Marylou:    Alicia Anderson is a master in the art of prospecting. She’s currently a B2B sales coach and a strategist working with Aaron Ross at Predictable Revenue and spends her time implementing the process that regularly doubles and triples sales for her clients.    Alicia started working with us in 2011 when we co-authored the book Predictable Revenue which is still for sale on Amazon and still a bible that a lot of startups and small to medium businesses as well as larger companies use when they’re thinking about implementing an outbound prospecting system. For Alicia, reading the book prompted her then jumping to prospecting world from a very different place, fashion. In this podcast, Alicia reveals how she jumped from the world of fashion to become an expert in prospecting. The tip she has for us to fast track prospecting efforts and what variables go into successfully finding prospects. She also dives a little bit into lists which is interesting because lists make or break a truly predictable outbound prospecting system Alicia an account strategist and lead coach for Predictable Revenue which is a company now located in Vancouver, Canada. The company was founded by my former author, co-author Aaron Ross and he is working with the team up there now. They’ve put together a really great suite of products all the way at one end a software sort of do it yourself thing to a coaching service to an outsourcing. I’ve ask Alicia on the show today to help us understand some of the different ways that they serve clients. If you’re thinking about needing to either supplement your prospecting team or you’re not sure if you want to make that investment of hiring internal STRs or business developers, what Alicia does may be a viable alternative for you. I’ll start conversation with her so she can help guide you as to how to get started doing prospecting with the goal of creating Predictable Revenue. So Alicia thank you so much for joining today. Alicia:    Hi Marylou, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Marylou:    Great. So as some folks may know, Alicia, Aaron and I go back pretty far, I guess. We’ve been known each other for a while now. Alicia’s had a number of different roles but she is what I consider a master in the prospecting side from starting conversations with people we don’t know and taking it all the way through to qualified op. I don’t know if you’re new position gets you all the way to close one and close loss, which you can elaborate on that. Tell us about your journey and how you got started in this particular area with the funnel, the top of funnel and where that’s taken you. Alicia:    Sure. I’d love to. My background actually before you and I met was not in sales at all. I actually worked in fashion. My career prior to this to get me into sales and prospecting specifically was completely different, vertical different business. I was back of house, I had no interest in sales whatsoever. I actually stumbled upon Aaron through a friend of mine who was working with him and she was going to go on a maternity leave for a little while. She asked if I would fill in for her. I was kind of like oh I kind of thought of it as a temporary thing. She’s like he just ask that you read his new book to be published, Predictable Revenues. I was like, okay I’m reading a sales book, I was like, that’s the last thing. The funny thing was of course I did. I started to read it once I started to work with him. I was like wow, and I had the opportunity to meet you, and I was like Marylou’s amazing, and I was like this book is incredible. You guys really transformed the way I perceived sales and what was possible because my context for it was always very manipulative, just not very positive exchange between people. With the book, it was really about communication and finding out if there is, for me that’s how I read it. It’s really about your communication skills and be able to determine if there’s a fit first before you launch into a sales conversation. I was like, to me it’s revolutionary. I was like this is brilliant. It was perfectly aligned with where I was in my life. I was studying communication so I just really jumped into it feet first and it just happened to be that we have just signed up with a new client with Predictable Revenue who wanted us for them. I became the prospector that Aaron started to train from start to finish. We didn’t have an outsourced service at that time but I just became that so there was a need and we filled it. I learned a lot cause it was a challenging client so it’s always good to get your feet wet with someone that is not such a clear path in terms of being able to generate opportunities. You have to test a lot and try a lot of different variations but it was a great experience. From there, I just basically started to get coached from both you and Aaron. Eventually, coached along the side of him in terms of the different clients we’re bringing on Predictable Revenue. That’s really how I got into prospecting. I love it. I actually love that I learned the skill set first and I’m able now to coach the companies who are looking to either try and pilot their own prospecting program and or looking for us to actually help them come in and do it for them for a little bit so we can prove out the strategy in order to convert their ideal prospects into qualified opportunities. And then when they’re ready to hire their own prospecting team, we can actually help make that an easier transition for them. Marylou:    What’s interesting is when the book was written, Predictable Revenue, this is how things evolved. When the book was written, both Aaron and I really talked about should we focus on getting people in house and having the strategies set for an in house team. And then, and only then, once you understand your sales message, your value proposition, etcetera, etcetera, would you outsource. But what I’m hearing from you now, and it’s a wonderful thing that you could go either way. Is that correct? Alicia:    Yes. Absolutely. A lot of times, clients come to us and may think that they have an idea of what the strategy should be. They obviously know more than us because we’ve had experience with lots companies but we’re not experts in every single vertical. We actually will start to put together, we do a nail a niche exercise to make sure that