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Episode 8: Intelligent Outreach Automation Processes – Mark Kosoglow

Predictable Prospecting
Intelligent Outreach Automation Processes - Mark Kosoglow
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If a sale requires risking political capital, how do you establish trust? Our guest Mark Kosoglow is an expert in outreach and here to share his success tips. Mark believes that effective outreach requires multiple contacts. These contacts are done through a variety of channels and ultimately lead to a sales pipeline. Today we discuss how to provide high value content during outreach while balancing efficient automation and personalization. Mark Kosoglow is the VP of Sales at Outreach.io a SaaS tool that empowers sales teams through intelligent automation of outreach processes. Mark believes that it’s important to communicate with contacts where they live. Effective contact cannot be limited to one channel or a fully automated sequence. Personalizing content and bumping emails dramatically raises the success rate of outreach. Every line read is a step closer to qualifying a sale.
 
mark-kosoglowEpisode Highlights:

  • Testing to find the right process
  • Tiering to determine who is in buying motion
  • Using a “bump” to increase replies
  • Communicating where they live
  • Varying call times to connect via telephone
  • Personalizing the sales conversation email
  • Using time blocks for efficient calling

Resources: Connect on LinkedIn Email Mark at: mark.kosoglow@outreach.io

Episode Transcript

Marylou:    What I’d like you to do is for our listeners. For our listeners on the show, you know this process, you know the foundational elements. What do you think you took away from that and how did you make it better?Mark:    I don’t know if I made it better. The main thing for me is I think something that I’ve always believed in which is if you talk to a person rather than a prospect, you get a lot further, right? The only way to do that is to write an email, or to make a phone call, or if you’re doing old school snail mail, or co-cowrie stuff by the office is understand the person well enough to know how to talk to ‘em. Why should I talk about a stuff a lot? Sometimes when we’re talking about a certain person or a certain group of people, it’s like one group is speaking Chinese but they’re living in America. They’re always trying to talk to you but it’s in a different language. Their verbiage is just different. While you might get the most of it, you don’t get that intimate connection that makes them a really close friend. If you’re going to live in America, learn English, right? Marylou:    Right. Mark:    Speak English. I think that’s the point of these emails and stuff like that. You got to learn how to speak the native language of the person you’re talking to. When you figure out how to do that, I think you make a lot more connections. Marylou:    You’ve mentioned the phone and you mentioned email. What is work for you? Why don’t you tell us a little bit of what you’re doing first too. Mark:    You mean doing as far as job or overall? Marylou:    Just whatever you want to tell us. I’m sure they’d like to hear about outreach. Mark:    Outreach is a platform for exactly what we’re talking about. You know that. We help empower sales teams to make sure that their sales communication is tight, and predictable, and unified. I like to tell people I think you can test your way to the perfect sales process if you had the right kind of visibility and the right kind of tools. That’s what our tool does is let people continually test their way to the right process, right? Marylou:    Right. Mark:    What we do is we use a combination of three channels. We use email, phone calls and then social stuff. 99% LinkedIn, maybe 100% LinkedIn. Marylou:    Right. Mark:    That’s what we do. Our tool allows you to build a multi channel, multi step process. For example, first of all we tier our account. We tier them based on importance, based on some markers that we found that tell us the potential of a deal. Tier one, obviously most important. Tier two, nice good accounts take ‘em. Tier three, we want the low hanging fruit and we’ll work with it if they’re quick design and not much trouble. The tiering then determines the level of personalization and automation that we put into the messaging for that. Tier three, fully automated. We have some good emails but we don’t spend time on them because again we just want the people that are already in the buying motion, people that are already thinking in this direction. We don’t want to educate them, we don’t want to take ‘em through a three months sales process because the revenue just doesn’t want that level of resource dedication. But tier one, we’ll do anything for tier one. On the first day that we prospect the person in the account, we’ll do three touches. We’ll do a phone call, we’ll do an email and we’ll do a LinkedIn connect.  We’ll wait a couple of days and bump that personalized email that we sent in the first day with an automated message. I can tell you about some of the stuff we’ve found through doing that. Marylou:    Yeah. Mark:    Then another phone call. Basically we touch them 18 times over 21 days to those three channels. Depending on what happens in the response that we get, then we kind of branch to another directions. We want to communicate with somebody where they live. If they live on the phone, we’ll talk to them on the phone. If they live on email, we’ll do it there. If they live in LinkedIn, we’ll do it there. We’re just trying to find where they live so we can talk to them where they live. Marylou:    It’s funny you say 18 times. I can just feel people cringing. Especially B2B. Tell us about that. What did you discover? Mark:    First of all if you have a crappy approach and crappy messaging, you better not be touching people 18 times. Marylou:    There you go. Mark:    If you’re delivering value and trying to educate someone and have a conversation, that’s a much different scenario. A lot of the touches that we do are un-trackable. We might call somebody six or seven times of those 18 touches but we’ll only leave two voice mails. Marylou:    Okay. Mark:    A lot about it is just trying to get in front of the person at the right time and not always leaving bread crumbs that you’ve been there. Marylou:    That’s good because I think one of concepts of the telephone is this best time to call. It’s not an exact science but you have to make those dials in order to figure out on average when your people, your persona is going to actually answer the phone. It’s different per industry. We had an example, I think it was about a year ago. We did a test where we came in the normal 9:00AM and did what I call block time which is you sit down, you put your do not disturb sign on your door and you start making phone calls. In the telephone world, you get better as you go in terms of conversation. We did a 9:00AM to 10:00AM and we got three connects, maybe on average. We bumped that down to 7:00AM and we were done in half an hour. We got connects. I want our audience to remember that you got to try different times to connect with people but that explains the 18 touches. What else have you found out by doing it that way? Mark:    I think that we found out that—my one boss used to tell me persistence beats resistance. You can beat somebody down or bang down the walls that they’ve erected. Basically our CEOs says it’s mail time. Companies are a political organization that’s bent to not purchasing. Everything inside the organization is meant to not buy something. Somebody has to put their political capital on the line when they decided they’re gonna purchase something and that’s putting their necks out. Sometimes in order to build up enough trust with someone for them to risk their political capital in a company, you have to really do a lot of touches. I use something called the momentum of touches. I think that what we found mainly is there’s not one specific thing that works, it’s the momentum of touches, it’s a LinkedIn connect here, a phone call there, an email a few days from now that are all really built to have value. A couple things about value is if you’re always hitting them with an email that takes three or four minutes to read, they’re not going to do it. Hitting them with a nicely crafted shorter email that has real value and then bumping it a couple of times with small two sentences, “Hey, I don’t know if you got this yet but I just want to get your reactions on it.” Bumping it two times like that within a week will typically get you the same or better reply rate on the bumps than the actual first manually written email. We call that three for one. You can write one manual email, bump it twice with automated email. You get three touches when you’ve written one email and each of those touches will have basically the same reply rate maybe a little bit better on steps two and three. Marylou:    We discovered the same thing too. We call them the in-thread replies. Mark:    Yup. Marylou:    I think a lot of people because they’re so busy, when they see the in thread reply they first thought, “Oh, I didn’t see that,” or “Oh, what is that?” They’re going to go from that subject line to the first line at least to see what it was about. Word to the wise there is that your first line is really important, it’s not just the subject line. It’s that first line so that people will say, “Oh, let me go read the next line.” We call it the slippery slope of reading the email but you’re essentially wanting them to slide down towards to call to action. When you do these replies, do you embed another call to action or are you just saying, “Hey, want to make sure you saw this,” and add some value statement at the end of that. What do you normally do? Mark:    Actually, we try to keep it to two sentences. We usually will have a call to action. “Hey, would you like to get together and talk about this.” Or, the call to action would be a more soft one which is, “Did you read the below, do you have some reactions to the below, can you get back to me about the below.” We found that to be highly successful. I don’t know what it is. I get them too and I feel a pull when I get them. Marylou:    Yeah. Mark:    These little two sentence bumpers. I think that slippery slope analogy is very accurate. I’ve read enough now that I can I slide into the first message. Now, I’ve spent so much time I might as well reply. I’m not a good litmus test for that. I believe that the Sales Guy code. I read almost every sales email I get. If they’re good, I reply. Marylou:    My code of ethics is if you reach out to me, I will respond because my whole world is starting conversations with people we don’t know. Mark:    Yeah, right. Marylou:    When people reach out to me on LinkedIn and they say, “Hey Marylou I’ve read your book,” or whatever, I will reply. I love those people because they’re making that effort. Mark:    Yeah, right. I agree. Marylou:    Word of advice everybody, don’t be afraid to contact me. Connect with me. That’s great. That’s really good. Are you blasting through response rates? Because the Predictable Revenue book, we shot for 79% response rate. That was really on email number one. We’ve been able to maintain that. But through the course of the cadence, we’ve gone to double digits now. Are you pretty much way past that? Mark:    I would say on our big sequence, the one that we used with our best account, right now we’re at 28% reply rate. Marylou:    That’s awesome. Mark:    A reply would count as a phone call answer or a LinkedIn connection request that was approved or something like that too but an engagement activity happens on behalf of the customer. Marylou:    That’s even better because 79% response for Predictable Revenue was positive, negative and neutral. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    If you’re getting neutral to positives in the 20% range, that’s wow. Yay! Mark:    I wouldn’t say that. Maybe I misfocused. At least we’ve got 28% right now. It might be 31% on the one. I would say 35-40% of those are positive. Marylou:    Okay. It’s still like the one third but still that’s a lot of people going through that you’re maximizing the conversation which is great. From there, you get them into what kind of sequence after that. Is it more template based or? Mark:    After they’ve responded to the initial one? Marylou:    Yeah. Mark:    No. We have a tool that’s designed for salespeople. Typically once you get a reply, then you need to write something that’s actually from your brain with your fingers on the keyboard. I go back to the Sales Guy code and there are certain things that I expect as a sales guy that I act towards others salespeople. One of those is like if I’m going to send you an email or reply to your cold outreach to me, I do not expect you to send me a template or a deck back. I want you to actually respond cause I’ll typically ask important question. I want an answer to that question. For us, that’s how our team works. We’ll send an appointed response but then we have something we call a follow up sequence. A follow up sequence is if I don’t get a reply to this handwritten email, I’ll give you some statistics on that. They don’t reply to this handwritten, customized email within two or three days or if it’s really important within four hours because you can set it to however you want to, then they’re going to get this little bump again, that two sentence, “Hey, I didn’t hear back from you yet. Are we still going to do this?” We usually bump them three to four times on something like that when there’s a reply to a reply on our inbox. Marylou:    What’s the stats you’re getting on those? Mark:    It’s super interesting. First of all, I want you to guess what percent. This is probably across 17,000 emails the last time I looked at it, a pretty decent sample size. Tell me, if I have any reply in my inbox and I reply to it to somebody, what would you think the reply rate is on that email that I sent? Marylou:    We hope it’s somewhere about 30% response. Mark:    You’re more pessimistic than I am. I would think 70% or 80% of the people reply to my replies. They’ve already replied to me. You know what I’m saying? Marylou:    I know, but they get to see. Mark:    We find it 50%. Marylou:    50% is good. Mark:    It’s not bad. Marylou:    I would be a hero if my clients have to 50%. I have everybody trained at around 30%. Mark:    Sell low, deliver high. Marylou:    Wow, that’s great. Mark:    It’s good but that still means half the people that are unhooked get off. By doing that follow up sequence where we automate the touches afterwards and we do four, five touches over ten days or something, what we end up with is we capture half of the people that didn’t reply to the original ones. We actually will get 75%, low 80% maybe of replies on people that are already on the hook which means that we keep people on the hook. That’s the hardest thing to do as a salesperson is to continue fishing while keeping all the fish that are on the hook on. Marylou:    Once they move from that cold status to working status, where we’re trying to get the AWAF call which is the are we a fit sequence that start. I call it disqualification but it’s a qualification call to get them into the pipeline. Our benchmarks are low. Mark:    I don’t know. We’ll see. You’ll never know. I think that as certain techniques proliferate, they become less effective. You have to constantly be thinking about your game. Marylou:    Yes. The other thing that we do too is the handwritten email that you talked about. We do really want our folks to research about the person because they are people on the other end of that email. