| Book details | |
|---|---|
| Author | Justin Michael & Tony Hughes |
| Release Date | 29 Jun 2021 |
| Pages | 271 |
| Homepage | --- |
| Amazon | https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tech-Powered-Sales-Achieve-Superhuman-Skills/dp/140022652X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 |
| ISBN-10 | 140022652X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1400226528 |
Sep 2021 read.
29 Oct 2022 late notes:
As I dive into AI, with a Sales lens, I'm reminded of this book from last year: Tech-Powered Sales - Achieve Superhuman Sales Skills.
It's the new "Hacking Sales". If you are in B2B Sales, at any level, it's a must-read to:
- understand what best-in-class looks like when leveraging today's SalesTech stack
- envision what Sales could (will) look like as Technology continues to progress
- just plainly stay relevant in the future, as a Sales contributor or Sales leader
Honestly, the book could be half as long, edited better and/or dive more into "how to" (though I understand the authors want to sell their services and keep some of the magic for themselves :) ).
It's also missing on the Sales workflow automation front.
BUT it does articulate 2 critical points that everyone in Sales should know and understand:
- the importance of TQ (Technology Quotient) in addition to IQ & EQ (good news for those who score lower on one of those two, like me!)
- the current benchmark (and what the future benchmark is most likely to be) of high-performing Sales teams when leveraging Technology at its best.
There is A LOT of name-dropping of tools, just like "Hacking Sales" in its time, so it also helps making sense of the SalesTech jungle and get you going in the right direction.
my highlights
Economists use the term zero marginal product (ZMP) to describe when someone adds no value at all.
page xiv
About 70 percent of what sellers do can be automated by technology.
page xiv
According to a 2020 survey by Revenue Collective covering more than three thousand inside salespeople and companies generating more than $26 billion in revenue, 83 percent of inside sales reps fail to hit the target and almost 40 percent last less than six months in their role.2
page xiii
The Harvard Business Review defines technology quotient as: Our ability to assimilate or adapt to technology changes by developing and employing strategies to successfully include technology in our work and life.5
page xvii
Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler,
page 1
Execution is where most things fail.
page 2
An inside sales rep (ISR) is mainly known as an SDR (sales development rep) for inbound and a BDR (business development rep) for outbound.
page 15
Inbound reps sometimes report to marketing because they are qualifying the marketing department’s leads to move them from MQLs to SQLs. Outbound reps usually report to sales because they feed the field reps (AEs) with qualified leads.
page 15
grit, coachability, and adaptability matter most to SDR success. He challenged BANT as a qualification method with GPCT (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline).
page 18
Every category here is the price of doing business—table stakes. If you don’t have the essential stack nailed, you are underinvesting in your team and already being lapped by competitors. Ensure you’re buying all of these. Pricey? The average high-growth startup is spending $1,000 per rep, per month. Ryan Chisholm argues: “We are going to see this number move to $2,000 or even as high as $5,000 per month including VA work.”4
page 22
Data enrichment. Cognism, ZoomInfo/Discover.org, Adapt.io, SalesIntel.io, LeadIQ, Seamless.ai, Lusha, Triggr, RocketReach, Infotelligent, ClearBit, Outboundsales.io, CloudLead.co, UpLead, LeadGenius, Modigie, VA’s, Custom Built scrapers for event apps such as Slack, and so on.
page 22
Intent data. Bombora, TechTarget, Slintel, and 6sense impute which accounts are searching for a key term. Leadfeeder identifies buyer intent data fueled by revealing the behavior of website visitors after seeing the IP of the incoming web visit and fingerprinting it.
page 22
Prospect enrichment and ML-driven personalization suggestions. Nova.ai, Autobound.ai.
page 23
Smart teleprompter and conversation intelligence. Gong.io, Chorus.ai, ExecVision, RingDNA, Jiminny, Wingman, Fireflies.ai.
page 23
Deal management. Dealpoint.io, Dooly, Slack/Troops deal rooms, P6 Risk, Slack/Einstein within Salesforce.
page 24
Win/Loss insights. Trinity Perspectives.
page 24
Live crowdsource intelligence. Guru, Tribyl, and so on.
page 24
Arm your warriors. Inspire customer-obsessed sales “warriors,” driven by the company’s greater mission and vision, who embrace a “human + technology” sales motion . . . vs. . . . compliant sales “soldiers.”
page 26
the sales / marketing tech stack is the endoskeleton of today’s sales team!
page 26
Cropped illustration from https://salessource.com/resources/the-ultimate-absd-tech-stack-infographic/.
page 28
We already did it when working at OutboundWorks. They had outreach sequences with personalization injection, mobile responsive design enabled, that looked so natural and convincing that they were indistinguishable from something written by a human. Sales Ex Machina (hat tip Victor Antonio and James Glenn-Anderson). It passed the Turing test!
page 30
The meta-skill of future salespeople? Maybe you guessed it? Messaging and coding!
page 32
Conversica, an intelligence virtual assistant that leverages AI to process all your inbound leads,
page 32
Nudge.ai (recently bought by Affinity), People.ai, Gong.io/Chorus and Conversica are helping teams identify target personas and even identify active buying signals that come from them at target accounts.”
page 32
The big four in the arena of sales engagement platforms (SEPs) are currently XANT, SalesLoft, Groove, and Outreach;
page 32
Imagine you look up a CXO and you can see she typically responds to four emails, two cold calls, and her average ACV is $26,300. Don’t forget timing either, as she may only respond to emails between 3:40 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.
