Streamline your sales process with sales cadence automation for Hospitality

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coming up on today's episode of the sales man podcast i think the big thing is getting the messaging right um so i think if you if you think i'm just gonna do 30 steps and because it's 30 steps the messaging can be rubbish actually because i do like this high volume approach i feel like the messaging actually becomes even more important i slightly differ with the linkedin and email approach and i think it is good to get meeting on that call and the only reason is because the phone is actually an interactive channel hello sales nation my name is will barron and i'm the host of the sales man podcast the world's most downloaded b2b sales show on today's episode we have the legend michael hanson you can find out more about michael over at growthgenie.co and on today's episode we're getting into the ultimate sales cadence we're going to explain what a cadence is what goes in the beginning the middle and the end of it it doesn't even end that's another question i asked michael in this episode and there's a ton of value if you're doing any outbound outreach everything that we talk about in this show is available in the show notes over at salesman.org and with that said let's jump right into it right so we're going to dive into the ultimate outbound sales cadence and we'll get into how we can define that what that means in a second and how we can justify the title of this podcast episode but michael for people who aren't familiar and this would have been me four or five years ago i wouldn't have been familiar with a sales cadence when i sell medical devices what what is a sales cadence what does that term mean yeah i think it's a good question and i definitely make the mistake myself of thinking everyone knows what a sales cadence is because some people call it a sequence uh essentially it's the steps that you need as a salesperson to to reach someone so there's there's different types of cadences so you may have a a cadence for a cold lead that you're trying to turn into a sales opportunity or a qualified meeting or maybe you've already got someone in the pipeline you haven't spoken to them for a while they've gone cold and you're trying to get them on to another meeting and then essentially you're going to come up with a formula right it's steps that you're going to use across particular channels so i know we're going to talk about r1 later but that's 30 touches and it's the touches across linkedin email phone or some people use other channels those are the three i recommend but some people doing like facebook and all kinds of stuff and then just to give you an example like first day typically our cadences we send an email don't ask for a meeting in the email we connect with them on linkedin and then based on linkedin we'll do a bit of research and we'll try to call them typically people don't pick up their phone nowadays on the first try so you have to try again two days later so essentially we're doing steps like that every two days and you can use sales engagement platforms to essentially track that so you could log in at the start of your day and it would say okay you've got 50 contacts and you need to send them emails and give them a call and that's essentially what a cadence is it's outlining what those steps are and again for someone who's not familiar with this you use two terms here which i think are really useful is it a formula in that if the buyer does this then we do that and it goes into this tree of just a mess of potential opportunity and things that we do need software to keep on track or can it be as simple as your outline then of email linkedin phone call and you know that could be considered a cadence yeah i i think the big thing is you're getting the messaging right um so i think if you if you think i'm just gonna do 30 steps and because it's 30 steps the messaging can be rubbish actually because i do like this high volume approach i feel like the messaging actually becomes even more important and to answer your question about oh they're kind of like if they do this you've got to do do something else i try not to think about that too much the idea with the cadence is just to have a conversation that's the thing that people forget about so when we released this cadence was our most popular bit of content and i think it wasn't because it was such a big a great piece of content or like that mind-blowing it was because people thought wow 30 touches that's insane it's so many touches but actually the idea is just to have a conversation with someone so it's not like you're going to have 30 conversations it's saying that you may need to call someone 10 15 times just for them to pick up once or you may need to send them six emails for them to reply essentially perfect and that's what i wanted to get out of here just to start the show with of with the goal here isn't just to set up a sequence of emails and automated voicemails and walk away right we're putting our plan of attack together as opposed to using automation to do a lot of the work for us is that it's it's a mixture right so there's certain things you can automate and and certain things that should be personalized um so a great tactic that we're using at the moment is uh sending like polls so you can either do this on linkedin linkedin's got this poll function that you've probably seen or you could just send an email we'd love your quick feedback as a vp of sales like what's your top outbound sales challenge right now so that's one we send that's very relevant to our business like about implementing sales technology relevant messaging etc and then that can actually be automated you could just be like i'm going to send that to vps of sales then if they respond saying relevant messaging then i can send them a personalized message afterwards that's relevant to that challenge obviously if they don't respond i'm going to send a different type of email so certain parts can