Sales prospecting for Sport organisations

How to create outlook signature

[Music] welcome to the prospecting fundamentals module of the sales feed sales courses my name is Will Ain and I'm Tyler lard and today we're going to be talking about the fundamentals of prospecting what that means is why we Prospect the keys to making sure you have a good message and value prop how to figure out who your ICP is and how to compete for retention in today's noisy world where there is more sales people reaching out to buyers than ever let's put the fun in fundamentals the purpose of outbound prospecting is to give you as a seller or your company more control over your entire pipeline while marketing is great there's only so far you can get by getting leads from advertising dig digital marketing and demand generation programs the reality is a lot of folks who are looking will not find your company they will't know of your company your advertising can only hit a certain limit and when it gets that limit the company's growth will be halted so the idea of outbound prospecting is taking control of that and instead of waiting for your Market to come to you you take your product Your solution your service to your desired Market as an account executive as a business owner as someone who manages their own pipeline it gives you total control so that not leaving your fate and your ability to close deals and Source deals in hands of other people like the marketing department or an SDR bdr Resource as a marketer myself I can tell you we love it when you don't have to depend on us for every lead you're trying to get to close new business can't trust the marketing department to do your job for you they're lazy they're not very good at it and half the time they're just guessing as an SD or bdr your entire job is to generate pipeline you are paid on qualified opportunities generated for your company so so the key to do that well is what we're going to be talking about throughout this module and all the different other sales feed modules that are available on sales feed what's a website on sales speed.cd on the sales feed website so what are the two types of buyers that you can expect to encounter in modern sales there are folks who are looking for your solution they have demand for what you sell in those cases it's your job to capture the demand that already exists there but the problem is for most products only about 5% of your buyers are ever going to be actively thinking about buying your solution vast majority of sales messaging outbound messaging is almost catering just to these people it's talking about the solution it's talking about the product it's talking about the features the only people who care about that are the people who are actively looking for a product as we just mentioned there are far fewer of that type of buyer the vast majority of people you reach out to are not actively looking for a product like yours they may not know it exists they may not think they need it they may not have ever heard of it or know that a product like yours exists they may think they don't need it they may have looked at it in the past so by talking about your product when you reach out to people you immediately lose their interest because they're not shopping they didn't ask you what your product did and they have no reason to care and while these people may not know anything about your product what they do know about painfully so are the problems that they have today day this is why it's so important to Center your messaging around the problem you solve rather than the product you sell if you're talking about your product you're losing people if you're talking about the problem you solve you have the opportunity to sell that much larger segment of those two types of buyers the folks who aren't actively looking and in the process instead of capturing demand you're going to create demand from people who weren't already look for your product the advantage to this these folks are in your hands once you have them interested a active buyer is already looking at several different vendors they're probably evaluating you a couple of your competitors they probably feel like they know what they're looking for and have a list of criteria they want your solution to match meanwhile when we get someone who's not actively looking to buy and get them to show interest in your product we have the ability to control that narrative a lot more as sellers we have the ability to help them develop their criteria understand the problem that they're facing figure out what's important for them in a solution and therefore the win rates on those deals is much much higher by going after the folks who are not looking for a product we have the ability to proactively control a sales cycle versus reactively trying to get someone to decide that our thing is best so we want to talk about the problems and outcomes and how much better their life can be when they adopt our solution right will not quite although we don't want to be talking about our product its features its benefits we also want to be careful not to focus too much on the positive outcomes that we can deliver for our clients as well whilst everyone would like to do better they don't always believe us when we tell them that we can help them do things better why is this well because positive outcomes things that are going to be better faster larger more with our product are harder to Envision than existing problems that our buyers have today think about like this if you have to imagine something being better then it's easy to deny it it's easy to procrastinate on it Everyone likes to procrastinate on things that they know they need to do better on so when we come to a buyer and promise them that our solution is going to make their lives better increase their Roi improve the amount of profit or Revenue they have make their life or processes smoother that make something faster they don't believe us and if they do they think okay well I'll be just fine if I don't have that because the majority of our buyers are getting by just fine today if they think well that could be better but I'll be fine without it then they just won't have interest in what you're selling so instead what we need to do is focus on the problem what is the issue the challenge with the absence of your solution what is wrong with how they do things today or what could go wrong if they continue to do things the way they do them today because problems and pains are psychologically much more motivating than gains as someone who gets sold to a lot I can tell you that when a sales rep starts talking about their product or these big benefits that I can have I tune it out immediately because right now as much as I'd love to try whole new things to get way better the reality is I'm fighting a lot of fires and I have to solve my problems that I have today and if somebody has a solution to one of my existing problems I'm way more interested in talking rather than a hypothetical I could do this or I could achieve that so when we use problem and loss Focus messaging we have a much higher chance of generating interest from our buyers essentially creating fomo versus