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Outside Sales Talk
The Most Effective Way to Do Outbound - Outside Sales Talk with Donald C. Kelly
00:56:16
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- [00:00]
A
You need to have some level of personalization nowadays, and it's not just like the, the dumb stuff like, hey, I saw that you went to Cambridge. It's like, that's stupid. Like, no people are the fall for that anymore. Maybe 10 years ago, like, oh, cool, they saw a college I went to. Yeah. But now what you want to look at is, is things like I mentioned, are there things that they're posting are things that their company's doing. Like, everyone has something that matters to them.
- [00:27]
B
This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for outside salespeople. I'm your host, Steve Benson, and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game. Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today I've got Donald C. Kelly with me, and we're going to talk about the most effective way to do outbound with. Welcome to the show, Donald.
- [00:55]
A
Steve, Excited to be back, man. Thank you so much for having me. It's been, it's been a minute. It's been a minute since I've been back on a show. I've been on your show, so thank you.
- [01:02]
B
Yeah, years. Well, I, I, I, I remember the room I was in when I did your, did the Lost Port podcast with you, and that was, that was the old, our old, old office pre Covid. So it's at least four years ago. So.
- [01:21]
A
Either one, you got desperate to get, you know, or two, you know, I may have done something right the first time to get back on the show.
- [01:28]
B
Actually, we, we, we score our. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, we score people based on, like, how good we thought they did. And then we go back and ask for the ones that we thought really did a great job. We asked them, wow. We figure you got more to teach us.
- [01:45]
A
Well, I appreciate that. We passed the test, man. Thank you.
- [01:48]
B
Absolutely. Well, and just by way of reintroducing Donald here, Donald is a, a seasoned sales professional speaker and trainer who's on a mission to evangelize effective selling methods and to inspire sellers at all levels to do big things. He's earned recognition from Salesforce as a top sales influencer for 10 years, two consecutive years. So that's 22 and 23. And he's the accomplished author of works like Sell It Like a Mango, a Sell A New Seller's Guide to Closing More Deals. Donald also hosts the Sales Evangelist podcast and is a trusted voice in the sales community. So, first question, in your experience, what are the must have components of a great outbound sales strategy.
- [02:48]
A
Yeah, this is a good one. I feel like it's evolving. I saw a post the other day, somebody asked, is outbound dead? And the majority of resounding number of people said 70% said no and 30% or is dying and 30% said yeah, it's dying. I think there is an evolution of outbound. I don't feel that it's at a point where you, you're going to where it's ever going to be extinguished from the, you know, from the zeitgeist, so to speak. But I feel that there's going to be and there is an evolution of it. And I think the first thing that's important right now is people. The people do want to connect with folks that they have some kind of connection with. Like it's the stranger danger idea right now. And I know it sounds like it's been around for a minute, but I would say it was. People were more open to accepting a cold email two, three years ago than they are now. And I think our preferences are just getting so much more stringent when it comes towards our cold email. And the same thing with a cold call, like even right now with the iPhone updates. And most people are calling to a personal cell phone or direct line. So you can see this. I, I can see if, when somebody's leaving a voicemail or it's still ringing, but I can see, you know, what they're saying on a voicemail and if I want to take that or not. So there's just all these preferences in the, in the side of where they can help guard against unwanted or unwanted distraction or unwanted outreaches. So when it comes towards what's working and what's one of the things that's important when it comes to the outbound understanding buyers behavior and all of us are our preferences right now we need to establish some kind of relationship that's going to help us start beforehand or some kind of credibility factor. So for me, it's fairly easy if I'm calling into, not fairly easy if I'm calling into my industry where a lot more people may know me already. It becomes so much more effective for me to be able to have that conversation. But I've developed that for like the past 10 to 11 years when I work with clients and they're trying to figure this stuff out and it may not have like a big presence established. One of the things that we try to do is how can you grab attention from the jump and one of the ways you grab Attention is through tools like LinkedIn and we're going to use LinkedIn and talk about that a little bit here. But if you're doing B2B sales, it's incredible, it's important. It's incredible. It's incredible how many sellers are not taking advantage of platforms like LinkedIn to do so, but establishing that credibility or one grabbing your attention before I make my do my phone call or email is pivotal. So for my standpoint, before I send my first email, I'm looking up Steve and I might look up Steve and see that you work with Badgermap or even before that, I use Sales Navigator and I build a list of people that would be a good fit for this ICP or this focus that I'm going after. And with that list of focus prospects, I, I didn't take that and I will find your obviously pull your details through like Apollo to enrich that list. So now I not only have your mobile number and email address, I'm also looking and seeing your behaviors or things that you're doing on LinkedIn. I look for people who have, who are comment or, excuse me, posting on LinkedIn. So if I see you're posting content, I can engage with it. I'm not going to do some dumb post like hey, great post or awesome on the comments, but I'm going to do something that's relevant. Like you might say, you know, we're just launched a new episode with XYZ on Outbound. I would leverage that and be like Steve, you know, out of cur, you know, out of curiosity, saw the episode you did with Donald on Outbound. What's your take on is Outbound truly dying or is Outbound? Is there still opportunity for us? And you probably will share your opinion on that at least, or might say, you know, I think there's still something there. But you engage with me now, you know me or have some kind of acquaintance with me and I would use that conversation, even if it's not a major, I would use that in my connection request to you. Hey Steve, I just saw your post with Donald. Thanks for the video. Thanks for posting it. Permission to connect here on LinkedIn. Now there's people who have different schools of thoughts on this who say, well, I don't use a personalized connection request in my outreach and I get it accepted. And folks that says you should use it, I'm firmly in the camp right now that you should have a personalized connection request unless you have a strong credibility in your niche already where it's not Needed because I feel that when I did a poll to ask folks, you know, do you accept connection requests from someone without a message? What I get is I thought the number was around like that is north of 60, 65% that said they don't accept connection requests unless there is a personalized message behind it. But sometimes people say things versus their behavior, but oftentimes the behavior may come back like I get people accept my connection request because of all the credibility that I already have. I have a podcast, they know me and so forth. So all do I really need to have that personalized message? It's more of like a celebrity factor that allow them to accept. But if I don't have that, which most of our clients don't, that personalized message tie back. And if I am commenting on something that you find of importance, your podcast and this post that you just did with Donald, and I'm commenting on that and then I'm using that to be able to start my connection request with you. It increases the chances of you engaging and that's all I'm trying to do. The first two step when you outbound nowadays is again, establish that credibility or to connect with you, grab, break through the attention, break through the distractions and to grab your attention. And then if I can start having conversations or interaction, engagement, I'm way ahead. Now that email and that phone call has a higher propensity or higher chance, higher chance of being open and being respond to because now I've broken through the clutter. I've been talking for a little bit there, but am I making sense on this here, Steve?
