Empower Your Business with b2b sales development for Supervision

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I want to kick us off by talking about like when we're doing prospecting of any kind Discovery is such a big piece of this what's your like number one favorite thing that you do in terms of Discovery the one that I get the best feedback and like the greatest engagement from is uh something called two buckets so you provide prospects with context around what your clients care about and then you ask your prospect where do you feel like you live so if I were to display it it might sound like so Bob just to give you some context our clients kind of typically fall into one of two buckets or one of two camps if you will Camp number one is they'll say Charles we really want to do better at significantly reducing the amount of time it takes for us to conduct research we're looking for help there or they're falling to Camp number two and say actually know we actually don't care about that at all what we really care about is mitigating risk on ensuring we don't miss critical Insight that could be important to our company when we're doing market research it typically fall into one of those buckets I recognize they're not mutually exclusive I'm curious which bucket you feel like you fall into that's what it is so what it does is does a number of things it provides context right to the prospects they see your experience right but the second thing that it does it helps them think about where they live and they'll kind of like usually get a response like oh that's a good question and then the third thing is once they give you an answer the answer helps you kind of frame how you want to take the rest of the call because they may say I actually don't care about the first one at all I really care about the second one you know the that they've admitted to it I can say oh can you tell me a little bit more about how you think about it and then it's very free so that's something that people really like can you use this do or do you use this call email do you have a preference yeah it works everywhere just different levels like if you're on a scheduled call it's like a very deep you do it in a very deep thoughtful way if it's in a cold call you just of do it in a more bridged version right I actually got a cold call yesterday from somebody that did it and it was like Wow and she asked me like how do you think about those things and I like first of all I was this is a great cold call which you didn't expect so it works there and it works in email as well just helps people better understand what your clients care about and then allows them to give themselves an opportunity to tell you what they care about and if it's neither one of those two things that's also good they just tell you well it's not one of those two but we care about why you know we care about Z or what have you and that just really helps start a conversation which I really really like do you either of you do the two backet Theory I I use that my Cal opener right now I normally prease it saying hey you know we a in from wherever I'm calling from for myself right now it's just me mind if I share the two big problems a lot of folks come to me and tell me that the and that kind of builds some curiosity they go yeah sure what are those two big problems then I can just you know in 15 seconds say this or this don't suppose those relate to you right now and you know nor chuck if you layer in a couple of jokes in there as well it helps people think and that is very refreshing for people when you give people a chance to think about things they respect you and it makes them feel good so that was I like that a lot I love it okay let's switch over to email if you don't mind and email in terms of cold prospecting what are some of the things that make a great cold email number one continuity most of the time when I get emails they're like hey I saw you like cats that's awesome we have an HR solution that helps you make your people happy do you want a demo and that doesn't make sense so my first rule is connect the subject line to the opening line then connect the body to the opening line and then connect the call call to action to the body so everything should make sense so if you're going to talk about cath which I encourage you not to make it some kind of metaphor but my second tip is that there should be some level of relevancy it needs to be timely there needs to be some research that justifies why am I reaching out and why am I reaching out right now right now right now me out okay so continuity I I mean don't talk about cats unless that's what you're selling I think the one time that you can talk about cats is if you are doing some kind of outbound campaign that is not meant to book a leading right this minute but is meant to build relationship and so I think there's a time when I'm just trying to connect with Charles and get Charles to be my friend and so I'm just going to try to find ways for us to Vibe together so that when you are on the market you are like H man I really need an HR Solution that's going to make my people happier wait Sarah she's so great great we love cats we should hang out I'll give her a call right now but that's like the only time I would talk about cats is is more for relationship building than actually like in in action trying to book a meeting then cats are off women no cats when we're thinking back to cold prospecting emails do you have a framework that you're utilizing when it comes to email followup what are you doing yeah 100% have a framework otherwise how how can I remember go short time memory so for my code emails this framework's been used in a few different ways I like to call it opsa which it stands for observation problem solution AR so this is a first touch code email framework that you can use essentially goes like this observation something about them problem problem that you can hypothesize because of the observation solution how you help with that and then an ask a CTA it's just like is this relevant to you so if I was reaching out to you Leslie and I was selling let's say notion which is like a project management and communications platform I could say something like observation hey Leslie spotted Zoom info sponsored your the r and Brooklyn event great to see that they've renewed and then I'm go into a problem the problem could be a lot of folks in the media space find that the biggest risk for customer churn is lack of communication between them and their clients solution