Ep
isode 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.