we’re on the right path. We have a messaging workshop that I’m actually creating right now. We sort of figured out a path to start testing. We can figure out pretty quickly if their initial ideas are spot on. If not, if we need to adapt them, cause there are so many variables in order to prospect successfully. It could be you’re targeting the wrong ideal buyers, it could be your messaging is slightly off, it could be your lists. There’s so many things to get correct. There’s lots of room for variation but we’re able to sort it out pretty quickly. I would say, somewhere between three to six months is usually what our engagements look like for our prospecting. Marylou:    Yeah and one of the things I wanted to point out to the audience is that because Alicia’s group has under their belt combined years of experience working with different verticals. You probably have different cadences? One of the questions that comes up all the time is how should I sequence? How do I blend the phone in? What does my cadence look like? I’m sure because you can dig deep into all of the breadth of the accounts you’ve worked with, you can come up with at least a general baseline of, look, we’re going to go in with these types of cadences, these type of sequence, we’re going to blend this with email and phone this way. Because you could fast track that, I’m sure your clients get up and running a heck of alot faster than if we do an internal model where we’re trying to sort of blend what they have technology wise, that’s another issue. In your experience now, you said three to six months. What can someone expect when they engage with you on from an outsourced perspective? What does the day in the life look like when you start engaging? Alicia:    Sure. We basically start off with a nail a niche workshop. We have a series of meetings actually to get everything set up. We’ll start with that initial identifying the segments of businesses that you want to go after ideally where you can have the most success with prospecting. We’ll sort of understand those buyer personas and then work through messaging that would be compelling for them and actually design the content strategy from there. That way at the same time, for prospecting, we don’t prospect the same domain that are clients use for their regular email service. We actually set up an alternative domain so that we can prospect from there just because we don’t want create any issues if there is any spam issues that come up. Google is, I don’t know you’re experienced but, because we use an automation tool, we’re sending usually about 500 emails a week. We just don’t want to run into any issues where we would compromise your regular domain. We also start to take care of all that in the back end so that within the first couple weeks, we’d actually be ready to start sending your first campaigns on your behalf. We say within the first six weeks we’re basically testing the messaging and we’ve started to see a couple of handoffs usually during that time. And by the sixth week, that account will be fully ramped and you’re going to start to see ten handoffs per month. Then, we just continue at that point after six weeks, we can actually start to launch the different campaign with another vertical if you like. There’s lots of testing and refinement to be done but that’s essentially the process. For us, how we know a campaign is working is basically our guideline is the positive reply rate should be between 3% and 5% and handoff rate of at least 0.5% or higher. Marylou:    Okay. Can you help the audience understand what a handoff? How you describe that? Because in the book Predictable Revenue, there was something called a Three Fifteen Process where we did an are we a fit, an AWAF call, for fifteen minutes. Then, we did a one hour scoping call and then a two hour discovery call. Now, that’s an in house model with a more complex type of sale. Can you describe how that has morphed into your hand off process? Alicia:    Sure. This is a little bit different. The handoff that we’re talking about is because we’re solely creating these conversations over email, our prospect team, our accounts strategists don’t get on the phone and speak on behalf of our clients. We handoff a little bit earlier than the process in the book. A handoff, how we define it is someone who raises their hand and basically says, “Yes, I’m interested,” in a meeting. And then we introduce either with some companies and account executives, other times it’s going to be the CEO directly. It depends on how early they are in terms of testing that program. We’ll basically say, “Okay, perfect. I’m going to loop you into this person, who’s your best resource for initial conversation?” And then they determine at that point, once they have a meeting, if that is a true opportunity or not and all of that data is really important to us especially at the beginning of a campaign because we know how to modify the content after we learn. Yes, this was spot on exactly what we want to be reaching out to and or actually this was a smaller deal than who we’re looking for. This wasn’t quite the right buyer so how do we then adapt our content to make sure that we’re getting to the right people. It’s all great information early on. Marylou:    Go ahead. Alicia:    Ideally, once we have that process optimized then we will be having conversations with those ideal buyers and creating qualified opportunities. Marylou:    That’s perfect. Let’s talk the sales stack which is the way people describe the tools that one would need from an outsource perspective. Tell us, if I was a company, I came to you and I wanted to start up. It doesn’t even have to be a start up, it could be I work with larger companies and they may decide we’re going to try outbound prospecting for a particular line of business manager. We have tools in place but by no means do we have the elaborate sales stack that I’ve been learning about with a lot of the SAAS spokes. At a minimum, what would I need in order to be able to engage in an outsource model? What tools would I need to have? And you don’t have to give me names of tools but like the role of the tool. Alicia:    Okay. With Predictable Revenue specifically, you actually don’t need anything. We sort of do it all for you. But ideally, you’d have some sort of list source. There’s also different ways to