Predictable Prospecting
The 'Why' behind Predictable Prospecting
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Episode Highlights:
- Background : The “Why” behind Predictable Prospecting
- The effect of automation on sales
- Roleplay as a training tool
- Timeblocking in the workday
- The “Keep or Kill” technique
Resources: Pre-order my new book Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline , out on August 19th 2016! Check out Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, the book Marylou and Jeremey agree was fundamental to beginning their sales careers! Connect with Jeremey Donovan on LinkedIn or through his website, Speaking Sherpa.
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hello everyone! I’m here with co-author for Predictable Prospecting, Jeremey Donovan. I asked him to have a call with me because I wanted you guys to get a feel for the why behind this wonderful book. I’ve asked Jeremey to join us. I have a starter question I guess Jeremey for you and that is if you go back in time and think about what trigger would have event that prompted you to pursue not only the topic further but to pursue writing this book with me, can you take us back to what your thought process was and what that event was that caused you to say this is really a great topic that should be in a book? Jeremey: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I think also this will be fun actually to recollect and reminisce about all of that I’ve noted. I think if I run the clock back even further which is why do I write books to begin with especially since I have a day job that I quite enjoy. The reason I write fundamentally is about learning. I write to learn although I read tons and tons and tons of books in a given space whenever I’m transitioning into a new role at work or taking on some kind of new project that’s foreign to me. I’l tend to read eight to ten books on a subject until things start to get repetitious for me. There are certain things were I feel like there’s something that wasn’t said or I don’t understand it well enough so then I get motivated to write. The motivation here was throughout the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to keep reinventing myself. Some people like to do one thing for a very, very long time. I would take my father in law as a great example, for 40 years he designed cooling systems for a variety of different types of power plants. He is probably one of the best people in the world who were doing that. That’s not how I’m wired. I’m wired to want to switch radically every couple of years and do lots of evolution. I wouldn’t say making huge leaps. There is a path to it but making some kind of evolution. For me I began to evolve originally from an engineer to an industry analyst, to a product development and management person then to a marketing person and then ultimately to a sales operation and strategy professional. In each of those major transitions, I mean really to learn a new domain. In this particular case, I knew enough to know that I didn’t know as much about sales as I wish I did, in particular B2B sales. I read every book under the sun. There are some amazing books that have been out forever like Spin Selling is definitely well regarded as a classic in the area. I think it’s still every bit as valid today as it was when it was written 20 or 30 years ago. There’s lots and lots of new books like Trish Bertuzzi’s book, the Sales Development Playbook, the Cracking the Sales Management Code. There are all kinds of new books that are constantly being created. When I read through the stuff that was out there, I landed on the book that you wrote with Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue. Like many people who happen upon that book, I felt, wow. This is something that’s actually really, really different than what’s out there. What I liked about it, it really fits with my style of writing, but what I liked about it was, it was really practical. It wasn’t theoretical. It was clear that both you and Aaron kind of had boots on the ground and were not only helping salespeople sell but you are also selling to build your own businesses, that you both were experienced sales professionals. That was an important piece for me. Sometimes people get so bogged down in sort of the consulting world that they forget a little bit of what it’s like to be boots on the ground. I felt like, “Wow,” what I’m reading in that book really resonated with what I was experiencing in the organization I was working at when I read that particular book. I’ll pause there for a second that I would assume that would kind of resonate with what’s in your head. I know from talking to you, I guess we’ll get deeper into the story but you also kind of had a I want to write a book one day interest in you. Marylou: Yes. I was actually asked by a number of people who I had the good fortune of servicing after we wrote Predictable Revenue. They saw the differences in what they read in the book to what I was teaching to assemble, activate, and then optimize their top of funnel frameworks. There’s always this hint of it’s been nice if you can get this down in some type of coursework, some type of manuscript, or how to guide because what we read in this book is a foundation of what you’re teaching us. It wasn’t unusual, I had heard it, but as you know writing books can be a daunting process. There’s always this fear that you forgot something majorly important because you would pertain in some critical key element that they need. Gone are the days of when you pretty much got to get it out there. Now, we can add supplements to it and that’s what we’re doing with this piece is giving our viewers, our readers, our fans an inside kind of look us to how we came together to do this and