be automated and in other parts we we recommend personalizing something i typically do is here's a lot more um email automation tools than like there is linkedin automation tools as well but i try not to go into that now but typically or automate emails and then uh you can do like a more personalized approach on on linkedin and calling that can be one approach or again you could maybe have four emails that were automated for emails that are personalized just depends on the kind of the resources and talent and research that you have internally got it cool that makes perfect sense okay so if we are going to build the ultimate outbound sales cadence then michael what is the goal here what's the end outcome what what can we do that we we what goals can be set that we can tick off as in this is the greatest sales cadence of all time what do we need to achieve to make that happen yeah i mean like like anything in sales right the ultimate goal is is revenue um to close deals but essentially what you're doing with a cadence is almost like nurturing someone into a conversation so like like i said typically like at least the first two touches both on linkedin and email we never ask for a meeting we do the whole like give before you take approach so like if i knew a company was was hiring sdrs for example i'd send their bp of sales uh an email saying hey i noticed you're hiring sdrs at your company um would you mind uh looking at a list of interview questions that that may be helpful in the hiring process just giving them something that's relevant and then kind of warming them up that way but to answer your question it's essentially the goal is to get uh a qualified meeting to have a conversation with that person on the phone to discuss kind of what you do and then from there obviously the goal is to to actually close a deal right but essentially that a cadence the main goal of a cadence is to get someone like a zoom call where you can discuss further information with them and what you're doing through those 30 steps is kind of nurturing them towards that got it so if we had to put a number on it it would be we would look at a number of sales qualified leads that we have at the moment number of closed deals and we need to beat that by being more effective or efficient yeah exactly that's totally it so it's a mixture of like the formula as you said like how many touches are you doing on these channels and then of course the the messaging so that's typically what i'll do with with companies i'll go in and say okay send me your cadences at the moment or your sequences as i said as some people use that term and then i'll be like okay the messaging we need to change the messaging or we'll say the messaging is quite good but i think we should add more touches maybe they're going in for the meeting straight away but the meeting email is good and i'm like let's maybe give a piece of content away before asking for that meeting cool okay so let's let's start from scratch then let's say that you know sam's a salesperson we'll talk about automation tools and stuff in a second uh we'll get on to that i feel like that's all the fun and easy stuff to spend money on and talk about later on um but say some brand new salesperson he's going he's only ever done um with no real thought about it linkedin message email message call and that's what he does he's got a crm so he's tracking ish the amount of contacts that he's doing to individuals but what is the starting point for sam with all of this yeah i think everything starts with the the pains of your buyer persona right or your ideal customer profile it's the thing that every sales consultant or or trainer will tell you but unfortunately there's still so many people that are product pitching i'm sure a lot of people listening about that where someone connects with them on linkedin straight away they get a 10 paragraph email pitching a priority service so think about in in those opening linkedin or or email messages think about the pains that your ideal customer profile are going through and then align with marketing a lot of my background is actually marketing which is one big into this you know give before you take then think about pieces of content they're essentially giving them advice that can help with those challenges like i mentioned one before i know if a company's hiring sdrs are like what do we look for in an sdr because there's a lot of different things some people say you should hire someone experience some say it should be someone green who you can kind of nurture um so that's why i send a piece of content related to that obviously in your business you need to think about what are the the challenges of your buyer and how you can get around that so that's what kind of the approach for linkedin and email and then the other thing as well i've kind of missed actually a very important part here which is the data and the data is actually the people that you're targeting is normally where campaigns go wrong from all the clients that i've worked with so especially we're using automation tools automation can work very well but only if you segregate your lists into different buyer profiles so you can either do that by job title so for example if i selling growth cheating as we typically have three job titles we sell to ahead of marketing ahead of sales or ceo of a small company but they've all got different challenges so i'm going to separate those i'm going to separate via industry so good ideas to target industries where you've you've got case studies that can get their attention and then the last one which actually a lot of people don't think about are triggers right so trigger could be like hiring sdrs like i mentioned for us or hiring another position that's relevant to your ideal customer profile using a particular software that you integrate with companies going through a merger and acquisition companies launching a product and these are all things that you can you can build lists using various different vendors out there and then