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    And find out as much as you can about them. Include that in that reply email. We do give them a template. We do give them the sales conversation that we talked about that slippery slope. It’s embedded a little bit further down as to the why. Why should they change? Why now? And why us? We do it in a way that’s very respectful. We help the business developer really choose from a template of choices, which pain point they think would resonate most with that person to start. We actually organize the pain points one at a time but we put it into template format that we do expect them to customize. Mark:    Yeah, we stole that 100% from you. We’re do the exact things. We say keep it to two, three sentences at the top. Show them that you’ve done your research and that we actually care about them and can help. Marylou:    It makes such a difference. Just thinking about the emails I get now. When people actually make an effort and put one little thing that maybe in my LinkedIn profile even. I’m just blown away that they took the time to do that. I will respond. We are sales people. We are a little bit of a different breed. Even IT people, when you get something that is of value to them, or something they’re passionate about, or something that interests them and you include that in the email, you are more likely to get a response from them or just build a fun relationship. What I call squirrel feed them, get them further into the pipeline with more meaningful conversions as you go along. Mark:    Yeah. I totally agree. We don’t sell to IT guys, thank God. Marylou:    I have one client. He’s a HR. He thinks IT is hard. Mark:    I’ve heard about HR. Marylou:    It’s a challenge, definitely. They’re like I guess the best purchasing agent, they’re like that personality a little bit. Mark:    Oh, yeah. Marylou:    Yeah. Mark:    As salespeople, we love those guys too. Marylou:    Definitely. Tell me, how have you been since you know this process so well? How have you shortened the lag in your pipeline overall. If something needs to take sixty days to close, where are you at now? Mark:    I don’t know if we do that. I can definitely explain how we do that. I don’t think it has necessarily to do with messaging if you wanted to stay on that topic. But quite honestly, it’s the thing we’re just talking about earlier, keeping people on the hook. If you go in thinking this person that’s engaged is only going to reply to my email 50% of the time, they’re gonna do it at their leisure even when they do that. If you have seven or ten interactions with that person and they procrastinate just a few hours each time, you’re taking a week to a week and a half that you are pushing out a close just because they’re taking their time to get back to you. That’s fair, we’re all busy. I think that when you stay persistent and you’re on top of your game, first of all if you do it the right way, people perceive it as thoughtful and like, “Hey, this guy’s really trying to empower me to make a decision.” I think that those follow up sequence that we were talking about for us definitely. I know that when we brought those on as a feature of the product, it shrunk our sales something like 20 days or something like that. Marylou:    Oh my gosh. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    Your tool is completely automated. It’s not like you’re setting tasks to remember to do stuff. It does it for you, correct? Mark:    Both way. Some people, like in tier one account, super important accounts with super high stakes, C level type people. Their time is valuable. It’s $100 an hour they’re making. To me personally, I feel bad wasting their time. We do things, we do manual stuff. Some of the stuff we do is automated, you pick. If you want it automated, you can do it automated and you can test it and see the results. If you want to do it very manual, you can test it and see the results. For us, we have a certain sales velocity we need to reach not in terms of sales cycle but in terms of the amount of meetings that we’re generating. We need to be a little bit faster so we do incorporate a lot of automation. Marylou:    Yeah. The other thing too is you could set up what I used to teach a long time ago in sales forces is to set up queue. You’d have your working queue, you’d have your call queue. When you came into the office, you would just start at the top and work your way down. Is there something similar like that that you guys are doing? Mark:    Yeah. For us, we have rules of engagement. In order for you to be “working” an account, we say that the account has to be in compliance with rule 52. Rule 52 says I’d come up with bunch of stupid stuff. People will find it all the time. Marylou:    I love it. Sounds like NCIS like gives. Mark:    I am not coming up with periodic tables of selling but I’m getting there. Marylou:    Yeah. It makes it easier to teach when you got everything in a little box, right? Mark:    I hear ya. Rule 52 says that in order to be working an account, you have to have five people that you’re reaching out to at one time, and at least two of those need to be of a manager/director type level. That way, we’re not just prospecting the bottom drags, the easy ones and we’re not putting all our eggs in the basket of like the CFO is gonna respond or email, right? Marylou:    Right. Mark:     We have a report in Sales Force called Rule 52 Compliance. This is the number of contacts in the account and this is the number of contacts that are currently in a sequence. It turns the number red, yellow, or green, depending on how many people they have in a sequence. If it’s green, they know I’m good there. I don’t have anything to do with that. I don’t need to do anything with that account other than some tasks that might be queued up to do it. But if they’re red or yellow, then they know they either need to go prospect again and get some more prospects in there or hook more people that are already in Sales Force into a sequence. They’re our job in the first hour of the morning, we call it account planning, is to look at the Rule 52. Anything that’s yellow or green, get it into the green. Marylou:    Oh, that is great. I love that. When you just said in the morning they do it, it’s habit. It becomes a daily routine which, as you know, at the top of the pipeline. That’s really what we’re looking for is the consistency of habit. Mark:    Yeah, yeah. Marylou:    The same thing with phone calls. Mark:    Yeah. We do the block thing, too. I’ve always believed in time blocking. It’s just I don’t understand how people operate when they just go willy-nilly from one thing to the next and, “Oh, I don’t feel like calling after 12 minutes,” and then you get off on some tangent and you make 13 phone calls that day, it doesn’t work. I don’t think so. We have to have a three-hour call block each day. The first half hour is actually role playing. We break that half hour block into three blocks, three ten-minute blocks. One is drilling where if we say, “Alright, hiring.” That’s one of things that we help solve. When we see somebody is doing hiring, you taught me this, we have a whole content based on a research. We got what we call research buckets so when we go look at an account, we find the bucket of research that this one applies to hiring, a certain technology, bad quarter, new leadership, new product. And then, we have right here two or three open-ended questions that you can use to start a conversation in an email or a phone call. Here’s two case studies that you can use that apply to this particular thing and then here’s a quote from somebody in those case studies that you can use so that they set our customers for us, we don’t set for ourselves. Again, you taught us that. Now, all they do is they just look at the research buckets and then they drill, hiring. Boom! You got to tell me two open-ended questions. You gotta tell me the quote. You gotta tell me the case study. Marylou:    Oh, great. Mark:    And then we have fifteen or sixteen buckets, it makes it very simple for our sales people to know how to start a conversation with somebody that they’ve done research with three months ago. Marylou:    Awesome. I’m so proud of you. You took this to a level that I love this conversation. Mark:    Yes. Marylou:    Tell me, the Mark of a year ago. What would you say to him? Mark:    I’d say to that guy make sure you show up to your meetings with Marylou. I think the main thing is this that I don’t know if it was a mistake. It was definitely a lesson learned is that I think that sometimes you start moving so fast. For us, we are very blessed. We were able to really drive revenue and close a bunch of deals and it just seems like the momentum never stopped, the velocity kept picking up. For me, I needed to slow down some. While the rest of my team can be on that kind of super-fast acceleration, for me, I need to slow down and be much more thoughtful. I know my CEO is the most empowering person I’ve ever worked for and he told me one time, he goes, “Mark, when is your wide space?” I’m like, “What do you mean wide space?” He goes, “When is the time during the week where nobody can access you, where you go into a room by yourself and that’s when you just think about things?” He’s like, “How do you get your eyes above the wave?” Everything’s tossing and turning, how do you get your eyes above the wave so you could see the shore that you’re sailing to? I wish I would’ve started doing that a year ago because that’s when I really start to collect my thoughts, gather my senses about me, and then concept the direction and the priority of the things that we’re trying to do. That’s probably the biggest thing. Marylou:    Yeah, that’s great. That’s great advice. To think a lot of times we are running a million miles an hour and you need to go to your happy place. Mark:    Yup. Marylou:    I’ve been lately going down to the river here in Des Moines, Iowa, and just sitting and looking out and so many ideas come to you. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    It’s just incredible if you let your mind just chill. Mark:    Something about stillness and rest. Marylou:    Yeah, definitely, and mulching. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    We’re getting close to mulching time. Mark:    Are you coming to my house this year? Marylou:    No, I have three truckloads coming in April so I’m going to be very busy. Thank you very much. Mark:    Yeah. Marylou:    Was there anything else that you’d like to share with our folks because I’m sure they’re all like, “How do I reach out to this guy, he’s got it figured out.” Mark:    I don’t know about that but yes, the easiest way to get a hold of me is LinkedIn. I don’t understand Twitter. I tried, I just don’t get it. Marylou:    Yeah. Mark:    I actually got into a nice groove where I was following a bunch of people and they were putting up a lot of content but I think they all got together and decided, “Let’s retweet everybody’s stuff that they post,” so I’d literally read through a hundred of the same exact thing and I just couldn’t filter it enough. But anyway yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. mark.kosoglow@outreach.ios. People can always email me, too. Marylou:    Yes. What if before we go, what plans do you have? This might be too long of a question. You talked a lot about these processes that you have in place for your sales teams. Are you empowering your clients with similar teaching materials and things so they can come and hit the crowd running and be successful? Mark:    We asked earlier about how we shorten sales cycle. That’s kind of like our little secret sauce. We treat people like customers before they actually sign a deal with us. I believe to do a true evaluation, each party has to have skin in the game. We actually have a pilot agreement that you have to sign in order for us to let you on the platform because a frivolous evaluation is just a waste of time for everybody. Part of that pilot process involves us giving you a solutions consultant that looks and knows exactly how my team works and all the things that we’re learning we constantly share with them the things that we’re learning. They will help the company take what they want to do in their sales process and then graph our best practices on it and propose to them. This is the way that we think that you could really scale up. We just took a very large life insurance company, this is no joke, Marylou. This is insane. He said that it used to take him eight hours or thirty hours a week to do one task and we got them down to four hours. Marylou:    Wow. Mark:    Basically, it freed up an entire week worth of time because we’re able to say “Alright, how do you want to do things?” This is what we think are some great ideas to help you then let’s built it out in the tool that can increase your productivity. Marylou:    That’s so great. We’re not talking hundreds of transactions here, people. We’re talking right now in the hundreds of thousands transactions and email sent and what are the numbers looking like, millions? Where are they? Mark:    I haven’t even seen the, I know in January of last year we we’re sending three or four million emails a month for people. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s fifty million now, I don’t know. I don’t even know. Marylou:    For those of you listening who are numbers people, fifty million transactions are gone back and forth. This guys really know what they’re doing. You need to contact Mark and that team over there because it’s a great tool that appeared really serious about outreach and starting conversation for net new business. That’s a great tool for that. Thanks Mark. It’s great talking to you. Mark:    You too, as always.

Episode 7: Engaging ‘Dream Customers’ in a Whole New Way – Heather R. Morgan

Predictable Prospecting
Engaging 'Dream Customers' in a whole new way - Heather R. Morgan
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How do you capture the attention of someone you’ve never met in a way that encourages them to respond? Starting conversations with people we don’t know is the most difficult and the most crucial part of building a successful pipeline, but too many companies see dismal response rates to their cold email templates. Today’s guest holds the secret to creating copy that speaks to the desires, fears, and personalities of your customers to engage them in a whole new way. Heather R. Morgan is the Founder and CEO of Salesfolk, a company that helps salespeople create compelling cold emails that lead to three times the responses from customers. Heather began her career as an economist working internationally before entering the business development field.
 