the why behind it. I do agree with you by the way that Spin Selling for me was the book that I used, because I’m also an engineer. I had this feeling that I wasn’t really a salesperson per se, I was more of a consultant or consultative type of person trying to solve problems. Spin Selling was just a godsend to me to be able to formulate my process, ideas, and my systems know how into conversation that lead people down the path where they were excited about doing business with us. Jeremey: Yeah. I mean it was Spin Selling by the way. I will say that there’s almost nothing in any book that’s come in the years subsequent that isn’t covered at least in some level in depth by Spin Selling. It’s all sort of in there. People might brand things around but there are maybe rebrand things that are in there and variations on the theme. There’s additive stuff and we definitely try to be additive with our book but at the end of the day, falls is a pretty fundamental during that—all of the techniques change, the ultimate purpose which is providing supplying an individual or accompany with the product or service that they find value and that they get a return on investment in. That fundamental thing doesn’t change. Therefore, and some human beings don’t change that much. Human psychology doesn’t change that much. There should be a similar foundation, I’m not surprised by that. Getting back to our story, my recollection was I was on a new role and I can’t join an organization that really needed to enhance its sales culture. After reading Predictable Revenue, I think I called or emailed or LinkedIn connected, I can’t even remember, both of you and Aaron to see if one or the both of you actually did training and consulting work. You reply quickly, I vetted you by I’m sure the way I vet all partners which is to have a phone call, understand what your methodology is, what your approach is, to see if I would judge you to be a good facilitator for a training session. I think that’s when I hired you and we met up in Boston I believe. Marylou: Yeah, we did. That’s what I call an immersion program which is when we sit down together for hours on end and work through step by step the blocks and the new framework that the book is written against. Jeremey: Yeah. What you may not know, I can’t remember if I told you this or not, but we actually hired a second person. We booked this one hotel conference room. I can’t remember if you were first or you were second but we did like two or three days with you, then we did another two days with or vice versa we do these two days with the other person. At the end of the session that you read, I was just totally blown away. Especially the other person was good but not to make you blush too much but you were great. At the end of the session, I thought there’s definitely stuff that you know that is not in any book I’ve read and wasn’t even in Predictable Revenue. I think I walked up to you and I said, “Hey, you should really write a book.” Even though I had anything to do with it or not, I just taught you got something special here that I haven’t read before. I do that a lot by the way when I’m really impressed with people so I think that’s probably what I said to you. Marylou: It was very much along those lines. When I laid out the framework on the board and we worked through the critical path elements, I remember you shaking your head towards the end saying, “I have never learned like this before in this manner,” then you said, “You really ought to be putting this into your book.” It’s more of being my mentor saying, “Okay the next step now Marylou is to take this and to put it into a book so that you can share with the world.” Jeremey: Yeah, yeah. I’m glad eventually we sort of connected to do it together because, selfishly, writing the book in a way was a half a year of free consulting, of picking your brain so I can get smarter. I think what was great about the partnership was you had ideas, more ideas than me. I had some ideas, then I was able to actually take those and put them into practice in an operating environment in real time. As we are writing the book, I could say that, “Hey you know what, that didn’t really work,” or, “That really did work.” Here’s an example. I know Aaron and you really talked about this which is, back when Predictable Revenue was written the sort of mass customize, or it’s not even customize, mass personalized email like, “Hi Marylou. Blah blah blah blah insert company name, insert dynamic field X.” Those fully template emails which were talked about a little bit and were adopted widely by a lot of Tech Companies, particularly fast cloud based software companies. That worked a long time ago but it is just stopped working. I’m a buyer and as a buyer whenever I say an email like that I just press delete. What we started testing out was we started testing out okay what happens if you really slowdown? Don’t send 100 or 150 emails a day. Slow down send 40 to 60 maybe a day and for every one of those 40 to 60, spend five minutes or some or so ten minutes or whatever it happens to be. We really take the time to personalize the email. Read that person’s LinkedIn profile, get some preferably professional but maybe personal tidbit out of it that you can reference or go through the company’s 10K, 10Q in yesterday presentations, whatever it happens to be so that your email is contextually spot on. That might just be the subject line and maybe the first sentence and a very, very much often in last sentence. I’ll tell you, when we switched over from generic templates to a degree of personalization, we’re still using a template, we customize the subject line, we customize the birth line. That switch over had a dramatic impact on our ability to convert in the meetings. I’ll add one more