you can actually send automated emails and they seem personalized even though they aren't because you've you've essentially used these triggers sure let's dive on let's dive into deeper this idea of triggers for a second are there any tools or automation we can do to uncover some of these trigger events especially such as your emergency acquisition something like that i monitor this within the sales industry um just by following companies on linkedin but it's not very efficient but i'm also only really targeting for ad space for the podcast stuff like that say 50 companies so it can be done at almost a glance you know a couple of times a week i can pull some of this out but what do we do if we are if our target market is far broader than that is there any is there any tools that we can use to automate the trigger event side of things yeah sure so you've got companies like apollo or um like zoom info is a bigger one cognizam as well you know from the uk and some of the ones like i mentioned there like i can literally find lists of companies who are hiring sdrs i just put that in in cognizant and it will pull up a list of companies and then i can get the job titles etc um rounds of funding these are all things that that you can actually use so again your messaging can be based on triggers and you haven't had to like you said go on the internet do an insane amount of research you can just kind of do it with the click of a button through these tools so when we come on to their messaging because i feel like what we've discussed so far is it can be done a blog post can describe a lot of the steps that we've just outlined michael but the messaging is clearly copywriting is an art as well as a science right yeah so how do we go about crafting that first message is there a series of rules is there a somewhat of a template that you use how do we go about that first giving email before we ask for a meeting yeah i like to keep things super short i think even though everyone's going this way i still think a lot of people i work with are very shocked by how short that i keep things and say it's that first email i would do either like one sentence about the pain typically you know a vp of sales like yourself has x payne um here's a piece of content that i think can help you solve it or a trigger right this has happened at your company here's a piece of relevant content that's more of an automated approach if it was a personalized approach you can also add a line of personalization again you don't want huge paragraphs about them just go on their linkedin add one line of personalization and i think the reason to keep things short and concise is that there's so many channels nowadays like i just mentioned three phone links in email people on instagram facebook c-level people at um like enterprise companies if you're using email as well it's it's i think especially this year it's become harder and harder to essentially get people's attention like as a small i'm like a small business owner right with a few people in our company and i get 100 prospecting emails a day so people are bigger companies they must literally be getting thousands so i i think you can still get their attention but the messaging has got to be super sharp and essentially hitting their pain straight away and is there a call to action in this email or is it here is content and then you know i'll follow up with you in the future yeah there's there's different approaches i like to do like first email um actually so you you give a piece of content a thing that some people may not know watching this is if it's a completely cold lead so it's not an inbound lead that's come to your website their email server hasn't like recognized your email address so it's actually best practice not to include links in the first email so typically what i'll do i'll say here's a pain you may face we've got a piece of content would you be interested in seeing it and then essentially they may say yes right i can send it often a good thing about them replying on email even if it's just a yes it's got their phone number in so you can then give them a call have a conversation with them um so that's one approach another approach if it's further down the line you may just want to give a piece of content as i said like giving without taking um and then further down the line we see the the i the goal as we were talking about is to get sales qualified leads so further down the line you do want to start talking about case studies but again very much about their challenges not talking about your products we helped another company in this industry solve a challenge that you may be going through um would you like to explore more about you know how we can help you and with things like calls to action as well um gong have great content as i'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this no and they said how actually if you put like are you interested in exploring more or something like that rather than like would you like to have a five minute call it increases your reply rate quite a lot so that's another tip that i have on uh on calls to action sure and this is a side note i know lots of marketers to the show as well michael so this might be useful for them but just to reiterate what you said about i know for us we've got our email list it's like 110 000 people now and we changed our first email when you sign up to from a big resource page with loads of links and content to training and videos which is a great value packed email we changed it from that to an email with no links that just asked people to reply to that email with the biggest problem in sales and we use this uh to create content on the back of we track uh i've got my board in there it's basically a tally chart right of different groups different individuals and what their problems are and we create podcasts and content on the back of that but our spam hitting the the inbox rate or the opposite of that not being in spam went up by it's like three thousand percent it was the