- [08:23]
B
Yeah, you're absolutely making sense. But how do you know if you're, if your campaign is successful so you're doing these things correctly or you think you are, how do you metric it? How do you know, oh, should I be doing this or should I not? When you're running your A B tests or trying different things out, what metrics or results indicate that your Outbound strategy is successful?
- [08:49]
A
Yeah, I mean ultimately I'm looking at appointments and the first, you know, as measurements on the way towards that is I try to bet in my. I did a speech at Outbound last year or two years ago, and one of the things that I spoke about in that keynote was if you look at attorneys, lawyers, they do not have any type of, any type of case that they don't have a chance of winning. They don't accept that case. So for salespeople, it's the same concept. And I try to teach that so with my LinkedIn approach and sales Navigator, again, I'm looking at people who have a higher chance of doing or engaging and people who are posting on the platform or those who look like, like they're active or more than likely you can have that filter in Sales Navigator. So that's one piece, the mix. The next metric I look at is that acceptance rate. And I'm not looking at, I'm not putting like hundreds of people in my campaign. I'm looking at Focus accounts. So I might have maybe 20 to 30 Focus accounts that I'm trying to break into this month. And in those 20 to 30 accounts, there's probably two to three individuals that would be my ICP. So of those three, two to three individuals. So now that list pops up to like say 40 to 60 individuals over the course of that month that I'm trying to get traction to. So the first step is trying to get my connection request accepted. So what percentage of those are going to be there? And you're probably going to look at about a half, maybe a 50% acceptance rate. So you have to, let's go back on the conservative side and say you had 20 that you sent out or 40 connection requests. You have 20 of them that were accepted. Awesome. Great. Now you can start having that engagement. And then we start the way my team does it. We look at meaningful conversations, then meaningful outreach, meaningful conversation, and then appointments booked. Those are the metrics that we look at at the top of the funnel. So our connection requests were accepted. Now we're trying to get a, you know, we're tracking the activity. So the activity that led to that was me setting up some connection requests, personalized. I engaged on their stuff on social media, on LinkedIn, people who are posting. So therefore I'm making meaningful engagement activities and then so tracking those, tracking my, excuse me, tracking the, the, the meaningful conversation. So if I start having convert conversation with you in the chat, that's great. That's enriching that, that potential opportunity. And then usually I do, we do a pitch where we pitch via email. I usually like to pitch via email rather than directly on LinkedIn, to not poll, but also open up another channel of conversations. And sometimes I have people that read the email and reply back in LinkedIn, and that's totally fine. But those are the metrics that I'm tracking to see if I'm successful. I'm getting 50% of those connection requests accepted. Great. And if my team could have start anywhere from that five to eight conversations per day, Money in the bag, all day and then if you could get that and try to convert and get an appointment, if you can get north of that one appointment a day. Then again, cooking with hot chicken grease at this point, I love it. Or fish grease if you like.
- [12:05]
B
Very important to cook with hot chicken grease. I love that. That is a saying I have not heard before.
- [12:15]
A
Unless you have some cholesterol issues, then we don't want to do that.
- [12:19]
B
Avocado oil.
- [12:21]
A
There you go. So.
- [12:25]
B
Well, I guess intrinsic to what you're saying here is that you're using different types of outbound and outreach methods. You know, maybe, maybe the reps are just swinging by a location in the field they wanted to. With a customer they wanted to visit and dropping off samples or some pamphlets or just trying to say, hey, maybe they're emailing, maybe they're using LinkedIn. I get, maybe you're just, just call, calling them, calling on the phone and I guess probably the right mix probably depends on who your, who your end user is. If your customer is, you know, that owns a bar, if you sell liquor and your different customers, your customers generally own a bar or restaurant. That's different than if your customers are surgeons that, that you know, you're selling a medical device to. So I guess. But I. One thread between these is that I think was intrinsic to what you're saying, was that you're using different ways, trying to reach the same person. How can reps do these things in concert? What should they be thinking about to coordinate these efforts and, and actually improve their results by using these different ways? Kind of in a, in a well thought out way.
