Empower your team with outbound sales lead generation for teams

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[Music] today we're going to be talking about how to how to grow sales with outbound prospecting and i feel as though over the past maybe six seven months that outbound has been put on the back burner a little bit because people have been a little bit afraid about doing cold outreach and uh whether it's by email by phone phone actually right now that we mentioned it for me i've said this numerous times that i am not getting like any way in terms of volume that i used to get in terms of cold calling uh i probably get one to two cold calls a week that's not an invitation by the way for people to start picking up the phone and cold calling me but honestly i think i think people have a have a bit of angst around actually picking up the phone and doing cold outreach at the moment because they're just not sure what the reaction is going to be i've seen some some data that suggests that in certain industries that it's actually working really really well and aaron i know you've got some experience there as well we've spoken about it a number of times but uh with that i'd like to introduce you to our our guest today who's aaron ross doesn't need a huge introduction i guess myself and aaron have have been speaking uh quite often here and also done some b2b rebellion videos on that but just to give you a quick background on aaron so uh aaron is is well known in the sales space having uh written the book predictable revenue and from impossible to inevitable predictable revenue being one of my personal favorites i've mentioned that a couple of times as well but it's it's one of the the books that i read early on in my career um and it really helped me strategize in terms of how to build sales and marketing teams without that respect and it's based around how aaron grew or helped grow uh the sales force business up to 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue in a short space of time and it's a very simple structure and when you read through it you see the things you say oh i can actually do that but it's like an instruction manual you know i i put up something on linkedin today to push people to come and register for this was it's like being in tech sales or being in any type of sales role at the moment and not having read predictable revenue is a bit like buying something from ikea without the instructions right you'll start you'll get there in the end but you'll end up having to break things down and build them back up uh up again a couple of times you'll probably have a few screws loose or a few screws missing by the time you finish in the end so uh it's a good instruction manual to everybody that's in sales and as i said it's it's known as the uh the sales bible of silicon valley and it's it's known for that as a reason siren welcome today mate it's really great to have you on again hey andy yeah thanks i hadn't heard the ikea you know example before but it makes sense i just made that one up this afternoon aaron would you believe yeah you know worse it works okay with that i'll i'll leave it over to you just some housekeeping before we get started if you have any questions guys please feel free to put it into the q a so someone has asked me or people have asked in different times what's changed right predictable revenue the book came out into 2011. uh not so nine years ago um the impossible book which i i have up here came out um it was refreshed as a new edition last year and what's interesting is that really there's one thing that's changed technology which but that's had a cascading effect on other things so technology has changed a lot in the last nine years just because it's cheaper easier to build stuff which means that there's more apps get built and there's more people building them which means there's more stuff more apps sending more types of messages so there's more channels more messages of all types whether whatsapp email or like texting email also like newsletters content like across everything and so this uh just this complexity and noise is growing and growing growing this is going to continue indefinitely this is an unstoppable uber trend for our foreseeable lifetimes and this affects both your customer your your sales team your sdr's and your customers so this affects a lot some things haven't changed at all comes the way people interact with people but this noise affects a lot of the the way that we market and sell today so what to say is you know really the goal of predictable revenue and not just not the book but you know there's this magic moment when you are um closing deals regularly from a predictable source of quality meetings so i say is if you want to drive predictable revenue you need predictable lead generation which is predictable meetings always quality meetings and when you have that then you can really uh this magic momentum you can invest x and get y you can like drive the growth of your business with predictability and we put this into a formula just for fun right so this idea of i mean there's no perfect way to do this it's just if you had consistent top of funnel right predictable sources of lead generation and you're feeding that into sales systems and this all takes time then the goal of that is or the output predictable revenue so let's talk about top of funnel but even before that it's reminded that you know a lot of growth and success is predicated on is based upon the idea that you've got um you know successful customers and employees in product market fit right you've got something that's that's worth growing you've got something that's ready to grow so with that as a caveat because a lot of companies i think actually the the number one most common struggle for companies trying