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today we're diving into the strategies of the top performing strategic accounts SDR at mcra Jacob farmer since he joined mcra ISU $ 5.86 million in pipeline the highest in company history he bought in over 765,000 in annual recuring revenue ranking among the top three reps welcome to the game the podcast created to Accel just's career and help you bring more pipeline in this episode You Will discover strategies of a successful entrepr year how to organize your day as an isia how to use videos in your Outreach and how to adapt your Outreach approach let's get started so Jacob could we start with your stepbystep breakdown of how you plan organiz your typical workday to maximize productivity I think the first step is knowing everything possible that can get accomplished throughout the day and then Cal calendar blocking task for yourself to achieve it it's relatively intuitive but in my sector of sales development there's so many ways you can book a meeting whether it's from marketing triggers or whether it's from past relationships there's so many things you can dig into the book of meeting it can get overwhelming in terms of structuring your day so what I like to do is kind of have a you know like a white board of like okay these are all the ways I can book a meeting now how can I prioritize my time so it's relatively distributed if you set yourself up for for failure by spreading yourself too thin there's a lack of scale um because you're doing you know you're sending one email and one LinkedIn a note one call you're trying to do everything at once but if you focus on only one method it it doesn't account for Market changes for example Google and and HubSpot there's something going on with their emails where there's um uh a lower performance in opens and stuff like that in the UK they're they're releasing more legislation on dials and if I'm in the US I can't um pose as a UK caller get a UK number if you only use one method is it's not going to set yourself up for for a good performance so I like to have a distributed approach talking about having a weight Bard and different ways of booking meeting are you talking about source of meetings for example for marketing or from that's a good question I think I break it up into Channel and then uh Source or trigger so with Channel you have phone email social media namely LinkedIn but I booked some meetings over Twitter or Whatsapp you know uh and also you also have video or texting all of these are um either general or obscure ways to break through to the prospect in terms of triggers you might have something like a job change where someone you know is starting at a company in the past three months so they're a little bit more Prime to you know take a meeting you might have a marketing trigger like a blog post where your company posts content and you send that content to to a prospect that you think is relevant you know if if elri you um you cover reporting for sales and I have a reporting software I'm sure we're going to release some blog that you're going to find interesting so you know that could be a trigger and uh I would also say you can also build your own Hook by creating value with the platform so with mukra it's essentially a a software that allows PR people to work within it so what do PR people do they're tracking coverage they're building relationships with journalists Etc so if I'm tracking their company's coverage and I send them a report that they like if they had mck right they will be sending to their to their boss saying hey these are you know the stats for this coverage if I if I'm send that to them then I'm helping them out and I think that's value you can curate yourself which um really tells the prospect that you actually know what they do and that you you you care about them besides getting your meeting quarter at mcre are you sending like let's say you have a prospect a can you do the report and then you send them like a lead Magnet or something that um to to get some some interest from them or what do you do with that it's seldom I'm sending a report I'm like here you go and I and I hope and wait generally I try to have multiple hooks in the in the message of hooking them with because like I said they work with journalists so I might use mukra to find journalists that that cover their topics so let's say it's sales development journalists that cover sales development I say hey Rick uh Jacob and John are covering this topic in mukra and here's a comprehensive report on you know the data hope you find this interesting and you know would love to connect around how this could potentially improve X Y and Z in your workflow you know and and I call it a day keep it pretty simple because I've in the beginning of my career I've set the par the par graphs and people don't read that yeah you especially with aab so yeah mhm I think outbound is changing really a lot and the way you're doing it leading with value you can show basically what you're talking about here basically it's the problem that MRA can solve but you already showing them to them you say hey here's how mcra could help you and that's I think a great way to start because it's not just hey jump on the demo and you will see how we can help you now you're already showing them that what they can get from it and if they already see value it's easier for them to say yes for for having a fast conversation 100% if we go back to time management because you are talking about all those different channels and triggers that you are using so how do you split your how do you yeah organize your day in terms of the the structure so I on uh strategic accounts I am assigned companies so I don't can you say how many accounts do you have uh yeah yeah so I maybe uh between it it fluctuates between 4 to 500 so I know a lot of other um sdrs they might part of their prospecting is finding the