build lists. When you find out what your ideal customer profile looks like, you can actually build lists customized where you’re identifying the companies and then using an outsource service to actually build up those listed names and ideal people, or you can actually buy lists from lists services. Part of Predictable Revenue, we have agreements with like 30 different lists building services. We invest heavily in that. There’s lots of different ways to build lists. Whether you want to pull them based off the different technologies companies are using, or just general lists, we have the capabilities. A lot of our clients really love that feature because list building is a pain in the butt. We’re able to take that off of their shoulders and actually build lists for them. In terms of our software, software pretty much handles all of the automations so it really simplifies the process for whoever is doing the prospecting. They can basically spend half an hour every morning managing their inbox. The system is basically taking care of everything on the back end. The system will send out a hundreds initials everyday including the follow ups to any emails that are already in the sequence. At a max, I think we can send out 500 emails per day including follow ups. That’s what Google allows. That’s essentially how our process works. If you weren’t using Predictable Revenue, you would want to use some sort of automation tool. There’s lots of apps out there that can manage your different templates as well as the metrics that go along with your sending. There’s lots of different variables out there for you. Marylou:    Okay. One of the things I did hear was that this is primarily an email engine that you’re basically getting people to the point where they’re raising their hand, that they’re interested in having conversations. Their level of awareness may be somewhere in the this sound interesting versus I’ve got a real problem so that I do need someone to talk to about that. Tell us with respect to Google, is this running through Gmail or when you say Google, do you mean Gmail type of engine? Alicia:    Yes. We do use Google in terms of setting up. We setup the domain for you and then we actually create a Google account, a Google email account. That’s what we’re using primarily to send out our campaigns. Right now we’re actually researching other alternatives to just using Google, but we haven’t actually created what those alternates may be. We do, as you have mentioned, we’ve created a calling feature within the software and we’re actually piloting it now. It’s not available for general but it will be, I imagine, in the next few months, available. We’re looking to integrate phone and email touches specifically for our clients, for the product site. We’re talking about internally how we can do that on behalf for clients. I thinks we just would do it for fewer clients than say our full workload but ensuring that we’re set up successfully to have those initial are we a fit conversations. Marylou:    Right. It’s funny because I was just teaching a workshop yesterday. The phone is this mysterious thing to a lot of people but blending it in with the email engine is really the key to bump up those response rates, to move that 3% positive reply up further really is putting the phone in place. What that does obviously is reduces the lag and that Predictable Revenue formula that’s on page 42 of the book still applies. You’re trying to reduce the lag in the pipeline in order to be able to generate a consistent scalable stream of sales qualified leads. That’s great, Alicia. Wow. You’re a coach, and tell us about that side of things. I mean when you go into a client, what is your typical scenario of engaging and how much homework do you give? Alicia:    There is so much homework, actually. The beginning of the process is the most, I think, labor intensive. It’s just really educating the client on the methodology and the taught process behind everything and for their initial campaigns. There’s just a lot of work for both us and the clients in the beginning. We get to a point where we actually put the framework in place and they’re starting to send emails and we’re starting to do testing. It will smooth out in terms of the homework but then basically ensuring that they’re taking on the process and implementing the steps. It’s just a process of testing and iteration after that. Every client’s different. I love, actually what I found is my passion in all of this, the training process is actually the content creation. I am really a big believer in customized content. I would say with Predictable Revenue up until now, they’ve been using more of a mass approach in terms of their content. I’m actually excited to work with them and actually create new ways of approaching content because I think Predictable Revenue, thanks to you and Aaron, has been such a success and it’s been called the sales bible of Silicon Valley. As a result, there’s so many people using the methodology. They haven’t necessarily been trained by us. They may not be doing it very well but they are doing it and so as a result, we’re dealing with people just being bombarded sometimes by prospectors. I think it becomes even more important that the content is really relevant and engaging and provides value. That’s really my passion inside of all of this. I love cracking the code on what would that compelling content look like and actually figuring that out so that’s something that I love, and I look forward to with each client. Marylou:     Yeah, that’s great. Again back to this workshop that we just finished, there’s three levels what I call of personalization for emails. One is the highly personalized, then there’s a hybrid where you’re blending in data elements that you’ve captured maybe during previous sales conversations or if you’ve done some mining of the data so that you get some of the social impacts stored that you can reference, and there’s the completely automated leveraging the database kind of email. Obviously, Predictable Revenue came out with the completely leveraged version. Alicia:    Right. Marylou:    Adding in a hybrid is another way especially for the nurture sequences because you’ve had those conversations with the buyers so you’ve collected hopefully something meaningful that you can input them in the right track when