we work with organizations like 30 minutes to pres Club to track manage and communicate the performance of the the campaigns that clients run with them to their clients to keep them happy and then I can do the AR which to close ended you know is is this rather you right now worth a lot are you using anything to keep track of your project as Bond ship they B that's my first email I follow that framework pretty well with 75 words in under subject lineing for that one I just try and go for one word maybe even just say Zoom info that i' probably get your attention given that you Ren things I think the problem that a lot of sell reps fall into is they tried to put too much in their first email they tried to tell everything we notion has got a million different things we can do from different personas but what I'm going to do in my wops is I'm just going to start talking about different problems assuming the first didn't resonate then I can talk about keeping projects on track managing events like this and how oce might help of that maybe layering in some value ads so I could send you an onboarding checklist that a lot of our clients are finding success with using notion and that over time hoping that I can strike a cord that resume to view so it's called email boil obser again observation observation problem problem solution ask ask ask ask got it I love that what is the point or the purpose of a cold call in your opinion it is not to book a meeting it is to start conversation sales is OB obviously it's very counterintuitive what we feel makes sense most of the time doesn't and so most salespeople feel it makes sense to call because I want to book a meeting that's normal that people feel that way and it takes a lot of failure to realize that wait a second you know my my feelings don't really reflect the reality of the situation it's tough because it's what we're measured on right booked meetings but to your point having a conversation you make the minimum kind of the worst case scenarios that that you gather some information from a coku that helps you massively as well that you can walk away knowing who might the right person be or if they do or don't need it as well I think your kind of like two options of bucketing earlier was really good because if they do say hey neither of those things are relevant to us and then they say we don't have any brought and then you maybe offer up two more and they're still relevant I don't really want to book meetings or have a whole s of someone who doesn't have any problems with the way they're doing things so that's still a good outcome for me I've learned they don't have the problem they solve or at least they don't think they have the problem that we solve at four so that's a good outcome as well your quota will go up if you book meetings that don't convert to closed one so if you book really good meetings because you had conversations and you qualified people in versus qualifying them out then you're going to have a higher conversion rate and you're going to make more money and your quot is going to stay lower how about you just take a meeting and you pressure someone into having that followup with you one they're probably going to know show so you're going to have a higher noow rate so you're going to have to book more so you're going to be putting in more kpis and then two if they do show up it might end up being disqualified by the AE so you have to book more and you have to do more kpi and then your AES don't want to work with you and then you don't get promoted when you want to be promoted so it just works better it's a better customer experience and it is a better experience for you as the employee because if you look really good meetings and people want to work with you a lot of AES will ask me oh Charles what happens if those problems don't resonate what do I do then like I get a lot of that I'm like nothing you let it go and they're they have a surprised face like oh I didn't CU they're used to kind of like I have to win everything it's very interesting like what do I what do I do if they're not AIT then they're not a fit and then you go find people who are a it right like I think the sooner you get to that answer that's that's the wit right there as an account ex especially now that I'm running my own sales because I know really well the moment I stopped trying to make everyone a fit and assuming that no one was a fit and then look for reason to prove that they are instead of assuming everyone's a fit and trying to prove prove that I found myself wasting less time on deals that just weren't going anywhere and those deals that don't go anywhere they wasted my time twice as long on sales cycles and on some level you have to care less about the outcome and care care more about the conversation really this stuff is really hard for people to do I will caveat your tip though where sometimes you're not speaking the language of that person and it might be worth taking those buckets and rephrasing them 100% or you know before you qualify out and go oh this is a waste of time say okay well I'm curious what what is top of mine what do you care about or sometimes like you said they misunderstood what you what you said I actually called a senior fellow at a big Investment Bank and he said yeah we don't that's not for us so I said oh I I didn't realize that are you saying you don't you're not conducting research with like on brookers or k or ACC no no that is something that we do and then I said oh okay that's cuz that's kind of what what we help with and then it turned into a conversation to your point i' I've had the exact same thing happen where I was like can you just back up so you're you're in charge of blah and does this team report to you and do you ever have this problem with this other team they're like yeah that happens all the time okay because that's what I was trying to call about so I think I just kind of messed up on my ini blame yourself not them don't make me feel sleep and I think also especially in the context of co-o calling like people will reject as their default respond like they have a reflex to reject so sometimes asking the same question a different way it's kind of like going hey hey how are you and you go yeah I'm good thanks you and then I go yeah but how are you really and you're like I'm a mess you know and then I get the real answer right sometimes you just have to break that them out of that like autopilot reflex Instinct response of hey no neither of those things are a problem for us and to oh I'm