How to Really do Outbound Sales, a Discussion with Intacct and Salesloft

how's everybody doing today fantastic well it is actually a packed this is great well we're gonna be talking about outbound sales today and I'm gonna start things off with a few questions that are top of mind from me I've got some unbelievable people here that I've worked with in the past and love to get their insights but really the goal here is to also fire let you guys ask as many questions as possible not like we know everything but the conversation the goal is to really to get as many nuggets and tips out there as possible for everybody so that you can walk away with something and do something and so I'm John barrows I do sales training I train like Salesforce LinkedIn box Dropbox a lot of the companies here in the Bay Area even though I'm based out of Boston I train them almost all on outbound sales and so Kyle you want to do a quick intro yeah sure hi everybody Kyle Porter founder and CEO of sales loft and what we do is we help inside sales organizations and sales teams that are driven by sales development convert more prospects into qualified opportunities and happy to be here thanks everybody for coming out and know you could be upstairs or downstairs or anywhere else and you chose to be here really honored absolutely great Kathy Lord I run the direct sales organization for intact cloud accounting ERP vendor and we actually have leveraged John barrows on a number of occasions so I I do really believe in the outbound sales organizations and I think we're gonna have a really exciting topic today in terms of really helping everybody understand how can we best go prosecute getting clients who aren't coming to us and so just a quick gut check on the room real fast here how many y'all work for companies under 100 employees under under employees are right good between a hundred and a thousand give or take all right and a thousand plus all right now who are individual contributors like sales reps out there hitting the pavement all right versus managers and leadership in sales all right so it's mostly leadership fantastic that'll help kind of drive the questions and everything else of where we want to go with this so the first question that I thought of and prepping for this is when you really start outbound right because there's a lot of talk about marketing automation how we get the lead flow and all that other stuff and then there's always that inflection point with a lot of businesses where the inbound just doesn't keep up with the growth of the business with the you know we do with the bigger deal size and all that other stuff so there's always that inflection point and says okay now we got to go outbound so the question is is because it's a different muscle when should you start looking at it as a business as a small business I'm gonna kind of throw it over to Kyle and just get his feedback you know Kyle when if you're a small startup company where maybe you got a cool product I know it depends on what the product is but when should you start thinking about outbound prospecting I think for most companies it's absolutely immediately you know I every so often someone will come up to me a CEO and and our leader and say they'll brag about how they only have inbound leads I'll you know we don't even have to worry about outbound we just have inbounds that's all we have we just have to and I and I actually give them a look like their dog just died and I say I'm sorry to hear that because outbound plus inbound is better than outbound inbound alone or outbound alone and so for most companies I think the opportunity is to get started right away now outbound might mean different things and really outbound to me as an attitude I just spent some time with a company called digital ocean who's recently surpassed a hundred million dollar mark in a very short period of time and they've got a really heavy inbound play but I knew these guys when they had zero customers and you better believe there were some of the biggest hustlers I ever knew they would walk over to someone's desk and say download this download this go send it for this and wherever they went we just told a story backstage one of the guys literally did a hundred push-ups in front of a reporter so that he would get written about right like that's an attitude of like going out and grabbing customers is I think you always have to have that attitude and for most companies you have to put a process in place as soon as possible to start identifying who are the companies you actually want and then going deep to get them because inbounds not gonna always bring you those people that you totally absolutely need to have as customers where as outbound allows you to do that so I think immediately and as soon as you possibly can yeah I think that's a good point in in the fact you know inbound what my experience is at least is inbound drives you know low people on the totem pole if you talk about the power line and there's people above the power line and people below it inbound drives a lot of downloads of white papers and those and you can take the seed and grow approach where it's like okay I see you know you've downloaded this let me talk to you and then build it up but if you want a bigger deal sizes if you want you know to talk to higher level executives the outbound is a huge piece so Kathy talked to us about you know in fact when when I mean you've been there we were actually talking for a while you're a little bit of an anomaly so you could give a little bit background but couldn't believe when you said you were in seven years nine years nine years nine years in the same role which I think that deserves a round of applause by the way we did the math backstage and it's like four times the average sale so you're buying the odds yeah absolutely and I'm gonna be a little bit contradictory but yet I agree with you at the same time so I think it really depends a little bit on the complexity of the product you're selling the consideration and are you selling to mid market enterprise or are you selling to SMB and more smaller emerging companies because obviously if we won it's hard to actually get the data so if you're trying to target SMB and emerging companies I mean procuring a list of accurate information about these companies and getting the contacts is really difficult and so that was where we've spent a lot of our initial stages so I came on board at you know about two million in revenue and now we're you know very high double digits in revenue and it was all about to get that initial acceleration was was truly the inbound marketing we took the big net and we put it out there and we brought it in it did take a lot of refinement though and I think that's the point that you brought up Kyle is you know initially you don't necessarily know who that ideal target is that you're trying to get and I think it's a lot easier to do that with some outbound efforts but you also have to balance that with how efficiently can we go get to market because I don't think there's a single company in this room that's over funded that has an unlimited access to capital so how can you best grow your pipeline within the capital envelope that you have now I'll say one of the mistakes we did make it intact is because we were so phenomenally successful building this marketing machine we sort of got that attitude about you know the sales reps got that Nappi they didn't have to do much outbound prospecting we finally realized well wait a minute this is exactly the point you said well seems like Marketing is hitting a plateau in terms of the opportunities and leads they can generate for us and so we started building a outbound sales development team and unfortunately all of our processes and systems and we're huge investors in technology we're all geared around supporting this inbound marketing funnel and so for us it actually ended up being and we're still living the stream today a lot of reworking of Salesforce VIN slate sales I come all of the tools we use we've now had to retrofit to think about how do we go target accounts how do we go a target and do much more spearfishing approach if we want these companies and then not only train the people