page 33
Also check out Everstring: “The company’s predictive analytics platform helps companies identify and engage with their best customer prospects. EverString captures 20,000 unique signals per company and keeps data current by scouring the web with the capacity of 1,000,000 humans, by creating new data through machine learning, and by ingesting data from every relevant source.
page 33
ReturnPath is a technology that has enabled financial institutions to send billions of bank statements and stay whitelisted.
page 34
So if you want to send a thousand emails a day out of Outreach, you need four Gmail accounts and to warm them up. It’s esoteric, but in appointment-setting parlance we call this feathering. You need to be very careful of your core domain, Acme. com, so you don’t get dinged or blacklisted by the global internet service provider (ISP) community. So grab Acme.io instead. Sam Feldotto, head of sales and growth at SalesHive,
page 34
Controversially, funking the grammar (making the syntax look ugly) and also testing deliberate spelling mistakes resulted in more engagement because it looked really human rather than
page 35
Think of spectra as follows: funny to serious, colloquial to formal, facts and figures to touchy-feely soft stories, qualitative to quantitative, right brain to left brain, super long form to hyper short.
page 36
Leverage Lavender (trylavender.com) as an AI-powered, computational linguistics virtual copyeditor to craft more thoughtful, sensible emails with real-time scoring on the quality and relevancy. It can tell you your Flesch-Kincaid score and adjust your tone for the sentiment of the prospect.
page 36
Autobound is a company automagically creating contextualized email content managing serious complexity around industry vertical, buyer persona, and injected contextualized personalization.
page 36
Sharetivity that automatically suggests what the rep should write. Also check out Otherside.ai, compose.ai, copy.ai and Autobound.ai
page 37
Jeremey Donovan has done some groundbreaking measurement of millions of emails at SalesLoft and looked at their Flesch-Kincaid scores to confirm that writing at an elementary school level, or USA Today level, wins.
page 37
Players such as Lately (www.lately.ai) use AI to read your original blogs and articles, and watch your audiogram podcasts and also your videos.13 It then technomagically creates a multitude of posts across all your social platforms that are pre-tested to contain messaging it knows your targets will engage with.
page 37
Email verification is an art form unto itself if you can believe it. It’s why data companies have become unicorns. One has three hundred reps in Portland just calling businesses all day verifying direct dials and emails. SalesIntel leverages their patented AI engine to verify their data and then runs it through a team of researchers to hand-verify every record and guarantee 95 percent accuracy. They can even automatically enrich Salesforce or other CRM with that up-to-date accurate information.
page 38
If you want to land in the primary tab, there are three aspects of email deliverability you need to pay attention to. Technical setup (e.g., custom tracking domain, SPF, DKIM) The way you send emails Warming up your email domain Initially, people used to manually warm up their address, which was way too time-consuming. Today, you can do it automatically with products such as lemwarm to maximize deliverability without breaking a sweat.
page 40
Always sequence at the board and C-level too. Tim Ferriss is right: “The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.”17
page 41
This task of creating TQ in teams rests with the leader, starting with who they hire. Do they architect their onboarding process to include technology-intensive modules that engage the reps in activities that force them to see how the tech fits into the company’s processes?
page 42
Create hyper-visualizations of data all along the sales process, all while creating hyper-personalization at scale because of the messaging strategies involved in the various sequences being used.
page 43
Move beyond the simple binary emails and calls you make to connect with a prospect after adding them on LinkedIn. The future is multi-threaded, omni-channel opportunities created based on key pieces of data served up to a rep, or given to a rep by the lower-level prospects, data that are then disseminated to higher-level executives in prospect accounts in such a way that they influence a buying motion that is more meaningful. You take away some of the manual nature of their jobs, then SDRs can live a life of creating relationships at scale, backed by extreme air cover from increasingly capable revenue operations and enablement functions who are using technology to its maximum potential and training reps to do the same.18
page 43
In this most recent role, 9 percent of the calls he made connected, and he converted 15 percent of calls into appointments.
page 43
He hypothesized that if he could speak with more people in lower titles through their responses, taking a social engineering approach, and then reach up higher into the org earlier in the deal cycle with a relevant message, he could get more decisionmakers into play prior to the opportunity actually being created.
page 45
Hey ____, You don’t know me yet, but it would be great to connect. I know a lot about your org because I talked with so and so, who said X, Y, and Z, and it sounds like there are already some people discussing getting these things changed. These issues probably matter to you and I won’t waste your time. I’ll call you this afternoon to share some ideas.
page 45
Because he was automatically transcribing data across his accounts in sophisticated ways, using technology to reach as many people as possible to get all the data he could about pain, technology, budget, current initiatives, and so on. before he ever talked with an executive. When he got to an executive, he knew their business, and they listened.
page 45
This approach of social engineering created a sort of information funnel that led to accounts quickly gaining interest because high-level leaders notice how important things are to some of the lower-level people that report to them.
page 45
The answer is TQ and platforms blended with old-school principles of value creation, relationship mapping, political alignment, and strategic selling.
page 49
“The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do” —Thomas Edison
page 51
The foundation of sales success is strong product / market fit, clarity concerning ideal customer profiles (ICPs), knowing your buyer personas, and then nailing your message and narrative with insightful questions!
page 51
All communication must be relentlessly about the target persona’s opportunity to drive improved results in their role. Do not open by talking about yourself, your company, your product, your service, or your solution. Anything that looks like sales or marketing spam is deleted.
page 53
Your Value Narrative
page 53
All communication must be relentlessly about the target persona’s opportunity to drive improved results in their role. Do not open by talking about yourself, your company, your product, your service, or your solution. Anything that looks like sales or marketing spam is deleted.