to grow is if they're not ready to grow but let's see you've got that and you realize you know if we actually get more meetings we can we can close more sales and so that consistent top of funnel is step one right how can you consistently create meetings with new new accounts new companies new prospects right add-on revenue and expansion revenue and renewals are also critical and those will come but and um a lot of companies like if you if you don't build the the the skill to go out and talk to new customers who don't know you then at some point you're going to plateau in your pond all right so there's really kind of three different ways like types of leads that are important to understand and if this you've read either one of the books this will be a review but this is so fundamental because this really one of my for any time i do a sales assessment or sales due diligence of a company one of my first questions are what are the where does your revenue come from what are the lead sources of your revenue and a lot of companies don't know or they can't break it down to into what's organic versus paid what is predictable versus uh you know plateauable so word of mouth these seeds nuts and spear seeds really is through word of mouth that's where you get started and you want you want as much as you can get because the advantages these are the best leads the disadvantages are hard to generate and hard to kind of predict and drive you can't really do that the best thing we suggest doing to kind of create predictable word-of-mouth leads would be to create create a consistent customer success approach the customer success management team customer success whatever you want to call it but a framework to help target the right customers and to onboard the right customers and set the right expectations and make them help them be successful with your service or product and then also help them see the value of it that'll help create more customers who stay longer create more referrals better case studies and testimonials okay that's the first one nets would be marketing casting a wide net content marketing inbound marketing whatever you want to call it it's great a lot of advantage to that the challenges are that oftentimes again they plateau and it does tend to be a quantity over quality type of program and the last one spears outbound prospecting app on business development again this is what i created salesforce.com and what our predictable revenue business specializes in still is outbound prospecting in the sense of you have a human who is building a targeted list and reaching out to set up appointments with people who usually don't know you now these are all three important and they're all great they're just all a bit different so let's give you some guidance i mean i think again this is assuming that for at least the the paid programs like marketing and sales and there's a lot of varieties when you're kind of investing your time and energy to go out and drive growth that's only going to work if you've nailed the niche and that really just means you have a new an ideal customer who you know needs you like a specific type of customer there's a pain they've got you know how to talk to them in their language and to help them see the value what you have to offer so assuming you've nailed the niche then you've got these three types of lead generation programs seeds nets and spears and just because again i think there's this new idea still for lots of companies around sales specialization so there's this term sdr i have in here sgr if you haven't seen this means sales development rep sometimes called business development reps or lead development reps but i'm just going to use the term inbound sdr so when you've got word of mouth leads or marketing leads they tend to be what you want is to not give those say they're coming into your website for the most part you you do not want to give them straight to sales people you want them ideally to go through a junior team inbound strs to review them pre-qualify them and only pass the right ones onto the sales people right so those seasons tend to go to the inbound sdrs and the spears the outbound prospecting is done by outbound sdrs basically dedicated prospectors ideally okay uh i'm hoping there's a lot of people who are at least familiar with the term outbound and maybe you want to build a team but you're not sure how and so this is we're gonna have time for questions if there's some new terms or anything that doesn't seem like has us fit we're to get to sales specialization next but now with these types of lead season nets and spears like they're all great you want them all but you have to kind of focus on which one you do first because they all take investment time and energy um like the goal for any of them is to have a consistent funnel like a predictable funnel this way right predictable lead generation and this is uh from zora this is actually an except from the from impossible to inevitable book um your outbound funnel may look different than this the numbers are not exactly what you need to be focused on it's the fact that each by the way yep we have uh lots of kids and lots of dogs in the house so there's never a quiet moment i think i've ever done a webinar ever where there wasn't some sort of invasion um so with zorah right they have account and they tend to have small customers and also like fortune 1000 and for them predictability looks like a certain number of account plans dialing emailing in linkedin uh certain types of phone calls but the goal is if we do x activities we get y revenue and whether it's in your marketing channels or sales prospecting channels or customer success channels this is your goal is predictability oops get back to here we go so one more thing on on the channels here before we