and get the systems but sort of change that culture and so I think it is best to start early but you need to be thoughtful about how you marry that in with the other parts of the organization and that actually brings up an interesting point as far as the technology like how you're the DNA was inbound right and there's such I want to talk a little bit about the difference between inbound and outbound and the skill sets necessary as a sales rep but I want to talk about real quick first for the people out here and in smaller companies getting things going howdy what do you suggest I'm going back to 'county here you know what do you suggest they do to start so that they don't hit that roadblock and have to reverse-engineer and go forward is there are there some things to look for early to segment out inbound versus outbound but also make sure that you're prepared so when that inflection point hits you're good well I think it comes back to really early on having an understanding of who is our ideal profile a customer what are their sizes what are their water coolers they're hanging out out and say okay we're going to segment these types of accounts we think we can get to with an inbound marketing approach you know maybe the top 50% or top 30% we're gonna start from day one of this mindset of the one plus one equals three by having inbound having outbound and really being thoughtful about how those two work together so that as you're building out your systems you're building out your processes you're contemplating that and it just was a good example for us I mean people only buy one accounting system so we have one shot to sell a company and frankly people don't want to do that any more ofter than they have to and so you know for us it's a matter of getting the name out there when the timings right making sure they call us well if you're in a selling a solution where you can sell to multiple departments or it's it's you know less considered you know you could start doing some very targeted outbound early on where you're actually driving incremental revenue a lot faster because you know they have a higher propensity to buy well there's a wide range of inbound right like you could have somebody that comes up signs up for the free product and sees the upgrade and wants to swipe their credit card like that was inbound and you have someone who signs up for the blog yeah right and there's a broad range between those two roles and so one of the things I love to say is for a lot of companies and a lot of funnels there's an opportunity to outbound the inbounds yeah right you've got an inbound person that came in signed up for a white paper but you still have to call email go on social you have to apply all these touch points in order to connect with that person so that you can understand their objectives and see if there's an opportunity there and then the other piece is is that a lot of times there's a guy named Craig Rosenberg writes a great blog called the funnel holic and one of his post is call high and wide young Jedi and the whole idea there is something that Mark robear's at HubSpot does as well it's that you might get an inbound from the junior or line level individual who wants to check out whatever you're doing but that's an awesome opportunity for you start calling upstream and moving into the director or VP level and so it's kind of outbound ish but the lead started inbound actually and that marries up you've seen a lot where leads scoring is great right well they hey they went on the website they did these five things but that could be a terrible account like I'm a one-man show I'm Jay barrows it's me if I go on your website and download some white papers and you are literally wasting your time reaching out having one of your reps call me it just is not because the profile of my company is not a good one for you but if you marry up the activity would the profile of the company then that's right totally agree where you can kind of set some of those aside yeah go after them and say hey what's up you know I saw you download the whitepaper by the way just small nugget here please stop sending the I saw you download the whitepaper I'd like to talk to you about some of your 2016 initiatives on how we can help you achieve your goals please just stop sending that email out everybody laughs because it's painfully true every single person in this company in this building has that stupid email just stop it we'll talk about other things to replace it with but anyways like you know if you marry those two up now you can almost treat those graduate the inbounds to out bounds where all of a sudden you have an inbound rep and this is what I want to talk about now yeah silly Karl is what's that muscle it's a different muscle right so pick up there to follow up with somebody and say hey I saw you downloaded this let's talk and versus I'm calling it to somebody that doesn't even know who we are so Kyle I know you know startup hustler when you started you know you did your thing I mean I saw you doing push-ups all over the place getting business but when you start hiring reps salesloft was one of those you could download it I mean I refer to a ton of people so you download it and all of a sudden a bunch of people using it where did you segment out the inbound versus out bun did you have both reps doing both or was it a graduation what was it yeah so the first sales development rep we ever hired a guy named Sean caster he came in and would field the inbounds and was also running outbound sequent you know he's reaching out to people outbound we eventually split those into two what we found over time was that the biggest difference is the timing with inbound you have to be quick you have to respond and you have to go deep as fast as you can and outbound is a little bit more processed ties you know you were able to kind of set the stage for what you want to do so that's the big one we see right now the other day I saw two of my inbound sales development reps playing ping-pong and their manager reached out and he goes hey guys five leagues just came in and they ran off the ping-pong table but the leaves didn't come in it kind of underscores this idea that you've got to be on the ball and there's no like resting and inbound well then I've got to have coverage a follow-up question on that you know a lot of rep site has asked me a lot of question about time management like John how do I if I'm an inbound rep and I'm being asked to do both everybody knows that we've all seen the statistics but you know if you wait five minutes to respond to an inbound all of a sudden the response rates drop by however many ridiculous percentages there's a vendor who helps you respond quickly that get that study done but the but but say what do you do right like how do you manage your time if you if you already have to deal with both how do you segment out to do some outbound while maintaining the ability to respond to the inbounds as quickly as possible suggestions we didn't do it well we ended up splitting it out okay you know started that way but it was quick to where inbound and outbound and they became totally different functions and today inbound sales development reports to marketing at sales loft okay an outbound sales development reports to sales at sales loft and so they're two different functions for yeah it we had a similar situation only they both roll up to the sales organization but we tried to expect the inbound team to do outbound and funny enough they just never seemed to have time even if their their leads were fully followed up with and and frankly it's a different skill set so so one of the things we've done and there's nothing better than growing your own people so we actually have three roles and sales development of sales associate which is they're building lists they're doing light spacing those kinds of activities so they learn the systems they learn the processes they're hearing the people on the phone all day and then we get young fresh people in for inbound and that's their training ground because there's no better training than having thousands of conversations every month and so you're gonna have way more conversations with inbound than you aren't