page 53
Be brief and communicate like a peer rather than a needy seller. No sales cliches such as “provide value” or “solution.” It’s okay to be slightly cryptic and assumptive. Get to the point fast because your buyer suffers from executive ADD. They are thinking, “What do you want and why should I care?” They also want you to “be brief and be gone.” Anything too long is just ignored. Be easy to do business with by having a clear call to action that is simple.
page 53
Relevant personalization is the force multiplier. As the legendary Marylou Tyler says, “Show them that you know them, right from the very beginning.”1 Make sure you reference a common relationship, a trigger event, or a relevant attribute as the reason for the approach. Quote them back to themselves if they’ve published something salient. Evidence any claims using other customers that they will regard as relevant. Anything generic damages our attempt to break through.
page 53
Provide genuine insights. Be confident yet humble. Be consultative but with a worthwhile point of view. Rather than behaving like a “professional visitor,” aspire to be their trusted advisor. (It’s not a mythical unicorn role: it is possible and we know CEOs who publicly acknowledge some of their supplier partners in this way.)
page 54
Have a clear and simple call to action.
page 54
Break your ICP into five to ten personas, then break those into title cloud arrays (VP, CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, CMO, CSO, EIEIO, etc.) to cluster for baseline messaging highly relevant to each in their role.
page 55
Personalize your cadences with injected custom fields based on firmographics or technographics. This can identify the prospect where you can replace inferior competitive or ancillary technologies, or augment and enhance other tech, which influences the targeting and scripts.
page 55
A/B test two dozen sequences and run sentiment analysis on the replies. Use the Crystal Knows Chrome extension to predict the sentiment and personality traits of each prospect. Leverage Lavender, which is an AI-powered virtual copyeditor, to craft more thoughtful, sensible emails with real-time scoring on the quality (Flesch-Kincaid method) and relevancy. Match the tone against DISC personality.
page 55
Crystal Knows uses AI to assess an individual’s personality to accurately predict their operating style and behaviors. The AI analyzes text samples ingested from publicly available data such as LinkedIn, blogs, articles, or social media published by the person. The result is succinct summaries of the best way to engage the person . . . pure gold for sellers. Here is just the beginning of what a seller would see with Crystal Knows to inform their outreach.
page 56
The enemy of every seller is false hope. The sooner you know where you really stand with a prospect, the better off you will be.
page 58
Your mindset needs to be give me a real no or give me a conversation.
page 58
If you push hard enough, you will qualify where to invest your precious time and secure fast referrals and even some yeses within the 3 percent who are in the buying window or the 40 percent of the marketplace willing to entertain switching.
page 58
The ultimate sophistication in technology is the radical simplification of its presentation, to where it is almost invisible and intuitively enables the thing you are seeking to do.
page 59
Chet Holmes statistics: “Three percent of people in most markets are actively buying, whereas 40 percent of your prospects are susceptible to looking and potentially poised to switch. Anyone can get the 3 percent. How well you get to the 40 percent and shape their buying vision determines your success with outbound.”
page 60
When we set out to write this book, we thought we’d share our experience and opinions on cracking TOFU, the top of funnel, which we’ve done for dozens of startups and more than a hundred market leaders. What we’ve discovered is that most sellers are using as little as 5 percent of the capabilities of the systems there to help them—even in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is devised like a Bloomberg terminal.
page 60
For top of funnel, applying high TQ gives you a huge advantage with: Targeting. You are finding the deals faster. Messaging. You are curating and sharing insights that are literally more relevant, piquing more interest (create real desire to meet!). Personalization. Showing relevance (opportunity, not just pain- and fear-driven) and building trust right from the beginning through common relationships, triggers, or playing back to them relevant attributes. Conversion. The perfect storm of “in the buying window meets relevance.”
page 60
“Everyone is drowning in the very data that can save them. Yet most don’t even notice, let alone take advantage of what is available to them.” —Tom Rielly, CEO of Triggr.ai
page 62
A trigger event is something that creates buyer awareness concerning opportunity for change or the need for what we sell. Trigger events can occur in the client’s industry, within their company or department, or in their personal career. Trigger events can also occur in the marketplace and can include competitor activity, environmental or economic changes, reputational issues, new regulatory requirements, and more.
page 62
the average CXO deploys $1 million in capital on new solutions in the first ninety days in their role.
page 63
This is because new senior people are hired to effect change, and they also have a limited window of time in which they have high levels of support from their boss.
page 63
Bad experience with incumbent suppliers. The decisionmaker has a negative experience with a current provider’s product, service, or people. Dissatisfaction makes them open to considering other options, but the window of opportunity is usually small. Time is of the essence. Role-based change. A senior decisionmaker or influencer leaves our existing customer or someone new joins a target buying organization. We should follow our supporters to their new employer and also defend our existing account against our competitor doing the same to us with the new person coming in. Change in results or strategy. The customer organization has a significant change in results or announces a change in their strategic direction impacting priorities and operations. There is an appetite for change and desire to explore options for improving results. Operating environment changes. The decisionmaker becomes aware of the need to change for competitive, risk-avoidance, economic, social, legal, or compliance reasons. There is an opportunity to provide insight and aspire to be a trusted advisor shaping their business case for change and influencing their requirements.
page 64
In the above example we have identified two “new logo” sales opportunities, managed an account risk (competitor follows new executive into our existing client), and created an upsell or cross-sell opportunity in an existing account (elevating the level of engagement with the new person). Although tracking job changes is easy to do in Sales Navigator, it’s an underutilized feature.