- [13:44]
A
Yeah. The easiest part, and this is a great question too because it can get confusing after a minute. Right. And especially if you're a field rep, you're going out. I've been there, you know, we've all been there where you. There's so much stuff to. So many admin work, so much admin work that could be done. I remember when I was doing selling to nursing facilities throughout South Florida and the west coast of Florida. And I'm trying to get throughout the day but there was some critical stuff that I would need. So in the morning I spent some time in the office and this is before I learned about cool stuff like Badger Map. I was like doing Google Maps and trying to figure out where my locations are. But you're still doing some administrative stuff as far as like who did I speak with there? What's the best chance of me connecting with them? Do I have connection with them on LinkedIn prior to going out to it. But I would make a simple little checklist. And in your CRM you can have a checklist embedded for each of the. Depending on whatever you use, you should be able to have a checklist embedded for each of those different accounts. So you can say did I do this already? Did I do this? Did I do this? Did I do that? And also if you don't have that, I mean if that's the bare minimum, if you have an outbound tool such as like Apollo, where you can measure your phone calls, your LinkedIn connection requests, you have all of these things that are being tracked and then you might put on site visit or visit to the, to to the location. You can put this into your cadence and that cadence can be repetitive for each of those different accounts. So if I'm trying to get some manicure of Boca Raton, who are those two contacts that manicure. I'm looking at the, you know, the director of nursing and I'm looking at the administrator. Those two people, are they on LinkedIn? Probably a higher chance my administrators on LinkedIn because of the business side. So I make connection. Is there an existing administrator that I can make connection with? So there's three people now that I can make that connection with or potential make the connection with before I even reach out to go to my on site visit. So I'm trying to establish all of that stuff. So when I do get on on site, it can start a conversation already. I might, you know, say, hey, I just saw that you guys are, you know, you got a new location or saw that you guys were being bought out by XYZ company or I saw that you guys just celebrated, you know, your Mother's Day campaign with some of your, with the city of, the city of Boca Raton. Like it was really cool idea that you had. Whatever. But now I'm starting conversations. So just makes the whole point is making that easy and the way to track that is through tools like that that I've seen.
- [16:01]
B
Makes sense. And it sounds like a lot of your strategy is really using social media and particularly LinkedIn. It sounds like very effectively. I guess a couple questions on that. First, what are some hints you and tips you have for engaging with people on LinkedIn? And also I was wondering about what other types of social media do you find helpful and when are those appropriate to use?
- [16:27]
A
Yeah, so the first part is what are. I was trying to put a little note down towards that the tips for maximizing LinkedIn talked a little bit about this, but I want to make it seem, go back and share it. Like in a story example or a visual example. Everyone has this in their city. I don't know if you trick or treat as a kid, Steve, what was that city? What was that part of your town that you trick or treat? And you knew that neighborhood that they had the best candy.
- [16:58]
B
That would be the rich people.
- [17:00]
A
Rich people, right. All right, so the one for rich people area for us was in Wellington and Wellington, Florida, it's equestrian community. People are out there, have money. You go out to Wellington and everybody got like they give. Not everybody, but some of the majority of those people are giving out like full size candy bar. You get even with some Snickers man. Like it's some good stuff. And then some of them will leave the door candy on the door if they're not home and they'll leave the light on and you use the honor rule or honor rule and whatever it is and you take one piece of candy and whatnot. But here's the thing. When I go to those neighborhoods, I'm going there because again, the idea is those people have candy and they have good candy. The other component too with those neighborhoods is that those people like I'm going to the houses though in those neighborhood with the lights on. I'm not going to any with the lights off. And the majority of salespeople I find, because we don't have tools like that that can help us to know if quote unquote, houses that have lights on that have a higher chance of having candy. We go to every single house and we waste our time, but we want to make sure we can get to those houses. So again, the easiest piece, one of the best tools in sales, Navigator. If you don't have a navigator, you should use net. You should figure it out and get it. It's just like a. It will save you tremendously. But I look at people who are one engaged posting in the past 30 days. It's a simple thing. And then also depending on your field. But for mine, I love when I get like a new administrator. When I was working into some of these going to the nursing homes, a new administrator, they're more than likely willing to shake things up. Or a new don. So a director of nursing. So when I would as I would find these people, I would see they change their jobs on LinkedIn. So you get this notification. So now I have somebody that's posting stuff on LinkedIn, sharing stuff or resharing things and they have job change, higher chance of me. Those are lights on. So to speak with big candy bars in those neighborhoods. The other thing that I like to look at when it comes towards people that are, when it comes to social media like platforms like LinkedIn and that helps me out is the audio messages and the video message capability because you got to look for ways that you got to stand out. So when I do connect with Steve and I'm sending you a message to put that voice with the, you know, voice with the face or put a face, you know, a face with the, the, the, the voice or whatnot, I send a video. And LinkedIn allows for you now to have inside of their application an opportunity to be able to send a video or an audio. So it's built in, but it's in a mobile device and most of us are out there already going office to office or you know, you're going from one side to the other. So you can do this and it can all be done inside of LinkedIn on your mobile device. But the cool thing about this is again is that it establish or helps to make that connection that we talked about in the first question that you asked me before we even get to visit with the prospect in the first place. So all of those things are working in concert to help me to be able to do again a couple other features that helped me out. And then the second part of your question was going back to. I can't remember exactly. Can you rephrase it?