without bound and then we transition them into to outbound but as part of that transition or growth plan we actually have them do outbound efforts to some of the inbound leads to and so we found that that's it's a little more comfortable it's a little warmer it starts to build that muscle memory so that I say transition into a pure outbound role they're much more successful I was gonna ask like what do you look for cuz I actually think the yes the inbound role is going to evolve drastically over the next few years here I wrote a post about how I think the you know the death of the average sales rep and all this automation is coming into play I actually think the inbound is gonna have to elevate their game quite a bit right because if anybody's read the challenger's sale talks about by the times how many comes to us they're already sixty to seventy percent of the way through the sales process that type of thing so if you're sitting there as an inbound rep some 21 year old kid out of college and you're getting an inbound and the person is like hey I want to talk to you I'm already educated 70% of the way through I want to talk to you but if you get some kid who doesn't know what they're talking about and says oh well you don't ask their crappy bank questions or whatever then you know you're gonna get frustrated like anybody ever called in to Comcast or Verizon and got in that front line person and you're just like just put me in touch with a manager I like I've already rebooted the router I already have gone through these ridiculous steps let me talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about so I actually think that inbound is going to elevate pretty significantly whereas the outbound I still think that you can have that kind of younger brand new into sales get your teeth cut so what do you look for in the difference between skillsets or when an inbound rep is ready to be up on I know it's like okay a year and inbound okay now you're ready but what are you really looking for for that that outbound that's gonna shine so so for us one of the things we look for it and we look for these traits when we first bring somebody into the organization and the same traits frankly that we look for in our sales personnel so are they business savvy can they have a good professional conversation and it's really frightening how much you find that a lot of folks coming out of college today are not used to having those conversations they're used to texting they're used to tweeting they're doing everything online but verbal professional conversations are definitely not the top of their skill set so we look for folks who have invested in that that that are very articulate in writing and and verbally very coachable so if somebody's really coachable we have great training and we can put them through and it's amazing how quickly they bloom and then somebody who's you know highly disciplined are they self-motivated a self-starter have they shown initiative if they have those three traits we find that we can make them highly successful and the sort of transition from inbound to Alabama because of the speed at which you have to get back to inbound you know we find that once they start to be able to define amongst the different flavors of prospects we have sort of and this is you know taking your your sort of yuy now but when they can start to understand that and craft that when they're having a conversation with an inbound repla understand how to pitch that back we start to then think they're ready to go to to outbound because without bound it's all about going in with a specific message for that prospect understanding what that means and why they should actually do something with us now and until they understand enough about the business the process and how to have an executive level conversation it's really hard to start now craft that individually for everybody that you're calling one of the things we did we recognize that inbound is it's a really critical and important roll and and sometimes even more so you know it might that that one moment of inbound might be more important than a moment of outbound and so what we did is we had our second ever sales development rep who did 18 months in outbound sales development and he was right on the precipice of promotion to an AE and we came to him we said hey we've got big goals a lot of them around inbound here are the numbers here's our expectations can you take over as a lead in this team three junior folks plus him and so now when unimportant and you know a well lead scored inbound comes in he's gonna be the one that leads that effort and then the other team sitting in the room with him as he does it and learning from him and growing with him and so I think that's been helpful to us and and then we have a lot of similar you know traits we're looking for in sales development just in general and I think one of the big ones is I love someone who's come from a hard challenging sales environment whether they were selling magazines door-to-door or they are selling knives door-to-door the Cutco knife that was there like I mean fantastic some of my favorite salespeople in the world came from selling Cutco knives and then I also absolutely love folks who came from the technical recruiting industry yes okay so our top outbound sales development rep angela is here today and she was recruited out of a recruiting company and they have to go into these environments where they're on the phone all day long and people are like hanging up on them telling them you suck and I don't want to talk to recruiters and they have to battle these hurdles of getting respected and I think it teaches them a lot of amazing skills and and the the recruiting industry is a tough one it's not a super scalable industry it's oftentimes it's real easy to start up a recruiting business so you find folks that are really talented but aren't in big growth environments and if you can you know get them out of those environments put them in fast grow software companies is a really big opportunity yeah just to reinforce that my top sales rep right now we hired as a sales development rep from a technical recruiting agency she moved up through the ranks and is now our top rep I mean if it proves that's a good good profile and on the for our outbound team the top couple reps are all female for us you know if there's any correlation there I love it actually there's a there's just popped into my head you know who I think would be great for outbound selling right now is people who are selling the political campaigns like doing the polls because I mean talking about taking a beating I don't care what your political affiliation is like those kids who are calling up and saying hey who are you gonna vote for you're gonna and then all of a sudden our candidate goes away like there's our prime leads for people to go higher because talk about taking a beating alright so the one there's not gonna ask one more question then open it up for everybody else's so if you got some stuff I would love to hear from it but the one that's kind of top of my mind right now and it specifically related to outbound is the whole marketing automation versus sales automation and how to turn sales reps into effective outbound without turning them into robots and I don't want to Kyle and I were actually having this conversation last night I got approached by somebody I'm not gonna say who it was but they said John what do you what are your thoughts between our marketing automation versus sales automation I go well marketing automation is marketing automation it's like yeah you automate you kind of lead score all that stuff sales automation to me is an oxymoron like sales automation to me is marketing automation yeah okay so if you're gonna automate your sales reps is why I say stop stop stop when I say that that white paper email stop having your reps send that white paper email have marketing send that white paper email all day long but stop having a rep sitting there push send every time somebody downloads a white paper and template it out because to me Gary Vaynerchuk is is one of my favorite guys that I'm following these days from a marketing standpoint total crackpot I love him what