move on is that i mentioned you want to do all three not the same time you usually start with your relationships right if you're if you're a smaller company getting up the ground um but again a lot of these principles are true if you're if you're enterprise but you want to usually start with your relationships um that gets you let's just go to startup you know if you're you know uh earlier stage company gets you to one or ten one two maybe 10 million in revenue ish and then you plateau typically and you're like wow we need to get outside our relationships our networks we need to do some marketing or selling now if you're a product company you tend to want to start first within a primary investment in outbound prospecting right prospecting is very uh and there's a lot of caveats right it's not for you want to be a b2b market not kind of consumer like not like really small deals of under you know maybe a thousand or a couple thousand pounds euros or dollars a year but if you're a product company it tends to be easier to do outbound anything because it's more concrete so outbound prospecting tends to be the best place to start if you're a services company said or if it needs if it's a complex conversation it's kind of hard you're struggling to communicate what you do you tend to want to start with content marketing because content marketing can help you break down what you do into more um it's better for education and understanding for complex ideas and of course yeah anyone can break the rules like if you are passionate about outbound maybe just start with that if you're passionate about inbound or content marketing or seo or whatever your your most enthusiastic then you should start with that because any of these takes a lot of time energy in a journey to turn into a successful lead generation machine so i want to touch on this if you have sdrs so we talked a little bit about sdrs so again these lead generation programs the the word of mouth or or content marketing nets sort of get fed ideally into an inbound sdr function who pre-screens and pre-screens and qualifies them before they go to sales people and outbound prospecting is done by the outbound sers and really common three quarters of companies that have these teams somehow they mix this role right they have these s these junior sales people bdrs sdr whatever you call them and they're these they're supposed to in respond to inbound leads and do outbound prospecting and i will tell you right now that while there are some exceptions like again highly transactional like small business consumer types but um i would say 90 of these of the companies who do this it is a huge mistake and you're basically shooting yourself in the outbound foot because for outbound these are completely different jobs this inbound sdr outbound sdr role on the surface it sounds similar because there's appointments and emails and phone calls and they're passing things on to sales people but the jobs are completely different because the mindset the compensation the metrics the methodology the the messaging the rhythms the the tools you use are all different so do not mix them it's a really really good reason all right so consistent type of funnel and we touched at the high level on seeds nets and spears and i think that fundamentally is such a vital uh idea is that the differences between word of mouth and marketing and prospecting different funnels different metrics different steps methodologies teams mindsets okay now whatever the lead generation programs you have whatever you've got you want to make them as predictable as possible when you can and they feed into your sales systems now let's just say sales people because again you often start end up with a lot of companies end up with a high volume low touch kind of small business like very small account channel and a high touch um i would say enterprisey but you know like higher value higher touch side of the business over time but usually what this looks like is you're you're not it's not just your sales people because you're really thinking about people are so important i mean look i i love low touch when it makes sense and i love people when they make sense we don't want to do low touch just as just because there's no people when it's cheap or always use people just because it makes it easier we want to kind of use the right tools at the right place but when i think about sales systems feeding these leads into it we want to know we want to have in place uh if i was a sales executive what are my dashboards telling me so ultimately if i don't have dashboards i really don't know what's happening or not it's very hard to gauge what's happening even with a small number of people on the team um are my tools and my people doing consistent discovery and disqualification so that they know how to keep the things that aren't a fit out of the pipeline and things that are often in the pipeline and it's as accurate as possible um how are we messaging my sales like sales people are so challenged with effective messaging in emails or sometimes some phone calls i think in general sales people are pretty good but for some reason emails and writing we just uh want these they're too long they're so afraid of leaving something out like what if there's this one thing they want it's so hard for sales people especially to write concise emails now i'm talking about the cold emails i'm talking about any email to any prospect client or customer uh and then frontline management which is really that's the keystone if you start to have more than um you know let's call it you ten you know five ten twenty sales people i mean even if you have five or ten sales people it's as soon as a vp of sale whoever your sales leader is needs a manager that really is the keystone of the effectiveness and