company and for me part of prospecting is more so replacing finding the company with building relationships because you can imagine after two two and a half years if you work the same amount of companies and you're spraying and praying you will go through every contact in like three three three to five months and you'll be like what do I do now but part of my part of my job like hitting goal consistently over two and a half years is leveraging what I said in terms of channels LinkedIn I've booked 18% of my meetings and really finding new contacts yes that's a part of it but also building relationships with old contacts I've had contacts that I've dialed either you know in terms of structuring my day in the morning I do a lot of European work because you know it's they're five hours ahead of Eastern so you know I've had some UK contacts where I'll call them and it's actually magnificent how they'll they have enthusiasm talking to me as if I'm a friend they like hey Jacob good to see good to hear from you blah blah blah and what that's a testament of is every day I prioritize where can I build relationships there's there's been the contact where she switched out of my ideal consumer persona but I saw she got a promotion and I just emailed her as said hey no you know no really hard sell here just happy you got a promotion cheers call it a day it's it's little things like that in my mindset where I'm not trying to necessarily book a meeting with everything I do I'm more so trying to have a presence in my in my segment okay okay and now could we talk about more specifically because like you said you don't pick your account so they give it to they give them to you so you have more time to spend like you said building spend time on building relationship or maybe preparing your session for your prospecting session so could you share with us how you prep a prospecting session first I start with a comprehensive look a bird's eye 10,000 foot View and then I I zoom down to a microscopic view so I I'll look at the amount of people in the company some some of these companies hundreds of contacts and our ideal consumer Persona um so it's going to be really challenging if you're just picking at random so for those really large employee counts then I'll structure it by title from enduser to uh decision maker or or uh maybe even a champion because they another trigger is if they've they've been at a company that has used you know mukra in the past right so you have you have a little bit of an in there um but yeah so I'll look at uh each employee and each each title I will assign a designation to in the sense of okay if I if elic is a director he's not going to care about a value that would be more tailored to an end user he's going to Care he's going to care more about you know broad picture Roi to communicate to stakeholders Etc so having a good understanding of each Persona helps me to multi-thread because I can send one email to a end user with a little bit of value send one marketing trigger like a blog or a job change I can uh message the director with something relevant like hey we had a conversation in 2020 um would love to reconnect because there's massive updates made to the platform I think is relevant because of X Y and Z and then I can have a LinkedIn strategy separate to that because you don't know if you know emails are going to bounce or whether you're some people send email they get no response and they think oh it was a bad email but you know they the the filter on the prospect's uh email inbox might just have caught it or something you know so you have to I have a comprehensive approach so when I look at an account that I haven't touch I'm hitting them at all angles but I'm not spamming them because too many times in early in my career I've gotten take this whole company off of your list like because what I'm imagining is if you're hitting everyone at the same time they're just hey did you get an email from this jacob guy he is so annoying right so I have to have a little bit of a distributed approach hit a couple people here set a has for two weeks later hit a couple people here and yeah I try to just vary my Approach if I'm sending everyone a video and it's not working is it's just not a good approach so I send someone a video someone in the LinkedIn someone to call I call someone and I just switch it up curious about the end users you mentioned that you you have like a multi threat approach so what do you say what do you send to a n user you said you are trying to to send them some some V so what do you say with the end user what I try to do is embrace the objection and by that I mean you know they're going to give you an objection it's either going to be I don't have any time I'm not the the decision maker there's no point in even us connecting all of that I try to embrace it early on so I try to say like I know I know for a fact that you might not make a decision on this but the reason that I'm reaching out to you is because it is very valuable on our end and on your end for on your end to see what what the market offers if you've only used a Apple phone all your life you're not going to know the value of a Samsung phone and vice versa so I I explain it like that obviously for us even if they're not the decision maker it's impactful to get the perspective of someone who will be using the pl using the platform every day they also can become become a champion to you know the internal decision makers so in terms of what I send to them I'm going to send something that I think is relevant to their day-to-day some some people in the job description they might have oh I work with journalists Okay cool so that means I'm G to send something around journalists I'm not going to send a report because if I send a report they're like I don't even do reports I just you know I'm working with journalists so I try to send something relevant to their