Heather-MorganEpisode Highlights:

  • How Heather Morgan went from sending letters to her favorite children’s book authors to becoming the CEO of Salesfolk
  • Preparing for the cold email: doing research on the audience
  • Heather’s tricks for writing a personal email to someone you don’t know
  • Getting into the mind of your audience & finding the “Dream Customer”
  • Crafting a focused email: sequencing and targeting every customer
  • The five levels of awareness
  • Keeping the element of mystery while being direct

Resources: Love Heather’s method to cold emailing? Sign up for the Salesfolk Cold Email Mastery Course or contact Salesfolk about consulting. Connect with Heather on LinkedIn, Tweet to her @HeatherReyhan, or send her an email directly: heather@salesfolk.com

Episode Transcript

Marylou:    Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. You guys are going to love this session. On the session with me today is Heather R. Morgan. She is a former economist and a CEO and Founder of a company in The Bay Area called Sales Folk. The reason why you are going to love this conversation is because Heather has really spent a lot of time in figuring out the formula, the code, whatever you want to call it in starting conversations with people we don’t know and doing it in a way that gets people to act quickly, predictably, and consistently.     She has a background that is going to be very helpful for you as you start crafting your emails, as you start thinking about the types of scripts and voicemails that you want to leave. Her methodology, her framework, her systems are a must study in order to be able to generate sales qualified leads and even take it further into the pipeline if you’re an account executive who actually closes business. Her particular methodology is something that you’re going to want to study and really master.     Without further adieu, Heather, welcome. Heather:    Hi, Marylou. Thank you for that sparkling intro there. I’m very happy to be on the podcast today and share a little bit about cold email best practices and what you can do to improve your emails. Marylou:    Perfect. The first thing I want to know is what got you interested in—this is very difficult, it’s a very difficult mastery really. It comes down to starting conversations with people we don’t know is a very difficult part of the pipeline. What got you interested in this and where have you taken it? Heather:    That’s a great question. My story is a little bit unusual, it’s not the story that oh, I got into sales or anything like that. I liked writing for a very long time and reading. I sent my first cold email which was really a letter when I was about four years old to my favorite author Robert Quackenbush in New York. He responded with a few autographed books and a letter back a few months later.     Since then, I had this idea that you should just reach out and start conversations with people. In the beginning, a lot of them were people like my favorite authors of children’s books. Then, it started to be famous CEOs and different people that I was interested in meeting and just having a conversation with. For me, it was really something that came from a love of writing. It was just something that I did. I would do it also when I would move to a new country because I lived in seven different countries.     When I moved to Hong Kong and I didn’t really know many people, I would make a list of different interesting people to me off of LinkedIn or different groups and just start cold emailing them or different interesting companies.     I think it really did originally come from, and it still does come from a genuine place of just wanting to start a conversation with someone. I think that’s what makes my approach different than a lot of other salespeople because although we work with sales companies, sales organizations, it didn’t start as a sales thing. It started as I want to start conversations and have intelligent conversations that add value and build rapport. That’s where it started.     It wasn’t until I worked basically doing business development with a Silicon Valley company a little over three years ago, maybe four. Now that I really started to do cold outreach for my company. I actually didn’t know that that was a thing. To give some back then, I guess I didn’t really know what I was doing with that job to be honest. It was in the games industry, mobile games. I don’t know if you play games, I don’t.     Here I am just came back from Cairo, I was an economist. No background in tech, sales, or anything. I was supposed to start conversations that seems to be gaming companies and I don’t play games or know anything about it. I’m just thinking okay, what do you do? The only thing I could think to do which was just build a couple CSV feeds of 100 or so contents each and start reaching out to people.     Within two or three weeks, I had a 68% response rate from people like the founder of Guitar Hero. I didn’t even know that was a good response rate, I thought it was okay. To be honest, I was just like okay, cool, people are responding. It wasn’t until my boss because he started getting all these medians with these crazy cool people. He started asking me okay, what are you doing? Are you getting intros? How are you talking to these people, how are you meeting them? I said I don’t know, I’m just emailing them. I don’t have any connections, I’m just reaching out. He was blown away.     He started to brag about it and then next thing I know I have half a dozen companies, 500 startups which we were at at the time trying to approach me. That’s sort of when I started doing some freelance work for them. Marylou:    Wow, that’s a great story. What I liked was the fact that you had—this is for people who are listening who think they need to have a roll of decks of names or relationships already pre-built in order to start conversations. You came into a field where you really had no background, you had no connections, but through your words and through the way you wrote your emails you were able to get people excited and get people to actually lean into their computer thinking wow, how does she do that. I would really like to know more.     That is a formula that everybody on this phone call wants to know more about how you went about that. Can you put that into a framework, is there a system for that? Heather:    I think there definitely is. We’re at a point now where I really don’t write many of our customers cold emails. I’ll write a few of them just to stay sharp each month. We have way too much to man at this point for me to still be writing cold emails because that doesn’t spill.     What I had to do about six months into starting my own company, we reached a point where I realized to scale I had to reverse engineer my processes. What I did was basically look at what I was doing and what wasn’t working and mapped everything out into operations, documents, to train people. I iterated on that a lot.     What I think it really comes down to at the core is thinking about your audience first. I know a lot of people say this but I don’t think enough salespeople think carefully enough about their audience. You really need to spend time before you write a single email thinking about your audience and doing research. That doesn’t mean the Basho or whatever method, researching every single person.     What we’re looking at today with sales, I’m sure you know, you need velocity. Rather than researching everyone, you just find your audience or your buyer persona and you say okay, we’re looking at VP Sales, software companies of a certain size and location. And then, you would take a sample of ten or so contacts and research them, looking at their LinkedIn profiles, Twitter, anything else you can find to think of keywords, KPIs they care about, pain points, all this things.     Once you have in your head and hopefully some notes on paper an idea of who your audience is, then you can start writing. If you don’t do that, you won’t be able to add value. I think it’s really all about adding value to your customer and being relevant to them. Marylou:    Let me stop you there because a lot of—what size companies do you currently hang your head in? Is it startup, mid-market? Heather:    We’re definitely moving more up-market. In the early days, we worked with all kinds of companies. We have a course for startups that are a little more early staged to sort of self serve themselves and educate themselves. I’d say we’re probably working with at least Series B startups all the way to enterprise companies now. Marylou:    Alright. The reason why I stopped you was because you mentioned the term buyer persona. In the larger companies, typically those personas are crafted by the marketing team. Are you saying that you recommend a sales person doing his or her own or are they taking marketing and building on them or is what marketing does good enough? Heather:    I definitely don’t think generally what marketing does is good enough in most organizations based on what we see from our clients. Whether you’re making an official document or just spending ten minutes to get your head in the game, I think every salesperson should be doing it. The trick to writing really good cold emails, whether you’re writing them to one person or a thousand, is having them sound personal and relevant. I like to actually try to write for one person on my head.     Even if I’m not going to just write that email for one person, even if it’s just going to be a template that goes to a large number of people, I need to have someone in my head to do that. I guess if you already know all the people in the industry and you can just imagine that you know everything, maybe you don’t need to do that.     Almost every time I look at a LinkedIn profile, I can think of a new keyword or something to include. It doesn’t take much time but to just browse LinkedIn or even their Twitter and see what things they’re talking about, what kind of content are they sharing right now. Not that you’re necessarily going to bring that up, but just sort of know what’s on their mind helps you think of better ideas for emails, even if you’re not going to include them exactly. It just sort of gets you focused on writing better. Marylou:    This sounds like it’s a somewhat manual process, it’s doing research. Are there tools that you think could help people? Heather:    Honestly, I don’t think it’s a tool thing. I think—there’s a ton of tools out there. Simply just doing a quick LinkedIn search can really help. You can take people that are already on your list, say you’re a salesperson and you’re given a list of prospect problems. You can definitely take a dozen random names from that list and look at some of them. It really doesn’t take you more than ten to twenty minutes to look for thirty seconds or a minute on a LinkedIn profile.     Like I said, you’re not doing this for everyone. Enriching data for personalization is a totally different thing. Now, there’s tools to do that where you can scrape, where you can have Upwork workers doing that for you for $3 an hour in the Philippines. This isn’t really so much for individual emails. It could be if you just have twenty targeted accounts that you’re assigned to, maybe if your market is very small and you want to spend some time researching, it’s really more about simply having your head in the game focused on your audience. Technology can’t really do that for you, your mind has to be really thinking about who are those people.     Even looking at job descriptions can be really good. I’ll often look at when we’re doing a persona I don’t know as well a few job descriptions to see the KPIs. If I’m trying to maybe write a campaign for a CIS and I don’t know a lot about them, I might look at a few job descriptions on Glass Door or LinkedIn just to see what their responsibilities are. Marketing might have that and looking at that document might be good, but I think a lot of times you just have to get that inside your head for writing those emails. Marylou:    For you sales managers listening who have said over and over again marketing generates buyer personas, you’re hearing from Heather directly that you still need to supplement that with your own personalized research. If you’re working with larger companies that are publicly held, you can go into their 10K and all those forums that are published on Edgar that give their annual reports where they’re talking about what initiatives they’re trying to solve, what challenges they have to overcome. You’re reading the language directly from the people within the firm who you’re trying to target. It really does fall into sales as one of the things you guys have to do to prepare for writing and crafting good emails, would you say so Heather? Heather:    Absolutely. I think you brought up some great points that made me think a little bit. I’ve never done acting but I know that actors try to get into the minds of the people that are supposed to portray. With sales, I think it’s similar. You have to try to get into the minds of your customers.     It’s great to interview the people that you’re talking to or know this people and that helped you have the stronger grounds but I think it’s actually huge to be able to read their writing at least for me and I think for everyone on the subconscious level. That starts to allow you to emulate the tone that you need to write in.     As you read a LinkedIn profile, it’s not just keywords. You’re getting a sense of the tone, how do these people write, how do they describe themselves. One of the richest places to look is on the recommendations they’ve given and received because that’s somewhere where they’re really going to show what kind of person they are in terms of how they describe others and what they value as well as what others value in them. Marylou:    Heather, do you recommend certain—I don’t want to pitch and haul you into the process step—you mentioned keywords, you mentioned what I call sentiment which is getting the feel. Are there other sort of levers that you look for and pull and write down on your piece of paper besides those two? Heather:    Yeah, I think those are all good. I’m also especially looking for benefits and pain points because those sort of become the basis of your emails. To go another step further, once you have this information, you need to write emails. If you’re writing emails which we found statistically speaking which we found the optimal number of emails for you to send in order to get your maximum possible response rate, 1/3 of responses will usually come from emails five through eight based on what we’ve seen. Those emails need to be tightly focused and not redundant.     When we do our campaign for our clients, we’re not only doing eight emails, we’re usually doing multiple variants and multiple personas. Next thing you know, you have 16, 32, 34 emails you’re writing. How do you keep that organized? How do you get enough ideas and not be redundant?     I think it’s important to sort of brainstorm and write your ideas down before you write an email. If you’re doing your research and you’re taking notes in a document, it’s really easy to look back at it and say okay, what are my benefits and pain points from my research, what will my emails become?     For every benefit of your product, there’s a corresponding pain point. As we’re thinking about how to write our emails, we can think of it two different ways. We can think of it as a spectrum between positive and value add and negative fear driven pain, or we could also think of it as very high level all the way down to very specific cases of how they consult a pain point or different use case for the product. I think about it in that way and then that’s how I plan all my emails.     It’s very important that your emails themselves are very focused. When I think of other problems, I see a lot actually, I see two problems. The first being people try to shove too much into one email. I was on a two hour consultation call today where probably the first 20 or 30 minutes of it I had to explain to the client why they can’t just try to shove five benefits into an email. They said but that’s one benefit and I said okay yeah, but what are we focusing on?     The reason for that is basically if we try to do too many things, nothing works very well. With that in mind, we delude our message. If it’s too long, people just don’t read it because it’s rambling. Unless the benefits are like peanut butter and jelly, people should just focus on one thing per email but they have eight emails to overall share their messages, if that makes sense. Marylou:    Yeah, it makes perfect sense. The other thing I wanted to ask you is I’m a firm believer—we’re talking about the cold queue. We’re reaching out to people, we are retargeting them, and I subscribed to Eugene Schwartz’s Five Levels of Awareness. Can you touch on a little bit not only the benefits but how you write emails based on whether the person is completely unaware of what you have to offer versus as I explain to my clients, you look in the fridge at night, you’re hungry but you don’t know what you want. You’re aware of a problem but you don’t know a good solution. Heather:    I haven’t read that book but I’m definitely interested to check it out. Is this sort of like crossing the case and how aware customers are of their pain points? Is that— Marylou:    It definitely was written for—think of the 1960s advertising where they’re introducing all these new products for people, like why do I need that? There’s five levels, I’ll briefly explain them.     There’s the unaware level, awareness of the problem, awareness of the problem and potential solutions, awareness of the solution and the vendors, and then there’s complete awareness, they know the vendors, they know they want to short list, they’re very interested and they have a sense of urgency. Usually in bound people filing out a form, doing a search, those are interested people but there are three levels before that that we in our world starting conversation with people we don’t know have to worry about. Heather:    Definitely. That’s a great point. Before I would even think of that which is a great question. We actually had a conversation very similar to this with one of our writers the other day. I think it shows that people are being very thoughtful and that’s a good thing. I think there’s a couple things going on. In the context of cold email, I like to try and imagine all the situations that a customer might be in and basically the range of situations and what would be the most ideal customer for me.     For example if I am in recruiting and I’m trying to get customers, say I’m just having a list of customers and I don’t know anything about their job postings or anything like that, I don’t know if I’m blind to those which companies I’m reaching out to are going to be needing recruiters for hiring, or some of them might already have recruiters, some of them might not, some of them might not even be hiring. Until I have signals like well, they just raised another round of funding or I see they already have a bunch of job postings or whatever. I don’t know unless they have those indicators.     The more you can have those indicators, the more I think you can pinpoint the states of awareness and sort of target your emails to that. I think it’s not always plausible because you don’t know who in your audience—it might very well and usually is a range of mildly aware to quite aware or vice versa. No one even knows what this is, this is a new category. Even not even aware, the product teams, how aware are they of them.     Often times it is a range, and when it is we’ll think about who is my ideal customer, who’s my dream customer. Not dream as in what’s the dream logo but who would need me the most, my service, my product? Those are what I call the low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit are the emails, probably the first one, two, maybe three emails you write should be targeting.     After that, the low hanging fruit are probably added to your campaign. If you’re thinking logically, by about email three, the people who aren’t very interested in your emails or totally not interested, never want you to talk to them again have probably responded.     Then after that, you have people who are either just not that responsive or might be on the fence and maybe they’re busy and you don’t know if by email four any of those people have read your emails at all yet or if they’ve been reading every single one. You do with analytics, but when you start your campaign, when you actually write those emails, you don’t know there could be people who email six is the first email they read. As you’re writing them, you need to also have every email stand alone but you need to have your sequence become increasingly direct and have more things to deal with skeptics who are less aware people.     To get back to your question, your first few emails should be for the people who are most likely to be more aware. I’m not sure if awareness is awareness of the pain point or an awareness of your product, but people who are in severe need and have a lot of interest. After that, you need to sort of take the challenge your sale approach a bit more and have more and more evidence. Not to say that those other emails don’t have the same elements of the challenge your sale but they’re going to have more and more directness, more and more explanations, more and more reasons that would help overcome doubt. Also, different use cases of the product for the people that are less likely to be aware of the pain point.     It’s kind of an interesting question you asked. I guess I’ve not really thought about it that way. I’ve taught of these things but they’re not necessarily the underlying things I think about. I think usually more about who is the best customer and who could be in my audience and how do I find a way to get those people really quickly and then vary my email campaigns so that I can try to test as many things as possible and attract a range of people as much as I can. Marylou:    I think you’ve answered it. I’m coming from a process background so everything of mine is formulaic. I consider you more the creative with ROI in mind but I’m definitely process. I’m looking at the raw data to tell me behaviorally what people are doing and when they act. Eugene Schwartz’s Level of Awareness document which was written a very long time ago maps perfectly for cold queue, for the cold sequence in that he’s saying that every hundred people, your first thirty mail’s probably reaching three to ten, somewhere in that range. The second and third may get up to thirty more people saying I know I don’t want this like you said before.     But then you’ve got 67-ish, depending on that seven of people who still need to be sold, that this is something that’s a value, this is something they should be putting on their urgency list or bumping up and bubbling up to the top. You answered my question in that what you’re saying is low hanging fruit first, get the people who are recognizing there’s a problem, recognizing there’s solutions out there, didn’t realize the sense of urgency but you have now shared that with them so that they’re like holy crap, I really need to do something about this. I really need to respond to this email.     Get those guys first and then the rest you’re going to nurture along with specificity around endorsements and testimonials and specifics about the results that you get so that people start thinking wow, I never would’ve thought of it that way. Heather:    Yeah, and I think probably almost every email we write has some element of social proof. I think of it—I actually think of it very quantitatively, almost like a store in terms of how strong or weak or positive or negative something is. You could have something that’s a score five which might be the extreme value add or you could have a score of negative five which could be an extreme fear of loss or something more neutral like a zero.     Usually, you don’t want to start your campaign with something really negative. It depends, there are some situations you might so actually want to go with something that’s positive but a little more neutral and intriguing that has an element of mystery to try and just get the people who would have that relevant problem to be interested in a way that they’re also just intrigued to respond to you.     Those people are done by email two or three and so you just have to become much more direct with your approach. I think even the directness is part of what changes as you go through that campaign. I like to often alternate between—if something is a strong fear of loss email, then you have something more value add. You don’t want it to be too negative. Marylou:    Okay, very good. I kept you longer. I want you to share with the audience how—this topic can go on forever. To me, this is the missing link, this is what the book Predictable Revenue really never talked about but is very important. You’ve taken it to a level that I think your response rates probably blow away anything that most people are experiencing.     I’m sure people in the audience are wanting to know how the heck do they get a hold of you, Heather? Heather:    Absolutely. A few ways, one you can always tweet at me at @HeatherReyhan. Also, you can visit the Sales Folk Website, salesfolk.com and fill out a consultation request form or shoot me an email at heather@salesfolk.com. Marylou:    You mentioned that you do have a student, your course. Can you elaborate a little bit about that? Heather:    Yeah. The course is somewhat new, something I wanted to do for a long time, made it a few months ago. Basically, I tried to distill a lot of the information that we give our clients and the questions I hear people asking over and over, how do you write good subject lines that get opened, how do you build social proof, how do you structure a tech campaign and so forth. I tried to just basically create content to share others because I only have 24 hours in a day. That’s what it is.     So far, we have 14 lessons. We’re adding a new one until further notice every other week. It really already covers a lot of the main topics that people already asked. Marylou:    If you’re a do it yourselfer and want to get started. A lot of my clients are like that, they want to dig in first and then realize very quickly that it could be a little bit overwhelming and daunting. Now, they have your contact information so they can get a hold of you.     I really recommend if you’re serious about generating predictable amount of sales qualified leads that you have a consult with Heather because she will set you on the right direction for sure and jumpstart you from where you are now. For many of the people listening who don’t think lead generation works in cold situations, it doesn’t work because you haven’t done this homework of figuring out who the ideal targets are, how you have those conversations, and in what order like we were talking about, how many of those emails should be done per persona, all of this is covered in Heather’s courses. And then of course for those of you who want to jumpstart, give her a call directly.     Heather, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate it. I could talk to you forever. Heather:    I know. It’s so great to catch up with you. Thanks for having me, Marylou. Marylou:    Will talk to you later. Heather:    Okay, bye.