he talks about is say your content is Kay everybody talked about content being King right what he says those context is God and that really struck me because to me that sales versus marketing right marketing is content where sales should be at least context so so help me I mean I'm gonna Kyle start with you because I mean one in your tool to a certain degree is a dangerous tool alright and I'm not I'm not promoting anything here but one of the things there's a lot of these sales automation tools you take Marquitos and apart us and a lot of them have trouble when they bring something like a sales loft in because I don't know Marketo does that does that but no that's turning your sales ups into mini marketers so then they invest in something like sales laughter yes we're tout app whatever pick pick one and the sales reps use that one yeah well pick Skiles but but their sales rep used them but then automate they all of a sudden use them to just blast out template emails stick them into a cadence without any thought process so there's a fine line here between sales automation and efficiency versus sales automation so help me understand how you strike that balance yeah everybody's trying to solve the the scale verse personalization equation and I'll actually I got a quick a shameless self-promotion you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk if anybody is in March in Atlanta seventh eighth tonight we're gonna have our conference which is predicated on personalized outreach and personalized sales but gary vaynerchuk's gonna be a keynote speaker so we'd love to have you out there um i think i think we were saying is a big big deal you know i I went to New York two weeks ago and spoke at this event called building the sales machine and I had an opportunity to spend a ton of time with some amazing sales development leaders and what I heard from these guys and gals was that when they started their business they started by doing a lot of these automation tactics these big emails that went out they didn't know exactly who their prospects were going to be they kind of blanketed the universe and what happened was they got a bunch of appointments not not a not a large percentage of appointments or they got a lot a couple of appointments right and then they ended up closing some of these businesses they ended up generating some revenue and they kept trying to do it and what they realized was at the very very very early beginning when their opportunities were very green field some of us automation stuff worked but then what happened is they started honing in on who's my actual customer what which businesses do I want to go deep with and acquire as companies and they realized those tactics just didn't work anymore what they did is it was like they took a gasoline bucket and just put it out all over the market and threw a match in it and just lit the forest on fire and so automation can really hurt you when you start to scale as a business and so my belief is that the best way to go about an outbound sales development process is to pick the logos that you want to be your customers now might be 50 might be hundred might be a thousand the those amongst your sales development team and have them set a process for personalized connection with those folks because what you want to do is you want to communicate you want to connect and connect means really connect like human connect I understand you I'm connected to you I understand your problems connect with them then qualify them to move them along and you do that through personalized communications now it doesn't have to be like you research for an hour and write a 30 minute long you know email to them but you've got to show them that you care that you're paying attention that you are like them and that you're there to help and if you are able to solve their problems that's what this thing's all about and so the right types of emails the right types of phone calls and the right type of social social touch points but doing them at scale with process you know with with tools that help you accelerate those connections you know I there's an analogy that I like to use and and it's based on Terminator versus Iron Man right Terminator is just he's a robot he's just turned on go go go go go go go no thought like you know programmatically trying to achieve this thing whereas Iron Man is a human with emotion and intelligence and connections and all these ideas but then he puts on the suit right he hooks into Jarvis and everything's accelerated and so the salespeople of the future the modern Sales Professional is the Iron Man or iron woman of sales and they're using all their human skills and then adding to that all these technologies to help them do better Cathy from your perspective as a VP what do you and same same type of thing but I'd love to your perspective on what do you tell the rep out there that they're VP and I'm not you know I'd like to understand what you're doing but but like when they're pbps telling them you have to do 100 activities a day and you're and when you're saying we're saying hey but you got to be personalized right and the rep saying time management how so that's why I'm blasting out my hundred emails what do you say to that and and how do you see the difference between the two so so a couple of different things and you're gonna think I may be schizophrenic when I say this but it really depends on the type of business and the type of sale that you're doing so I've been at other companies where it was all about you know you could get them in the hook and in a sales cycle and one or two conversations because frankly it was so compelling it wasn't a big huge considered purchase and they could implement it fairly quickly that in those scenarios it was you know you have fewer conversations and fewer dials but you're having very meaningful so that was all about how much effort you put into that that target list because you wanted to really have those personalized because you could with the right one call or two calls get them into the funnel conversely and just to use I think in tech as an example for it so for considered complex applications which there's more more of those especially in the SAS world now as the markets evolving for us we have to have a minimum of sort of a thousand working accounts for an outbound wrap because for us it's all about timing so people replace the solution every 7 to 10 years and so we have to have enough working folks that you know enough of them are gonna be at that conversion point or new companies coming up and so I think you have to sort of look at your market look at the landscape and the buyers profile to understand what that right mix is now regardless of what you said it at the outbound reps are going to say there's no way I can hit that I don't have enough time and so what we've really invested in and what I you know it's great there's all these technologies now is how do you automate those low value preparation tasks so that they can spend all of their time on the human aspect of it to take and bridge that gap between us and that prospect without having to you know do Excel spreadsheets or manual searches on the web and trying to find trigger events and stuff and so there's so much great automation you can do behind the scenes that puts that person on this stage much more prepared to have a a live human human conversation it's like it's like your golf caddy he'll Drive you up to tee and hand you the club and say you know there's the you know there's the bunker you want to go the riots a dogleg left right ball on the tee now you swing the club right you as a salesperson you get out and connect with those people and you use the creativity and if you're and if you're eliminating a lot of that you know kind of rote process stuff then you can do it more and more and more I'd like to talk about metrics a little bit yeah I was at I was at a customer site and I looked on their big-screen TV and I saw that they had a metric that they were monitoring the success of their sales team on and it was email sent and I was like dude you can't doing that you can't be applauding your team for the number of emails they sent it just doesn't work now if you were