need to do.
4
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And the best way to do this is as a sales work.
4
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So again, for those enablement and sales leaders on the call today, the best way to do this exercise is you get your best sales leaders, people from the marketing department, your best reps in terms of the people that sell to those personas, you get them into a small group of five to 10, and you guys workshop this out for each of your personas.
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And the acid test is around your language,
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Yeah, Duran, I m going to talk about, you asked how this combines with the cold call intro.
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I m going to show you how this connects to the cold call intro.
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It s pretty cool.
4
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So language, the acid test is, are these words and phrases our prospects would use?
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Two, is it buyer centric?
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Is this actually what they talk about or is it more about our solution?
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And three, is it super specific?
4
SPEAKER_00
So with your messaging, you know you ve nailed this exercise if in your cold calls and your sales calls when you use this, because it could be used in both contexts, if people start saying things like, wow, have you been listening into our meetings or something?
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You should get responses like that when you ask about these things.
4
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And with outbound, we have to remember that you re starting from behind the starting line.
4
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So in other words, you start from a place of skepticism.
4
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There s no other occupation probably besides being a politician or a lawyer, at least in America, where people are inherently skeptical of you before they meet with you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like your prospects don t trust you until they meet you.
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SPEAKER_00
And even then it takes a while to gain their trust.
4
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The way you can reduce skepticism is by speaking their language and showing them that you understand their world.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s step number two.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we ve talked about targeting messaging.
4
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Let s dig into some of the cold calling pieces.
4
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Before we do that, let me know in the chat, what s been your biggest takeaway so far?
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What are you gonna put into action?
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We ve talked about the fit.
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We ve talked about a lot of data.
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We ve talked about the messaging piece.
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What s been most helpful for you so far?
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Let me know in the chat.
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Yeah.
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Messaging customer stories, speaking with customer voice.
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Omar liked the martini metaphor.
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Yeah.
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The martini glass.
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Cool.
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You guys are awesome.
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All right.
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Let me share my screen again.
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Let s keep going.
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Okay, we re gonna spend the rest of the time talking about cold calling.
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So I wanna get pretty tactical here with the approach.
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Let me know in the chat, do you initiate conversations with strangers?
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So like the cashier, barista, other people standing in line, do you initiate the conversation with them or put no if you wait for them to initiate?
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This is something I m actually working on.
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I tend not to be the person to initiate the conversation.
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I m introverted, so doing things like I m doing right now, running sales calls, it actually depletes me throughout the day.
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And I kind of burn up all of that energy, my social energy, during work.
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And I don t always proactively engage people.
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So the reason I ask this is your brain kind of works in these two modes.
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So thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman wrote about this.
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And there s essentially these two different systems that our brain is operating in.
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System one s automatic.
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That s the mode like when you re getting coffee in the morning at the drive-thru, let s say, or you re driving to work, or you re driving to the gym, or you re brushing your teeth.
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All of those things, your brain goes into this autopilot mode where you re not even really thinking about the activity that you re doing.
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Because if you had to give serious,
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like thought and mental energy into everything that you did throughout the day, you would be absolutely exhausted.
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So we have this automatic system that our brain is in.
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System two is calculated.
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System two is I m standing in line.
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I initiate a conversation with someone and we start having a dialogue back and forth.
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It s calculated because I m like in the mode.
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I m not on autopilot.
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My pupils are dilated.
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I m paying attention.
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It s the same thing when I m driving along.
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Commuting in the morning, let s say I m in system one and a car swerves in front of me, I automatically move out of the way and now I m in system two, I m there, I m thinking, I m active.
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Which mode do you guys think your prospect is in?
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Which system when they pick up a cold call?
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They re in system one.
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They re doing something else.
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Can we all agree here that a prospect does not pick up a cold call on purpose?
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No one picks up cold calls on purpose.
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So with that being the case, there s this relationship dynamic between a buyer and seller, where as sellers, we tend to chase buyers.
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We tend to be at their whim.
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We want to sell them.
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And as a buyer, we tend to avoid and run away.
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So chasing and selling, running away.
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We have to break out of that automatic response
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The way that we do that is not by going into the call and like putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to land the meeting.
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It s to be so likable and genuine that prospects can t help but have authentic conversation with you.
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That s all we want.
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All we can ask for in a cold call is that we show as much as possible that we are not a telemarketer and we are a human.
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and that we are so likable that prospects can t help but have a genuine conversation with us.
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That is the difference.
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And what I ve seen in sales teams that I ve worked with where they have an average of 2% conversion on the left,
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where literally they have to have 50 conversations to book a qualified meeting versus 30%, three out of every 10 or one out of every three.
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That s the difference right there, is how quickly can they get to having a real, authentic conversation with the prospect.
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So let s talk about how to do that, okay?
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Couple common mistakes.
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One, mindset.
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If you have, how many of you let me know, give me a guess in the chat who s been told at some point this year or last that cold calling is dead or who has read maybe online that cold calling is dead or that it doesn t work.