day I try to keep it light because if you try to if you overwhelm the prospect with your messaging then you're just gonna end up left on red you know they're gonna open it they're not gonna respond so something light and something uh valuable if you go back to what you're saying about the research about an account you are talking about you based on titles you you try to figure out who the and user decision maker the champion uh what other criteria do you use to for your research you were talking about previous conversation uh for example in from the past year but what are you looking for I I'm looking for any correspondence at all and I don't even care if I've only gotten objections I could I could have gotten you know take me off your list we we we're not looking for this right now and then I'm going to be contacting the next person saying either way I've talked with El he told me that it wasn't the right time but the reason I'm reaching out so I'm trying to get get ahead of that objection um you know and when I do that it's kind of hard for them to repeat the same objection back to me because if they say well it's not the right time yeah yeah I said that that's why I was I was reaching out you know and I have a different hook so they have to hit me with a different objection so obviously that's like the worst case scenario but the best case scenario is we've done done a demo with them before or in the past we've had conversations about use case or whatever because then I can name drop and um and really use it as the opportunity to to uh grab some social proof like yeah this isn't the first time we we've talked before yeah and I know for big account that works very well to use some information you use from that you you internally because uh on to of the comp they really tough to get in so using information you get from someone else it's key here I know when we're preparing the you are talking about you you shared with me that you use um parallel data for your Outreach so how do you use that um do you use that actually if I was curious do you call also in users or in users do you just send them em so I I parallel out everyone okay everyone and the way I use it is really a part of my daily workflow now in the sense of in the morning in the afternoon I make dials and this been a game changer I've had cold call experience in the past but cold calling is relatively new to the SDR organization here at mukra okay but parallel dialing what is what it has done is it's made the process more efficient and I'm having more conversations than ever which is what we want in like like you kind of like what you said is what we want in Enterprise we really want to have that discussion even just yesterday I had nine conversations and we don't know where those nine conversations will go but the point is that they happened and the way that I I will use it in terms of director and user I really don't have a I don't have a a different script for each Persona because I don't want to over intellectualize what I'm doing you know those people who they they do 20 minutes of research before making the call I don't want to do that what I want to do is have a very broad approach with the call so my broad approach being that I'm I'm hopping on the phone with you I'm asking you how have you been very simple question that it's hard to be mean it's hard to be mean and give an objection to how have you been you know and after I I get past that there's usually some hook that I can think of on the spot a lot of times it's you know hey I'm working with similar teams who X Y and Z have you heard Muk Rock's name tossed around in the pr Arena or whatever you know that's like the generic but sometimes if you know El rck I talked to you um two years ago I'm saying I'm not even saying my name when I'm getting on getting on the phone I'm saying hey ER we talked two years ago it's Jacob farmer mukra you remember you know and just having any hook will help me um get conversations but in terms of broadly the parallel dialing it's been a game changer and I'm really booking meetings because if you're trained it it it's the best weapon you can have I think my last like nine meetings have come from calls something you mentioned the way you using it because for me I'm Prett I'm s new with um those kind of tools so some I use it last year and we are testing three to four calls dial at the same time so and you are mentioning that you do two dial at the same time could you share why do you do two di at the same time sure the way a lot of parallel dialers work if there's a simultaneous connection they will hang up on the other Prospect and then it'll create a new pipeline for you to call after you know you called everyone on your current list to me that's inefficient because let's say two people pick up pick up at the same time that could be the only time the second person picks up like if you call them back then they go to voicemail you're like ah Miss opportunity but if it's a little bit of a lower Cadence I think you get the efficiency of calling more than one people without the risk because it's about risk without the risk of calling five people they all pick up and then none of them pick up when you call them back right I'm I'm chasing conversations and not necessarily call volume something El also you mentioned uh to me is you use video uh earlier you were talking about you send the report to your prospect when it's relevant but also you started to test videos uh to show how the they could use the platform or yeah how they could use the platform so could you share with us how you use that sure I take it as an opportunity to not only show something that they couldn't get in a screenshot but I take it as an opportunity to show the functionality of the platform so if you were demoing you know your your phone to someone who wants to buy your phone right what you're what you're not going to do is