- [20:05]
B
It was other, other platforms.
- [20:08]
A
Where do you. Platforms.
- [20:09]
B
Yeah, what are LinkedIn's? Obviously really important for you and I. I've for a lot of field salespeople depending on their industry, things like Instagram can be really powerful if you're selling to, you know, bakeries, the beverages.
- [20:23]
A
Yes.
- [20:25]
B
You know those people, bakers aren't necessarily on LinkedIn but they are on Instagram with their cupcakes, etc.
- [20:33]
A
So Insta and an X or or formerly known as Twitter. Those are two other platforms that I find work great and especially for the visual industries. So stuff like you get go back to the baker or go back to the food industry, go back to like, you know, folks selling like, you know, services like you know, the retail stores or whatnot. Engaging on their platform is also a really, really effective way on Instagram because all of these people are trying to grab attention. So that account is managed by someone, whether that may be directly the entrepreneur, the owner or it may be managed by, you know, a marketing or some kind of someone in comm. In their social media team. But what I like to look at is I want to become the person that grabs their attention or become like a super fan for that individual. So, like, on Instagram, one of the easiest ways is to engage on their stories, if they have stories and not just say something dumb, like, looks great, like, awesome dessert. It's like, stupid. Like, don't say that. Like, say something like, oh, my goodness, this looks amazing. I may have to look at that for my son for his birthday coming up and then tag somebody else in that. Like, my wife does this to me all the time and we have, we have an understanding and I'll tag my team members. But it's. They know that, okay, Donald's tagging me in something. But for you, Steve, you'll probably get really excited, like, oh my goodness, this person tagged somebody else in it. My stuff is working and you get all excited, but that at least grabs your attention. You're going to remember my handle or especially if I engage on that or add it to in my story. Like, again, it just engages. It grabs your attention. My friend Jared Easley has a. He co authored a book with a guy named Kamanzi and the book was all around influencers. It's like, stop chasing influencers. And the kind. The idea behind the book was like, become a noticer yourself. You don't have to chase someone, chase influencers. You can become, quote, unquote, that influencer. Just notice people. And if you can do that on Insta, it's going to be great. And the same thing again you can find on X. Like, they. Those are platforms where you don't see like, the average Joe's doesn't necessarily have like thousands or hundreds of comments like, like a New York Times or like Elon Musk will have. But when you can comment on their stuff, it's kind of like, bro, where did this come from? Who is this person? And that helps you. And just one more example with this. Like, if you're. If their main platform is something like TikTok and they have a lot of people there, but they don't have a lot of people on Instagram, I would make sure you do that type of engagement on Instagram. It's kind of like going. When you're coming to a traffic light, are you going to go in the line, the lane with. If there's three lanes, the one that has the most cars in it, or are you going to go in the lane with the fewest cars so you can get through the light quicker? And obviously we're going to go through one of the fewest lines and that's the same idea Instagram for some people have few of a shorter line because it's not where they hang out, not where they have. They started building their influence but they may be trying to build influence on that platform as well. And it's a great way for you to be able to get to the quote unquote, grab their attention. And a simple one for me, there was a guy I was trying to get connected with on LinkedIn. I couldn't get there, the line was too long so to speak. So I went over to Instagram and he was trying to build his brand on Instagram and I was able to get in quote unquote getting line and start a conversation and led to the DM and that led to an appointment for, for me the, the point is you there, yes, there are other platforms. Utilize them, utilize them wisely. Don't like be engaging. Like what would you, would you have a conversation with your friend about one of these things? Or if my friend posted something cool, am I going to say nice or I'm going to say man, that's so cool, man, where did you get that like, or what kind of golf clubs did you eventually get? Like I would engage with that person. That's a close friend. That's the same way you want to do when it comes towards those platforms, other platforms.
- [24:25]
B
Makes sense. And with outbound in general, how, how much is enough? Like how. What percentage on average would you say a field salesperson's week should be dedicated to outbound activities?
- [24:41]
A
Yeah, I think you're looking at if, depending on your, your setup. But if you know, for me or for most of us who were doing like, you know, you don't have a ton of inbound leads coming in, that's, that's all of it. Like your majority of your time and obviously you're going to meet with clients and you're going to do follow ups. But what I would tell sellers, if you're not getting any inbound, you don't have any client meetings. Yeah, your time should be there. So at least, at least at that point should be about, at least 50% of your time should be focused on some outbound activities to help generate stuff. But you're going to get to a point where you may start just doing more account management or you have tons of, you know, leads and opportunities. Well in that case then, you know, don't waste your time doing stuff. You don't need to focus on servicing those people, but you should do it. And even if you have tons of opportunity Coming. I still tell sellers don't get lazy like make sure you have keep filling the funnel. So at least an hour of some kind of activities to outbound will help you out. And if your day is totally packed where you have just all inbound. Lynn yeah, I probably try to get maybe 30 minutes every other day to do some kind of outbound, so I don't get lethargic. But every salespeople want to get to the point where you're just getting. Every business want to get to the point where you just have customers coming to them and that's a good thing.