page 65
Triggr.ai is an excellent example, with their platform using the internet as the sales pipeline database to search and filter based on intelligent combinations of attributes and trigger events to provide salespeople with context and relevance in their sales outreach. Triggr detects technologies, identifies hiring trends, finds contact details, and more. It then serves those details in a consumable format for sellers in a web browser or pushes the data into CRM or marketing automation systems.
page 65
LeadIQ or Apollo.io are further examples of how you can also efficiently build lists based on trigger events. For example, you can pull the saved search for job changes last week, suck those leads into a cadence, and you’re off to the races.
page 65
A strong ICP is the foundation of building a solid data-driven sales strategy because it allows you to focus on high value clients where there is alignment and greater propensity to buy.
page 66
Sales is a game of change management, and we must identify where the pain of the current state is greater than the pain of change.
page 67
The easiest thing for a prospect to do is consume your time by evaluating and then just doing nothing. The only way to pique interest methodically, almost programmatically, is a pain-centric message.
page 67
Tony Robbins talks about humans being pain- and fear-driven when the optimal state is love and success.
page 67
At the end of the day, if there is not a serious problem to be solved, why make the effort? In the land of laziness, fear and pain is the most effective motivator . . . sad but true.
page 67
Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey from ClozeLoop always say that tailoring the message, in a way that addresses the pain that typically exists for a certain persona, provides all of the personalization most prospectors need to find success.
page 68
If an email specifically describes the pain points solved for someone like the recipient, and they actually have that pain, enough folks will pay attention to fill the pipeline.
page 68
If they don’t have any pain, a further conversation is likely a waste of time anyway, so “attention-getting personalization” that has nothing to do with the recipient’s needs can take everyone nowhere.
page 68
There are only four reasons to buy software and most other things in the world of business-to-business sales: make money, save money, reduce risk, or maintain compliance.
page 68
Remember, latent pain—the pain they don’t even realize they have—is what creates the interest and drives sales.
page 68
Another approach is to consider the person you are trying to establish your credibility with and provide them with an example of how you helped a similar persona, rather than focusing entirely on the industry they are in. Some prospects could care less about how you solved a pain for another company in their industry. If they’re a VP of Sales, they probably care just as much about how you helped another VP of Sales with a specific pain they may also be facing. Even if it’s in a completely different industry, that pain and social proof will resonate far better than relying on logos. This is especially true for companies that are targeting SMB-Mid Market companies. If you’re using a client like Adobe for your social proof to a company with fifty employees, it’s not going to be compelling. In fact, it may do the opposite. Since you may not have social proof for a company similar to them that’s recognizable, focusing on the pains of the persona you are reaching out to and drawing social proof from a similar persona can be extremely productive.7
page 69
find everyone who’s considered the product in the past year. Sequence to them en masse with “I see you’ve considered our solution in the
page 69
The other logical corollary technique here is to find every customer who has ever purchased your tech in company history and run a “where are they now” search to locate them currently on LinkedIn so they can be champions for your solution in new places. Sales Navigator has a “past company” advanced search to make surfacing this data simple. Often, past buyers move up in the industry because they succeeded using your tech and understand it the most. The users of today are the decisionmakers of tomorrow.
page 69
Philosophically, be committed to quality but abandon perfectionism.
page 71
The future of sequencers will be programming the types of personalization for experimentation. You would send a thousand emails and for each email it would see the best connection in common and inject it into the sequence—university in common, common charity affiliation, relevant groups, and so on. Remember, avoid inane personalization . . . it must be relevant! There have been forays into this type of personalization using technology such as Hexa.ai that became part of OutboundWorks. That is the closest thing we’ve ever seen. Apparently, Nova.ai is getting into the game using machine learning to auto-generate injectable snippets.
page 72
Tactical things to split test include: time of day, day of the week, subject line length, super short copy and long copy, blends of short and long copy, test all lowercase, and so on. Test imagery in the second to eighth touch—it can be made quickly with CloudApp so it’s compressed and features a wow moment. Test injection of custom fields. Test GIFs and emojis. Test fear-based or gain-based sentiment. Test every pattern interrupt you can think of at the front of the email. Example: “Hey hey hey . . . {{customer.name}}.” Test a single sentence in the subject line of the email. Test song lyrics. Test humor. Test customer quotations. Test grammar formatting—very formal, super compacted, or funked out like poetry. Test purposeful misspelling (yes, controversial!). It often performs higher, looks plausibly human and not spat out of a sequencer . . . even if it was!
page 72
Companies like XANT have enough anonymized big data to be able to understand a “baseball card” summary per user. Imagine if you got into work, the system served up the appropriate customer list that day, optimized it per region, gave you the right playbooks and scripts to approach these leads, and knew when to stop the automated cadence so you could inject more personalized real human interactions. Even recommended ideas about what to personalize and a propensity score on the personalization angle.
page 73
Amplemarket, has developed groundbreaking sales engagement software that allows you to start hyper-personalized multi-channel sequences (yes, LinkedIn; touches included). You can leverage dozens of buying intent data points like someone that liked or commented on a specific LinkedIn post or ad and then start a sequence to that person that starts by visiting their LinkedIn profile, followed by a personalized connection request, and finally an email. LinkedIn is always closing doors of automation to outsiders so it’s a tricky space to play.
page 73
dynamic scripting so you can set up smart parameters that go beyond curly brackets for custom fields. Imagine one call-to-action (CTA) for directors and another for VPs, or adding a customized case study depending on the industry of the company.