measuring whether they were personalized or not that that might be an angle you can take but what we believe in what I've seen and what the best sales leaders have taught me is that the old-school world of sales the post opportunity sales that we grew up with spin selling they had three things that really mattered the concept of an opportunity and they still do by the way the the sales cycle and the and the hit rate the win rate of those opportunities to close and what's happened now top of the funnel selling has three very similar metrics that matter for the professionalization of this new sales development world and it's where the salespeople have opportunities sales development people have logos right they're not even even talked to them yet but they know they're the right logos and where the opportunity stage has sales cycle STRs have SDR cycle how long does it take to go from uncontacted company to qualified appointment and then the other one is the percentage you put a thousand logos in how many qualified opportunities come out the bottom one and that's one of the biggest metrics in the world because if you had a rep a who says I'm gonna reach out to 200 accounts and convert 30 that's wildly different than someone reaching out the 2,000 accounts and converting 30 and so that's what we try and that's what we've seen and that's a it's also a dangerous thing for all you out there thinking that blasting out of email is just to kind of get some groundswell you know if you look at those two numbers say say you send out a thousand emails or a thousand you know straight-up cold calls and you get five meetings versus a hundred and you get five meetings those five from the hundred are a thousand times more valuable than the five from the thousand and for multiple reasons usually they're higher qualified but beat the other is by getting five meetings out of a thousand even though you got the same thing here you probably pissed off 995 people that when you try to go back at them they're gonna be like yeah take me off your list you psycho alright so I really really recommend you no tearing out your accounts getting the logos tweeting them separately then the tier 2's in the tier threes and maybe if you want to automate a lot of that stuff and the last point I'll make this on this before we open it up for questions is really you know recommendation for everybody here's split test everything you do literally split test everything you do if you're gonna if you have a thousand people and you are gonna play a volume game don't just send one email out to all thousand of them send one hundred you know 200 200 200 200 and split test to see what works same thing with cold calling you know really hone in on a persona or something like that and come up with a message that you think is that persona is worthwhile and then call in a hundred times with your group to see if that message resonates marketing does it better than anybody else I mean marketing and split test everything right it's the science of everything sales has got to catch up on that or else we're gonna get replaced by marketing so any comments yeah absolutely I you know I I sit in our outbound sales development room that's where I that's my office and there's 16 outbound sales development reps all day long making calls and sending emails and while I'm sitting there I'm always like man I would have done this I would have said that I would have done this and one day I woke up I was in the shower and I thought oh this is totally my cold call opening this one's totally my cold call opening I went in the office and I said hey team listen up I got these ideas we should say this when we open a cold call and they're like that's pretty cool and the other ones like oh that's pretty cool so they start trying it that day and I'm hearing some success but it's all anecdotal and so we go okay we we've got to figure this thing out because I know sales managers that'll walk in the room and say you absolutely have to ask for permission to continue a call and then the other sales manager comes in because you never ask for permission to continue a call and they're both absolutely 1% right right in this opinion so we went in and we and we decided to design we went into Salesforce tasks tasks fields and created a field called call opening drop-down box one two three different types of openings and four was a custom opening and then we loaded that in our sales phone calling tool and when they launched those calls as they're ringing they just click call 1 or call 2 or call 3 and now a thousand calls later we can say which one most successful and so we went from this opinionated approach to like scientific proof that call opening to was more effective than three or four not just to get them into a discussion but to set up the appointment that produced the most pipeline that closed the most business and so that was really cool to kind of see that in this example of split testing any like how do you help your team figure things out yeah so one of the things that's been really helpful for us and I think this is partly how we utilize some technology automation while keeping it very personalized so similar to how you know Marketo or whatever is used for marketing automation we have a sort of sales app that lets us track you know with cadence and measure you know for these emails where they which ones were more open more frequently which ones didn't get open and then so we can help tweak the cadence that they're going through with the messages now we we provide them within that here's some core templates that's like 50% of the content and then the other 50% is the the why that prospect why them now with the personalized stuff but it still helps us know is it better to talk about the risks I'm not doing something early in the sales cycle or is that better later in the sales cycle so the key thumb attics and the order in which we need to present those to the prospect we're able to gauge kind of what that Cadence's and so we're starting to we've just started this the past few months and and really seeing success and and it's helpful for the reps and it makes them feel good about what they're doing I always say if you make 50 dials in the day and you get no meetings that's a miserable day any rep will tell you that's an absolute miserable day but if you make $25 with this approaching $25 with this approach and you still get no meetings that's actually not a bad day because you just figured out two approaches that don't work all right tomorrow you come in and try a couple of new ones if you want a SDR role and you guys can back me up on this it's a brutal role brutal role all right I mean after about six months of wailing your head up against the phone like making your ears bleed and send it on emails you're sitting there going how and it would like to how much longer do I next roll time so you got to make it interesting and split testing can make it interesting and if you do it as a group to by the way individual reps should do this but as a group you figure out things so much faster I'll come to you first question but say what one final comment on that and this is one of the things that we've seen is is that if you have reps who are you know targeting companies outbound you have to remind them that it's not going to be the same quick cycle that it is for inbound because if you believe that the buyers doing seeing where from fifty to eighty percent of their research before they're willing to have a live conversation that's not going to change magically without bound and so one of the things we had to reset was just expectations of thinking about it's not just a matter of live conversations but measuring what is that engagement so I have I been able to increase the engagement level of this prospective company with mine and that starts to build that sales funnel if you will at the very top before it's even an opportunity and so tracking that engagement level I think it's really important whether it's an SDR or sales rep doing that outbound prospecting and I do want to add one thing just on the sales side on the phone side I think uh you know for first-time founders for technical founders like the phone for first-time people in