Episode 5: Understanding Buyer Personas – Adele Revella

Predictable Prospecting
Understanding Buyer Personas - Adele Revella
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 Buyers are more than demographic statistics. They have sophisticated needs and are frustrated when companies fail to understand. Effective marketing requires alignment with the entire buying journey. To achieve this goal many marketers use the information in a buyer persona to guide sales interactions, advertisements, and content. Gaining true insight into the buyer’s journey takes far more than compiling search data. We will discuss how to create effective buyer personas with today’s guest Adele Revella. Adele Revella’s mission is to educate marketers about how to harness the power of buyer personas. She’s spent over two decades in marketing perfecting marketing tools such as personas. Her experience led her to develop the Buyer Persona Institute. With available content, workshops, and the Buyer Persona Masterclass the Institute utilizes the power of buyer interviews to teach modern marketing mastery.

adele_revellaEpisode Highlights:

  • Goals of an effective buyer persona
  • How to utilize personas for sales funnels & automation
  • Is the buyer’s journey a linear process?
  • The fundamental question to ask when creating content
  • Why are buyers reducing engagement with marketers?
  • What do studies show about the main buyer influence?
  • Guidelines for discovery interviews

Resources: Buyer Persona Institute Buyer Persona Masterclass Buyer Personas Book Follow Adele on Twitter