page 74
Airborne is the first sales engagement platform designed and built for agencies:
page 75
On Sequence Design Architecture When we built a hundred concurrent Outreach and SalesLoft campaigns, we had copywriters but there was an initial bet we made: brevity would rule. We dubbed the sequences spears, which is really a morphed term from Aaron Ross. Instead of a long-form marketing brochure, the sequences were painfully short, even to an extent that it was often a bit tricky to get clients to agree to sending them. Day 1—Spear: Subject: Growth Hey Jim, Curious how it’s going with Competitor X [HG Insights technographic insert]? We notice they have [limitation 1], which drives [customer pain 2] to augment or switch to our solution. We differentiate by value prop A and B. Customers like Acme and Beta Corp have seen a 263 percent lift in performance due to [technical proofpoint 3] and reduced their risk. When’s a good time to hop on a call? Thanks. Day 2 Bump: Subject: Thoughts? [Hit reply all to previous email.]
page 75
Jeremey Donovan tested five million emails and found reducing subject lines to one word increased reply rates on average by 87 percent. The other huge tip is, be willing to end every single email closing with thank you. There’s a 20 percent increase in response rate for displays of gratitude.4
page 76
As far as the structure of the emails, three sentences maximum with the third being a call to action. No bullets, dashes, or wingdings. No italics, bold, or funky fonts. Hit the strip font key. Emojis are cool to use in emails two and three. Usually the body copy is just mentioning social proof of compelling business case outcomes and measurable results for similar clients.
page 76
This begs the question of jargon—what’s its role? We’ve heard pundits talk about removing all jargon and gobbledygook. Yet some industry-specific jargon adds massive credibility . . . if it is theirs and not yours! If you are selling to trucking supply chains and you know an acronym that is uniformly used across that industry, dropping that into an automated email will lift results.
page 77
Let’s talk about architecting a value narrative arc. We went deep when designing thirty-day sends. Think of it this way. Send an email, bump it the next day. Wait forty-eight hours. New subject line (thread), bump it the next day. Continue assertively like this until you get removed, no, not interested, or referred, even yes. Visualize it and draw it out on a whiteboard or in an illustration that paints the picture to your team.
page 77
You don’t want perfect expository essay paragraphs and formal structure in iambic pentameter. It needs to be compacted, the concept of spears. If you have three paragraphs per message, you’re doing it wrong because it looks like drip marketing to a mailing list. You’ll get deleted. A golden rule is that deliverability depends on brevity.
page 77
Each spear and bump (a fast reply the next day to the original message) is broken into narratives in accordance with your own style. The first sequence cluster could be value narrative one. The second sequence cluster, value narrative two. The third sequence cluster could be diagrams or imagery. The fourth cluster, customer testimonial. The fifth cluster, an upcoming event and a calendar invitation. In accordance with COMBO Prospecting, condense touches within a sequence to pattern-interrupt viewers’ habit of ignoring strangers and sellers.
page 77
It’s possible to leverage best-in-class messaging and sequences with REGIE, a sequence creation tool. You can choose your workflow and buyer persona, and then REGIE feeds you recommended messaging variables and sequence designs. The recommendations are built on over two billion rows of sales engagement performance data, plus their workflow allows you to take sequence creation from up to ten hours down to ten minutes.
page 78
LOW OPEN RATE Open rates should be 30 to 50 percent at a minimum (ideally, you’re at 60 to 70 percent or more). A/B test the subject line. Try using their first name or company name. We also have success using one-word subject lines. Make sure the first line of the email is personalized and relevant. This shows up in the preview on their email client. LOW REPLY RATE Reply rates should be 5 to 10 percent of total prospects contacted at a minimum. Share relevant results you’ve created for others. Leverage social proof and case studies. Use an empathy-based approach by leading with the prospect’s challenges. Prospects are much more likely to respond when you lead with their challenges, not your product or service. Keep your outreach laser-focused. Use only one CTA and keep the email to around three to five sentences, or fewer than 120 words.
page 82
LOW CONVERSION RATE INTO MEETINGS At the end of the day, this is the most important metric. Conversion rates should be 3 to 6 percent of total prospects contacted at a minimum. Make the CTA clear. Try being very specific with the day and time for a call. If a prospect responds “not interested,” pick up the phone and call them. You’ll get a ton of useful feedback to improve your messaging.8
page 82
Lars Nilsson and Travis Henry prophesize: The inside sales world is evolving. Fast. Covid has hyper-accelerated the move from outside sales to inside sales. With these changes, it’s more important than ever to make sure your touch pattern is dialed. Every touch matters a ton. We’ve spent decades watching the trends. Implementing. Testing. Tweaking. Re-implementing. . . . We suggest twelve touches for tier one. Sixteen touches for tier two. Eighteen for warm inbound and twenty for hot inbound.13
page 83
Wesley Pennock is a coder by trade and the engineer whisperer for sales. He trains product founders and CTOs on sales techniques.
page 86
Google “Outplay 30 Sales Teams Share Their Sales Sequences.” It’s an enlightening real-world playbook.
page 86
This is where we began to develop a novel method of selling for tech companies where we put a competitive landscape diagram into a Venn diagram. We would then screenshot it and put it in a sequence. The results were astounding.
page 88
Venn diagrams based on it that pertained to the competitive technology landscape. The title of the email was usually “Growth,” while the body was, “What are your thoughts on the implications of this diagram?” That’s it. Amazing responses. The Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of McDonald’s responded in a single email with the Venn in the body. The Home Depot VP, on the first send, cold-called my phone and asked me to pitch him. I was dumbfounded. Brevity and visual relevance was breaking through.
page 88
There are a ton of ways to implement visual prospecting using HTML scripting to customize and automate the visuals in every single email sent outbound pulling in logos and assets from the prospect’s sites. Imagine the logos change each time, based on a check of the website. It can be very space age, but remember, use images only on the second or third touch to clear the spam filters.
page 88
A powerful video is a live recording of you navigating their website on the screen with your talking head
page 89
The company Potion is using AI to dynamically change what’s written on the whiteboard in the video per message. Instead of recording two hundred times, you just do it once! To make it even more sci-fi, it will even attempt to change what your mouth says.
page 89
Search YouTube for “Becc Holland and Josh Braun and How to Personalize at Scale.” This video is one of the best coaching videos you will ever see on personalization and automation of sales outreach. Note: if you do just one TQ Booster in this book . . . this is it. Becc is a legend.
page 90
Yet inbound leads still demand persistence in order to secure engagement.
