“Reserve those early morning blocks for doing prep so that you can have your call blocks and work backward from how long it takes for you to get an appointment, to make sure that you’re blocking off enough time to get those appointments.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 353
How do you troubleshoot your prospecting efforts?
Join the conversation below and feel free to share your thoughts!
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
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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 from Blissful Prospecting is back with yet another killer prospecting tip. Here he is:
Jason Bay: One of the challenges of doing cold outreach is troubleshooting. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while now and one of the big challenges I had at first. I would say within the first 6 to 12 months of learning how to do outbound is if something wasn’t working. I didn’t really know why. I sort of felt like the equivalent if you’ve ever been on a diet before, been wanting to get fit. I remember before I knew how to really eat well and to exercise in the most efficient way possible, I’d feel like I was hitting a roadblock right? Where I was putting in a lot of action and something wasn’t working the way that I wanted. I wasn’t losing weight in this case or putting on the amount of muscle that I wanted and I didn’t really know why and it can be very frustrating. And when I learned more about health and fitness, it allowed me to go through and look at well; Hey, could it be the calories that I’m eating? Maybe the macronutrient breakdown. Am I doing too much cardio? Am I doing not enough cardio? Am I doing enough weights? Am I, how many times am I exercising? You know, I could go through a checklist of things. And what I want to give you today is that checklist for outbound. So if you’re going outbound, you’re sending cold emails, you’re doing cold calls, and for whatever reason, it’s maybe not working as well as you would like, or it might be working really well and you want to know where you could amplify it. I want to give you that framework. So the way that we look at outbound is in three different areas and these are the actions that we believe you should take to be successful at prospecting.
So when you know how to identify. So that’s the first bucket. Identify great fit prospects. Engage, that’s the second one. Then in great conversation and convert three them into an appointment, you’ll have everything that you need to know to grow your sales pipeline at that point. So let’s dig into those three areas.
So first one, identify, there are three components to this. So this is the who part of prospecting. So the first part of these segments and find patterns. So the first thing you need to look at is, “Hey, do I have very clear ideal client profiles and do I have clear personas?” Because one of the things that might not be working is if you’re sending the same general messaging through the phone and email to everyone you reach out to, it’s not likely to resonate with them as if you break down things into segments and you can scale up your messaging with people that are experiencing very similar challenges and have some more goals.
The second part to this identify bucket of the who you’re reaching out to is to know your prospects. So one of the things you can also do that I highly recommend is interviewed your customers. So take your last two or three customers that you’ve closed in the last three or six months and talk to them about what their challenges were prior to engaging with you. So whether that was with your cold outreach or they came to you guys through your website or through some other inbound channel, talk about what was going on prior to them seeking out your solution so you can get a better idea of the language that they use when they talk about their challenges.
The third part to this is finding quality data. So make sure you’re using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. We like Apollo.IO, Lead IQ is another really great source. Make sure that you have good accurate email addresses and phone numbers.
The second bucket, this engaged bucket, it’s a couple of things that are really important here. You want to make sure that you’re not only reaching out to someone two or three times but that you’re running multi-touch, multichannel cadences. And what that means is a good generic rule of thumb is am I reaching out 10 to 12 times over the course of 30 to 45 days and am I at least using email plus phone.
The second part to that is using prospect centric messaging. In my leading with my prospect’s challenges and how and then how I can help versus my value props and then feature dumping.
And the third part to this is outsourcing redundant tasks. So if you’re in a place where you maybe have a sales enablement team or the ability to work with virtual assistants, having them help with some of that list building and some of the light to personalization that you’re doing really helps.
So for so far, we have identify, engage. The last and third bucket is convert. So turning them into appointments. The first part to this is responding and handling objections. And what you can do here is take note of the top three to five objections that you hear. Start creating templated, repeatable responses that you can use and start testing them in measuring the effectiveness and get those translated into emails and stuff that you would see in your cold call.
Number two is prioritize engaged prospects. So if you’re doing a good amount of volume, let’s say you’re reaching out to a hundred people per week, prioritize the people that are opening your emails and do all the extra personalization and calling and sending one-to-one personal as videos to those people.
And lastly, make sure you’re maintaining your productivity. Reserve those early morning blocks for doing prep so that you can have your call blocks and work backward from how long it takes for you to get an appointment, to make sure that you’re blocking off enough time to get those appointments.
And that’s it. So identify, engage, convert. We’d love to hear how you approach troubleshooting your prospecting as well. Go ahead and leave a comment on the post.
Scott Ingram: do you troubleshoot your prospecting efforts? Leave a comment on the post at DailySales.Tips/353, which is also where you’ll find links to connect with Jason Bay and Blissful Prospecting. Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!