numbers are insane by just getting a reply from a lot of people that that email went to because i guess the email servers are getting more sophisticated to try and combat all this spam that we're all facing right yeah yeah that's that's really interesting and good example i'll use your example when i'm next explaining that to my clients because a lot of them don't believe me they're like no you can use links it's fine it's well yeah maybe 20 will open your email but what if you could get 50 by excluding links you know yeah it's mad and i don't know here's a question for you then because a lot of our emails are going to for example gmail outlook whatever people's personal email addresses how does this change with cadences when it's going to a you know if you're sending an email to salesforce and i assume they have their own mail servers with their own algorithms and spam filtering does our approach have to change if we were emailing a personal email address versus a corporate email address i've never i've never done that like i've had which i always find interesting so this whole uh sales cadence actually one of the reasons it became a viral bit of content i essentially didn't create a landing page but i knew i had our biggest following was on linkedin so i did a linkedin post saying would you like to see the ultimate outbound sales cadence 30 touches that's kind of got people's attention and i got 1600 comments underneath actually it's a higher team people in the philippines to go to go through it um but the the reason i'm i'm saying this is i was surprised because a lot of people when we followed up and said what what email should we send the cadence to that she replied with their personal emails right so i i was thinking oh this is it's kind of strange a lot of people don't like having personal emails as well there's a lot of websites where you essentially have to put your business email address but i i haven't really changed the approach and i think you could actually look at personal emails as even better in a sense because you have your personal email for life whereas you only have your business email like while you're with that business and most people are changing jobs more than ever before uh so i think that's think about it from a marketing perspective this is i don't know if you can do this anymore with gdpr but i'll tell you about something we used to do at my last company is typically people have personal email addresses on their linkedin there used to be a function on linkedin that's not there anymore wherever you were connected with someone you could get their personal email address we used to take those and put them into facebook targeting because also on facebook people have their personal email addresses so it's much easier to target people on facebook through personal email addresses rather than business email addresses so actually people hate personal emails but they have their advantages as well yeah we do exactly the same and uh you know we'll get into it but all kinds of pixeling and stuff that we do with people who visit the site come to the podcast and stuff we do we do right this second we do zero marketing on anything for our sales training product all that paid marketing other than on facebook and facebook just blows everything else out of the water and we've tried linkedin we've never managed to get linkedin to be profitable youtube worked but didn't have the roi that facebook did youtube supported me to reinvestigate in uh probably towards the end of this year uh yeah anyway we'll put all the marketing nonsense to one side for a second michael okay so we've got this first email we've we've laid out now hopefully people can go away from this and they can they can create a really great email from that what is whether we get a reply or not what is the next step of our cadence off after you've done the email essentially yep yeah i i normally um send them a linkedin request for the linkedin message i there's either two things one which is controversial as well don't say anything at all because i think if you send a really long message as a linkedin request people instantly think they're trying to sell it sell you something so either don't say anything at all or literally send one line that's it for uh for a connection request and say oh well i love your salesman podcast and that's it because people put out content because they want you to listen to it right so if you can compliment their content a lot of people will it will accept and then from there i actually typically do a phone call after that and i like to pair the linkedin with the phone call and the reason i do that is because when you've got on linkedin you've had a look at their profile and then you can use some of those nuggets so sayo is like a marketing agency for example i could say hey well notice you've got this brilliant salesman podcast notice you had michael hansen on as a guest um what's your strategy to increase your youtube followers and then it's highly personalized rather than we do digital marketing seo blah blah and we're the best which is what a lot of people are doing unfortunately and what's the so if the first email is to kind of introduce yourself and lead with value so you're not immediately just it shove your pitch down people's throats then you've done the same on linkedin you've connected with them again without holding back from shoving your pitch down people's throats so immediately you're in people's good books right especially an executive someone who has funding rather than like just a mere mortal like me who has no funding for nothing but is yet getting pitched all the time right what is the point of the if we do get them on the phone what is the point of that phone call is it again to give them more content insight to have a conversation with them or is it to then perhaps pitch the pitch in a future phone call yeah i i do i i slightly differ with the linkedin and email approach now i think it is good to get a meeting on that call and the only reason