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Emails should never contain HTML or spammy links. The signature pane alone is a big problem for most senders because it triggers the spam filter and negatively impacts sender score. Never put Sales as your title. Again, avoid images and links in early emails . . . your first goal is to get past the spam filters.
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DocSend has a heat-seeking missile in that you can set the forwarding to require inputting an email. Imagine you send the VP your deck and she forwards it to five people—with DocSend, they’d each input their email. What’s remarkable here is that they’re willing to do it and you can therefore sniff out the power base.
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Pique curiosity and interest. The mystery close. Cliffhanger! Leave them wanting more. Create desire and intrigue.
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Nadir Mansor, founder & CEO at GR8 INSIGHT, has built a technology that integrates with the majority of the sales enablement tools and CRMs.
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The preferred sales intelligence tool for recruiters globally is LinkedIn Recruiter, with Lusha for personal email and cellphone numbers. LeadIQ has strong cell data, SalesIntel in the US, as well as Cognism in EMEA.
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“Vice President” OR VP OR “V.P.” OR SVP OR EVP
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Outreach, SalesLoft, Groove, and XANT.
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There is a significant learning curve for effective adoption and usage.
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Dialing upstarts like Orum are distinctive in that they are software-only platforms. This opens up a whole world of possibilities around data intelligence and performance optimization.
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This simple framework works because you call the person in charge of data and ask, “Who’s in charge of your data strategy?” Natural reaction is the prospect is forced to take ownership and self-identify. This bypasses the trigger reflex to hang up the phone or intone “not interested.” It’s hyper-short and low overhead.
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LEAiDS combines behavioral targeting data, identifying who is in the market for what you sell, with the full contact record, so you can reach out to the right person at the right moment in the buyer’s journey.
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A genius SDR even took the trend analyses, turned them into mini websites, and injected them into Outreach custom fields.
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Other upstarts, including Outplay, are building a faster, leaner mousetrap to the Big 4 sales engagement players.
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Mark Chaffey, cofounder and CEO of Hackajob, is thinking outside the box by blending everything together. According to Mark: “We’re running SDR Outbound via SalesLoft using email, call, LinkedIn plus Video. We add to this retargeting (across LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram) while contacts are in cadence. It’s exciting to see the combo of outbound and inbound ads in the same workflow! We’re leveraging ActiveCampaign in Salesforce with smart rules that automatically trigger paid media campaigns when someone moves into cadence inside SalesLoft. They see the ad and automatically get moved into the SalesLoft cadence. It’s mind-blowing.”17
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Automation of data enrichment is important because customers and potential clients expect us to engage them on the basis that we 1) truly know them, 2) personalize their experience, and 3) anticipate their needs.
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LinkedIn engaged in a watershed legal case against hiQ who (along with thousands of others) were machine reading public-facing data. LinkedIn believed that scraping violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 law that makes computer hacking a crime. After LinkedIn issued a cease-and-desist order, hiQ sued, asking courts to rule that its activities did not, in fact, violate the CFAA or constitute hacking. The result? David defeated Goliath; hiQ won the initial case in late 2017 with US District Judge Edward M. Chen in San Francisco granting a preliminary injunction giving hiQ access to LinkedIn. In his twenty-five-page opinion, Judge Chen said that the 1986 CFAA was not intended to outlaw the collection of online public information.
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Microsoft/LinkedIn lost the appeal and the hiQ victory validated the position that public data is public data.
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Technology such as LeadGnome can sort through bounces, update your database, update “out of office” cell phones, and also sort replies to your reps. SiftRock was acquired by Drift and is now Drift Email, which routes qualified email replies to the right people on your team to book more meetings and drive more pipeline from your email marketing programs. It also automatically updates your marketing automation platform and CRM—keeping your database up-to-date when people change jobs or unsubscribe, and adding any new contacts found in those replies.
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Revenue Grid takes nurturing automation seriously—the tool allows you to create automation rules, especially for account nurturing. Revenue Grid will automatically stop a sequence for all leads from the same account when one person from that account engages with you in some way; or a prospect from that account has been mentioned in an email; or your fellow SDR just secured a meeting with them. The same goes for a multitude of scenarios, like stopping a sequence if your lead just changed ownership in Salesforce.
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Many years ago, he did a video about calling a prospect who viewed his LinkedIn and we initially thought, Wow, that’s so invasive. It’s just a profile view.2 Truth is, you’re either serious about engagement or not: treat the view of your profile like a trigger event. We’ve taken that philosophy and morphed it into a whole social signals modus operandi. If someone comments on a status update and they are relevant, call and sequence them. If someone views your profile, send a sequence to them. If you notice someone commenting passionately, even on any random thread, use that as a signal to initiate outreach to them around that topic. It’s all contextualized reasons to engage . . . strike while the iron is hot!
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Social platforms, especially LinkedIn, are gold mines for finding context for your outreach. You will also regularly find diamonds. Play back someone’s own words from their article or post. You can comment on their posts or articles to bring yourself into their orbit as they see your name and face. Give before you seek to get—harness the law of reciprocity. When you contact them later, to sell, there is nothing cold about it.