thing, I’ll pick a pause which is the other thing is just a concept that you really opened my eyes to which is so many people just think that they can do it all via email. You really opened my eyes to the necessity of doing a multichannel approach. We modify, we ultimately settled on doing just three email touches. If you hit someone with email more than three times, you’re going to drive them bonkers. We do one on the beginning, one on the middle and one on the end. The beginning is a typical intro email. The middle one is sort of a follow up, did you get the chance to check it out? The third one is a little bit more in the break up email which has been successful but eventually people are really getting wise to that one too. We’ll have to changes as things change. We call at least five times with the premise that you have about 20% chance of connecting on any given call. If you want to get a call, you got to call five times. That actually also was really a breakthrough to move from email only to that sort of mixed phone and emails at a regular cadence. The combination of those two things I think is a massive business accelerator. Marylou: I think it’s really funny that you say that about hundreds of emails with automation, scaling it down to something more meaningful and that you can really take time. The original book, Predictable Revenue, when it was published recommended somewhere between 25 and 50 emails per STR to be sent out but it was pre all this automation that allowed you to just mass send. If we’re going back to that gentler, kinder, being more respectful, more authentic, researching upfront like you said one to five minutes somewhere in that timeframe. Then, provide the STR with the template that covers the sales conversation because a lot of times if you asked an STR or a sales representative to do a one off email, they may forget or may not understand the components of what goes into an email to make it impactful so that people will act. What we do is we write that hard part so to speak where we’re triggering an event, we’re looking at an obstacle. We’re getting it to a potential outcome or result that the client can get. We provide specificity and proof and then we share the opportunity that’s ahead of them if they take this action. Those components are pre written in template format but we tie it all together with personalization. That’s what you’re doing at your company now. Jeremey: Yeah, exactly. It really has been so effective. I have the luxury of being able to listen to the calls that going are on, I have the luxury of being able to audit emails that get sent out. Definitely, our most successful STR’s are the ones that are taking the time to do that pre-call research, are taking the time to truly personalize the emails. You’re communicating with a human being. I also add that personalization is so critical because in the company I work for currently, we target generally quite large enterprises. Fortune 1000, Global 2000 kinds of companies and large financial services companies. There, if you burn a senior level contact with a crappy outreach, you’re dead. This is the point you made to me which is you vary the degree of personalization based on how critical any email is to you. If you’re Yelp and you’re targeting Mom and Pop small businesses, then you probably can’t afford to take the time to do that kind of pre-call research. You just got to be smiling and dialing. I will say taking the time to do less dials per day potentially with or without automation, we use a decent amount of automation as well also has a positive impact on the longevity and quality, and productivity of the people that you hire. These STR’s are human beings just like everybody else and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. If you try to get them to do over 100 calls a day, you’re just burning this person out. One thing I’m proud of in having our folks do less calls is it gives us a lot of time to spend to train them. I’ve been told that our training program is pretty unique. I know from the people we’ve hired who went through STR programs else where, they just got handed a computer and a headset and told to start smiling and dialing with limited training. We actually, with our STR’s, we role play every single day which I think is the best way to train people to be successful and listen to calls every single day. Marylou: That’s a key takeaway I think that we really focused on in our book was this concept of role playing and like you said roleplaying every day. The way that I’ve seen it done where it’s just a natural part of the rhythm is that we advocate block time or people call it time blocking, there’s different terms for it, uninterrupted telephone time, because data has shown that the more we’re on the phone contiguously throughout time, the better we get in our conversation. If we warm up those conversations by role playing, by the time we actually hit the phones and get ready to start conversing with people, we’re ready to go. We’re warmed up, we pick the topic. It may be objection handling one day and maybe how to speak with the gatekeeper the next day. Whatever the topic is, the STRs can raise topics that they want to drill down on. The point is it takes 15 to 20 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, somewhere in that range everyday to role play. If I were to shake somebody at 3:00 in the morning and say some objection, it will be natural to them to come back with not only an answer to the objection but a follow on question. That’s where the Spin Selling comes in. A follow on question that will allow the client to start thing, “Wow, I never thought of that, that way,” or, “Gee, okay let’s talk about that.” Role playing is a big, big deal. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing it the way you’re doing it because that’s spot on. Jeremey: I try to play not just as a manager to just play that client because that’s an easy role. As a salesperson, you need real credibility that you need to be willing in those situations to get uncomfortable too. Even if you screw up as a manager in a role play, in some ways your people will respect you even more because they know you’re not on the phone every day. They know it’s been some time since you had to do that personally but they definitely respect that you’re trying. We try to keep fresh by having managers do their own cold prospecting every once in awhile just to maintain the rhythm. You said that all these lines are actually written in the book but you just mentioned something else that I think was another breakthrough concept that you have to reinforce for me as we work through the book which is this contact of time blocking. If I had to point to a single factor that probably is one of the key make or breaks in success, it’s time blocking. In the end, talking in the abstract about it and trying to think in the abstract about it was one thing but once we actually stared at the calendar and tried to figure out, “What are the exact time blocks and how we do this or what do we do?” What we landed on and what I’ve implemented is four 90 minute time blocks per day, that’s going to take up six hours total. You need those other times for people to be human obviously and for lunch and for the occasional meeting and so on. We really hold those four time blocks to be very, very sacred. We don’t cancel them, we don’t book meetings on top of them. We try to give our philosophy, at least my philosophy is to try to give our STR who are sales professional a lot of control on autonomy. Our metrics is 20 meetings set per month so that we’re just one a day. It’s not a huge number. Believe me, it works to get a meeting in a high level qualified meeting per day that is work. Marylou: It is. It is. I think a lot of this position, the block time can be used for telephone work. I have one client who’s actually using 15 to 20 minutes of that time to start teaching how to write a good email and the concepts of writing a good email. Everyone sits down and writes an email, and they share as a group. Then, they put the “winner” or the ones they think will do well actually into the sequence for testing purposes. As we said in the book, it’s assembling the network, it’s activating it and then optimizing. You’re always iterating. You’re always changing. You’re always making it better. That’s what allows us to do this Predictable Prospecting technique is that we’re continually looking and not satisfied with the results that we’re getting so that we can improve. Jeremey: I’ll add to your point, there is no silver bullet. There is no perfect subject line. There is no perfect subject line. There is no perfect email. Even if you find something that’s perfect, the rest of the sales development community jumps on that so fast that the approach gets burned out. At the end of the day, that’s why the thing that matters the most is the personalization because that’s the one thing that cannot be, a lot of people will claim they can automate true personalization but I think that still requires a human being to really think through and synthesize the information. Maybe I’ll eat my words when artificial intelligence technologies reach the point when they truly seem human or more human than they seem right now. I think for now that that personalization by the human being is incredibly important. Marylou: Like you said, there is a spot in the sales pipeline that personalization is a must. It’s when you’ve begun the dialogue, you’ve confirmed it’s the right person and now you are starting that sales conversation. As soon as you start the sales conversation and you’re trying to understand what challenges they have, the needs that they have at this time, and where they fit in the spectrum of offers that you offer, that’s the way you develop a relationship that builds trust, that builds rapport. Like the exit off the freeway and it moves to nurture sequencing, at least now you have those conversational elements so you know and you should be tracking what conversations led up to the point where you understood their pain and then you send them off into long term follow up or nurture with the track that resonates with them. You have a lot more intelligence so that you can use data that way. When you’re actually working in the active sales conversation, it’s proven over and over again that your conversion rights are going to be higher the more you personalize which means you’re working less records. Let’s look at the map behind it. You’re definitely working less records and they’re more quality. That’s the point of this whole thing is to send quality down the pipeline so that the clients that you close bring in the highest revenue potential and they’re the highest likelihood of closing. That’s what’s going to build revenue for to the company. Jeremey: Yeah. I totally agree. I want to circle back around the training comment that you made on crafting email together. That’s the technique I love. We definitely use that. I was down a couple months ago at the conference for Sales Loft. Sales Loft is a… Marylou: Kyle Porter’s company. Jeremey: Kyle Porter’s company, yup. It’s actually, my favorite tool for sales development because it allows you to do that personalization. I was at that conference and I heard a great tip which we’ve implemented which is this, we stole the name, keep or kill. Whenever one of us gets a cold prospecting email or a prospecting email, we send it around to our business development or our sales development team. We all comment keep or kill. We actually don’t just say keep