they’re going through nurture. But I’m with you. I love persuasive copywriting to the point that I’ve probably enrolled in whatever how many classes I could find on the topic. As you know, I’m the same way, I just think content is amazing and the click throughs and creating the content based on the levels of awareness, there’s just a lot to it that you can get your arms around. I’m happy to hear that you’re focusing on that. I really want the audience to hear. Alicia’s background is not coming from a sales’ background. Well it is, but it’s not specifically prospecting. Through this whole process, she discovered her unique genius, what she loves to do. What’s cool about our area of the pipeline is that there’s so many moving parts that you can really pick a specialty and be really good at it and then apply your knowledge across multiple accounts which it sounds like that you have enable to do so that’s great. Alicia:    Thank you, thank you. Marylou:    Exciting. So what’s in store? How do you see your role evolving at Predictable Revenue? What kinds of things can you help our clients that are listening to this thinking, wow, I never really considered an outsource or I’ve heard horror stories about it. So first, tell us what’s on the horizon for you and then give us an understanding of the ideal account or client that you can serve and serve predictably. Alicia:    Right, okay. Great questions. In terms of what’s on the horizon for me, actually I don’t know, there’s so much opportunity. With any start up, and  Predictable Revenue is very much a startup even though we’ve been around for few years. There’s now a new arm of the business, it’s like everything’s changed. I’m very spiritual so I tend to not really create a plan. I just go with the flow and I have been clueless of what’s happening around me. I’m excited to be there and I love working with clients so this is really that opportunity for me. I don’t worry too much about the future. I know that Predictable Revenue continues to be successful. I had no idea when I first worked with you guys back in, I want to say 2010, 2011, where we would be today. It’s like kind of you just leap and I’m sure in another four years it’s going to be in a completely different place that we kind of anticipated now. I’m just along for the ride and I’m enjoying every minute. I really love coaching and I love to be able to contribute to the account strategy team  with my experience. I guess I just take it day by day. In terms of our ideal clients, ideally we’re going towards the direction where we want to focus on companies who already have STR team in place of maybe two or three sales development wraps. That’s where we can really augment and help accelerate their business and help them scale very quickly. They may have done some initial testing and prospecting and had some success but haven’t really been able to put that machine in place. We are looking to help them with that. Also, that we don’t want to walk away from the smaller companies who are just now looking to sort of pilot the prospecting arm as well. I would say that we’re never going to walk away from that business so we’ll always have a part of our business reserved for those smaller start ups. Those companies where we actually come in, they may not have even a salesperson in place. It’s really like a CEO and maybe one other person. We come in and create a strategy for them, help show them what’s possible through outbound. Pretty much within three to six months, they would start to hire their sales people and their first prospector so that’s sort of like two different tracks I would say that we can help both clients. Marylou:    Yeah. And the first track where you’re talking about the in place STR team, there had been a lot of conversations that I’ve had with folks that say, “Hey, we tried Predictable Revenue and it didn’t work.” That’s always like okay, define didn’t work. First let’s start there so that we get an understanding of what you’ve experienced. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that leveraging the outreach channel or outbound prospecting, whatever you want to call it, has part of the suite of business development that you’re doing whether it’s inbound, whether you’re doing direct mail. This is just one arm, one lever that you can pull. This is still the only channel that you can right down to the penny you can actually measure the success of it. I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to consider using this channel or at least understanding what this channel can do for you from the standpoint of augmenting, supplementing, in some cases replacing your current prospecting and lead generation efforts. Doing it right takes time. Having someone that can hold your hand through that and show you the different ways that you can generate these sales qualified leads is a blessing. I’m excited about your service and I’m excited that you’re going to be taking these folks under your wing and applying the newest technology because let’s face it, Predictable Revenue, the book itself is five years old now. Some of the focus in there, it still works but some of it is very outdated as you just said. One of the key points was the email engine. You can’t get away with just blasting out mass emails, it just doesn’t work. You have to create compelling content which is what Alicia was talking about. But you also, in creating compelling content, have to understand the story structure of an email and how to get people to sort of lean in to their computers and ask the question, “How do they do that?” Or, “Wow, I didn’t know about that.” That’s what Alicia’s specializes in now is changing the psyche of someone with hands on their hips saying, “Show me,” and actually getting them to like hit the reply button. That’s so great. So Alicia, tell us how we can get a hold of you and connect with you to follow what you’re doing. Alicia:    Wonderful. You can absolutely follow me on LinkedIn, you’re welcome to connect with me, or you could email me directly at alicia@carb.io. Marylou:    Okay. So LinkedIn is Alicia Anderson and carb.io email address is alicia@carb.io. Thank you so much for your time, Alicia. It was great catching up with you and I wish all you the best. It’s exciting what you’re doing. Alicia:     Thank you so much for having me today. Marylou:    Okay.