- [25:56]
B
So yeah, even if you're doing really well, I think it's still worth doing some outbound just because a lot of times the stuff that comes to you isn't, isn't your, your best customers or isn't your highest profit customers, you know, it's, it's. Whereas if you know where to find your, your best customers, your most profitable customers, spending time to fill your time with those types of, of people is often going to be, you're going to end up selling more. So you're just just reacting to, to deals all the time and not bringing in the really good stuff. It's you, you can end up spending a bunch of time on lower value things than you would have if you had gone taken your offering straight to the really good stuff.
- [26:44]
A
Yeah. And so let me give you an example with that. And this is why I go back to the top. When you feel, you know, do I feel that outbound is die, it will be dead. The majority of the biggest companies in the world are, they still have outbound because outbound is how you scale companies. Outbound is how you, you really grow. Like yeah, you can get the inbound, but you get, you, you get a little bit of everything coming with that inbound. But like those enterprise level deals, they may not all necessarily, you know, come and flop in your lap. And look, they may do an rfp, but the, if you're reaching out, you're building relationships and your landing opportunities, you have a better chance of getting those deals rather than just sitting back and waiting because they ain't gonna come. So like you're saying just go out and do it. But yeah, to grow a company you definitely need outbound.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah, it sure helps. What about personalization? We talked a bit about how you personalize when you're doing outreach over LinkedIn. What, I guess what are some ways that you've seen people successfully personalize their outbound methodologies at scale and, and you know how do you scale in general these personalized outbound campaign. How do you, how do you balance, you know, getting the posting the numbers and the doing the outreach you want with, with that personalization?
- [28:10]
A
Yeah, I, so the way I look at it is that you need to have some level of personalization nowadays. And it's not just like the, the dumb stuff like hey, I saw that you went to Cambridge. So like that's stupid. Like, no people are the fall for that anymore. Maybe 10 years ago, like, oh cool, they saw a college I went to. Yeah. But now what you want to look at is, is things like I mentioned, are there things that they're posting, are things that their company's doing. Like everyone has something that matters to them or matters to matters the most. So if I'm going after marketing directors, what matters most to them is the content that they're sharing. Right. Grabbing new, getting new leads or grabbing people, getting people's attention, bringing them into the company. Can I compliment them on that? Can I see how they're doing that? Could I, could I comment back on that? I might say, hey, I've been looking, when I looked at your Instagram post, saw that you guys have like saw the growth that you had over the past six months. Amazing. With that out of curiosity, what made that increase? P.S. love the cupcake, the cupcake you posted or a cupcake story. Like, but then now the person is probably going to be able to risk more likely respond because it's personalized to what they are doing. It's not about the college, it's about what they are accomplishing in their role. Am I making sense on that? And then the other component to that with the level of personalization and the strategy is I always encourage the first message to be hyper personalized. Everything after that could be focused on the role. So then my second message to her or to him may be around challenges that my icp, who I know in my niche, who are marketing directors for, you know, small bakeries could be facing. And now I don't necessarily need to personalize too much because my first one was hyper personalized email number one or outreach number, email number two or outreach number two. Outreach number three and four could be more focused on the role. And that's a huge level of personalization, but it can scale that personalization.
- [30:12]
B
You, you mentioned, you just said, you know, outreach 1, 2, 3, 4. What is the right amount of outreach and what's, how do people think about how should I outreach over all these different channels and how many times I mean you know, we, I've seen people have, you know, 15 email drips and I'm just like, come on, that's, that's. If they, that's spam. If they wanted, if they wanted to get back with you, they would have gotten, they would, they would have responded in the first couple ones. But then I've seen the same people say, well, look at the numbers. Like sometimes it's the 12th touch that people actually reach back out to. How do you balance that and how do you think about that?
- [30:50]
A
It's a very good one. And the reason why I say it's very good because go back to your set, what you said about follow up. Follow up. The money still in follow up too. And I'll give a story and then I'll come back. There's a guy that, a marketing company that was looking to partner with us and they were trying to sell me. So they're trying to sell the seller, right? And they sent out their, their content, their email. Email number one, it looked interesting. Email number two, it looked interesting. Email number three was I just. They sent email number three and I didn't pay attention to it. And then four and then I finally made, didn't do anything with four. And then five, I think is when I focus on it. Five to six was where I actually did something. And the reason happened between three, two and five, it wasn't that I didn't care about them. It's like I was busy, I was doing stuff and I just didn't have the time to focus on it. Their first piece of content was relevant, but it wasn't relevant. I mean, it's relevant to the issue that I had, but it wasn't like, hey, let's go ahead and my house is flooded, so therefore I need you. But it was relevant enough that it got me thinking and it made me started to say, huh, well, perhaps I should look more into this particular service and perhaps I should engage with these guys. And it wasn't like delete them. It was just like, let me, you know, on a priority scale of 10, it probably was down by about a six or six to six and a half. And it was again something that I deemed important. But the follow up helped to remind me because I had other things that were seven eights and nines that I put above it. Am I making sense? So that that helped me. It reminded me the other thought that I share. If you want to. If you're just sending straight spam, I like to look at emails like this. If I send an Email. And you're opening that email money in the bank, like that's good. Keep continuing that process. How much and what do you do? You do you continue. Is it a 15 email? I don't know if the 15 email is going to be there, but maybe over the course of like that, you know that if I'm doing a cold outreach, maybe the course of like 30 days doing a variety of things, go back to engagement on social and give a break, do a phone call and then do emails. I usually probably do about four emails in my outreach sequence. And then I'm doing, because I start off heavy with social, I'm getting that engagement or that connection before I start sending my emails. So it increases the odds of my emails getting replied to, you know, by that second or third email or outreach activity. Could be the phone call or it could be the stop by visit or whatnot.
