“And we just go on this huge rampage on tactics and the how-to of prospecting versus the why behind it. And what I really want to do is get back to the basics of why would a prospect even want to hop on a call with a salesperson they don’t know to begin with.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 178
How do you focus on prospecting?
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Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Blissful Prospecting
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today, Jason Bay, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Blissful Prospecting is back, and this is likely the beginning of regular appearances from Jason. I’ve gotten such great feedback on his prospecting focused tips that I’ve asked him to start contributing to the show more regularly and he generously agreed and then turned around and proved that I made the right choice with this tip:
Jason Bay: One of the biggest challenges we have just you know, in today’s day and age, let alone selling and prospecting, is there’s just so much information out there that it makes it really difficult to find out what it is that you should actually do. And specifically with prospecting, one of the biggest challenges you know, that we experienced just on our work with clients and in training sales teams on how to do this better is everything out there is very tactic based and it’s very easy to get into, “Hey, what should this email say? How short should it be? What tools should you use? Should you do multichannel? Is the phone better than email?” And we just go on this huge rampage on tactics and the how-to of prospecting versus the why behind it. And what I really want to do is get back to the basics of why would a prospect even want to hop on a call with a salesperson they don’t know to begin with. And that’s a really simple way of looking at prospecting rate. Our goal is to peak enough interest in show enough value with the prospect that they feel its worth 15 to 30 minutes of their time to hop on a call to talk with us about how we can solve a problem for them. Prospects have problems. We have solutions. We need to build enough value and credibility to get them to want to hop on a call so that we can tell them about how our solution can help them. So let’s start with that as the baseline. So to begin with here, if you’re not leading with a challenge or a problem that you solve, and many of us don’t, I’m guilty of it. When we started prospecting, we’d say things like, “Hey, our service can help you fill your sales pipeline. We would love to chat with you, we can set appointments for you, fill up your sales pipeline so you can hit your revenue goals.” And the bad part about that is that what everyone does and it doesn’t really speak to any challenges that that organization or person might be experiencing. So what I want to challenge you with is to come up with what we call a 3D Challenge. And this has been working really, really well for us. So instead of leading with a generic organizational challenge, that’s the first layer of challenges. So for example, we work with nonprofits and one thing nonprofits, most of them need to do is corporate development. So they need to find corporations versus individuals that can support their mission and give them donations. So when we were cold emailing these people, oftentimes what we’d say is, “Hey, you know, we noticed a lot of nonprofits have challenges hitting their fundraising targets and connecting with corporate partners that align with their mission. This is something we might be able to help you out with. Are you interested in chatting?” It sounds something like that. And to be honest with you that that worked okay. But when we really started to get traction, we went that second layer deeper, which is the persona and really wanting to speak more to what are the individual’s challenges that we’re reaching out to. What is the chief development officer in this case? Like what it’s like challenges are this person experiencing with that we might be able to help them with. So what we started hearing, cause we had asked them these questions in sales calls is they would share stuff like, you know, it’s challenging to get new money in partners when we’re trying to juggle existing partners. We don’t have time and I’m spread too thin. So what we started pointing out in emails that worked really effectively is if we’re sending an email to a chief development officer, be seek “Hey so and so was reaching out because a lot of chief development officers are telling us that one of the most challenging parts about their job is juggling getting new money and then finding new partners cause we have existing partners to work with and we just don’t have the time, more spread way too thin.” That worked extremely well. And where we even started to see more success was when we could add a third component to make it 3D. So when component a situational challenge, we call these sticky situations. So a situation where a prospect is experiencing that challenge and here’s what you can do and here’s how that might sound. So instead of going, “Hey, you know, after you’re being basically being spread too thin,” let’s call out an instance. And in when that happens. So he said, “Hey, you know, one of the big challenges that chief development officers sharing with us is that when they go to put together their target list of partners that they’re going to go after at the beginning of the month, they don’t have enough time to dig through the data and find out who the decision-maker is and carefully crafted email to send to them.” And that’s what’s worked the best. So if you could get down to not only the organization challenges, but specifically the persona and what they’re experiencing, and then dig a layer deeper, and you might have to ask them, you might have to call past clients and ask them about the situational challenges that they had in relation to your product or service to get that. But when you can add a wind component to your messaging and you can really relate to their workday in their workflows and the activities they do throughout their workweek, where they intersect with your product or service and where it could help them, that’s where you’re going to really find the gold in your messaging. So just to kind of step back and summarize this one, you need to lead with a challenge and if not, at least focused on the organizational challenges until you can get the information to get really specific with the persona and with the situation.
Scott Ingram: For more about Jason Bay and Blissful Prospecting click over to DailySales.Tips/178
Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!