creating motivation and desire so we want to focus on their problems today and the pains they might already be feeling but how do we actually figure out what those pains might be so that we can figure out how it is that we might actually solve them that's right we need to know what our buyer's current state looks like so we can figure out what problems what challenges we can talk about and which ones are going to be the most compelling to get someone to actually show interest in the ways that we can help them solve those so the places to look for these are often going to be by talking to your customers if you want to learn what's wrong with the status quo you need to be asking questions to figure out how people are doing things today and what might be going wrong with those another great place if you already work for an established company is to go and look in your CRM often times when people buy a solution their reasons for doing so have nothing to do with the solution and everything to do with why they had to make a change from their current state if you can look in your CRM and look for notes as to what people were doing before they used your tool and and what was going wrong with that that's going to equip you to have a really powerful message in your prospecting another place you can start to look talk to your customer success managers talk to some of the senior sales reps at your company and get them to explain what folks are typically doing before you come along and help them with your solution another place your case studies you don't want to be looking at the part of the case study where it says what they did with your solution you want to be looking at the challenge before they had your solution what was wrong with what they were doing without your product if you don't have access to CRM data case studies a customer success team or the ability to talk to your customers then one thing you can do is completely reverse engineer your product when you say my product helps companies automate this to make it faster and more accurate well think about what the opposite of faster and more accurate is typically slower and full of Errors those can start to become your problem statements that you can test on your buyers until you have a better idea of what problems and which ones you talk about are actually resonating you're also going to want to know what the the impacts and possible consequences are of those problems because people won't really care of something just a little bit annoying there's got to be a so what this is slow okay it's slow but so what well because it's slow it's delaying projects on the other side of the business or slowing us down from launching a new product release which is causing our customers to churn because they're not getting the functionality they want our ads have low click-through rates so what well if our ads have low click-through rates that means we're probably wasting ads and targeting a larger audience we might be burning through our total addressable Market damaging our brand and also not getting the results we want from our advertising campaigns which means that the sales team is getting frustrated we're not bringing enough Revenue into the company that's your so what there needs to be an impact of the status quo and the problem with it for people to actually care knowing those impacts and knowing which ones are the biggest will help you determine which problems you should start focusing on when you start reaching out to your buyers first the most compelling problems are the ones you want to begin with the ones with the large impacts and the ones that your customers are most frequently seeing we figured out what those big problems are that our prospects might have and why it's so important to solve them now how do we actually weave that into our messaging in a way that helps us stand out with potential buyers so we can earn their attention and start a conversation here's the thing when we're reaching out to buyers even if we're talking about challenges and problems we don't realize that buyers most folks we're reaching out to decision makers important people in their businesses are hella busy they've got a million things that they're trying to do at any one point in time they're managing a team reporting to their boss or their board kicking off projects tracking the progress of projects having meetings doing one-on ones hiring people firing people all of these things are happening at any one point in time their job is not to buy new products and solutions only a tiny fraction of it and most of the time that fraction where they spend buying new Solutions are things they actually initiate themselves things they've gone out and looked for so realistically they are so busy that they just do not have time to consume every single message they get because especially in recent years with the rise of Automation and the increase in the number of products Solutions and the size of the sales teams for those products and solutions there has been a huge increase in the number of prospecting messages a buyer receives they are being inated with code calls code emails code DMS all from sellers buying to get their attention that attention it's in very short supply so what can we do to make sure that when we reach out our message stands out through all that noise Rises to the top and doesn't get deleted hung up on or ignored the problem with the majority of the messaging that folks are receiving is twofold number one it does that what we mentioned before it talks about the product the features the solution the benefit but the second thing it does is it immediately stinks of sales these people are busy so what they've had to do is create defenses mechanisms to avoid sales messages if they were reading every single code email they got if they were answering every single code call they had and having a chat of every salesperson who wanted to talk to them they wouldn't have time to get all those things they want to get done done so instead what they need to do is learn to recognize the pattern of sales messages unimportant emails marketing messages look for signs that something is a cold cool and then immediately reject it so they can still go about their day so when we fall into the pattern of cod email code cool code DM we immediately lose the attention of our buyers to get around this we need to interrupt the pattern a pattern interrupt we need to do something different from all the other salese that we're competing with to get our buyer attention well we've got to make sure we don't fall into the Trap of looking like those messages one of the best ways to do this is by doing our research knowing our buyer better than these other salespeople who are reaching out to them do if we can do some research on the company and have a really good reason for reaching out we're much more likely to get their buyers attention we've invested some time in getting to know them and therefore we're standing out through all the generic stuff that was just spams I receive dozens literally dozens of emails every day from sales reps and it is so easy for me to see which ones were spun up in an automation machine which