is because the phone is actually an interactive channel so i think the first goal is to identify their pain that you can help with so that's why like i asked that that question if i was trying to sell digital marketing for you what's your strategy to increase your youtube subscribers and your strategy may be brilliant and i'm like okay they don't need help with that i'm gonna ask about something else so we're qualified in the right is that is that what we're looking at yeah it's it's kind of qualifying and probing you kind of ask a qualifying question like i may if i'm pitch if i'm switching now to growth genie i may be like i noticed on indeed you're hiring sdrs is that correct and that's kind of a qualifying question because i know maybe indeed the date is wrong sometimes they aren't actually hiring sales and then if they say yes then it may start probing like oh how successful are your sdrs at the moment and what types of playbooks do you have in place etc and then if they say everything's perfect like outbound is not a problem we need help with inbound i'm going to be like well that's not actually my expertise i'm not going to try and pitch them but if they start telling me they've got a load of pains when it comes to outbound then i'm going to start having a conversation and essentially try and get them on a next meeting so that's why the phone is still so powerful for outbound and even though a connect rate on a phone can be as low as like two percent you have to call someone 30 times just for them to pick up once people still do it because you can have a lot more of an interactive conversation rather than a linkedin message or an email would you consider after either a series of emails or a series of even voicemails and linkedin messages if you've had zero response would you can still consider uh that you pick up the phone as a cold call uh yeah it's a good point that you may i i think less about uh warm calling so i think that's that's the other thing now people are talking about cold calling still like cold calling doesn't work etc but i think it depends how you define a cold call because if you do your research like i said if you go on linkedin and find out that you know will barron does a salesman podcast or go on my linkedin and see that you know we are teaching people how to do cadences then it makes that call a lot warmer and again yeah if you're seeing that people are clicking on your your email content if they're opening your email multiple times it's like what 30 opens they probably forwarded it to someone then yeah it makes that that conversation a lot warmer potentially the only issue with that is like we were talking about email security earlier a lot of companies now they've got email servers that will like essentially click on your links and open it multiple times you have to be careful of that it's not always the case but yeah certainly everything's connected like you're saying so if they're interacting a lot like the phone is the best channel to actually get a meeting like i said but if you're if they're interacting a lot on linkedin and email then it makes it a lot easier to book that meeting on the phone yeah i just wanted to emphasize that because i feel like especially on linkedin especially when people are trying to get attention but they don't know how to get attention everyone's saying call colleagues dead cold calling's not dead it's it's a stupid conversation right but if someone well no one has my number so no one could call call me there's an open challenge to the audience i think it's like 500 i put on it right anyone could call call me and and i've not given them my number uh for kind of a business deal that we're doing on something else then i'll just give them 500 so that's an open thing for the audience right no one has my numbers no call call me but if someone did call call me that it would have to be an incredible like opening two three seconds for me to really give them any time because you're all busy right but if someone had emailed me and i'd opened it and got okay it's not for me then they added me on linkedin and then another email and a voicemail and then they got through to me on the phone i'm almost because i want them to i want sales people to win right and i think most people with a budget or even if they don't think that even if they've never thought about this they probably are of a of a mindset of you know i'll give them a chance and i feel like if you just show that effort and nothing is um this is you know evan is kind of targeted and tailored towards me content wise i feel like i would give that person at least the opportunity to to speak with me so i know this is massively anecdotal i just wanted to kind of emphasize that of i feel like i i'll go one step further than you might i feel like we really are warming up calls with a cadence and i feel like if we did have the numbers on it it would make a massive difference yeah 100 and uh i i feel like i want to do this challenge now i'm up for trying to use my network to get together go for it honestly if you can do it 500 is coming your way i think i will put this way i had um i don't know if i'll name him because i've had someone with one of the biggest um kind of like database companies the ceo of the company try and get my number and email me you see my couple times now and every time it's been the wrong number so i don't even know where the numbers he's pulling coming from but it's nowhere near um so yeah it's a good look if you want to try that again open offer for the audience there so with that right so let's let's say that this is all going to and we we went in with good intentions and now we're cursing michael and will because nothing's happening no emails are getting opened no replies no one's responded to us on linkedin we've called a few somehow we've got the number we've called a few times we've left two messages and we've had zilch back but it's a potential great account and so we want to keep going at it what happens in kind of step two three