- [33:32]
B
Is there anything you should be thinking about or doing when you're in the outbound stage or a relationship with a prospect that will flow through the pipeline and actually enhance your closing rates?
- [33:47]
A
Yeah, so it's probably. How to best explain it, A term that I find that I became very close to last year and it is relevance, like just increasing relevancy. And what I mean by relevancy is, is the problem or is the challenge that you are claiming is that relevant to me and to my company and relevant to me right now. If you want deals to close faster, get relevancy high. So if you can't, if you can say, yes, this is a problem that Steve is having right now and I can justify it because I see it here. Yes, this is something that Steve will need to solve because I look at his job description and this ties underneath his role. And yes, it's, you know, it's something that's relevant to their organization. Like obviously that one is probably an easy one because it's a niche that you go after. But if you can come with that type of relevancy and I can share that with you, a business case, essentially why this is important and why you need to solve it. And because I can back it up with claims, it's going to help to increase that close rate. And I'll give you one example I have with our TSC studios. We produce podcasts for other brands and that's a separate, the creative side of our business. And it's something that just developed over the past like four years and we're separating that company from the main sales training company because anyways, it's grown but one of the things that I find is in those conversations when we talk to somebody about whether or not they should do a podcast and so forth, it quickly becomes to a case study that we do essentially we present to them like a business case about how a podcast can help the brand recognition or help them to free up their time and how this is going to help them become a business or money generating opportunity for for them. Most people that we tie back to with that it's one, it's relevant because they have a podcast or in their niche we see that other people have podcasts. Two, we see that that individual, the marketing director is. It's relevant to them because they're looking for unique ways to, you know, create content. And three, the company is maybe in oftentimes we like the boring companies. The ones who are like in an IT space that they, you know, they probably do a webinar once a month and, and they're doing a webinar with like 10 people on it and it sounds like a tin can. It's like we have an easy way to be able to help them to be able to utilize or improve their content. And then also we look at people sometimes to have content already existing podcasts. So because of all of those factors the relevancy side increase and it increases the odds when we start talking the when we start adding a business case to it. It makes it so much more easier for them to close in the back end.
- [36:33]
B
Such fantastic advice. Have there been, have there been times when you could point back to your outbound and how well and how much time can people focus on knowing these are my closed deals and these are the outbound activities that really drove that.
- [36:58]
A
I'll probably say the.
- [37:05]
B
Yeah, I guess I've just seen people sometimes a certain outbound tactic will just have a. An oversized result in. In your. In someone's closed business way down in the pipeline. They just the things, you know, the. That specific activity went all the way through and I suspect that's a lot of things that something a lot of people don't even try to try to track all the way through when really you can expose this is really effective.
- [37:39]
A
So I was trying to put a pull up a little note towards that. But I let me give an example from my standpoint for my company right now and then hopefully that could could make sense. We do and you can tell me if this is on the same track we do especially if you're going on site to go visit someone or whatnot. I want to be able to just to I want to get a good indicator if that deal is on track to closing. And what we look at is how much they have done. Or let's back up. We sometimes we send stuff in the mail or we might give them a donut or bring some donuts to the office or whatever. Like we use some kind of effort to be able to, you know, give them a physical gift. But we don't give that unless they've been, they're getting rewarded for it. So maybe, for instance, if I send out those emails, one, you accepted my connection request. Two, you're, you're looking at my email. Three, you watch my video. I'm like, okay, this guy, he's doing all of these activities. He's close to the point. Let's push him over the line with a gift. And what. Those are some ways that we can track to help to see if our. What deals. So of those 30 deals that I have in my pipeline and I'm working on this, or 30 prospects that I have and say 20 of them becomes pipeline opportunities. Of those 20 that become pipeline opportunities, I start tracking you based on your performance as an organization or the interaction. And with those different interaction or with those different levels of activities, then I can still, I can help reward you. And that helps me to be able to track my close potential opportunities. Because then we see if people are doing these things, there's a high chance they're going to close. They're accepting the meeting requests really quickly for our meetings that we set up. Or if they have to cancel, they're replying to us, sending something beforehand that they have to cancel rather than just ghosting us. All of these things may be at our different levels of indicator to us or to me, my organization, to help me to know if that deal is going to close. Is that kind of like what you're doing going back to.
- [39:40]
B
Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what I was kind of interested in is, is that, and I guess the, the, the, the concept of the importance of tracking your different activities and.
- [39:52]
A
Yeah.
- [39:53]
B
And then seeing which ones are really working so you can double down there is just so important. I, I think it's an, it's an undervalued thing in general.
- [40:03]
A
Yeah. If, because if somebody's doing some of those bigger things, like again, spending time watching a video, again, it's a huge indicator for me. Like there's something here. Let's, let's, let's take advantage of this. Let's, let's help this, let's move along with this. So.
- [40:18]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. And in your experience training people on how to be better at outbound and studying outbound, what are some common mistakes that you see people making in their outbound sales efforts and how could they do them better and overcome them?
