“It’s really, really easy to get a personalized paragraph sentence or two and then literally give your bullet points or whatever after that. Slice and dice however you want, but you can figure it out if you spend more than two minutes looking up a person.” – Brantley Atkinson in today’s Tip 1439
What’s your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and check out the full interview with Brantley!
Triple Whale
Brantley Atkinson on LinkedIn
Brantley Atkinson on Sales Success Stories Interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes in the form of a clip from my most recent interview on the Sales Success Stories podcast with Brantley Atkinson who is the top-performing AE at Triple Whale. Listen to this:
Brantley Atkinson: You don’t always want to be poking people. You want to be poking people who you know need your product. You want to be poking people who have explicitly told you a reason or two that they need it and that you know are still engaged or interested. Right? You don’t want to be bothering people or a nuisance. And that’s part of my nonsales background, right? I’m always very conscious of, “Damn, am I the one in their inbox that is annoying them or the one in their inbox? They’re like, I can’t believe this sales guy keeps messaging me.”
So I try to keep it relevant, even if it’s not about what I’m selling them. The soft sell, I think, is something that’s really unique and interesting. I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot in my life. I keep up with the news. I pretty much watch the news every night, the nightly news, and things like that. Just having a worldview that is knowing that you’re not the center of the world and there are other things going on. Being able to make those connections and send something that’s relevant, whether it’s about your product or their product or not, or just relevant to the conversation you had, I think goes a long way in building an actual relationship versus a transactional, I’m going to sell you this and you’re going to buy it then we’ll never talk again, type relationship.
Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Any additional detail that you want to give just around this particular item?
Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, like in my initial outreach, I personalize every kind of email that I’m sending to people. There’s only so many ways you can really slice and dice what we sell, and I’m happy to go into what triple whale is and why it’s special as well. But just off the top right. We sell an attribution software, meaning companies who are DTC-focused, direct to consumer on Shopify. They’re spending a lot of money on advertisements. There’s reasons why they can’t see where all that money goes. When it comes to Apple privacy issues, as well as other factors related to browser-side cookies. I’m not going to go too far into it, but there are reasons they need our software.
So my initial outreach, there’s only so many ways you can slice and dice why they need this, the problems they’re likely facing. But you can certainly look at their product and determine whether it’s something you would actually use, determine some of the issues they might be facing, like if it’s a higher average order value item, they might have a longer sales cycle. And that’s something that our product is really good at and something they probably have never heard of a solution for, yet.
So I can generally know something they’d be interested in. But I also sometimes, like, we had a certain drinking mug on Shopify that is shaped like a Viking horn, right? So Whale and Ale, I think was the subject line. And I made a poem about how we would ride off into Valhalla together if we were to do a partnership. So I think just funny stuff like that that they’re not used to seeing in their inbox is really helpful because my boss says all the time; You know, how many of these a day I get in my inbox of people that have just done no research on me whatsoever or have the bullet points of why I should buy them? He’s like, I close all of them. I delete them all. I don’t need it.
Scott Ingram: Yeah. And it’s the unfortunate thing, I think, in a lot of ways, right, the reputation that we get as sellers because there’s so much lazy, undifferentiated, spammy type outreach. But the good news is the bar is kind of low. It doesn’t take a lot to really stand above and beyond to go; Oh. This guy actually spent the time to reach out to me personally.
Brantley Atkinson: Absolutely. With the availability of information out there, at least for me, like Facebook’s Ad Library exists. So these companies that are spending, let’s say, 30,000 a month to a million a month to 100 million a year, potentially on ads, maybe that’s a stretch, but you know what I’m saying, they’re spending a lot of money on ads. I can look at all their ads that they’re running on Facebook Ads Library. I can go to Google, I can see all the ads they’re running. I can go to their reviews, and I can look at what people are actually saying about their product. All that takes me less than five minutes, and it gets me at least an easy paragraph I can say about them. And then there’s LinkedIn and stuff, too. So it’s really, really easy to get a personalized paragraph sentence or two and then literally give your bullet points or whatever after that. Slice and dice however you want, but you can figure it out if you spend more than two minutes looking up a person.
Scott Ingram: For a link to my full interview with Brantley and to connect with him on LinkedIn, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1439. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!