health of the whole team especially as you as you scale like that is the it's kind of like the hub if you're riding a bike you know those that's your whether your outfits your chain it's either your chain or your your wheels it's something that's vital if it's not working the whole thing is going to fall apart but that's really a sales system to these systems that if you're consistently feeding these leads into your sales teams you kind of know um i mean i love people by the way but i think of like that one of the most inspiring books that i'd read back long time ago before this was really the toyota way how toyota created a manufacturing just machine in lean manufacturing and six sigma all these things to just have the most optimum way to move uh parts and inventory and cars through their assembly lines and that is what i aspire to with sales and while um i by the way too i never believe you should treat your sales people like robots but you want to kind of have systems in place to give people the freedom to focus on what they need to do and not spend all their time the least amount of time uh possible like inputting stuff or doing the wrong things or focusing on the wrong areas so one thing i do want to spend another moment on is idea of sales specialization because this is really where it begins and i know some of you might be like oh my god i've heard this so many times and you know what i'm gonna be talking about this for a lot more years to come because most companies still don't specialize as they should and the example like if i was if you're a sports coach like would you ever go out and tell your whole team okay everybody everyone everyone to attack and then everyone defend like it would be crazy no they would you would never win uh no you don't do that you have attackers midfield defenders and goalie or whatever your specialists are pick your sport i don't know any sport i'm sure there's something out there but i don't know what it is where everyone does everything but what in sales we want sales people to respond to marketing leads to prospect to close and to sometimes manage customers right or or pick two or three of those jobs and it's just impossible they can't do it all they can't be good at at all and they're being you know decent and something and not very good at everything else so i'll give you for example if you expect your sales people to do more to fill more than like 10 or 20 of their quota with their own prospecting uh like proactive business development and again there's there's shades of gray here like cold prospecting for sure they should not be doing much of um account expansion yep but let's say colder account development colder prospecting shouldn't be more than 10 or 20 percent of most sales people's pipelines they should stick to maybe under five or you know a handful like five or ten or twenty maybe thirty key accounts or key partners for them to develop personally and the rest should be done by a dedicated prospect or prospecting team like those attackers so these are those four core roles uh the you know the principle is focus people doing fewer things better all four may not apply to you if you don't have inbound leads you don't need someone to respond to them and maybe you are in a custom web app shop um web design agency or like a commoditized service and outbound is not going to make any sense so there's a lot of reasons why you might change this for your business but it really is more types of jobs so people can do fewer things better and you only need one person to start specializing or two one person you start specializing my block on time on the calendar if you have two people you you tend to have unless again there's a really good reason a junior the kind of person you're legion and a senior person doing sales but that is still not done enough by enough companies so when we're building sales systems just a few things to keep in mind again i mentioned uh this idea you over time you tend to have kind of higher volume lower touch um kind of line of business one or more and then higher touch bigger deal type funnels um because small business and mid market or small business enterprise just that's when people tend to end up at some point um but i think too this you know fewer bigger better deals or opportunities is really important especially with all like the noise and the hecticness of people's just lives so even with your sales person if you were bigger better customers if you're doing outbound prospecting fewer bigger better if you're in marketing fewer bigger better channels and then one thing is if you have sales stages it's not about getting the the perfect sales stages for your team it's about whatever you have getting the team to apply them as consistently as possible that's more important than the perfection of the stages so let's say you do have some outbound prospectors or you you're considering that right that's kind of what we're here for so just the thing is there's a lot of misconceptions about outbound or if you haven't done it before a lot of um it's easy to make mistakes because there's a lot of similar sounding let's go back to seiznes and spears really commonly a vp of marketing might say okay what's the lead conversion rate in outbound or what and like well that doesn't that that's you don't use that metric in outbound you don't really you don't have leads in outbound you've got like prospects and maybe accounts and the conversion rates are different it's just different it's like a it's a it's like saying um you've been a runner your whole life you've been doing content marketing and been successful and now you want to do outbound so now you're doing running and swimming right you've got that core health but the technique and the gear is all different so typically the qualification