ones are all about them and which ones have a little bit of commission breath to them and by that I mean you can tell it's a hungry salesperson who just wants to sell their product rather than getting to know me so a great way as a buyer speaking for you to stand out is to show them that you've done your homework is to show them that you're genuinely here to help and to demonstrate that you're a partner that wants an opportunity to understand what problems they might have so you can decide if and not that but if you have a solution that might be helpful all the Automation and uneducated cools out there we rise to the top of B because we've done a tiny bit of research and that gets the buyer attention because most messages aren't researched they're generic they're long and they're all about themselves when we research the buyer and have a really good reason for showing up we're much more likely to get their attention we also need to make sure we don't fall into any of those traps of looking like a salesp person when we reach out luckily by talking about them doing some research not focusing on product we do a lot of these already but we need to be aware of the cliches and signs that people are looking for in sales messages when someone calls me and I pick up the phone and they say hi there how are you I start to think what does this person want when someone emails me and says hello I hope this email finds you well I think oh Cy it's another marketing or sales email we need to be aware of the things that people are doing wrong so we can make sure that we're doing things the right way we'll be talking about that in other modules in this course we figured out the problems and challenges that we want to help solve and some smart ways to make sure we get their attention but how do we figure out who it is that we want to reach out to in the first place if you're lucky enough to have lots of CRM data you've come into an established company then you can start to look into that kind of CRM data of your closed One deals who was involved in those buying Cycles who were the rain makers who had the authority to make the decision happen who helped Champion your product that's helped get it sold internally for you you want to be looking for the folks who have some level of authority enough to make things happen in their company but don't just assume that you should go for the top dog cuz those are the folks with the least amount of time and attention to pay for you most B2B sales these days involve several stakeholders so it is okay to reach out to someone who would be a champion or an influencer in one of your deals you'll start to see which stakeholders care about which problems and the way that you talk about them that will end up being your buyer persona but it's also important to know which types of companies those people work for are you a fit for companies that are larger than a certain size or smaller than another size often times you have a pretty good range of what size of companies whether that be the amount of annual revenue they do or their total headcount the number of employees they have you'll start to figure out there's certain companies that when they get to a certain size May no longer be for a Fit for Your solution or require something bigger or more in depth or more custom than what you offer but you might also find that very small companies don't have any of your product yet and it's only a need that comes up and a problem that starts to appear when companies grow past a certain size again look in your CRM talk to your senior sellers talk to the customer success managers if available to you to try and get an idea of who these people are and the best folks that you should spend your time trying to Target that said don't go in too many assumptions a lot of times we get focused on the industries and the company sizes that we miss a ton of opportunities and these are opportunities that your colleagues and your competitors might be missing as well so if you have a hypothesis of who you might be able to help test it do a large sample and reach out to a few folks from a new industry that you haven't targeted before before because there might be a chance there is a wealth of untapped opportunity in different Industries and personas that you haven't thought about before a little while ago I was selling an eign solution and a lot of the companies that we were reaching out to were B2B companies so think software Professional Services accounting firms marketing agencies one day I decided to go a little bit Rogue I started targeting landscaping companies not just any landscaping companies but Commercial Landscaping companies I reached out to a few and I found very quickly that almost all of these companies had a big problem that had come about as a result of the pandemic previously they had always delivered their proposals their contracts their documents in person now they were now struggling with the problem that they weren't able to do that anymore and therefore weren't as able to get as much control over the closing end of their sales process the problem that we helped solve really resonates with that market and because no one had ever reached out or thought to reach out to those companies before they were really open to hearing about what I had to offer so where are some places where we can actually start to find leads okay so now you have a good idea of the challenges you solve the people who might be facing them that you should be reaching out to where can you start to look for leads and people and contacts to start beginning your Outreach your code calls your code emails your code videos your DMs you might already have leads provided to you as a seller maybe it's from your marketing department or maybe you get assigned them by your sales operations team most established companies also have a lot of historic data there's places that you can look in your CRM for leads that haven't been reached out to a little for a little while within your territory companies who maybe evaluated your product in the past but didn't buy or evaluated your product in the past and bought from a competitor but coming up for Renewal you want to look at all of these locations your CRM leads assigned to you your sales engagement platform however I found the best way to prospect is when I have full control over all the leads I can select that way I can Target the folks who I think I know I can help best and to do that I've found no better solution than LinkedIn sales Navigator the next module of this course is going to be focused on just that how to use LinkedIn sales navigator to find leads that no one else can so you can start reaching out to them a really relevant messaging thanks so much for watching this module of sales feeds prospecting courses this one's a freebie if you liked what you saw if you liked what you read if you lik what you heard then go check out the other modules that we have available on the [Music] site oh let's go I say will you say Aken I say Tyler you say lard Tyler first before anything else I have to say Cy hey bud it's Canada it's metab be code okay I'm not going to say thank you will you look delicious delicious