- [40:36]
A
They think the idea of more is better and there's nothing again, there's nothing more against the truth on that one. Like the more you do, the quantity of your outbound activity doesn't necessarily indicate that you're going to be that much more successful. And what I mean is when you see people who are sending out like I need to send out 200 messages, I'm going to send all these things out, that becomes spam. I would much rather you hyper focus on 20 to 30 accounts at a time and really get to know those accounts and really get a chance to grab people's attention. You're going to find that you can book way more appointments than if you send out those, you know, 100 emails. And then you're just waiting for those hundred emails for people to open them. And then that when, that's when you're going to start doing your stuff and go visit on site and stuff like that, like that, that, that doesn't work. And that's probably one of the biggest caution. More doesn't necessarily mean better for you. And then consistency with it. I find people, again, I mentioned this, they might stop because they say, well, I got too much business, I can't do anything else. And it's like, come on bro, like don't do that. Like you're quickly gonna, you're, you're, you're thinking of short term gain. What about for next month? We're not just looking at this month's pipeline. We, we gotta, we gotta feed our family next month and the month after. So what's in the pipe? What's, what do you have that's going to drip over that time period? And the only way you're going to do that is by keep feeding the.
- [42:04]
B
Beast at the beginning right now makes sense. So quick questions, quick answers. I call this section sales in 60 seconds. What, what outbound strategy have you seen yield the most results in the least amount of time?
- [42:24]
A
What outbound activity yield the most results and the least amount of time? I'd probably say I'm gonna go back to the social side, LinkedIn. But the second runner up to that is video emails. It, it just, it's given me, it helped me to break through and give way better results than just sending a, you know, three, four traditional emails. But if I can say it Send a video email, share something from their website or share my put a face with a name or share a case that helps out. So like say for instance, if I'm pitching you with the idea we connected on LinkedIn and I pointed something out that you're doing and I thought was dope and I have an idea of how that can be, you know, maybe something I can add value to you on that. Demonstrating it, quote unquote, that demo in the video helps to make that possible. So in your case I might say I'm selling Badger map and if I were to in my video to you, I might say hey, you know, I grabbed your attention on LinkedIn, we talked or whatnot and it told mentioned the idea of how you know the map, you know, setting up Google Maps, it might show you really easily. Like Donald, I mentioned to you how you know applying I day could be so much easier. Let me show you real quick. This is what one of our clients did that they're down in Milwaukee and you know going around and Here are the 15 visits that they had and it shows this is how much time they saved. Literally we can help your sellers to save you know, two hours in your day. Could that positively impact your business or how could that positively impact your business? Let me know if you're open to learning more. But demonstrating that, that I claimed in my email, my text, email is how I've seen that video cut through. Makes sense here.
- [44:16]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. Personalized outbound with a video over email. You know that, that makes, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, that would work. Well, what about, what about what hasn't worked or what, what have you seen that, that a lot of people think does work that you don't think is the best way to spend your time?
- [44:41]
A
I'd probably say like it's, it's. And I don't see like this happens too much because I know people, people don't do enough of it. But when sometimes it's a fault. Well, let's back up. Follow up is important but then follow up on things that are just like you should never have any right following upon just like end it. And where I go with this is I find that oftentimes sellers will get that first appointment with somebody and they're booking a follow up appointment when they're not doing enough good, they're not doing a good enough job in that discovery call to eliminate that person. So they go on Hope island. Like I met with Steve, so I'm going to keep following up with Steve. What the deal is dead like it was, it's not going anywhere at all. Steve is not going to be a fit. And what it goes back to one of the questions you asked me. It's like, how, what are the indicators if, to indicate if somebody's going to be interested or not? One, they don't have, they're not looking at the indicators of the person, how they're engaging with your stuff. And then two, in that actual meeting, they go on like, you know, they get some of these, like, you know, these, these, these hope answers from the prospect and they, they, you know, they end on those and they run with their happy ears as opposed to really digging down deep. So Steve might say, yeah, this is something I may be interested in. And all of a sudden I'm happy years like Steve is interested. I would say, Steve, it sounds like, yeah, you definitely mentioned that, that you're interested, but I, I, it sounds like there's there, there may be a chance that you're not interested. It's, you don't sound too confident on that one. Well, what, what's, what's, what's holding you back? But the fact is, if I go deep in that call and if I can try to get you as much as possible to give me the most intel, listen, I can be a big boy or big, you could be a big girl. And you can just simply, you know, accept it and say, all right, they're not going to be a good fit, as opposed to having something that's lingering in my pipeline stink for like four months and keep following up on that over and over and over again because of the hope that you gave me in that first call. So if the, if I summarize it into one, it's like being cautious of who you're following up with and being crit, being mature enough to be able to eliminate stuff from your pipeline that will never progress by asking those deep qualifying questions and not worrying about the fact that your pipeline may not be as big later on. Don't put crap in your pipeline.
- [47:09]
B
Such great advice. And a company can help all their salespeople by making it be partnering with marketing. Make it easy for someone, for the sales team to just move a lead that isn't good or doesn't need really personalized outreach or keeping warm into the hands of the marketing team in a, in a special funnel to just keep things warm and let them pop their heads back up. When should they become a good, a good lead in the future?
- [47:36]
A
Yeah.
- [47:40]
B
People say outbound is dying, which in my opinion is not the case. But, but I do think outbound is changing what, what do you see happening in the landscape right now?