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Solutions such as Sendoso will allow you to send twenty-five to fifty coffee cards with analytics to the top openers of your sequence. Now you tie light gifting and automation together with analytics on both ends.
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Find everyone who has ever purchased from the company, look them up, and throw them in a cadence in which you will be creative beyond the obvious of: “Hey, I see we worked with you at XYZ company—how can we help you in the new [or current] role?” Then build a harder list where the stakeholder’s past role was an existing customer. You want to map the champions of your product or solution into the power base because they either moved companies to get promoted or were promoted from within. They are familiar and have an affinity with your solution and can be an internal champion for your product where they land.
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LinkedIn themselves said at a big conference: “Tony Hughes is a node in the network for sales leadership globally. If you’re in sales, you should connect with him to enhance your own brand and improve search results
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The best sale you can ever make stems from a warm referral. You are five times more likely to open an opportunity referred to you by a trusted common relationship. This is because referrals start a new relationship with a degree of trust. Referrals also shorten sales cycles, improve win rates, reduce the presence of competition, and are the lowest-cost source of new leads. We simply need to ask the right way and at the right time. Anytime a client expresses happiness with our level of service or satisfaction with our product or solution, it is an opportunity to ask for a referral.
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When seeking a referral, simply use phrases like these: Thanks for saying that! Who else do you think we could help? Thanks for the feedback! Who else struggles now with what we’ve solved together? Thanks! Who else should I be talking to in the organization?
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“Commission breath” repulses everyone.
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Instead, the intent you’re seeking to convey is that your current customer is the hero of the story, and you want to share that story with others in their network.
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Maintain control rather than ask them to provide a formal email introduction. Simply say: “Would it be okay if I let them know that we spoke?” Then ask for the contact details.
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Trigger events and referrals together are like a sales superpower because they transform sales results and they make the sales process much easier than cold calling or sending generic emails.
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If you receive a no or not interested, run a referral script.
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Ryan Reisert says: “Everyone talks about referrals but then nobody knows how to actually ask or when to ask. They seem to believe you must already be working together and have long-term results. I ask for referrals on cold calls.
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Here is an example of a reply to not interested: “Thanks for coming back and letting us know you’re not in the window right now for this . . . who do you know who might be focused on solving {{problem you solve}} now?”
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Again, here is our greatest tactical secret for referrals . . . prove you were referred. Screenshot the message inside LinkedIn and send it inline in the email. “Lucy said we should talk.” Insert the screenshot that proves it. Even in social, capture an image and show you were referred by sending the screenshot inside LinkedIn. In emails, forward the referral thread to the target. This is crucial to convert because buyers think many sellers lie.
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What does that mean for P&L holders with a real budget? They could start receiving hundreds of emails per day, even thousands when you count all the likes, tweets, DMs, InMails, snailmails, and VMs. So what’s the best path in? The answer is warm introductions or referrals from a trusted source.
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91 percent of customers would be willing to give a referral but only 11 percent of sales reps actually ask.
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The acquisition of Slack by Salesforce in December 2020 was a genius move for more than the obvious reasons. Private B2B Slack channels are beginning to vet the buyer and seller in pay to play environments where CXOs join to learn about trends and insights. Vendors pay but can’t sell; they must instead share use cases. This model has legs where LinkedIn has become too noisy. Some now describe LinkedIn as the narcissistic echo chamber of annoying sellers, and the depreciation of LinkedIn Groups has already caused an exodus into private Slack Groups. The future of B2B is paid micro communities within platforms such as Slack, Patreon, or Discord where membership criteria controls the quality of the vendors placed in front of the CXO.
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If you are reaching out to just CMOs, there might be two hundred in the Fortune 1000. Now those two hundred are being spammed with outreach by up to seven thousand companies in the Lumascape. Think about it—it’s not just your competitors seeking an audience with the CMO at a particular prospect; it’s everyone competing for their available spend on any number of problems and priorities.
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Many SDRs and companies get lost in the trap of focusing on only decisionmakers when the reality of the consensus sale means that anywhere from five to ten or more are realistic targets to start conversations with. Having the ability to go up and down a given department to start conversations is one of the best ways to adhere to an ideal customer profile. It also gives you the opportunity to leverage referrals and responses moving through that org chart in order to triangulate your value proposition for the most relevant audience. Most SDR campaigns suffer from skimming strategies—rarely from immersive, ABM-centric penetration of even midsized (but especially enterprise) target companies.7
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According to Marylou Tyler: “Being able to reduce sales cycles and increase conversion rates depends on knowing who the buyers are, what they care about, what results they are looking for, and how they communicate.”8
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Most importantly: Why change, why now, and why with you?
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Also included is guidance on potential pushbacks or objections to anticipate, and words and phrases that usually resonate with the person in that role.
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Importantly, it also drives you to make sure your messaging is all about their opportunity to improve results in their role rather than you droning on about what you do and how it works.
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“Coming inbound should be a simple and pleasant process for your leads. Consider setting up your inbound machine to book meetings directly with SDRs. Rather than having the lead fill out a form and wait for a response, direct them to a calendar after they fill out the form so they can book a meeting immediately after. Now, the SDR doesn’t have to worry about the lead slipping through the cracks or doing unnecessary back-and-forths, and instead has a time on their calendar to speak with the prospect, qualify them, and book a follow-up call right then and there with the appropriate AE if they think it’s worth moving forward.”