sales the phone could be the scariest thing in the entire world right like getting on the phone to actually try to reach out and you're gonna get rejected so many times but I sat on a panel with LinkedIn and Salesforce and Aaron Ross and the question was asked what's the sales app of 2016 and unanimous unanimously everybody said phone and at sales loft we had will do about 250 outbound sales qualified appointments per month and it's literally 50% of those come from very first meaningful interaction over the phone and the reason is is that it's a synchronous communication right email is asynchronous I email you you might get back later you might I may it's just back and forth thing with phone you have the person on the phone you're able to connect really personally on the spot right and the one thing that I would add just as a tip is that when your reps are making calls have them record the sentiment and disposition outcome of the call because what you can do is at the end of the month you can lay out all your reps across a bar chart and see Oh Angela and Tim made the same amount of calls but it looks like Tim has like wildly more that don't that are bad numbers let's dive in and see why that the case or Angela gets stopped at gatekeepers all the time she actually doesn't Angela if you're out there I know you crush gatekeepers but you know Angela's crushing gatekeepers more than anyone else what is she doing let's dive in and see and let's listen to the calls and see what's making her different and so when you record disposition and sentiment you can go very narrow on the coaching for each individual rep on the thing they're actually struggling with and and have them do it in groups by the way he's opened these opus open office environments are fantastic for collaboration but with you marry up the Millennial nan phone like afraid of eight and then even if a kid wants to get on the phone they pick up the phone and if nobody else is on the phone it feels like they're the only person in the office and everybody else is listening to every single word that they say so I like power hours do a Power Hour where marketing comes in says this is the persona we're going after this is the what they look like here's what they care about here's a message here's a case study that we can use to do that maybe some questions specific to that role now everybody for an hour hammer the phones and say the same thing we show CIOs and the healthcare industry how to drive these type of results rinse repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat and then measure to see in that hour if you got ten people making calls 10 to 15 calls that's 150 to 200 data points right there that you can look at and say that worked or that didn't work and when they fall flat on their face give a round of casts do it do it I used to have an award for the biggest train wreck like whoever had the biggest train wreck got the warden they got a like a medal around their neck and then whoever got the most meetings right because I love train wrecks and that's why I would get on the phone - all right let's open up for questions we got 20 min 15 20 minutes left let's start over here and then and then we'll get over here that would be even better now you can actually hear me so I'd love to know how you get as specific as you can how you think about the number of accounts that FCR should have based on the total number of addressable firms and ACV specific data points but I'd love you're gonna defer to you because you're in you're in this world a lot more than me as far as segmenting that oh yes and so I think it really depends on how quickly you believe that you can cycle through those accounts in terms of disposition amount are they a potential customer are now are they a potential customer but just not now or are they never a potential customer and so you know understanding how quickly that cycle is and how quickly you can get to that disposition I think helps you determine how many accounts you can have so you know there's you know some great calculators out there where you say you know if I'm prosecuting a six-step sequence or cadence and I'm gonna call them that you know every three days for the first week and then I'm calling them every five days so whatever you decide that Cadence's you can quickly calculate how many incremental accounts you can put into that and so it's just kind of creating a waterfall metric of those those components there and I think it's really important to do that for outbound so that you know how quickly they can be funneling new accounts in because like for us list building is the hardest thing so how do we find the right companies and find those right contacts because we're not targeting the Fortune 5,000 we're targeting SMB and you know it's hard to find those companies especially when you go outside of technology and so we've got to be having you know the sales associates in the background building out those accounts so that we make sure we've got them in Salesforce they're ready to go and they can be feeding into their funnel so they have that right set of accounts I know I'm not directly answering your question but it really depends could you talk about with your specific business how many Estia or how many leads the STRs have an ACV yeah so so from an outbound perspective we try to keep them with a thousand accounts in the system and that may mean per rep some of them are because there are year out some of them are immediate but we know if they have a working set of that if that's very top of the funnel they've got a thousand accounts and then they can take them through each of those stages and our ACB is anywhere from 25 to 100k depending on what vertical it's in and a very considered purchase so there's a lot of dialogue that happens with these folks is that a thousand last the entire year or does it last six months or or is it indefinite until you close it's kind of like a running set so as you disposition some out you need to repeat some more in and that's where it's having that that calculator of knowing that you're going to get through these accounts in a certain period of time and so having that view which by the way is not easy most systems look at stuff at the contact level not the account level so you need to just make sure that you're looking from an account perspective or a company perspective that they have enough working set any given point time whether you decide that's a thousand or five hundred make sure they have that they're continually feeding new companies into that as one's disposition either because you win them or you figure out they're not a good fit yeah we have something very similar we want to see our wraps make over a hundred and twenty five touch points per day and so that might be new contacts might be following up old contacts and we have two groupings of sales development one is upstream and when it's downstream the upstream team has obviously a smaller set of logos so fifty logos that they're working and when one of those logos pushes off and says call me back in six nine months they go off and a new one comes on when one of those logos gets a qualified appointment schedule they go off and a new one comes on right and so what you need to do is you need to figure out mathematically how many touch points do you want to apply how many touch points does it take to convert a prospect into a qualified opportunity over how many days and then how how many touch points can you expect your reps to be executing on and then you'll be able to fill in how many logos they can cover within a given month yeah by the way that's on that note going back to split testing don't don't listen to the studies out there about how many it takes five touches ten touches twenty touches it is a hundred percent dependent on who your market is and who you're selling to so I mean those studies are a good baseline to get an understanding let's put it this way it's more than one so make sure you have a contact strategy but something you can split test is take a group of accounts put you know five touches in 30 days or something like that take another group of accounts do 20 touches in two in 30 days or something like that and you'll figure it out