criteria for inbound leads is different than for outbound opportunities or meetings so if you have a team that's been really successful at inbound and the sales people are used to basically being able to do high velocity show up and demo and propose and win which is great love that and yet when that starts to if that starts to plateau which it always does and they start doing outbound those alpine appointments are just different they need to be prepared to know if they get an outbound set appointment that person may or may not know who they are really and they need to be able to do some more uh conversational discussion selling explore exploration before they do a demo the other thing is that uh because you know you your sales team can become that inbound dependent as well so you gotta watch that you don't have to stay that way they need to be able to adjust whether it's like an inbound like appointment or outbound and just be able to do either one depending what's happening another thing is if you have prospectors or plan on them you want them to support no more like one prospector just no more than four sales people pretty common is one prospector to three sales people again that might be an enterprise might be one to one one to two but when one prospector supports more than four five they just get spread too thin the focus goes down right so that's a pretty again cardinal rule uh you need some kind of you know i'll repeat this again later we need some kind of minimum deal size for prospectors to kind of get credit when they're prospecting because if they're just prospecting to small and large opportunities and again small ads are relative the small ones which tend to be easier to get from meetings are just going to eat their attention so that might be the most common comp mistake made uh well paying for meetings is another one but not having a deal size minimum for prospectors to feel good credit and then uh michigan you know most the messaging that people send on emails or linkedin is pretty pretty atrocious and these are a lot of great prospectors by the way and a lot of people that are still have very jargony uh hard to read cumbersome alienating messaging you know i see like sales people are usually worse love sales people you know i just but honestly most of the emails they write not very good too long too complex don't sound real and just too many calls to action they're not easy to read easy to act on so we're going to move on to number three so you can you generate a consistent you have a way to generate consistent leads you're feeding them into this systematized sales team which by the way you know it's a never-ending journey to build all this uh let's talk the time right you gotta invest the time uh which is to if you're building a team from scratch let's just stick to outbound today right we're building an outbound team from scratch dedicated prospectors um and again the rules are a bit different when your enterprise enterprise right right so if there's anyone who's you know like kind of the size of like a i don't say like multi-billion dollar and up uh companies but the complexity and the budgets and politics become kind of complicated so you can be curious to see if you are in one of those kinds of companies and you're not allowed to build this kind of team it's our question in there we can talk about that but if you're building from scratch you kind of want to expect it to take could be 12 months right um and what does that mean though probably two how do you want to define roi like seeing enough revenue coming in that the higher executives like to see a see material change and like they're seeing the revenue enough revenue where okay there's consistent revenue so let's talk about some quarters um this is getting pretty high level around the first quarter if you're building a team from scratch right you're hiring people you're putting in place training them getting the tools in place getting them ramped up how do we send emails or send linkedin or make phone calls you know the first quarter is kind of like putting all that in place getting it started the second quarter you're okay getting meetings you're basically ramping people up towards hitting quota consistently and quota should be defined primarily as the number of sales accepted meetings sales except whatever sales accepted x sales accepted opportunities sales accepted leads there's a lot to purchase for it so they should be hitting quote at that point in terms of pretty typically for a mid-market sas company it could be eight right six to eight to ten depending on complexity this that and the other it could be higher than that for very transactional things could be lower than that if it's you know unique super enterprise q3 right so this month's kind of like seven eight nine you are seeing that pipeline grow hopefully you actually see some deals come in like kind of lucky they're not consistent yet might be one two three there's some number there's something there but no matter what's happening you're seeing consistent progress of the pipeline right you started out with sending emails and you got responses and you got meetings which didn't go very well then you got meetings which did go well and then you started to get pipeline and stuff so you always seem progress but you're not seeing the revenue start to close consistently until again probably around could be you know near the end of the first year q4 could be after first year it's something that q4 to q6 again there's some of that variability is based on the challenge of your market based on did you get everything right with the right team from day one did you have to switch anyone out you know the sort of factors let's see here but what we have seen is it not unlike salesforce.com where it's where this was created