send like a picture of your phone and say hey it looks good right what you're going to do is you're going to go on your phone you're going to swipe through the apps you're going to show how smooth it moves through each screen Etc so that's really what I approach video for and I do 45 seconds to a minute and 30 seconds in video and when I send the video I I attach it with a very brief message because I'm already asking them to watch a video right so I don't want them I don't want them to have to read a book a whole book as well in my email so in the in the video generally I'll keep the introductions light because that's not what they're watching the video for and I'll really attack something relevant in their day-to-day so even for this podcast if it's like oh Eric I'm sure you're looking to get more listeners so here is how you use mukra to find uh podcasters who can help promote your blah blah blah and you you go you go through that process and what you what you'll find is that people appreciate the intentionality that you took yeah to send that message instead of just you want to meet do you want to meet please I need a meeting for my quota like and you know instead of doing that you're actually putting thought into your message and those videos do you send them via email or LinkedIn I send them via email I've heard LinkedIn is really good too if they don't reply what do you say because I know if you send a video it's a lot of time to to record a video so what do you say next if they don't replay it would just be business as usual I'm calling I'm still calling emailing trying to follow up I like to do high energy low energy high energy so video is very high energy I want to do a low energy touch next I'm not going to send a video in the next next thing send a a a gif and a and a report next because it's overloading the prospect if they look through the email thread they're going to have so much to read and process that what I want is a very easy experience for the prospect so I'll send low low energy follow-ups after that and if there's nothing no opens I'll send the video to someone else and I'll be like hey I sent this video to I sent this video to elri uh I would love your thoughts on this because I think it might be relevant for you too when you say high energy low energy high energy video low energy is just text for example or yeah low energy is just text and it's uh a minimum amount of text so you know those little bump replies like hey have you seen this yeah type type replies yeah when I Was preparing the episode I I found like an article on mcre website about you you you got an interview and you you said something interesting on the interview and I wanted to ask you a few question about that so uh since you joined the the company you mentioned that you you've seen that there is strategies that stop working and you need to to adapt to that so how do you identify what to change and can you provide an example of a tactical change you've made recently as a SDR you should be tracking everything that's working and everything that isn't working so the first way I do this is through a demo tracker and I'll use a spreadsheet even I'm looking at my demo tracker now and I have the deal status of each tracker the deal amount the sequence that won won the meeting like the channel and Etc so after you track everything that's working what you need to do is really analyze okay my last nine meetings have come from calls how do I pivot more into this even if I'm already calling a fair bit so now what what this is telling me is not that I'm being very successful with call but I'm being less successful with email and and other channels so I have two options I can either try to increase the market share of the email and Linkedin and all of that or I can double down in what's working and you spend more time and calling and all that a good example is that um earlier on in my career I was doing a lot of spraying and praying because it was working you only do what works you know I was spraying and praying it was working it stopped working and one of my strategies is really to go to everyone in my internal Network at the company say what are you doing how is it working any advice for me I don't care if I'm going to someone who's very Junior I don't know if they have an idea that you know I could I could you know take uh take from so I'll go to everyone get advice and then I I'm going to switch it up completely and I'm talking about switch it up completely even if it's against who I am as a person so me I'm not someone who does video just because I'm a I'm closer to a perfectionist so you know when you're recording the video you make one mistake you're like all right time to do it over again you know so even me I had to overcome that and like kind of like what I told you in the interview i s i sourced a very um a very good opportunity through that and that's an example of how I was able to to Pivot and end ended up working out yeah for video a trick for me that works uh to do that it's to set a limit of three text us set three that's it and even though you do a mistake on the your number three record file recording number three you you still send it yeah that's really good advice and it also makes you more human in the video like if you sound like a robot you know reading off a teleprompter like it might be less effective exactly and I I really like the the fact that you are talking about asking you for everyone what's working for them because I think that's a great way on top of that something um that I'm doing at every company I'm working at it's shadowing top performers because uh I think it's great to ask tips to everyone do what do you think is working but also a lot of people they don't know sometime what's working or they don't know to self effect on what they're doing so um generally it's I Shadow them so if you're on a remote environment is on