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Adele is on a mission. Her goal? To educate marketers and help them harness the power of buyer personas. Just type in Buyer Persona on Amazon and you’ll find out that she literally wrote the book telling how to gain and use insights about buying decisions. Her book is titled Buying Personas: How to Gain Insight Into Your Customers’ Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies and Win More Business. Designed and written to help you see your offerings to the eyes of buyers and become more effective at marketing. Adele is the founder of the Buyer Persona Institute that can be found at buyerpersona.com, a great source of studies and resources to help you on the journey of understanding your target audience. In this Podcast, Adele reveals four unique insights. One, how to look beyond the facts and gain buying insights. Two, how you’re annoying your leads and how to be helpful instead. Three, the key question you have to ask before creating any content. Last but not least, ways to conduct discovery interviews and get the initial intel you need. Adelle: Because we’re interviewing buyers every single day, we have probably two dozen interviews going on today with buyers. Every single one of the buyers is frustrated with their inability to quickly get the information they need to make an important buying decisions. It doesn’t matter whether they’re engaged with the marketing content or the sales people. We hear repeatedly, people aren’t prepared to talk about what matters to the buyer. We’re in there and we go in and we have the company prepared story present. We really haven’t built that story from a clear understanding on what the buyer wants to hear. That’s what our work is meant to resolve. People have weird ideas about Buyer Personas like we’re just going to get a name and a picture and we’re going to put it in the wall. Everybody got empathy with the buyer, we’re all going to feel good about that. That’s really not our thinking about Buyer Personas at all. We want when we do the researcher or when people engage in our approach to the research, they’re learning how to interview buyers about a buying decision and to get what we call buying insights. So buying, not buyer right? It’s an important distinction because when we get buying insights, we get the kind of considerations and expectations that buyers have that factor into every engagement, every encounter we have with the buyer whether it’s an initial marketing encounter or whether it’s a sales call later on. We want to know who the buyer is but that’s a small part of the Buyer Persona. We also want to know how, when and why they make the decision to solve the problem that we solve for them. The how, when and why is the buying insight and the who is the buyer insight. Together, they form a complete picture so that they could really prepare us to meet the buyers where they are and to deal with them in their terms rather than our terms which is what buyers are so upset about, it’s why the buyers are increasingly saying I’m going to avoid talking to you and engaging with you for as long as I can because you’re not very helpful to me. They’re not saying that out loud to us but we’re seeing that in the data that buyers are resisting the sales encounters and the marketing encounters for as long as possible cause we’re not helping, we’re not talking to them about what matters to them. We don’t we call it B to B versus B to C, we call it the level of consideration a buyer gives the decision. Have you recently been engaged doing a long search for something that was hard to find. You have, right? Okay, you got something in your mind. Now, I want you to think about what you did and I want you to think about all the steps you took and all the encounters you had and how very different that is than walking to the grocery store and buying the same bread you buy every week or the same milk you buy every week. It’s a very different kind of buying process. First of all, I want people to think about—let’s say this was a consumer purchase. I want people to think about the fact that there’s a difference in the way we need to engage with our buyers depending on how much consideration they’re giving the buying position. For a decision where buyers spend hours, weeks or months doing that, or even years for some of our clients looking for something that’s a perfect fit for their needs, searches this big in the overall aspects of everything that goes on. On the other hand, if I know exactly what I need. I want to buy the same vitamins that I bought last month, I bought them online. I go and type it in search. Maybe I do a search on price and I buy it, I order it. It’s over. I always want to make that distinction in these interviews because some of the people you’re talking to are engaged in very long, complex sales cycles where there’s multiple buyers involve. Some are engaged in things like which bakery do I go to buy my bread or which restaurant do I go to. That’s a different kind of consideration process. I think when search is being talked about, like okay we’re just going to look at our search data and that’s going to give us our buyer persona. Or we’re going to look at what’s happening in our website and that’s going to give us our buyer persona. It depends a lot on how much offline work your buyer is doing to really make the cracks of that decision. When we talk to B to B buyers, if they go search at all, it’s mostly like, oh yeah, oh yeah and we also went out, we do the whole search. I have never yet interviewed someone, ever, and we’ve done thousands of interviews who was engaged in a complex buying decision, who told me that the vendor that they selected was initially discovered through search. Not once. Not once. Not once. It’s a bit upsetting but that’s part of why I’m talking this and writing about it is because we’ve sort of collapsed these spots. It’s really important to make these distinctions around where is our buyer’s mind, what are they thinking about as they go through a buying decision. It’s a very different thing than just grouping you and me because we happen to both be the same age, we both work from home or we whatever we have in common, we still, what buying decisions worth emphasizing in our lives right now. The process we go through might differ dramatically have nothing to do with our demographics. The other one is market maturity. It’s just a product that I know a lot about as the buyer because I’m on my fifth version of CRM and now I’m looking to improve it. Or is it something around predictive analytics where I’m doing something that’s much more leading edge and I’m trying to really do a lot of research about that. This sort of one size fits all idea that we’re just going to go look at our online data or search and we’re going to build our buyer persona is just ridiculous and it’s appealing because it’s easy. My thinking is that if we’re going to go through the trouble to do buyer personas, they ought to give us a competitive advantage. They ought to tell us something that’s not obvious, that our competitors don’t know but if we know, that will change the game and allow us to be truly more effective than anyone else. We’re looking for insight and that’s why we call it the five rings of buying insight. We’re looking for insight, we’re looking for something that’s an aha moment. We use the word insight casually but if you look at what the word insight means, it’s really a game changer. We aren’t going to get this by just taking what we know and putting into a new template or just mining data from our online data. We have to really go a little bit outside the box and start to think about what do we really need to know about how, why, and when our buyers make the decisions we want in for us. It’s frustrating. In hindsight, you go why did I have to do that? I think that the internet has spoiled us but we don’t expect to have to do that. Think about that. If your buyer is like that then think about being the company that has understood that buyers’ buying experience so well, understood what they were thinking about that you can now be there with the swipe right, swipe left. You can be there instantly. That kind of source of competitive advantage. The other thing that’s really interesting about that, those long searches for the right solution. Price almost, prices are relatively small aspect at the end of the day. We can’t be outrageous, it has to be affordable for us in our budget. But at the end of the day, buyers that invest in these important decisions, these high consideration decisions, prices are minor aspects to this so we don’t have to be the low priced option. It’s huge. First of all, we really ought to try to find out whether the sales pipeline matches the buyer journey at all. Marketing automation is a part of this. Everybody has this idea that there’s this very linear process that people go through and sales pipelines always look like that. I think that what we have now realized, those of us that are investing a lot of time and understanding the buying experience is that the purpose of the sales pipeline ought to be the report to management about which deals are going to be likely to close in the next few months. We’re really looking at how many deals do we have and what is their likely close date and that’s the sales pipeline. A buyer’s’ journey is fascinating because it isn’t linear at all. Buyers go through fundamentally the same kinds of steps. In other words, anybody who’s buying a swimming pool goes through the same kinds of decision criteria issues to build a swimming pool but they don’t go through them in the same order. The sort of theory that we’re going to have a marketing automation solution that’s going to say on the first visit you get this and on the second you get this, the third encounter you get that. It’s really bogus. It’s not aligned with the buyers want. Where we need to get to—and I’ve just done a whole thing about personalized marketing—is right now, personalized marketing, we know just enough about the buyer to be completely annoying. The same thing is true about marketing automation. We’re at a level of sophistication with that that we can now be even more efficient at being annoying. If you’ve ever been online and searched for something and bought it and for the next week had an app for that same thing, or for me, I’m searching for different clients that we’re doing business with and for a week I’ll get their ads. We know just enough to be perfectly annoying. I see a future where we actually use these tools to be helpful to buyers. We’re not there and we got to be really careful right now because we’re so likely to just irritate everybody to death that some major, I don’t know, whether the government comes in or somebody comes in like do not call us and just shuts us all down. We need to show some restrain around this and we need to say—our question has to be all the time when we’re making decisions whether they’re marketing decisions or sales decisions, do we know enough about our buyer to ensure that this engagement is helpful. What’s the content of a helpful engagement with our buyer? I don’t care if you’re on Pinterest or YouTube, they’re on your website or whether it’s a white paper or data sheet. What I care about is the data, is the content helpful? Does it answer your buyer’s questions? We’ve got to be asking that more. Telling me who you are doesn’t tell me how to do that. I have to get insight into your buying decision before I can be helpful to you. Yes, they can but it takes a first step. I just wrote an article for a brand quarterly magazine, the title was There’s Nothing Automatic About Automation. It was all about the things we need to do before we do automation. We’re automating, we’re taking our 368 pieces of content and we’re just plugging them into this marketing automation machine and we’re just sort of assigning them to these made up stages in the buying process. Now, we got names for Suzie Qi or Smart Sam and we’ve given those names. We’re feeling good about ourselves because it feels like what we’re seeking is control, right? We’re seeking control and that’s a worthy objective. We’ve gotta stop and realize that the buyer is in control, we’re not in control. Kind of like cleaning,  if I’m really depressed I go clean a drawer because it makes me feel better. I think there’s a sort of sense of we’re not doing this right if we just clean this out and we get it organized, we’ll have more control and it’s not working. What do we have to do? We have to first understand what our buyers really want to know about. Then, we need to rewrite the book on the way we do messaging, build our content to give our buyers access to the real information that’s helpful to them and to put that into our marketing automation engine. Not we are the world’s leading provider of flexible, scalable, compatible interruptible market leading, double neutral. Yes, cause that’s what we’re doing. It’s because we’ve reverse engineered all of our content. We’ve taken everything we do and we’ve looked at it and we said we can solve this and this and this. And then we reverse engineer the message, we go out and we say now our buyers need to be educated them we can do this and this and this. Instead of if we didn’t reverse engineer but if we engineered it from the buyers’ perspective, then we’d go to interview buyers to find out where they are, what matters to them, and then we’d build that path for them. We really live in a buyers’ world and we’re acting as if we live in a sellers’ world. The internet’s been around since the eighties. The fact is that it’s really that everything that’s been built around the internet in terms of expectations that buyers have. Just like we’re talking about a few minutes ago, people want it to be at their fingertips and it’s not. I don’t know if you saw the Gartner study, I wrote a blog post about it. Gartner says they did a study worldwide of B2B buyers and they found that through the entire buyer’s’ journey through every phase that buyers go through, they’re only engaged with either our sales people or our marketing contact for 32% of that journey. 