“Once you get it, you’re going to see a huge increase in your reply rates to your emails and the effectiveness of your cold calls.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 864
Do you understand very clearly your prospects and priorities?
Join the conversation below and check out the links!
Blissful Prospecting Podcast
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’s tip comes from Jason Bay. Jason is the Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. Here he is:
Jason Bay: Outbound is hard, right? If you do it. You know that it’s not the easiest thing in the world. And oftentimes the feeling can be, you know, especially if you’re sending out a lot of emails and making a lot of calls where you’re almost guessing you’ve got hundreds or maybe thousands of people that you’re reaching out to if you’re not doing something that’s enterprise and highly account-based and it feels like a huge guessing game. You don’t know if what you’re saying is going to be a problem they relate to. And maybe you’re making cold calls and you’re trying this problem-centric approach where you’re saying, “Hey, I reach out to people like you that spend way too much time on spreadsheets to manage their accounting. Is that something you run across?” and then you miss because they’re not dealing with it. Or maybe you’re selling a product that the challenge, the problem that you fix is one of the buyers not very educated on because they don’t know that there’s a different way of doing it.
So the cheat code for outbound, if there was one and this is not to imply that this cheat code is an easy thing to do. It’s not like the games back in the day where you could look at the instruction manual or get on the internet and look at cheat codes for a video game and instantly, you now have this advantage over your competition. I don’t mean cheat code like that.
This cheat code is actually a very hard one to find. It requires a lot of upfront work and requires a lot of ongoing testing. But once you get it, you’re going to see a huge increase in your reply rates to your emails and the effectiveness of your cold calls. Working with a guy right now, Ethan, he was setting about seven and a half percent of the cold calls he connected on for a meeting and now he’s setting about a third of them.
So the cheat code is this. You need to understand very clearly your prospect’s priorities. You need to connect that to a problem, and then you need to connect that to how you could help that problem go away or some sort of education around that problem. So the acronym here is, I remember it from Pay Per View, PPV. So problem, priority, and then value.
So the priority needs to be laser specific, though. So I’ll give you an example. Ethan sells a software solution at a CMS, so I think maybe WordPress maybe would be a good example for you. Think CMS he’s selling to people that are marketers in insurance companies that are really big, hundred million dollars plus insurance companies with very small marketing departments. And one of the big problems that they have that they’re thinking about from a marketing perspective is two things.
So one, what they’re thinking about is how do we reduce risk with the content that our individual brokers, because they’re ten ninety-nine, the content that they share because from a marketing standpoint, if they share content that they’re not supposed to, it’s illegal and it can get the company in trouble.
Number two is differentiation in the sales process. So specifically, since insurance is so commodities, how do we create personalized experiences at scale for the people that we’re selling to. Now, those two priorities I just laid out to you are extremely specific. So when you call these people and you do your permission-based opener, “Hey Jason, with so-and-so company, can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I’m calling? You can let me know if you want to keep chatting?” Person says “Yes” or “Hey so and so… When I talk to people like you, typically what I hear is that your top two priorities are one of two things, reducing risk or increasing close rates.” If I said that, that’s not specific enough. You have to be really specific with what I just mentioned around reducing the risk, around the content that your brokers are sharing so they don’t share the wrong things. And how do you control that at scale and in creating those personalized experiences at scale. So you differentiate across your competition. I have to be super-specific. And when you do that, you’re going to get people telling you what their priorities are. And then you can talk about some things that you notice associated with those and how you can help.
So if you’re a little fuzzy, I’m going to give you a couple tips. If you’re a little fuzzy on these priorities and you don’t really know what they are.
One, pay really close attention in every sales call you do moving forward. Ask this question at the very top. “Hey, I know you’re probably working on a hundred different things right now, but what are your top two priorities?” And take specific note of those, literally write them down, transcribe them, record it, whatever you get to do word for word. If you’re not doing the selling and you’re an AE, make sure to talk to your AE and listen to their recordings or get them to ask these questions.
Number two is you can look at job descriptions. So look on indeed for job descriptions of the positions that you’re prospecting into and those people hiring.
Number three, what you can also do is look at yours and your competitor’s case studies.
And number four, you can look at yours and your competitor’s G2.com or any of the reviews if you’re not signing software and what it says.
So the cheat code is no inside and out your prospects, priorities, so you can bring that up first thing in your cold call or your cold email.
Scott Ingram: For more about Jason, including a link to his Blissful Prospecting Podcast, just click over to DailySales.Tips/864
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!