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The best way to build out cadences is to create a spreadsheet of all your top accounts and then a minimum of five to eight stakeholders each with a verified email from Adapt.io, Lusha, LeadIQ, RocketReach, Triggr, ZoomInfo, Seamless, and so on.
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“Try every way of reaching someone until you find the way that works for them.”7
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The key here is to pattern-interrupt them away from ignoring strangers or sellers.
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The way you need to feel is like this: Give me a valid no or give me a conversation, but don’t ignore me. I’m not going away—I have a worthwhile point of view on how you could potentially improve results in your role.
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When it comes to how many people you should be targeting in an organization and whether you should start at the top, the bottom, or build out from the middle, here is our very definite advice. Call everyone at the same time and gain traction with multiple executives before someone seeks to block you. It’s a good thing if they ask each other about your messages and emails . . . someone needs to get back to you.
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The Bryan Kreuzberger “Waterfall Technique” is where you send one email that references three other people and send the same email flipping the names of those three people to the other three people (see Figure 9.1).
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It causes a forwarding frenzy where everyone tries to get the email off their desk, hot potato style. Ultimately, the game of musical chairs stops and you reach the decisionmaker you are looking for.
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Kreuzberger crafted the “Appropriate Person” subject line, which became more popular than the Save PBS! chain letter. The fundamental problem with a template that everyone uses is . . . everyone uses it and it becomes ineffective. Yes, you can still close big deals if you follow the tenets of anchoring high at the C-level and then push for meetings at the next top layer. If you get delegated down, report back to the senior person you started with. Multi-threading to all stakeholders who form consensus for change is essential, but we must avoid being blocked by a mid-level “seymour syndrome” operative who loves to comparatively analyze all the vendors but has no decisionmaking power. Some technology companies sell seat-based SaaS software and give dozens of demos just to build consensus at the user level.
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Most sales tech is like an expensive gym membership . . . you pay every month and hardly ever use it.
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We initially scoffed at hiring VAs, a la the Tim Ferriss “four-hour workweek” model, because we thought it was just too good to be true. From calendaring, to list building, to pre-call research, there’s almost nothing tedious you are doing now that you can’t farm out easily. Even if your boss won’t pay for it, put your hand in your own pocket! Start behaving like you are running a territory franchise and think like a businessperson rather than a salaried rep. This approach gives you real competitive advantage and pays for itself in additional commissions . . . or in just keeping your job. If you wake up in the morning with a hundred, or even a thousand, perfect contacts and your competitor takes days or weeks to send a sequence with a 30 percent bounce rate, you have a time edge and penetration advantage . . . game over, you win.
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Chili Piper is hands down, far and away, the most effective scheduling software for sellers.
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Honorable mention here to X.ai with excellent technology for scheduling a ton of personal meetings. Your assistant’s names are Amy or Andrew Ingram. Get it . .
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Grab your CEO’s email or LinkedIn inbox and study the subject lines. Your head will explode in the sea of sameness. Dare to be different linguistically. Cognitive dissonance is real. If content is bizarre, it will get read . . . just don’t damage your brand!
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Non-hunger is also known as the Law of Principled Disinterest. This comes with a paradox: you can come across as arrogant or uninterested. Conversely, the more interest you show in closing a deal, the more repulsed the prospect will be with your demeanor.
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Genuinely curious people have an advantage when prospecting because questioning is in their DNA, and they don’t have to fake it. Barry Rein advocates selling through curiosity, and he is famous for being paid on future revenue performance by his customers.
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You use LinkedIn InMails and emails from the CEO’s accounts to set up “neighborhood” meetings for them with you in attendance. These focus on a conference or industry event that’s coming up or a planned trip to a particular city. Ideally, you and your CEO go as a team to the meetings. If the CEO can’t attend, then you, ghosting as the CEO, simply hand off the meeting to yourself “due to unforeseen circumstances” just before the scheduled date.
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Special thanks to Scott Britton who came up with the best conference idea: Call every single prospect attending or on the list of speakers. Then, either for yourself or your CXO, book a meeting room across the street at a premium hotel and secure back-to-back meetings there. In general, neighborhooding and setting meetings with like-minded people attending events is a good strategy. Throwing events while at conferences is also very powerful. Create a VIP dinner with extra seats, and as C-levels roll through your booth that day, get fifty business cards and then text them all about the dinner. You should be able to fill a dinner party of twenty that way.
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real. If your own CEO will allow you to drive their LinkedIn profile, the first wild thing you will discover is that even they struggle to secure meetings with new people.
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To effectively and rapidly personalize on the good target list, take a batch of fifty names from your master sequence and decide that you will do the necessary research to “show ’em you know ’em” and record a personalized LinkedIn video. CheetahIQ and Owler are great tools for this.
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“In order to show them you know them, LinkedIn is a good starting
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“In order to show them you know them, LinkedIn is a good starting point but you’ll want to go wider to find something that will show you’ve done your homework and aren’t another salesperson taking the traditional research path. Look for podcast appearances which can be full of interesting and valuable personal insights. If they use Twitter, you’d be negligent not to review their account. Using a tool like CheetahIQ allows you to quickly do this for multiple prospects at the same company with one click.”12
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Here is an example from Guillaume: “If I’m cold emailing, I’ll use the personalized video thumbnail strategy (search for it on YouTube to see). Add their company logo and first name onto the image to create a unique thumbnail for each prospect. Result? A click rate of 86 percent, plus the image grabs their eyeballs in an instant. Once they click, they get transferred to a dynamic landing page that’s also personalized using the same tags. Furthermore, it reduces friction if I’m trying to book meetings because my Calendly is embedded right below the video.”16 The above example takes minutes, instead
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