um in salesforce it went from added an extra 100 million dollars in a few things like four years from just from outbound but um and i've worked with companies uh whether it's small startups to you know again like the cisco micro um cisco oracle red hat types but you can create predictable pipeline and whether it's like multiplying the meetings you get um or maybe you've trying to try and fail for a year like pemberton and then you got it off the ground and saw a million the first year on the way towards more or acquia is a great success story because love them because they were really willing to share so many great details right they're in the impossible book and a lot of people aren't either aren't willing to share which is fine or they don't have the details so but they added an extra 30 million in three years and help them go public and then they were just sold to vista for a billion last year they started aqui was like a 40 million inbound driven company they wanted to add outbound as another layer to help them drive towards 100 million in revenue i like their story because they took six months with three prospectors there's two in the states one in the uk uh six months kind of got the systems dialed in started to see some data some traction and then they said you know we're going to hire another 30 or 40 prospectors because we saw the data we saw we can make it predictable that's working for us and then we're going to multiply it so there's three basic models there's a lot of ways to do anything but here's three common ones in outbound if you want to get started so the first one is again you transfer or hire one or two you know a small team of dedicated prospectors one need at least one dedicated person to see the magic happen two is better because when you start something new better start with two uh that buddy system competition friendly competition um and i'll say it's just lonely out there especially working virtually without a buddy so you hire them to get started if you have a manager great even better um number two hire the a no ego manager someone who whether they've done it before or not they are a manager but they're willing to do the work first to be the first str and make it work and then once it's working hire a team behind them i would do this every time but again if you can find the right person and budgets and someone who's actually willing to do it and so on so it's not quite as cookie cutter there's a great guy's name scott at acquia scott wong did this i did this at salesforce so it happens and i'm just an option and the third is hire an external service uh could be an sdr as a service it could be there's there's a lot of them out there obviously we sales predictablerevenue.com does both helps companies build their own teams and do outsourced to get them off the ground at least in the states so i think we see again what works what doesn't so it's not about the right model like what's always the best it's about what's right for you it's kind of saying you want to get into shape well for some people they should do more spend more time on their diet for other people they should spend more time exercising like what's right for you because everybody is a little bit different again for your enterprise if you're um like a microsoft or cisco or like it's a bit different story because of the complexity of the oftentimes budgeting and kind of role definition and internal politics and other things so again happy to talk about that here if we have someone on and has a question so last bit here on some mistakes internal team mistakes again you're hiring your own people building that dabbling is one hey let's just uh hire an intern for a couple months and see if it see if it works out and if it does then we'll invest in it so you kind of gotta you have to really go for it to make this work because if you hire an intern or someone part-time or someone who's just like super junior with no guidance and it doesn't work it doesn't tell you anything if it works okay then tells you something but if it doesn't work it doesn't tell you anything second i mentioned comp design not having a minimum deal size or paying just for meetings like two boo-boos no no's don't do those third round robin uh which is kind of related not having territories so especially for prospecting you got to have some kind of segmentation or territories brown robin you know again i'm not a big fan around robin except in very specialized situations which i see very rarely but use some kind of segmentation and territories and when you're hiring an external partner to do this for you to help you start it or do it uh common mistakes writing a check hey we just send some money to someone they're actually going to do it all you know he still takes time and focus from you and your team to to work with them and to get this up the ground to adjust and to adapt and learn and so on um again this mistake of treating inbound and outbound meetings the same right you start to get some outback meetings from a service and you just don't really know how to how to handle them and so you they don't work out and you blame that provider and sometimes it might be their fault but sometimes it's the it's your fault because you got these meetings they didn't they're just different and you're the salespeople didn't know how they weren't like properly ready to handle them and didn't go very well the last thing is this kind of belief which is yep we're our business is fine our sales process is fine we just need more meetings and we're ready to grow sometimes that's true and sometimes honestly it's not so kind of a reality check and are you really ready to grow sometimes that's a yes and sometimes that's a no and doing outbound can help you discover are you ready to grow maybe maybe you are maybe not