- [47:54]
A
So a little bit of kind of like what I shared earlier, I feel that buyers are being way more cautious of who they're responding to or connecting with. So it becomes absolutely vital for salespeople that you try to establish that connection beforehand. One strategy that's working, Scott Lecy talks a lot about this is the idea of nearby. What near bound is is can I take it, can I use my network as a tool? And this is nothing revolutionary new. It's just being more bringing back something that's old school. When LinkedIn first came around it was like that old the idea of that Rolodex right people had if you don't know what that is, basically it's a con. A list of your contacts on paper, on your desk. But it's just bringing back this idea of who do I know that has relationship with these prospects in this, these account campaign that I'm going after these 20 accounts. Who do I know that have connection with them and how can I use them to be able to not use them but connect with these people to get influence to. That can influence me to build a relationship or get an appointment because more than likely again people are going to go with. They're going to go to respond to you if they know you in those emails, if they have or if you're, you're. You're not a stranger. And for some reason now we have the stranger danger id. If I don't know you, you're trying to sell me something and I don't want that. I want to only connect with people not only but I'm going to have a higher chance of connecting with people that are safe. And I'll give you a behavioral example with this with me I noticed noticed it and then I also served started evaluating with other clients as well and friends and the same old concept, same phenomena. I go through my email and I first look at who can I delete and the people that I know I leave or people that I have some kind of their email look like it's has more sustenance, like there's more there's something there towards that that I need to respond to. I leave those but I'm trying to get the wheat, the weeds out so to speak first so I can have time for the quality stuff. So initially as a sales professional, are your prospects deleting your email quick or are they saving them so they can go back in and read them and spend time with them. And the way that, the only way that we can do that is one using tools like processes like near bound or using like that level of personalization, grabbing attention beforehand, breaking through the noise so that you can be seen as a trusted source.
- [50:25]
B
Makes sense. Well, I'm going to do my best to summarize some of the wisdom you've dropped on us here today. So many of our listeners are out in the car while they're, while they're hearing this. So it's good to help makes it stick if we, if people can't take notes. So first of all, Outbound is, is going through an evolution and people's preferences, your prospects preferences are changing. People want to connect with people that they already have some sort of pre existing connection with or awareness of. So you, it's, it can be really helpful to establish some sort of relationship or credibility with your buyers early in the outbound outreach process. You can grab people's attention with tools like LinkedIn and you can find more relevant info with tools like Apollo in order to engage with people. It's really helpful if you use personalized connection requests when you reach out on LinkedIn or over emails because that'll really increase your chances of engaging with someone. It's great and helpful to measure success through metrics like accepted connection requests.
- [51:45]
A
How.
- [51:46]
B
Many meaningful conversations you have from a certain campaign, how many appointments did you book, things like that. You can use a checklist of important to do items and that can really help you increase your outbound success. You can work to establish a connection online before an on site visit and that way you can already have built engagement and awareness before that that attempted meeting in person. You can use Sales Navigator, which is the a part of LinkedIn, to find people who are very likely to engage and engage with you on LinkedIn because of the way they're already behaving there. It'll let you filter by people who have posted in the last 30 days and also you can use that in conjunction with other factors like are they, you know, a senior person in their company or are they an administrator, whatever, whatever kind of extra thing you could filter on. And you can, you can identify things about people that show that they're looking to shake things up. Maybe they just change their job or change their title. You can also try other platforms besides LinkedIn like Instagram and other social sites. And you can engage with business businesses and their Instagram stories with interesting comments or even tag other people to make you, to make you stand out.
- [53:18]
A
If.
- [53:18]
B
You don't have much inbound coming in. Focus at least 50% of your time on outbound to generate more leads and outbound is how you can really grow in a scalable way. Even when you start building your inbound or existing customer base, make sure you still have focused time on outbound to find the deals that are the best fit for you. Everyone has something that matters to them and you want to look for the thing that matters to your lead or your lead's role in general and reach out about that. Donald suggested making the first message hyper personalized and then you can move to conversations that are more role related, their role related. It's worth reaching out through a variety of channels and that'll greatly increase your chances of engagement. So use email, the phone, LinkedIn, do a drop in and coordinate those activities so they're all happening, you know, in kind of a way that makes sense. Track which activities have led to the best engagement and your closes. You'll know to do more of them. Donald, this is all such helpful information. Where can our listeners read more about your work? How do they learn more from you? How do they reach out to you?
- [54:42]
A
Yeah, the easiest way you can go to our podcast, go to thesalesevangelist.com and there you can our website you can check out our podcast. We have a tab for that as well as we also have some free stuff. So if you're not using LinkedIn and you're curious about LinkedIn, you can check that out at the bottom of the screen of the footer and you can get that free LinkedIn guide. Or if you're looking for help with like you're out there as a seller and you just feel like you're isolated, you want to get some more guidance. We have a mastermind where sales professional can come they get a join weekly. We help you go through some of your challenges you're facing, get you motivated, get you pumped up and that's a sales evangelist.com mastermind you can apply there.
- [55:30]
B
Outstanding. Well, this has been a great episode of the Outside Sales Talk. If you work in field sales, you'll love Badger Maps. It's the number one rank route planner for field salespeople. Helps you sell 20 more, drive 20% less. You can get a free trial@badgermapping.com today. If you can think of any other sales reps that would benefit from learning all this stuff that Donald taught us taught us about today, definitely share this episode with them. Donald, I do really appreciate the time. This has been fantastic.
- [56:00]
A
Thank you so much for having me again, Steve. Appreciate it.
- [56:03]
B
Absolutely. Take care. Until next time, everybody.