four and and when do we give up on a cadence yes i think you might mention at the start is 30 touches which i preach which again is some people think it's madness um and the reason is so yeah typically looking at like 10 to 15 calls um like between six and eight emails six and eight linkedin messages uh but there's a lot of background for this one is that so i used to work with an outsourced sdr firm help grow the business but also a lot on the operations side we're seeing what works what didn't work with different industries and and clients and i noticed that when our accounts are doing like 20 to 30 touches versus like 10 to 20 touches they were a lot more successful which is is how this came about my colleague um lawrence as well he's very old school like hustler mentality and i saw he actually i think changed my opinion a lot because i was before one of those like 10 to 15 touches people and i would see him forget 30 touches i would see him get meetings and like the 45th touch i mean this um this this approach works but to look at like the science behind it right as i said earlier typically a connect rate for a cold call and i think this data comes from a company called connect and cell who abandon eyes millions of uh calls through there their dialer is i think on average about four percent so that means literally uh you need to call someone over 20 times to get them to to pick up once um so that's a bit why you need to do like i said 10 to 15 calls but you could do like 20 calls i always recommend double dialing as well so you call someone once if they don't answer you call them again and the logic behind that is that how many times you even miss a call from like your aunt or your grandma or whatever so let it look like a cold number you're not gonna answer that first time often and then if you look at like an email and again if you some of the vendors who do sales engagement like apollo or outreach training these people they advise their clients to do more touches because they know across their accounts the the guys that are doing six touches versus three touches they're getting more meetings and it's actually even though the messaging has to be right it's also numbers because if you've got six different emails you've got six different opportunities to connect with someone or six different subject lines to get them to open versus just three so it's essentially expanding that and you can do different approaches right if you've just got two emails you're probably not going to do my whole giving on the first email you're going to go straight for the meeting so it's just a bit more opportunity to nurture etc so um yeah that's kind of the logic behind it and i'm not putting you on the spot here just i'm going to ask you in case there is data on this michael how much of this comes down to the fact that the first two emails you send are at a time when the person has different priorities but by the time you've sent the the 30th call or email or bit of cadence things have quieted down for them or the company's changed or they finally made the acquisition that you were preaching about and and kind of pitching them in the first instance how much of this comes down to just the fact that if you go at people long enough circumstances will change and then you're likely to get a deal from that yeah 100 i think sales is that balance right between quality and quantity and then like we're talking about earlier like personalization and automations coming into it but yeah a lot of it is timing which is where you know even though i think your messaging needs to be really good you need to also accept from a timing issue right if you go after a bigger group of people it's going to be the right time for some of them so yeah 100 like by the end of the cadence maybe they're warmed up and that's why i never like finish a sales cycle with someone even if someone goes through the 30 touches i'll put them in like a you know marketing nurturing sequence and then three months later contact them again so yeah everything's timing and i think the the other thing and this is could be very controversial for a lot of people because i know i i see loads of abuse about this online and i i see a lot of these like sales influencers on linkedin like having a go at you know junior sales people for these terrible product pitches that they're sending and i i tried to be empathetic i was the same when i first started in sales my messaging was terrible i used to send long emails pitching products with like six different questions so i i sympathize with those guys and i say the only thing worse than sending a really bad sales email is sending nothing at all and the reason is even if you do that really bad sales email that product pitch it may resonate with like 0.001 in the audience who they just have the need at that time so that person's got away with being a bad salesperson and if you start as well you're going to get feedback like i try to give back to the community so sometimes if i get a really bad email actually did it this morning and i said look just have like one sentence and one question don't send me like eight paragraphs and you'll be more successful so i think you've always got to start somewhere and i think a lot of these sales influences they can't look back at the start of their career and kind of the mistakes that they made yeah and i i'll be i've i've rinsed people for really crappy emails in the past but i guess what i'm coming from a different perspective of rinsing people because it was not necessarily the content of the email i just feel like i've been spammed at and i don't know we can even have different thoughts on this or you can tell me your thoughts michael but is it ever okay to for a salesperson just have a list of a thousand people and just send them and not even put the first name at the beginning of the email or get the first name wrong is that ever appropriate for your sales cadence no it's not at all um so i it goes back to what i said at the start which is segregating