the zoom call they share the screen and you just observe what they're doing that's it pretty pretty straightforward and then when you are not on a call with them is to listen to their course what do they say how do they start the call and then something else for AA specifically it's what sequences do they use uh what channel do they use and then what you are talking about your spreadsheet using a spreadsheet you do the same and you do the same for them and you analyze what's working for them and so you understand also based on analytics was 100% and now I'm curious so because you were talking about um you have your spreadsheet you you are talking about you could double down on what's working or do focusing on emails L for example so uh how often do you check your spreadsheet uh is it like on a monthly basis and then you do your analysis and then you take some action or what's your process I check it every day the reason for this is is twofold the first reason is I have in my demo tracker I also have a warm pipeline section and by warm pipeline section I mean sometimes I'm not even chasing a meeting I'm chasing a no but a quote unquote no comma but because a lot of times when I get the no but reach back out to me in a in a couple months or no but I'd be interested in this down the line a lot of these become very warm opportunities for me to follow up with and when I call email LinkedIn all of that what I can do is say hey we talked in February you said this was the right time and I have that in and it's been really useful for me and so I check it every day for that for the warm pipeline but in terms of my also my demos booked I want I want to be diligent about checking where demos stand not only not only because of you know the obvious um reason of like checking oh where's the when is it going to close type of situation but also because the account Executives that I work with is very busy and if there's an opportunity for me to jump in and ping someone who let's say rescheduled or who said reach back out to them in August if there's an opportunity for me to do that I want to do that so I really want to be diligent about checking where everything is at and it's also a good learning opportunity because you get to see the mechanics of how these conversations go and even on the sales development track if you're talking to someone and they talk about uh red lines or they talk about these very specific terms that you don't experience at the top of the funnel if they talk about these things you want to be able to know what they're talking about so if they say yeah it didn't work out because of contract stuff you should be able to know what that means for your segment and then you should be able to have a rebuttal because if you're only if you only know how to respond to no time no budget Etc you're going to be you're not going to be in a good position when they give you something an objection that is uh based off of being down the line in the process last question because we're already at the end of the conversation but based on your experience what's the biggest mistake made by SD and how can they overcome it I think the biggest mistake is thinking that their pipeline isn't in their own hands it's easy to complain about a lack of inbound leads or that no one is responding to your emails or that all you get on the phone is objections but the truth of the matter is that the best of the best don't care about what obstacle comes their way they're finding a way to move forward and succeed regardless so my advice to overcome this lack of accountability is one product Mastery you want to really know your product inside and out and that will be the key to knowing how to respond to any objection anything almost anything in the company learning the product better will help you number two diligent practice of how you present on all channels like you were talking about in the video you implemented a Strate stry and a system of three takes no matter what what does that do for you what that does for you is it makes you more efficient with each take because you know you only have three ticks so what you did was you practice how you present on all channels video email call and then number three is a proactive pursuit of feedback and you know there might be a situation where there's a manager who let you get by without trying to develop yourself and you might think like oh that's good they're not on my back I don't encourage micromanagement but what I do encourage is a manager who challenges you to look at yourself and try to get to try to get better so you you should be a you know how people say they're a voracious reader you should be a voracious pursuer of feedback yeah this one I think it's a really good one because like you said some manager they won't give feedback productively so and you need to look for them so and you should maybe on the daily basis like for feedback and that mentor it's an email or call call or or whatever but you need to look for this great great fun well Jacob we are at the end of the episode but before we wrap up the episode do you want do you have anything else you want to share with the audience uh yeah I think sdrs get a bad rap but I love sales development and I think anyone who pursues a career here will uh be happy they did perfect Jacob thank you so much for being on the show today and for everyone listening I see you on the next episode thank you how if you enjoyed this episode feel free to leave a review on Spotify op podcast so for Spotify to leave a review what you can do is you can use your phone then go on the Spotify app then you go to the ASR game page and then at the top of the page you can leave um a review it's a a five star review if you enjoy the episod obiously and then if you're listening to this EP on Apple podcast feel free also to leave a review on your app thanks for listening and I see you on the next episode