or kill with one word. What we kind of do is we frame the feedback as build on or think about. The build ons are here’s the stuff that actually was solid. Every email has probably something good about it hopefully. The think abouts are the things that didn’t go well. When the subject line grabs you in a relevant and non-salesy way, when there’s a personalization, when they took time to show you that they knew you than when it was shorter rather longer. When it looks like it was plain text normal that some human being would type rather than some fancy HTML with other lines involved and all kinds of ridiculous stuff. We go through all those and just figure out. Even different techniques. One I think and I’m pretty sure we put this in the book as well. One great technique that someone used on me while we are in the course of writing the book, they sent an email. It’s an interesting technique. They wanted to get to me to sell their product but what they did instead was they went to somebody else in the organization at my level and sent them the first step email, this other person ignored the first email. Then the second email they sent, the subject line said, “Should I be talking to Jeremey Donovan?” Sure enough, they instantly forwarded it to me. It was just a brilliant technique. That one still works at least at the time we’re talking right now. Marylou: Today is 2016 May. Jeremey: Yes, exactly. I’ve started to see that same technique being used by other folks. It’s definitely starting the flow through the sales development community and eventually will burn itself off also. Marylou: You designed that in chapter two of the book when you talked about the bulls eye for the buyer profiles, the indirect and direct influences. If you’re doing your research, you’re going to have the names of the indirect and direct influences of your potential buyer. You essentially outline that framework to do this type of email in chapter two. Jeremey: Yup, yup. That’s exactly right. It takes patience to use that approach because STRs are so hungry to get a meeting with the person, with the decision maker right out of the bat that they think that’s the most efficient thing. This is a good example where I probably wouldn’t have responded or taken a look at that had it not come from another person. By the way, one of the most effective ways to do that getting at the bulls eye is you might actually send that email one level higher. Send it to my boss first, if my boss ignores it the first time when they get the second time when it says, “Should I talk to Jeremey Donovan?” You can be pretty sure that my boss forwarded it to me and just because it came from my boss I’m going to read it. Marylou: Of course, the psychology behind that, yes. Yeah. Jeremey, tell us what’s next for you. How many books have you written? Share with the audience. Jeremey: I write them to learn but I think this is probably book number six. What’s next for me, I don’t really have a quota for writing. Writing is painful. I mean really, any writer would tell you it does have moments of fun and flow and enjoy but I would say those are in between lots and lots of moment of frustration and pain. I’m sure I’ll write again. Right now I’m just focusing more on my family, focusing on work. When the music hits me again, I’ll do something. I have been fascinated lately by academic studies around what leads to performance at work, sales performance or other performance. That might be the next area. There’s lots and lots of books out there that aren’t really academic grounded, they’re really opinion based and yet there’s an incredible non-academic research that shows what really matters. I’d like to pursue that and popularize that. Also again, it’s about understanding, I want to understand for me and for the people I work with what’s going to help people be successful and happy. That’s an area I’m fascinated by. Marylou: In closing, I know you’ve got a lot of different hats that you wear but if people wanted to reach out to you and talk to you more about some other things that you’re doing in your current work environment, how would they do that? Jeremey: Yes. I guess two great ways, I’m super active on LinkedIn. You can always message me via LinkedIn. Based on those conversation, obviously a super authentic message is not just please connect with me on LinkedIn and try to sell me something immediately. Marylou: Indeed. Jeremey: Show me that you know me. LinkedIn is great or they can go to speakingsherpa.com. There’s a contact form there, I do respond to emails I get there as well. Marylou: Okay. Then of course everyone, he will be at the ready when the book is launching which this is being recorded prior to the book launch and we’re going to be putting this out as a takeaway for people who pre order the book. If you are thinking around the fence about pre-ordering the book, we’re going to be putting a lot of different work sheets and intelligent guides and things like that for you to follow along because the book’s got so much in it. There’s a lot to learn. In fact, my team went through and pulled out Jeremey a lot of the different learnings page by page. We thought, “Ahh we’ve done maybe 50 that we can look at and maybe build content for there are over a 100 that they pulled out of the book. The book is only about 200 pages or something. Jeremey: Yup, yup. Marylou: There’s a lot of good stuff in there. I do really appreciate and enjoy tremendously working with you on this project. Jeremey: Alright, It’s been a blast. It’s hard to write with other people. It was a pleasure all the way to write. I both enjoyed writing with you and learning from you. Marylou: Very good. Thank you so much for your time, Jeremey. I really appreciate it. Jeremey: My pleasure. Take care. Marylou: Okay.