68% of the time, they’re not even talking to us or looking at anything we wrote. What’s really scary about that is that’s when they’re deciding who’s in their consideration set, that’s when they’re deciding is this a problem I care about solving. I think there’s one way we could look at this like oh my gosh, we’re sunk. I say no, I say shame on us. The reason that they’re turning elsewhere is because we’re not doing a good enough job of being helpful to them. We did I don’t know how many hundred buyer personas last year. The only thing that every single one them has in common is every single buyers starts with their peers. What concerns me is I’ve been in sales and marketing for more than thirty years, not saying how long exactly. I see us very gradually losing control over our ability to influence the buying decision. That’s what we’re here for. That’s why our company hires us is to influence a buying decision. If we can’t do that, it’s happening and the buyers are saying enough. It’s like we figured how to buy cars essentially without having to talk to the car sales people. And we have, we have essentially made our decision before we ever show up in the car lot. We know what price we’re going to pay, we know what car we want, and the rest of it’s kind of just sort of we got to shop to buy it, to pick it up. The last time I bought a car, I was literally at the dealership for less than an hour. I’ve phoned the person and said this is the car I want and I’ll be there in an hour. I want to send the paperwork and be out of there in an hour and I was. What if that happens across all? Cars should be a high consideration buying decision, they are. It’s all occurring where it’s hard to watch. Big data and everything’s going around that allows us to get inside that as long as the buyer is online. In most high consideration buying decision including yours, the key influence point didn’t occur online. You picked up a telephone, unbelievable instrument and just phoned someone. No digital footprint. Let’s consider this. What if the suggestion he made you wasn’t verified? I’m not trying to freak you out, Marylou. What if there were other even better options that you didn’t learn about. See. Because by this time you’re just exhausted and frustrated and so like I said, we’re losing the ability to influence the outcome of the buying decision. The buyer, this is where we get a little altruistic maybe it sounds like but we’re also not serving the buyers because we’re not giving them the benefit of knowing that we really do have a better option for them. I think we’ve got a win-win situation here, we’re just taking shortcuts because it’s new muscles we have to learn to exercise to think this way and work this way as companies. Buyer personas buying large aren’t getting people there. It’s because they’re not doing it right. We’re seeing this proliferation, my gosh we’re inundated with people saying we need buyer personas. When I started the Buyer Persona blog in 2006, buying buyerpersona.com was the easiest thing in the world. Right now you couldn’t get it free. Nobody, I remember looking at Google Analytics or wherever they had in a day to see how much traffic there was around buyer personas, none. Now, you look all over the map, it’s crazy. People are taking the fewest possible steps. Okay, we’ve got buyer personas, but do you have buying insight? Do you know how to influence that buying decision for that buyer? It would be helpful to your buyer, the answers is no. We’re starting to see this generation first when I wrote the book to try to get people not to give up on buyer personas cause I said if it keeps going this way, people are going to pretty much say we tried buyer personas and it didn’t work. They’re a waste of time. That’s really bad for me. What happens to the value of my domain then? The buyerpersona.com would be available for a nickel. I said I gotta really take at least,write it all down. It doesn’t mean people are going to read it, does mean they’re going to do it, doesn’t mean they’re going to hire us to do it, but at least I will upset it, it would be out there. This is what you need to do to get buying insights and not just to know who your buyer is. It’s not enough. The first thing is this is a very specialized kind of interview. You can’t do surveys, you can’t do focus groups and you don’t need a discussion guide. The hardest part of this process for people to get, it’s a simple idea, is that you want to get people on the phone who have recently solved the problem that you solved for your clients. You want to have them walk you through every step of their story. I’d love to interview you about that buying decisions we’re just talking about. I could get inside. Tell me what happened, Marylou, on the day that you decided that you needed to go solve this problem. And then, you could probably walk me through. I can see it in your eyes, we talked about it. There’s angst around this. I’m going to get to the emotional highs and lows of this experience, everything you tried and everything that didn’t work. What I’m gleaning from that is that I’m starting to get a picture of what you at least, one person, not a persona, but what one person is doing and thinking about is there in that decision cycle and all that criteria they have to solve this problem. I’m going to do that a number of times. Surprisingly, you don’t have to have a whole bunch of interviews to do this. This is qualitative research and we’re in a discovery mode. We generally find that after about ten interviews, we don’t learn anything new after that, about that. As long as we segment the market crack list, kind of a longer conversation. Then, you can look for patterns. We’ve created sort of a template for that, we have five insights we’re looking for. We call them the five rings of buying insights. We’re going to go and look at every interview and we’re going to look for patterns and trends so this is all unstructured data. We’ve recorded the interviews, we had them transcribed, and now we’re going to look for what did Marylou say and what did Joe say and what did Suzanne say with respect to what triggered their search. We call that the priority initial insight. Then what were the outcomes that they all wanted, we call that success factors. What were their barriers? What sort of obstacles they faced? We call that their perceived barriers inside. What did they think about different approaches that didn’t fit our solution? The fourth insight is decision criteria. We look at all the qualities or attributes of the services or products you cared about as you want through that assessment. And then, the fifth insight is the buyer’s journey. We look at everything. We write down these are all the places she went, these are all the people she talked to, this is everything she did and all the other. If there were the other people involved, maybe your husband got involved or a business colleague and we record all that in the buyer’s journey. We take verbatim quotes from the interviews, we put those in the persona so that everybody who’s looking at that persona gets a whole picture of that story, that is your story about the buying insights, the buying decision. Even if we’re going to spend four hours on this call, I can’t give you enough detail which why I wrote the book. Any bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the book is called Buyer Personas. It’s easy to find. You can go to our website at buyerpersona.com and we’ll take you there. There’s even a preview of the first three chapters of the book available PDF on our website. You can go to buyerpersona.com and just look at the first three chapters, see if this really fits your goals. There’s a lot to learn about finding the right people to interview, who you want to interview, getting them to agree to talk to you, and then conducting an interview. Whatever answer they give you first to any question isn’t going to be an insight. You have to learn how to ask good probing follow up question and then building the persona from that. Even just as important is now if the book goes into, how do you build your content strategies around what you learned. I decided, a lot of people in business write a book that says you really need to do this, this is a great idea and here’re all these case studies, I didn’t do that. I wrote down everything I know after thirty years of doing this about how to find the people to interview and do this. We disclosed every secret we have about that in the book. I wrote for the person who doesn’t know how to do this. For people who hate to read, we have an online workshop that people can sign up for. It’s called The Buyer Persona Master Class. It’s only two hours and you can just go put in your credit card and watch it at your leisure. I learned my personas, some people like to read, and some people like to listen and watch. We have that option for people who would rather kind of do it in two hours. Unfortunately, we haven’t published an audio version of my book. This is kind of the audio version. Then if you sign up for the Master Class, you get a 90 minute session that I do every month, and you can attend and ask questions about your specific situation. “I’m having trouble with this, what do I do about that,” and so forth. Reading the book and buying the book is useless, reading the book is useless. You actually have to do it. It’s just about how to really do the interviews and not as much about how to use the interviews. I’d say it’s condensed. And of course, most of our business is people hiring us to do it. I was a sales rep for about a whole year of my career back in the 80s. I sold weighing computers if you want to go back that far. And then I ran sales for four years. The five rings of buying insight are derived from the things that I tried to learned about when it count at a time, every time I go in I try to do discovery. This was the 80s, people didn’t have a chance to just go online and find their options. They’d be stuck talking to me and I’d go in and I’d get all this information from them. The first year I was a rep, I was 400% of quota because I really focused on learning what they wanted and presenting my solution as a perfect fit for their needs. Buyer Personas are just a tool to help us do that for a market full of buyers. We can do this one count at a time if we’re really good and we have the opportunity to get into the consideration set for every deal and go in and do that discovery. If we are trying to scale our business and get into more deals and we just don’t have a chance to do that discovery to influence every deal, then Buyer Personas gives us a sense of how a market full of buyers thinks about those five things In the olden days, you can call the company’s receptionist and say I want to talk to the IT director and they’d put you through. We had a different set of challenges. The more winners stand. You got that inside around the asbestos and they just wanted you to put a digital photo on it. That’s really an insight, right? If you have that at the level of the market and none of your competitors knew that then you could exploit that not just for those five accounts but across all of your marketing and in your website and all your engagement. That’s the kind of thing. Sales people intuitively hide out and seek that sort of what button do we have to push to get the buyer to react. Good sales people are really good listeners and they’re really good at figuring that out one account at a time but it doesn’t scale. It certainly doesn’t solve the problem called marketing’s giving us crony leads, the marketing content, the sales tools I’m getting are filled with dribble. I don’t even feel like I could give those to my prospects or when I do give it to them they don’t read it. That’s really what we’re trying to do to with Personas, were trying to get that insight at the level of the market full of buyers. I’ve been selling this for a while. I really understand. I meet with a lot of buyers every time, every day, I think I understand my buyers pretty well. What’s going to be different if I go and build a Persona, how about that? Does that work for you? Because you know that’s true, right? Thank you for thinking that. It’s one of the things sales people think, why do we need to this, I know the people, I meet with them everyday. That’s such a common question, Marylou. The fact is sales people are really good about knowing one account at a time. There’s really several reasons that they don’t really get as much information as we do from these interviews. One is that salespeople aren’t patterns and trends people, they’re really looking for one deal at a time, and what they see, what’s happening in that deal. Keep micro focused on that. The other thing is that buyers are hiding information from the sales people. They simply don’t share everything that’s happening in their organization or all the factors that are affecting the buying decision while that is going on, they’re hiding information from you that they won’t disclose later on. We also talked about the fact that the buyers aren’t even engaged with you for much of the buying decision. You’re getting in late and you’re never talking to buyers who don’t consider you. It’s almost like the self-fulfilling prophecy where you keep selling to the same type of buyer the same thing because that’s what’s being reinforced for you every day. What you’re missing is the ability to break out of that and go into buyers that are considering you and that people in the organization that are beginning to influence the outcome that you don’t ever get to talk to. It’s like this virtual circle where what you’re doing well reinforces continuing doing that. What we want to look at is what’s happening in the market, what’s happening with all these other buyers and how could you just break out of that mode and get into some roll that will radically change your ability to win more business. That’s the objective. Buyer Persona: How To Gain Insight Into Your Customers’ Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, And Win More Business. The reason I wrote the book is because people are building buyer personas, they’re not winning more business as a result of that and that’s got to change. Once you get that buying insight, you can actually use that to win more business. buyerpersona.com I’m also on Twitter @buyerpersona and on facebook.com/buyerpersona. It’s pretty hard to lose me. Thank you. Thanks Marylou.