your list right so if you've got a thousand people segregate into job titles segregate into industries segregate into triggers and then you may have 10 lists of 100 people and you can still automate but your messaging is going to be relevant to those 10 different groups so that's what i'd recommend and then i think that if you get the name wrong unfortunately with automation that's often just that comes down to the data right you've got you've got bad data and you've got the person's name wrong in the in the spreadsheet yeah yeah look i've said emails before of course that you put the wrong name on or you copy and pasted or something or but you know i don't mind that as long as there's an email that follows five minutes later going oh well i've screwed up here no that's fine it perhaps even humanizes you as long as you're not using it as a tactic right okay so final one on this before i want to get into just just a brief look at the software and how we implement some of this what does the messaging look like in the middle of the cadence perhaps it's email email nine are we still just doing um short emails with a piece of useful content hopefully on the back of a trigger event or do they kind of funnel people more more towards a call to action or a pitch yeah it's more a pitch so i think kind of as you go through the email sequence we're almost going like further down the funnel so as i said things like sharing a case study make sure the case study is relevant to their industry or their job title to say you know i helped another sales leader in the cyber security sas space um with their sdr team but you know four times more meetings than they were before would you like to see if we can replicate the results for company name right so that's the kind of approach that looking for is still messaging that's very relevant to them but more bottle of the funnel right these are these is what this is essentially what we can do this is the benefit and how we can solve your challenge within your industry um so yeah things like like case studies are great um i also find like always talking about the content approach maybe like a little bit before that case study takes something from that content so it's not even a a report that we have there's a report about sdr metrics and it says on average having interviewed thousands of sales it takes three months to ramp up an sdr team i know that a pain for for buyers is the time it takes to train and ramp up an sdr sim to say oh ing to the bridge group it takes three months to ramp up an sdr how long does it take uh uh your company and then that kind of gets them thinking and again if i then call them and get on a conversation with them so you're just kind of proposing all these questions getting them thinking and then by the time you present that case study and and ask for a meeting uh they're often a lot more open to it like you said because they feel like you can actually help them rather than just being another salesperson yeah i feel like there's a level of inception that could be done here right with with a just an almost offhand comments like that you could go well you could you could change people's paradigms with a simple comment like that of they might think that it is appropriate for six months to ramp up a sdr team they might think that you know this is i've done this the past five startups that have been out they might not realize that other people are doing it in three months so are we is that is that fair to say that there's we can incept them a little bit and and put things at the back of their mind that will eventually lead them to our product or service yeah 100 percent my my my aim is to get them thinking and to get them to challenge what their their current process is because you've got two types of leads right like we were saying before you got that person who just has that need at that time and you can get really lucky and even with bad sales messaging but then you've got the ones where they almost don't know they have a challenge so like you said it's almost like inception you're trying to make them aware they've got this challenge and then when they realize it they're like okay will or michael they're the person that made me realize i have this challenge i need to speak with them yeah and immediately you're at the forefront of the conversation at that point right exactly and then even things you know from like a it's it's almost like a marketing type tactic where you you like how you would have digital ads in front of someone or your youtube videos etc after people are following your content and it's very relevant to the problems that you're um that they have they're naturally going to come to you yeah i think so if you agree with this i think a lot of marketing whether people agree this or not or whether people think it's more sophisticated than this i think a lot of it is just impressions if i see if i see michael enough times on linkedin i'm gonna go it's probably our item i don't know what there's something to that and i meet people who listen to the show especially not there's been any conferences this year but at conferences and events and they come over and the everyone's that excited i'm excited to meet meet people as well and they feel like they know me because they know all about the the car and the jujitsu and all this kind of stuff and i'm i had no idea who they are or you know what they do um but i feel like is that is that again something fair to say that just the number of impressions that you have in front of someone over and over and over again as long as they are positive ones that just has a massive influence on people's uh kind of perception of you yeah definitely and that's why you know there's a big thing about people who say you should try and post on linkedin on as many days as you can i think the algorithm doesn't like you to post too much but that's why i try to post monday to friday and again the algorithm will favor that but it was also just about getting my content in front of