for your business yeah don't listen to the stats I'm gonna come over here and then I'll come over to you there was somebody over here that a quick question could you guys give it a little bit of information about a typical cadence that your STRs run right now in terms of number of touches yeah mix between email and phone time in between each one good can you also talk a little bit about targeting more than one person in an account at a time well then I'm gonna actually hand out one a cow because they Nate what like you have a very specific you know exactly what your contact strategy is so and also help everybody understand again who is your target market for sales left so that give some context to it yeah so we sell to software technology and tech enabled businesses between ten wraps and a hundred wraps sometimes over it's really good once over but what we do is we have the split between upstream and downstream and upstream is going to be the anything above 30 or so reps and then downstream is going to be below that the the strategies are a little bit different with the two for upstream it's it's more personalized it's deeper within an organization so multiple people within the organization it's a lot of phone calls and it's breaks between weeks so it'll be like phone call email phone call and then it'll be a break and then phone call email phone call and then a break because it's not like always hitting them up you know we want to kind of give them some some breathing room and then with the traditional sales development team they're working a standard seven by seven process so it's seven phone calls and emails over a period of seven days and then they kind of recycle that with some additional touch points afterwards but one thing that they've added in is a social touch point so we're running analysis on which of the prospects are on Twitter and doing a follow doing a favorite sometimes doing a reply very you know not overburdensome but it's it's those are kind of some of the things but it's tweaked all the time I have a sales development leader that reports directly to me another thing we do it's actually different than a lot of companies is sales development that the the Director of Sales development reports directly to me doesn't report to our VP of Sales our VP of Sales handles all our Account Executive efforts and everything post opportunity but I give her full autonomy to run any steps in process that she wants she's great and open and available to a call or conversation if anyone wants to meet with her specific cadence that you figured out we absolutely do and we kind of did a little bit of a be testing on it but what we've determined so we we score all of our leads whether they're inbound or outbound based on company fit so we do behavior scores and we do fit scores so you know maybe we have that gays and bees are the best and we have a bunch of a and B leads come in but you know they're really not engaged with us I want to scale one to four or four B and bad they're like fours so we know they're the right company they're just not you know don't have an active project they're not thinking about us so for the a and B leads we actually have a 12 step cadence that we follow up with everything always starts with a phone call and most of them are multi-touch so will will will you know call if we don't get them live we'll leave a message and then we'll send a follow-up email so we're trying to hit them from multiple multiple points there and then one of the other things we do and this is I think really interesting as you start to think about you know we don't just hit one a one one title so even with inbound leads we're gonna go if we get the controller in we're going to get the CFM the CEO we're gonna reach out to them too and so that's a little bit of the outbound efforts on the inbound leads so we do the same thing like one of the the new campaigns we just started this has been proven really effective a short tenure but but high effective rates so far for our count execs who are doing outbound they're doing a much smaller number so they may pick a customer and they'll go to LinkedIn and say give me five customers or companies like this one so very targeted campaign and they're actually including in males and with that so LinkedIn in males so they'll do a phone call an email CEO we always go through LinkedIn and we're finding with different titles we can actually social media sometimes is easier to get to them because they're our admins probably not monitoring their LinkedIn account they're doing that directly and so you know combining the phone the email social interactions and even in some cases you know following them on Twitter and doing things like that has really proven effective especially at the cxl level yeah actually and my quick analogy on that one is if anybody's ever seen the movie focused with Will Smith you haven't seen I highly recommend it he goes and this guy who kind of scams this guy and he bets him double down on all this other stuff and loses a million dollars and then the guys like he's Wilson goes one more bet and it's like didn't pick a number on the field I'll guess right the guys are you out of your mind okay fine he picks the number and we'll guesses it right well the thing is is he set this guy up as soon as he landed in New Orleans for the Super Bowl everywhere you saw was 55 so the license plate was 55 there chandeliers were 55 the room and the guy stayed in was 55 so by the time the guy took but the binoculars and look down on the field he saw 55 that was the that was the person he wanted he was like that's the number right and so for me people asking in males an email is it phone is it social media it's all of it ladies and gentlemen it's all of it it's you know you want to follow people on Twitter you want to jump on their LinkedIn groups you want to answer a question don't sell them on anything answer a question you want to email them you want to in mail them you with every piece being value oriented yes and having context around the content that's where you start to make a difference and that's what you have to yeah in my opinion elevate a lot so all bound all about it exactly I'm coming over here there was a question question here yeah I'll come to you next all right so you may have already answered this so if you have I but my question is I'm kind of also in the SMB space as well and we find we have some difficulty around the list building and all those things as well like we we also target a very specific occupation within you know that particular company can you share anything on sort of your list building strategies or is that to baseball yeah I'd be happy to so having been going at this for a number of years there's there's a lot of new resources available so there's you know traditional folks whether it's reach force or datacom or folks like that that can help but they're really only going to get down to sort of that that 50 employee mark so if you're selling below 50 employees it's a lot more challenging what we've found because we're also very vertically oriented as there's a number of associations for each vertical and we actually have partnered with them to build out say four franchises you know we sponsor their shows we help sponsor and do stuff for the national franchise Association and as part of that you know we get lists of franchises so multi office health care is another great one so it's it's a lot more pain and suffering and you have to be very targeted with it but there's a lot of places to go get an itch vertical content you just have to be creative as to how you get them and then usually if you give them something in return of value it's a lot easier to get those those lists for data sources is that what I didn't hear like how do you build a good list yeah that's the biggest problem with mostly and garbage in garbage out right that's right there's some fantastic data service providers that are probably that are here that I know over here we're big fans of discover or work is a good one particular iti think they're expanded out Dayton eyes another one they're here today you can go see them for company lists matter mark is a good one I saw someone wearing a data fox shirt in