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Give me a yes in the chat.
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Yep.
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The irony is I work with sales teams who have built like multiple tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue off of cold calling.
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So mindsets, like if you re doubting whether or not cold calling works, you re reinforcing this self-belief that it doesn t work.
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That doesn t help.
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Okay.
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You gotta get through the mindset piece of it.
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So that s the first thing.
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Two is tonality.
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Does anyone here feel like they transform into a different human when a prospect picks up?
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Like you go into like, oh, customer service wise, Taylor, it s so nice to talk to you.
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Thanks for taking my call.
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It s like, dude, that s not how you talk.
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So this like corporate speak or up talk.
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Phone voice, man, it s real.
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So this phone voice, customer service voice, corporate speak, Uptalk, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to call it, all of the data, they ve done lots of research on this and social experiments, people that use Uptalk like this, they appear less confident to the people that they re interacting with.
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So we got to avoid the Uptalk.
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Lastly, the approach.
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So if we go in with this pitch and respond, I m going to pitch you and see how you respond to it versus sharing.
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and asking, that s the other big transformation that we need to make is we gotta get out of this pitching mode.
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So the strategy here that we re gonna employ is we re gonna deconstruct and break apart the components of a great phone call.
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So I m gonna kind of high level break down this call and then I wanna make sure that we have time for me to show you the rest of the stuff that s in that document.
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So I m not going to get quite as much time as I wanted to here, but I m going to share this.
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Let me share with you guys.
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So we ll spend five minutes on this.
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Now let me five minutes here to kind of regroup with you guys.
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So again, this framework is in the document that I m going to share with you.
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What we want to do is we re going to break down the cold call into three parts.
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We re going to deconstruct it.
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Intro, hook, and close.
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The average cold call only lasts about 80, 83 seconds, depends on where you look.
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Chorus has got stats on it.
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I think Cognizant has stats on it as well.
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About 80 seconds.
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So in other words, the majority of the time, refs get stuck in that first 60 to 80 seconds.
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So the first thing that we want to employ is what s called a permission-based opener.
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Let me know in the chat if you re using a permission-based opener.
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It can sound something like this.
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Hey Todd, it s Jason with Outbound Squad.
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I know you weren t expecting my call.
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Can I get 30 seconds to tell you the reason I decided to give you a call today?
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Or, hey, Katie, you re gonna hate me.
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It s a cold call.
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My name s Jason.
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Do you mind if I take 30 seconds to share the reason for my call?
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Or, hey, John, was reaching out, noticed you re hiring a ton of SDRs right now.
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By the way, it s Jason with Outbound Squad.
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Do you mind if I take a minute to share the reason for my call?
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Any variation of that, I m gonna give you a bunch of them, you guys.
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Any variation of that works really well.
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So the idea here is that the prospect, they didn t ask you to call them, let s get them to opt in to participating in the call.
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That s what your PBO is, your priority, or your permission-based opener, excuse me.
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The priority drop next,
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What you re going to be really tempted to do is pitch your product.
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You re going to be really tempted when the prospect says yes.
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In my case, you re going to say something like, yeah, I was giving you a call.
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We do sales training for companies like Gong, Zoom, and some of the largest SaaS companies in the world.
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We help with playbooks, et cetera.
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And I was hoping that I could talk to you about your sales training needs in 2024.
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click or we do that in-house or we have, right?
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So we re not going to talk about what we do.
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What we re going to do here instead is talk about their peers and what they re focused on that relates to how you can help.
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So if I m doing this, I ll just pick a sample client.
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So I worked with a client that sells into contact centers.
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And the VPs of contact centers that they are reaching out to, the number one thing they care about is reducing cost to serve.
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So think about a contact center like at Nordstrom.
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The irony is that the customer service people don t want you to call them.
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They want you to work with them through chat or to find your own answer on an FAQ page because it s cheaper for them.
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So I would do permission-based opener.
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Hey, so-and-so was on your FAQ page.
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Notice that you re redirecting customers into the contact center.
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Was really curious.
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By the way, it s Jason with so-and-so company.
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You got a minute for me to show the reason for my call.
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PBR.
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Priority drop.
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Great, thank you.
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The reason I was giving you a call again is I noticed that you guys have an FAQ page.
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And a lot of what we re hearing right now from contact center leaders is their number one priority is reducing costs to serve.
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And they ve built out all of these assets and FAQ pages and customers go to those pages and they just end up picking up the phone and calling in anyways.
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I m curious, how if at all does that resonate with you?
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And if I ve really nailed the messaging, the prospect s gonna be like, oh wait, so yeah, who are you with?
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What are you calling about again?
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And now I can dig into the hook part where I can actually focus the conversation and ask a couple pointed problem-based questions.
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Yeah, again, I m with ABC Company.
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The reason I was giving you a call is I noticed that you have, again, those FAQ pages and some directions there.