Episode 4: Increasing Sales and Team Morale Simultaneously is Possible – Jeremy Donovan

Predictable Prospecting
Increasing Sales and Morale Simultaneously is Possible - Jeremy Donovan
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 When your goal is to double sales productivity AND increase happiness the insight of a sales strategist is key. Our guest today is Jeremey Donovan the Head of Sales Strategy for the Gerson Lehrman Group.Jeremey believes that goals in sales and improving staff happiness can be achieved simultaneously. He views his position as that of a service professional with a goal to make the sales staff’s jobs easier. Jeremey Donovan was once an electrical engineer who moved through many roles to his current position with the Gerson Lehrman Group. His methods include involvement of key sales staff to improve a process before rolling out and split testing emails before templating. Jeremey strives to make the prospecting process personal by encouraging staff to write with a conversational tone. Providing training to employees is one of his largest priorities when tasked with improving morale; increasing skills to empower.

Epjeremy_donovanisode Highlights:

  • How to “stack the deck” in your favor when introducing new policy
  • When to ask “Are We A Fit for You?”
  • The process for creating an email template
  • Tips for effective emails
  • Common requests of sales staff during employee survey
  • What skill Jeremey believes is invaluable
  • Jeremey’s biggest tip for increasing prospecting

Resources: Gerson Lehrman Group Connect with Jeremey on LinkedIn   Marylou: Raising the Performance and Happiness of Your Sales Team: Jeremy Donovan. I’m very happy for you all to meet Jeremy Donovan. He is the co-author of our new book Predictable Prospecting that’s coming out in August 2016. Jeremy is a gem. He’s one of those guys who is always optimistic, always willing to try something new, always ready to receive instruction and put it into execution. He’s like the perfect client. He wants you and your team to be happy while doubling sales. He helps companies achieve both at the same time. He started out as an electrical engineer but he quickly transitioned into roles like his current role as the Head of Sales Strategy at Gerson Lehrman Group Group, GLG. He’s also a very accomplished author and has written a number of different books, some under pseudonyms so you have to kind of look for them. One of my favorites was Strategic Storytelling which got me along the framework that I developed for my clients called Compel with Content which teaches how to write emails that are actionable in nature and get people to move and advance those opportunities. His call though is to make prospecting more personal and effective to the teams he works with while also making their job easier. He’s a master at leveraging people, process, and technology in order to achieve that end goal of predictable revenue that’s consistent so that if you want to scale your organization you can do so. In this podcast, Jeremy reveals tips on rolling out a new policy smoothly, how to write effective emails that actually get responses, common issues and requests among sales teams, and finally his biggest tip ever, to increase your prospecting. Welcome everybody, today I’m here with Jeremy Donovan. Jeremy and I go back not very long but we’ve been working together on a project called Predictable Prospecting. I’ve asked him to come on the show today because I really would like you all to hear his path and the way he views the outreach engine that we know and love. Especially when it comes to business to business and higher end or complex sales. I’ve asked him to join us today and we’re going to start by Jeremy giving us a background of how you progress to where you are now and what actually you’re in charge of and then we’ll talk a little bit about the types of programs that you’ve implemented and what your finding is a success and what’s failing and how you go about testing and all that good stuff. Jeremy: Sure. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I imagine I have one of the more non-traditional backgrounds of the sales operations leaders that you’ve talked to. I actually started my career with a dream that I would be an engineer for the rest of my life, an electrical engineer actually. I pursued the dream for all the year and a half before I became an analyst working for an information technology research company called Gartner. Then, as engineering led to business, I moved into the different roles in product development, product strategy, and ultimately into corporate marketing and then over into sales leadership roles and sales operations roles. Now, many many months removed from being a semiconductor engineer, I’m the Head of Sales Strategy at a decent sized company although private called Gerson Lehrman Group called GLG and we helped connect business professionals with experts that give them guidance on strategies and decisions that they need to make. Big change for me but I think part of what’s in there is both of the fields that I’ve touched on recently, marketing as well, sales operations, are fields that have become increasingly technical and increasingly scientific as years have progressed. I think that’s why I find myself here and that’s why I find myself intellectually stimulated and challenged to do interesting work in the field. Marylou: Let’s go into those challenges as a sales strategist. What is the day in the life of Jeremy? Jeremy: Lots of different pieces. If you think about sales strategy or sales operations, there’s lots of elements to it. Obviously, one is processes that improve sales productivity. Then, there’s analytics, there’s compensation and territory and on and on and on; there’s lots and lots of different pieces. For the last couple of months, I’ve been very heavily focused on implementing more robust outbound prospecting programs. I think overall just trying to improve sales productivity. In fact, I’m very proud of this but my CEO called me into his office a few weeks ago and handed me a new badge. I was wondering why he handed it to me and he said take a look at the back. At the back, he had written my goals for the year which amount to double the sales productivity of the organization while making the sales business development person much, much happier. It’s both a quantitative goal as well as something that’s a bit more qualitative although we do measure happiness of our employees so I guess they’re both measurable. Marylou: For the doubling sales growth, obviously you have a great background in how to do that with the sales process. What are the types of things that you’ve started to implement or have in place now with that trajectory of doubling the sales growth? Jeremy: I think there’s two things. One, obviously, is the more sales capacity you have the more sales professionals you have. Assuming you’ve got a good product and assuming the products is resonating in the market, the faster you’re going to grow. That’s definitely one number that I always pull. It’s a lever that I learned when I was at Gartner even though I was not directly involved in the beginning of it. Gartner grew its sales capacity from 2004 I think it was maybe 650 professionals to well over 2,000 when I left a couple of years ago. With the leadership of a great CEO and the leadership of a great Head of Sales. I’ve done the same thing, tried to replicate. What I’ve done is I’ve moved from company to company so that’s one piece of it. The other piece I think was all about process and discipline. If you walk into most B2B sales organizations, unless they’ve had a really rich sales culture, very process centric culture, they tend to be a group of incredibly talented, highly entrepreneurial sales people who I found are actually hungry for a little bit more process and discipline, not to be told what to do everyday obviously and every hour of everyday but tricks and techniques that help them become more productive. I think this is stuff that you and I have been talking about for the past year or year and a half that we’ve known each other has really been instrumental to the success of the organizations that I’ve worked in. Marylou: It’s interesting. I had a conversation with a colleague this morning about the very topic of very seasoned sales professionals. They like their own rhythms, they don’t necessarily want to conform to a process. It’s interesting though because once you start putting a process in and they see the habitual success because you’re consistent and you’re constantly improving which I know you’re a big fan of, that eventually they might say yes to having some of their accounts go through the engine. You’re validating that by saying that you think the reps are really looking for some process, maybe like you said not taking over their entire workflow. Have you discovered that in your current job that you’re able to convince more people that it’s not a curse to have a process in place? Jeremy: Yes, definitely. You got at something that’s really fundamental that so much of trying to improve sales productivity in any organization is all about change management. It’s the exact same change management that’s around any initiative, any strategy initiative whether it’s in sales or elsewhere. There’s a number of techniques I learned from a series of great bosses that I had at Gartner. What does not work is to come in with a radical new process and just ask everybody or expect everybody to march in line with that. That’s bound to fail and that’s bound to lead to very short tenure as a sales leader. The much, much better way is a technique or an approach that I learned from one of my bosses. He used to call it stacking the deck. The way to stack the deck is let’s say you have a great new idea, process, program or whatever happens to be, go stack the deck by finding your best salesperson or sales team on a very small scale. We’re talking maybe one to a maximum of one team of a sales manager and their six to eight which is the average sales people. Take your very best team or your very, very best sales person and work closely with them in order to test out the process. You and I share a philosophy which is there’s no right answer for every situation, no one size fits all answer for every situation that every single company even if they’re in the same geography, industry, every single company has some variation in what’s going to work for them as a function, who their customers are as a function of what their culture is like. If I step into an organization, a big part of my partnering with a successful salesperson or sales team is they have the rhythm of the organization and they have a gut sense for what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. That partnership I’ve always found is incredibly instrumental and my approach coming in to the company I’m working for now is partnered with a great sales team, prove success at that scale, add another couple of teams, and now deploy them more broadly across the organization. It’s not like that takes forever, that’s been about a four month or so process but you have to make sure that you rack up those quick wins and you really nurture those allies along the way because those successful people are a big part of convincing others. I’ll just add one last thing which I very much view myself as a service professional more than anything else which is I am there in the service of salespeople to help them become more productive. If the things I’m doing don’t make their lives better, easier, then I’m doing the wrong thing. Marylou: You mentioned that a four month process, now you have obviously extensive background in spotting the—even though everyone is unique—few 80-20 type things that you can start implementing right away. How long does it typically take you when you go into an organization that you’re just starting out to assess the landscape and then put together a plan on average? Jeremy: I’ve gotten faster. Part of it is the experience but I think part of it is expectations of the situations I step into. It used to be that new leaders—they used to say I have a 90 day plan or your first 100 days, whatever it happened to be. I think that the 90 day and the 100 day plan is worthwhile to have one but my feeling is I’ve got 30 days to try to figure things out. When I step into a new role, as I progress through Gartner where I used to work, in my sixteen years there I moved roles every couple of years, sometimes as short as a year to eighteen months. My process was basically step into the new job, in the first 30 days I’m in listening mode, asking and listening mode. I go and I figure out who the people with the knowledge inside the organization are and I interview them. When I say interview, it’s really having conversations with them in a very open ended way to understand both what’s working and what’s not working, what’s been tried before so I don’t repeat the failures of the past. And then, I think very importantly, in fact critically, I spend a significant amount of time in that first 30 days also talking to customers and prospects. That’s something that I did when I came into this organization, did the interviews or discussions with our internal folks, and then spent a lot of time doing interviews with customers and prospects. I’m a big fan of just qualitative interviews but every once in awhile I’ll do a quantitative survey. I think so many people make the mistake of jumping into a quantitative survey too early. Once I had a good sense qualitatively of what’s going on in order to justify certain decisions, I needed to do some survey work as well. I think that short answer to your question is you got 30 days to build a plan then start executing to rack up some quick wins. Marylou: Let’s pretend that you’ve got the 30 days under your belt, at the same time you’re interviewing and I think that’s a great idea to get that holistic view. What I like to do is also if the company is large enough, we interview the product management team, customer service, people who touch the customer and also people who are involved with prospects of any shape or form. If we can get to the actual prospect like you did, that’s great, and the clients as well. When you take that information, you have now a process in mind. What’s the next step that you’ll take? Are tools involved, do you have to go down that path at all, or are you just whatever you get you can work with. Jeremy: Sometimes tools are involved. I definitely think of any change, any initiative in the very classic framework way of people process and technology. We talked a lot about people so far, what’s been done in the past, by whom, the prospects and customers. The process piece we touched on. Technology wise, I think technology is important. I was reading something recently, I can’t remember which book, it might have even been in Trish Bertuzzi’s Outstanding Sales Development Playbook that just came out. It was basically talking about the fact that good tools are ones that actually make salespeople more productive. It sounds so basic but there’s just so much out there right now. I’m getting called multiple times a week, sometimes every day or sent an email by somebody who’s selling some new technology that supposedly will increase the productivity of the sales force. Maybe some of them will, most of them won’t. The key is to find the tools that you work with that you find effective. For me, I really do find most sales people grumble about Sales Force but I find Sales Force to be quite effective. I’ve seen Sales Force, I’ve seen Oracle. Thus far for me, Sales Force is a much easier tool. I think it’s the right thing for a mid to large company. If you’re a smaller company, there’s plenty of other great CRMs out there like Zoho and Infusion Soft and things like that. I think CRM is important. The other thing I found rather important, especially in the contacts and outbound prospecting, is it used to be called Sales Loft Cadence and now it’s just Sales Loft. It’s an outbound workflow management tool for salespeople to use that just helps them keep track of their activity. I think insidesales.com has some great stats on this. It’s pretty widely reported that most salespeople give up after one or two touches. You just have one or two touches, the odds that you’re going to actually get any kind of connection with the prospect or close to zero if you have a 20% connect rate on a dial to reach a person, you got to call five times to get through one time to them. I try to build cadences that have at least five calls to them. Most of the cadences I built tend to have two or three maximum emails, I just don’t want people to feel spammed. A tool like Sales Loft, and there’s other ones out in the market that do similar things, just helps sales professionals to be consistent in their outreach without having to track it on paper or in Excel spreadsheets or whatever, they get to put their brains into developing real content account based or contact based marketing if you will to reach out to individuals rather than having to spend their time managing too much of the process. Marylou: Let’s talk a little bit about the cadences. You mentioned that you’re blending the telephone in with email. What have your discoveries been in terms of email? There’s a lot of discussion around batch email where you’re essentially taking data from a database, you’re not personalizing those emails and you’re sending them out to prospects versus a highly personalized email where it’s almost a one off and then there’s something int middle where you are creating a template but you’re still doing research, you’re still trying to figure out something of value for that particular person with whom you’re going to be corresponding. You do have a template that allows you to make sure you’re covering all the points of the conversation to allow the prospect to say you know what, this is something that might be interesting for me. It’s worthy of having a conversation. Where are you on that spectrum? Jeremy: Yeah. It really is a spectrum. I think there’s as you said, there is the generic mass personalized email and maybe you get Dear first name, or whatever where the computer does all the work effectively. And then, there’s the other end of the spectrum which is every email handcrafted, every word of every email. I’m kind of in the middle but definitely have a bias towards personalization. I just think of all the emails that I get and the ones that look like spam, it looks like spam. The ones where it looks the individual took—even if you managed to figure out who I am, I’m much more likely to get a response especially if they made reference to some shared connection we have, even if it’s a hobby. But certainly if it’s a professional connection or someone who’s researched my company and knows what I’m doing, I have an extremely detailed LinkedIn profile. There’s almost no excuse for someone to not be able to reference something in my profile when they reach out to me. My middle ground is basically I like to start out with a template and the template has the critical language and the critical objective that’s in there but I encourage the sales professionals that I work with to highly customize it. If it means that they need to blow the whole thing away, so be it. What they tend to do is they tend to put some very personalized text at least at the top of the email which I think is important. I actually think it’s a nice touch to put personalized text at the bottom so that you show them that you know them multiple times. I think once in the beginning and once in the end is great, but even if it’s just once in the beginning I think that’s pretty effective. In fact, just today about 20 minutes before our call, I