“Just the understanding that if you are not breaking through the noise, you are creating it. ” – JC Pollard in today’s Tip 1478
What’s your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and check out the full interview with JC!
Gong
JC Pollard on LinkedIn
JC Pollard 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 latest interview on the Sales Success Stories podcast with JC Pollard, the top AE at Gong last year. Listen to this:
Scott Ingram: What is your overarching prospecting philosophy? I know you’ve had a lot of success with it. What’s the formula? What are the key components for you?
JC Pollard: The number one, is just the understanding that if you are not breaking through the noise, you are creating it. So everything I do from a prospecting perspective has that in mind. I recognize that I have to stand out somehow. I just read these stats. The average CEO or C-Suite Executive has seven and a half hours of meetings a day. The average professional gets 121 emails every day, and then on average, 125 Slacks.
So the reality is people are inundated with internal meetings with Slacks, with outreach from other Account Executives, other SDRs, you have to do something to be creative and to stand out. So I take that into a few different avenues.
The first one is my emails are hyper-personalized, and my goal every time I click send on an email is that the prospect knows and it’s abundantly clear that that was only sent to them.
And then the second component is getting really good on the phone. I still think that cold calls are the most effective way to break into accounts, even though we’re in 2023. I put the majority of my pipeline via cold call. And so I think leaning into it and learning to love it and mastering the cold call is hugely important.
And then the third avenue is just finding a way. When you get stonewalled by these accounts, you got to think extra outside the box. So I just sent somebody a pair of University of Michigan Slippers with a note that says, I wanted to get my foot in the door because they went to University of Michigan, things like that to just make it unignorable. But the submission is figuring out some way to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Scott Ingram: So you opened with an insanely, quotable quote. I think you said if you’re not breaking through the noise, you’re creating it.
JC Pollard: My favorite quote, yeah.
Scott Ingram: Is that original? Did that come from somewhere else? What is the source there?
JC Pollard: My friend at Gong, who’s one of the most talented sellers I’ve ever seen, his name is Emmett. I don’t know if he came up with it, but I’ll give him credit for it because that’s where I heard it and it stuck with me. He told me that when I was early as an SDR and I never forgot it and something I can live by from a prospecting perspective.
Scott Ingram: So good. And man, is there a lot of noise out there. Again, if you put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, especially if your buyer is a busy executive. Oh, my gosh, are they getting a ton of just garbage that is noise?
JC Pollard: Yeah. I mean, I look at my inbox and I’m an individual contributor and I’m getting tons of emails. I can’t even imagine somebody who’s literally a decision-maker. So you got to do something to be just so unique. I like to think of it as your needle in a haystack. It better be a pretty compelling needle if you want it to get picked up.
Scott Ingram: For a link to my full conversation with JC and to connect with him directly on LinkedIn, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1478. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!