people right like i was saying about the sequence if i have six emails versus three i've got six chances to resonate with someone it's the same on linkedin if i'm posting five days a week instead of one i've got five opportunities to resonate with someone rather than one so yeah completely agree about the impressions cool okay so we've got the content in the first few emails we've got the content in the middle and how it's kind of pushing towards getting a meeting we've got what we should say essentially on the phone we've got this element of inception how do we now all put this to together and build this cadence do we need expensive software can we do this on the cheap if our company isn't going to pay they want to see it before in action before they invest in you know uh you know outreach or someone how do we go about implementing this michael yeah i'd recommend getting a sales engagement tool i'm pretty vendor neutral so we we partner with with all of them they've all got different strengths and weaknesses i i think if you're going to do this you know like you should in any process as a buyer look at different ones um but we yeah we partner with outreach sales loft apollo apollo is quite a good one if you're a small business because it also comes with data included as well so you can kind of get the data and then actually contact those people as well and essentially you want you want a tool that helps you organize the cadence so you can build a cadence and it will say like i said you log in and first thing in the morning it says okay you're going to call these 50 people then you're going to email these 50 people and send them a linkedin message so you want some something that's got that capability so as long as it's got a dialer as long as you can do email automation and it can set up tasks that's essentially all you need the three i mentioned are good and there's you know a ton of different platforms out there that that i recommend good stuff and i know you've got a new ultimate outbound sales cadence that um hopefully we'll be able to put in the show notes retrospectively when the show airs because you're recording this before it's gone out but um is that is that the start point is that kind of a do we is a starting point to get a blueprint from or the start points to work with yourself right but other than that is it to get a blueprint and then kind of meld it to our own kind of messaging yeah def like i said i i think the step before a cadence we we help um sdrs build cadences uh we try to do it with them rather than write it for them um so that they're the ones learning but the step before that is essentially to write a playbook because once you've got a good playbook so that everyone the term playbook means different things to different people so i explained kind of our terminology of playbook is essentially like a centralized messaging document that's not for any specific channel it's just like what are your buyer challenges um what are some probing or discovery questions you can ask relates at some qualifying questions what are the triggers like you mentioned what are some questions you can ask around the triggers what what's your value proposition essentially your pitch and it's always going to be about solving those challenges that you've identified and then objection handling competitor analysis etc i recommend build if you don't have that kind of centralized messaging document build that first that's like a messaging document that every new sdr can have and then once you've got that then you start building the messaging across you know email linkedin phone etc got it cool and then final thing to wrap things up there michael what is one misconception about building sales cancers or what is one thing that you see especially from uh sales experts on on linkedin that you you just want to smack your for forearm into your head every time you see it what is something that everyone's getting wrong that we shouldn't be getting wrong yeah i think that if you're doing 30 touches that you're essentially just like spamming people right and that you shouldn't automate everything like you should have like a three touch super personalized email cadence like yeah of course that that can work but for me it's like you were saying it's the the the timing issue of it as well so if you can add more content that's super relevant as long as you're keeping it super relevant that's fine so i think people who really have a hate of automation like automation is terrible i think it's just because they've been on the receiving end of terrible automation and they think if they're going to do that then they don't want to be like that terrible automation they've received so i think don't hate automation just put a lot of effort into your data and those triggers and industries like i mentioned and then essentially your message can seem personalized even if it's actually automated perfect well with that michael tell us where we can find out more about you everything that you're up to in case anyone wants to kind of bring you into because this is getting complicated right to bring you in to lessen the burden here yeah sure so our our website is growthgenie.com unfortunately we couldn't get the uh the domain and then my email address is m hanson growth genie dot co and uh finally connect with me on linkedin so i'm michael hanson growth genie if you type that into linkedin i'll come up as i've mentioned earlier in the show i i try to post content uh monday to friday and always happy to connect with anyone whether you're an sdr vp of sales whatever you're happy to connect and always share advice good man well i'll link to all that in the show not to this episode over at salesman.org and without michael i want to thank you for your time uh your energy in this and i really appreciate the the content you do post on linkedin everyone should listening now go and find you on there and i want to thank you again for joining us on the salesman podcast thanks so much it's been a pleasure to be here