got an email from one of our sales reps who we just on Friday a couple of days ago enabled with this outbound prospecting system. He got a meeting via email. I was reading through the email that he used and he used most of our template that we had set him up with but he had that little personal touch just at the beginning and that was enough to get him a meeting. Marylou: But there also is a lot that goes into the template piece that I don’t want our listeners to think, “Oh, we can just put something out there,” and then have them customized. In the body of the email, if people do not know you, there still has to be some reason why they’re going to have a meeting. Obviously, you set your folks up with some deep benefit statements or some reason for them to want to engage. Jeremy: Yeah, there’s a lot of different formats. One way I like to think about it, particularly because we sell in the B2B space and we’re usually selling to a VP or a Director in particular functions. We’re selling an information service I think is the best way to describe it, a subscription based information service. In those particular situations, you often have one of two main types of templates that can hook people. The first one is if you’re selling into an organization that you’re already doing business with, maybe a relationship with one person or two or five or ten, whatever, and you want to develop a relationship with a new person. It’s incredibly powerful to just say hey, look, we’re working with Jane over in XYZ division, I’d love to spend a few minutes just describing how we’re working with her and figure out whether what we do might be a fit for you. I love the terminology that you gave me which is that a lot of these initial conversations are AWAF—are we a fit? I think that’s a really soft, nice way in. We get a lot of meetings with that approach inside of existing clients. If it’s not an existing clients, I think it’s the other thing that you mentioned which is there needs to be something powerful and compelling, it can’t just be about here’s what my—I see a lot of these emails which say here’s what my company does. It’s just all solution. I think some of the more powerful emails, outbound prospecting emails, are set up in a problem solution way which is something to be effective. Many of the customers I work with are working to solve this particular problem. I’d love to be able to discuss how we solve that with you and see if we’re a fit. I think the problem-solution thing is incredibly important especially when you’re prospecting into an organization that you don’t have a relationship with. Marylou: Yes, the whole idea of that big idea which should be a trigger for the reader to say yep, that’s so true, and relate instead of the response you don’t want is the so what response. I know you and I had a discussion about the review process of your emails, you had some really good thoughts about how you go about determining whether an email is ready for primetime, meaning that it could be a template. Tell me some of the things that you do, is it all gut based or is there some wording or the way that the text is placed in the email itself that you look at? Do you have a Jeremy checklist of what you look at before you let an email go to a template stage? Jeremy: Definitely. We’re AB testing constantly. There’s always an A. Sales people come in with ideas about what they want to try or what is or isn’t working for them, and that becomes the B. I try to very rarely say no. Unless I’ve tried something, I can’t know that it’s not better. An example of this in a related example is we recently launched Net Promoters Scorers Surveys which is designed to help with many things. We want to understand how to improve our product but also if someone says Net Promoter Scorers, would you recommend us to a friend or a colleague? If they say they would recommend, then you can go after them for a referral. We started out with even the subject line can have an amazing impact. We started out with one subject line, actually we started out by having a link to the survey in the email and that generated something like 2.5% completion rate which is pretty low. We then capped the same subject line and changed it from a link in the survey to actually just being able to click on what the score was. It was just one click, you didn’t have to fill anything out. That doubled the survey response rate to just over 5%. Then, we changed the subject line and that doubled it again to between 10% and 11%. Little changes even to subject lines can have a huge impact. The other things I think that are important technically are to write emails as if you’re writing them to a friend or a colleague. That’s all kinds of little things, it’s what you put in the subject line. We used to have first name in the subject line but we stopped doing that because people identify that as spam right away. It’s not something—if I sent you an email, I wouldn’t say “Marylou,” I would just put the subject in the subject. My big test is whether it’s a conversational sort of thing that you would write to a friend or a colleague. The body of the email. You see these marketing emails that say we this, and we that but the same thing. If I were writing an email to you, I wouldn’t use the royal we, I would say I. I think that’s a big part of it. Again if I were writing an email to you, I wouldn’t use any HTML formatting, very limited if not not existent use of bold or different fonts or caps or colors. The more plain text the email is, the better. The shorter the better. All these things just very practically. My governing principle is it doesn’t go out if it doesn’t feel authentic and conversational as if I were sending it to one person that I cared about. Marylou: I use kind of rule it’s as if I’m sending it from my cellphone. You know you’re going to be briefer, you’re going to be to the point, you’re not going to be worried about graphics per se. You have a point that you want to get across that or you want to be able to leave word with someone. That’s essentially my rule other than if it’s really, really cold and I don’t know the person, then I’m trying to think about the things that would matter to them. It’s always about what’s in it for them. We say that all the time that you really need to think about that because as Jeremy said it’s not we, it’s not us, it’s them, it’s you, it’s the person that you’re trying to have this conversation with in order to be able to share with them something of value. Jeremy: Absolutely. I think that perspective of value is so important. Many, many sales experts have said this which is—it’s not that you’re selling something to somebody, it’s that you’re giving them the opportunity to buy. You’re giving them the opportunity to buy if it’s a fit. If it’s not a fit, especially companies that thrive on renewable revenue which is more and more companies these days, acquiring a customer who’s going to non-renew is not worth it. Certainly acquiring a customer who’s going to non-renew and then become a detractor can have a negative view of your service and post negative reviews or tell their friends that’s not worth it. You really only want customers who are going to get value from you. Marylou: That’s one aspect of your role. You mentioned early on that there’s on the back of your badge it says that you’re to make your team happy. I’m very curious. Is there a process for that, or how do you measure happiness in the organization? Jeremy: Like many organizations do, we do an annual employee survey, pulse check if you will. That’s run by our HR and talent development folks. The good thing about the survey is in a way it tells me precisely what I need to do and the qualitative feedback. What people seem to want is a few things. The one thing that everybody asks for, that all sales professionals ask for, is of course more money. You have a cost of sales to maintain, a gross margin, it’s not like you can just wave a magic wand and pay everybody more money. I’d love to do that but obviously there’s practicalities. I think what you can do is give people much more control over their earning power. Helping people with tools and process that will help them earn more I think is an empowering piece to make them happy. I think my two goals are very consistent. The other things I think that make sales people happier are in particular training. That comes directly out of the feedback as well. One of the things I’ve been focused on is partnering with our HR folks, our training folks in order to bring better training into the organization or at least more training in the organization. I think that’s another big lever of happiness. Between money which is hard to control and training which is relatively easy to control although effortful, I think I can hopefully accomplish the goals. Marylou: When they say training, they’re not looking for only sales skills, it’s also product? Jeremy: I think sales training or training for salespeople is a better way to put it, is a pretty comprehensive thing. There are definitely sales skills and things like negotiation and objection handling come up every survey, everywhere I’ve ever been as being incredibly important things. There definitely is a hunger at all times for more understanding of the product or things related to the company in the value proposition. I think there’s always a hunger for more competitive insight so that they can understand how to position our products relative to the competition. What’s real is not. I think you need to be honest with sales people to tell them where the competition is stronger and where they’re not stronger so that they don’t get blindsided when they go into conversations with prospects. And then I think more broadly, sales people are developing leaders like everybody else is. I’m a big fan of the Four C framework; Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking. If there’s ways to bring those types of skills to salespeople, I think that’s key and I would double click amongst those things on the communication piece because it’s directly relevant to sales people’s jobs. One area they ask for is verbal communications. They all want to become better listeners and speakers and questions. Something that they don’t bring up as much but I think is actually quite valuable is technical writing, particularly technical writing in the context of writing emails. I think that’s an art that’s under invested in and incredibly important. Marylou: It’s something that’s not ubiquitous out there, even in training. There’s a lot of writing courses that are available through the internet but not as it relates to the sales message and how to encapsulate that inner persuasive piece of communication. Jeremy: Yes, there is not a lot out there. It’s practice, right? You need to get feedback. I think so often nobody really gets feedback on their writing anymore. In fact, I’ve had people interview for positions, we now actually have our candidates draft a prospecting email to test out what it’s going to look like. I think that’s an incredibly important screen. You have people who have four year degrees from decent colleges, even liberal arts disciplines, whose writing is just absolutely terrible. If I have the choice of hiring somebody who can write and who can’t write, there’s enough people who can write that I can weed out the ones who can’t. I think it’s an incredibly valuable skill and it’s something that’s becoming more and more differentiated skill because from what I can tell at least, it seems like a smaller and smaller percentage of the candidates that I see are able to write something even when they have time that’s grammatically correct and free of typos and spelling errors. Marylou: As we go through the rest of 2016 now, what are some of the things that you’re hoping to achieve and where do you see that you’re going to be spending more of your time versus less with all the things you’ve shared with us? Jeremy: There’s a few key areas. I’m certainly going to be focused on accelerating our outbound prospecting activity. Even four months is just the tip of the iceberg of that transformation. That’s going to stay at the top of my list. As I mentioned, training will also stay really, really high at the top of my list. Sales compensation is another one that’s very high on the list. The last one which I didn’t mention is just looking at not just the point of getting the meeting and qualifying a prospect but what happens is you manage opportunities after you get that initial meeting. I think that’s another key piece where process can become very helpful. I think it’s less intensive process especially in the B2B space for opportunity management but I think there’s still some process there. It’s worth mentioning that I don’t do any of this alone, I couldn’t do all that alone. I’ve got a great team that I work with both directly and indirectly that help to accomplish these initiatives. Marylou: I was going to say that’s a lot on your plate. Usually, most of the folks who are outbound or working on the outreach side of life which can encompass inbound as well as we talk about, that’s quite a bit right there on the plate. Especially it sounds like you’re going to be in testing mode for quite some time with the email engine. Everything else you’ve got going on, that’s quite a bit. It’s good that you have a team. Jeremy: If you’re one or two, I think getting that outbound prospecting engine going is important. I would say the two most important things I’ve learned doing this with regards to outbound prospecting, the first one is calendar blocking. There’s so much resistance to sales people. They know it’s good for them but they just don’t want to do it. I think you’d need to block your calendar for outbound prospecting. It has to become a habit. I think a minimum block is 90 minutes. If you go under 90 minutes, you’re just not going to get the momentum you need and really specialize. I might do a 90 minute block for email and then a separate 90 minute block for calls so I’m not going back and forth. Do those blocks, respect them, do them everyday, try to do them at the same time to maintain consistency, have a rhythm to it. The other side, two things. One was the calendar block. The second most important thing is the power of the phone call. Thus far, we talk a lot about optimizing email but far in a way we get more meetings and more sales ultimately as the result of dialing. You’ll get an email response here and there, I’d say we probably get at least 80% of our meetings via phone calls. Don’t get lazy, don’t just rely on email, email is becoming less and less effective no matter how well you optimize it. The phone is the key to success. Marylou: Right, and that was one of the unfortunate results of people who read Predictable Revenue is that they thought the email engine would replace the need to have the conversation via telephone. I like what you’ve done though in that you’ve warmed up that chill a little bit with the email engine and then you placed the calls embedded in the sequence but further in, is that correct? Jeremy: Yeah. We’ve had lots of tests and lots of arguments all the time about if you call first, email first. What we’ve actually settled on is the cadence begins with an email in the morning and then a call in the afternoon that falls on the email. We do that kind of one two punch of email then call. The call often says something like, “I don’t know if you saw the email I sent you earlier today,” sometimes they’ve seen it, sometimes they haven’t. Either way, that’s okay. I think that one two punch works really, really well. As we talked about earlier, there’s no one right answer all the time. It could be if you talked to me six months from now, that’s not working anymore. I think the one thing that mathematically that’s going to work is the email warms up the chill as you said and then you got to know what your connect rate is. If your connect to a live human being rate is 20% then you got to have at least five calls. If your connect to a human being rate is 10%, then you got to do at least ten calls. That’s important. I’ll just add in case people are worried. You might be doing all those calls but you’re not leaving voice mails all the time. We only leave one voice mail at the beginning, one voice mail at the end. All the middle calls are all just calls, no voicemail. Marylou: Yeah, what we call dials, they’re just dials. Jeremy: You can also spread them out. It’s not like you’re going to call them five times in a week, you can spread that out over two weeks, three weeks a month, six months, whatever is appropriate for your prospects. Marylou: Right, whatever the sequence is. The other thing that we’ve discovered is this block time that you spoke about is when you’re first starting out, you don’t really know what time of day your particular buyer is going to be sitting in that office. You may have a little roving target for a while of block time. As an example, we had a client who did block time from 8:00AM to 10:00AM and we did a test where he moved it to 7:00AM to 9:00AM. They had their connect ratio go up quite significantly. Not only do you want to put things in blocks, there’s a lot of studies about obviously on the phone side, you get better and better the more dials you do. The more conversations you have, you just get better. Don’t think that you can break that up because it doesn’t work that way. The other thing is initially, you may need to rove the time a bit so that you can see what is best for the particular buyer who you’re calling on. If you have two different buyers, they may have two different block times that you’re going to be working on. That’s another thing to think about as you’re setting up these calling programs. They’re very important. The other thing I want for you to hear this when Jeremy said is that emails went out in the morning and then a phone call was placed in the afternoon. That’s called intra-day, within the same day there were two touches. A lot of you guys like to spread out the touches but obviously there are some nuances that you’ll want to test. Intra-day is not a bad thing. Jeremy: Yeah, really important. Even multiple calls in the day. We have some cadences that have a morning call and an afternoon call. You just do whatever you can do to try to get people. Marylou: Right, because you have the bullseye of influencers and you may not target the actual buyer in your calling program, you may target around the buyer if you have that type of sequence. It’s perfectly fine to call in and around the buyer with an intra-day calling. I have a lot of clients who are doing that as well. Jeremy: Yep. Marylou: Okay, Jeremy, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to add for our listeners who are thinking wow? Jeremy: It was a lot of information. I guess I’ll restate that key thing that I just said which is make sure you block time on your calendar every day consistently for prospecting. Make sure you’re not afraid to use the phone because that’s going to be your best tool for getting the prospects. If you take nothing else away from the conversation we just had, that’s what you got to take away, that’s the key. Marylou: Yeah, the phone is still working. I always tell people that one phone call is fifteen emails. If you look at that math, you’re going to be spending less time if you can reach the person. You’re not always going to be able to do that, so your emails are your backup, they’re your backup team to be able to get the message to warm up that chill, to be able to give them some value that they can download, look at, view, listen to, whatever it is until you can get a hold of them and continue that conversation. Thank you so much, Jeremy, really appreciate your time. Jeremy: Thank you, bye. Marylou: Bye.