actually thinking about this now actively same goes when you get a negative response from a call to email and someone just says I'm not interested or take me off your list the first subcribe yeah un subscribe the first thing I do is call them ask them if they need a hug sounds like he need a hug I one time got chewed out by this woman when I cold emailed her I like cold called her like twice during the week and then emailed her twice she chewed me out so hard it was a multi- paragraph long want to yeah on email and I said oh man I'm sorry I'm just a stupid S strr I really didn't mean to overstep my bounds and she came back with like so sorry don't ever call yourself coming to rescue you and then she bought like six months later yeah slow slow down handshake yeah yeah that me there have that they got rejected on email Charles how would you respond I asked them the same question every time I go did you call them how answer 98% of the time is no like what are you talking to me for you me why you talking to me you should same thing what are you talking to me for I think email's great as a channel to like get interest and get quick responses as well but you can't ask that many questions over email without it like looking like a check list Buzz him like I I I was working with rapper Shopify recently and they got a response that hey no we've just changed vendor and they said something like does your platform do this question mark and she replied say yeah we do do that hope the rooll up goes well and I was like no that question is telling us something call him and say hey you asked about this what's make it that important turns out his point of sale platform that he just integrated didn't do whole sale and he was it was a massive paino and then she B the meeting turns out it picked the wrong vendor should have called Shopify in this case but I'm not affiliated with Shopify neither am I but it is trash that other competitor trash in this scenario I gotta hear what's your cold call opener my cold call opener usually it's just permission based that's just pretty much my opener do it ring ring hi this is Sarah hey Sarah this is Charles calling I know you weren't expecting my call was right I tell you why I'm calling real quick I'm calling with Alpha for me don't necessarily recommend and does this I'm like what's up it's will a here Lo Lesley spotted Zoom info on Rene as a sponsor got a minute it's a cold call I'll be brief though Co call pleas hey Leslie it's Sarah braer calling from demo have you been it works phone matters the most like you know if you're cool you're calm my number one tip is be someone that that person would want to get a beer with I've heard a little bit about reaching out to the Sea Suite do you have specific tip will when you're reaching out to the SE Suite told someone lower down in the organization someone who's maybe an IC if you're selling to sales teams talk to an SDR and your county executive get L the land if you're selling to HR teams maybe talk to the payroll specialist just to get some more context in there because then you can leave something hyper relevant and not below your shot maybe the only shot you might have with that executive so big fan of bottom up approach when I'm going those those top top folks head hun what about prospects that go you on the initial meeting do you have like a goto I do have a go to it's my favorite goto let's hear it goes back to what will was saying and Sarah about blaming yourself and I send an email that says something along the lines of hey Sarah I may have jotted our time down incorrectly if I did I'm sorry were we still on for 2 o'clock that's it the response rate is very high I don't have any data and actually a lot of my AES and SRS get call backs and Prospect apologized I just move the invite move it two days same time and send an email saying hey looks like something must have come up hope everything's okay I don't like anything that make them feel guilty you make someone feel guilty they're going to avoid you exactly no one likes F that way I don't say any move the invite this time let me know if that doesn't work oh I love that I do that too and then like if they ghost you like three times then you can do a slightly guilty tactic which is just say you okay you you can okay okay yeah for everything okay I love that if you were to move to an org where the ICP was not sales or sales leaders would what would you do different for your brand I mean my brand is for me so probably nothing I it probably would end up talking more about what's working in that space and inevitably you'll end up talking about the problems that say you're selling the cyber security that cyber secur is coming up against but I mean my brand is talking to salespeople about the experience of selling and that's what it is on LinkedIn and I'm doing it to help other people because I've had really crappy managers and I've had a really rough time trying to be good Cameron asks about the budget objection what's your fast quick style response to a budget don't have the budget Charles it's not there there are a lot of responses one response that comes to mind is is it secretly a timing thing a lot of times people when they tell me it's a budget issue it's secet just a bad time or maybe it's not a priority yeah I think that the objections you just got to get to the truth so similar kind of framework ignores what they said talk s Bud strict these days most fol think you don't just have this money lying around is it that you don't think and then I might recap the problem that I offered up is it a problem or do you just you just got too much on your Play why you trying to get to with the truth I'll recap that problem because again I want jump out of reflex mode and go oh that's the problem that he's calling about how do you handle a sales call when you're not getting to a decision maker necessarily you might be greeted by someone who's a gatekeeper or a admin or whatever that looks like you know this is why I call cell phones hasell phones I think like at the end of the day that gatekeeper if it's that person's personal assistant or whatever they often know that person's schedule really well they know what strategic priorities are important to them and so I end up asking some questions trying to befriend them and saying like would this person actually be in charge of that and maybe you can get a name maybe you can get an email worst case scenario has to be sent through the voicemail okay the three of you thank you so much for your time your thought