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A lot of times what we re seeing is that digital teams are spending millions of dollars creating the perfect customer journey only to have them call into your contact center.
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What efforts have you guys made to help customers self-serve?
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What are you guys doing?
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And I can have a great conversation there in the middle.
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And then once I find a couple of things that we can help with, and it only takes 90 seconds, two minutes maybe, I m going to hook and then I m going to close.
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A lot of times the transition sounds a lot like this.
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You can just summarize what the prospect said.
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Hey, so what I heard from you today, John, is you guys were investing a ton of energy into helping customers self-serve, but they re still calling into the contact center.
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Do you mind if I make a quick suggestion?
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And the prospect will give you kind of a weird, you know, kind of funny response.
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This is actually the exact problem we ve helped Nordstrom and several other retailers with.
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How about we impact this when I m not calling you in the middle of your day?
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Do you have your calendar handy?
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and then we go straight into scheduling time.
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You notice I ve worked in a really short customer story there, and then we go into the confirmation process, okay?
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So what I wanna show you real quick, and then we gotta take off in a couple of minutes, is how all of this comes together in our little playbook here.
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So we got our messaging.
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When we populate this messaging, what it s gonna do, so there s a deep dive here, by the way.
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Everything I teach on phone is all outlined in here.
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all of this stuff, the approaches, talk tracks, all that stuff.
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And there s like a customized talk track here too.
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So you can pick different permission-based openers.
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There s the reverse pitch and priority drop here.
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It auto-populates from the messaging tab here.
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The current solutions and problems auto-populate.
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And then we created a couple of questions here and then there s like how to close the call, all of that kind of stuff.
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there s a cold call scorecard in here.
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So for those of you that are leaders or enablement folks, there s a cold call scorecard in here too on how to score the rep, or if you re a rep, how to score yourself, et cetera.
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So I m gonna go ahead and share this with you guys in the chat.
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So it s gonna force you to make a copy.
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All right, let s do this real quick.
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So go ahead and make a copy of that in the chat.
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I got one more quick thing I wanna share with you guys.
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And then we ve got a couple of minutes for Q&A if anyone s got any questions here.
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All right.
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So before we take off here,
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Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn if you guys are looking for more content.
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I can actually drop in.
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Let me drop in my LinkedIn profile for you guys.
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Yes, I m posting content every day on LinkedIn.
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Let me drop this in the chat.
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Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn there.
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And then if you re a sales or enablement leader and you re looking for help implementing some of this stuff with your team, we do provide team training.
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That s primarily the focus that we re on right now.
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So that includes training, playbook creation.
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So if you re making an outbound pivot in your organization, if you re trying to move up market, if you re trying to get your reps to land meetings with more senior people, definitely reach out to me.
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I would love to chat with you.
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We got a couple more minutes left here though.
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Who s got some questions?
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Let me know, you can drop it into the chat or the Q&A.
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Yeah, Lauren, I can definitely scroll back to that slide.
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Let s see if I can find it real quick.
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There we go.
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There you go, Lauren.
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Yeah, let me know.
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Who else has got a question?
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We got about two or three minutes left.
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So Duran says, do you still use this intro?
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Hi, John, we work with similar companies.
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This is my name.
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Company for the name tossed around.
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Yeah, that s a great opener.
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I teach actually from Armand for Oak.
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Hey, John, you know, we re doing some work with the enablement teams at Gong and Medallia.
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This is Jason with Outbound Squad.
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Have you heard our name tossed around?
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It s a great opener.
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SPEAKER_00
Cool, cool.
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Anyone else having trouble with the,
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Link, you re probably going to have to let me see if I can do it one more time here.
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Let me share the link one more time and I ll share like a view link as well for those of you on Outlook.
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There we go.
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Check out that link.
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Yeah, there might be, there s like over 300 people on this webinar, so it might not be getting people in there.
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Preston says, as an introvert, how do you put yourself in the right mindset for doing outbound stuff since it s not your usual personality strength?
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My guess, Preston, is you probably work in a remote setting.
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I think one of the big things that you can do is try to figure out how to be social before you do a cold calling blog.
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So if you re living in a place where you can go to a coffee shop or walk around or interact with people prior to the cold calling block, that really helps me.
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I don t live by myself either.
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I have my wife Sarah here so like we can talk and socialize and that sort of stuff.
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I also find that me standing up like I am right now, I like to pace when I make calls.
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So just getting your energy right.
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I also work out in the morning as well.
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So that s how I kind of get around people.
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Do something where you can get around people
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prior to your day starting.
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And that s going to get you in more of like a social mood.
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Cool.
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That s all we got time for you guys.
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Let me know if anyone wants to talk about training and stuff like that for your team.
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SPEAKER_02
Jason outbound squad.com is the email.
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Really appreciate you guys coming on the webinar today and spending some time with me.
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And that s all I got for you guys.
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Appreciate it, everyone.
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Love the engagement.
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I ll send out the deck later for you guys so that you have it.
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We ll see you.