the audience I think that's a good company that helps people build lists of contacts there's some businesses in the predictive analytics space that are helping generate lists of accounts you should go after ever string is a good one for that another company that does good company data is inside view so these are some of the ones that I that our customers have used and had a lot of success with ring lead is another one so you know check these out it's it's always like what who exactly do you want and then one of them is going to be better positioned to help you get that and then what resources do you have to capture that information whether you want the reps to do it themselves or whether you want an admin or sales office person to kind of do it all themselves and so there's kind of varying ways to go about that but then once you get it is where the magic really happens right you know my company actually started off as a data service provider and we're no longer one one of the biggest things we found was people had all this data but they didn't know what to do with it right they didn't know how to turn the data into qualified opportunities so that's where some of the magic of what we talked about today is and a few things that I think you know that I've seen that have really been good tips for folks you know out there in the marketplace is when you are sending sales emails have those emails go through your own mail servers and not a transactional email server so it's a very simple one the marketing automation products send through transactional email servers when those emails get in people's inboxes they go in spam filters and promo tabs because they're sent through transactional email when you tie a system into your Outlook or exchange or Google then you get more hit rate and reply rate another one is when you're making dials record the dials if you can legally do it because it gives you great coaching moments and opportunities use a local dial when you can to call people from the area code of which they are you get a huge hit rate on connects their record disposition and sent them into some of the things we talked about a be test all those approaches and then use data to improve your you know connections and one more thing and I we're gonna take one more question but one more thing on that on really profiling you get the list only as good as they can get right it's usually based on the demographics size industry that type of stuff but then I used to have database cleanup days with my reps I'd look for that tier 2 information that was like the new us like what technologies are they using who's the competition all these things and I would just say pizzas and beers and Friday afternoon and I would run everybody's territory with all the white space in them I'd say look everybody your job isn't to get meetings today if you get them fantastic but let's just have some fun with this call another 1-800 sales line like if you're looking for sales data if you want some good sales data their sales reps on a Friday afternoon are a wealth of information you just call them up and say hey you know I just don't let me show you some stuff I'm doing I'd like to get you know pick your brain about some stuff or the 1-800 customer service line right and just farm information so later on you can better qualify so one more question and then I think we're gonna have to bounce here down here did you have that see how long this goes I'll come to you if it's more what's up could you just talk briefly about like what's been successful compensation packages for the SDR role yeah that's gonna be a time I'm not in that world anymore so I can answer what are this 70k OTE 50/50 split between bass and variable comp Don contribution to pipeline qualified appointments sometimes deals closed we've gone back and forth on that yeah and we've got a something on the internet if you type in SDR compensation then we've got two or three posts that'll give you some examples of what we've seen you see that like a little we're fighting the clock but yeah Google search it and first results what do they put in SDR compensation SDR comp sales law off put it in there and it'll probably map it out for you variable based on geography oh okay last question over here okay sorry thank you yep perfect okay so content comes in often RFC ours are saying that they're not ready to buy and pushing them off so how do what how do you make the that middle how do you fix that how do you fix the blow-off no how do you what do they say to get people who are not they're not they didn't download a content to buy the product yeah they download the white paper because they liked the white paper right that's why that white paper email doesn't work by the way because if I wanted to talk to you about that white paper I would have called you about the white paper but anyways III think it's all about who you're talking to I mean a lot of times those in bounds are super low on the totem pole and so that like we talked about earlier that's a trigger that's a that something happened there somebody drove they didn't just you know come across our website and say oh this is kind of interesting they did a search and it drove them so something's happening in that business so it there's very little I think you can do to get that person that individual below the powerline person to say oh my god we got to buy this but I think we can use that information and then almost do the transition between inbound and outbound where we say hey this was this fit a really good profile for us here let's put that in a bucket over here and maybe let's do a little bit of research on this account and know that there's something happening in there that prompted that so let's see if we can find out what that is and fire off an email to the CEO and not say that this person came to us just know that something's happening there so I don't know if you guys have anything to add on that but like I don't I don't think there's much we can do for some low-level person to download in a white paper all of a sudden but but but I think one of the things you can do is just appeal to him from a human perspective of we generally know why people download those white papers it's one of five problems or three problems or whatever and say wow you know I saw you you download it's white paper I've found and talking to folks that generally they're experiencing this this and this gosh you know are you experiencing that it just appeal to them and likely if they are at low levels somebody's sympathizing with them and they're like gonna take it for all they can and then you can learn enough so that we now you just reach out to the CEO you have a lot more information about what the actual problem is and then you know hey we're here to help you solve that parting words in general sales automation kills kittens sales if you have a process that you think is working but it's not dependent upon great sales skills it's not going to work a long time you have to be great at sales to have great sales absolutely my last parting wisdom is it kind of relates to that is objection handling the preemptive strike I love the preemptive strike when you know the objections coming just use it say look I know you Dino you don't want to talk to me but the reason for me talking to you is this if you want to learn how I learned that personally you can look at my blog of 11 lessons learned from getting drunk in Vegas an accident accidentally buying a timeshare you ever want to see the sale the science of sales in action go buy a tack go pretend like you're not gonna buy a timeshare and they will own you like they own me so anyways any last parting gift wisdom any nuggets tips that you want to leave everybody with here the only thing I would say is there's no way you're going to be able to grow your company fast enough without thinking about what your outbound strategy is all right everybody we're going to be hanging around all day so if you want to ask questions whatever it is hopefully they enjoyed this thank you all very much appreciate it

Channel: SaaStr

Views: 9,745

Keywords: SaaS, SaaStr

Id: UVGpki39HGY

Length: 58min 3sec (3483 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017