Are you ready to talk about outbound sales?
We’ve got a lot planned in this section. We’re going to show you how outbound works and how Sales can work with Marketing to deliver amazing buying experiences for your prospects.
Before we jump in, let’s make sure we understand where we are and get context with the #1 Client Acquisition Model, the Client Magnet System.
The Client Magnet System is the complete model for uniting and aligning Sales and Marketing and creating an Inbound and Outbound client acquisition engine in your business – that attracts more leads, boosts sales and energizes your growth!
And remember, you want to align Sales and Marketing because they are just like the wheels of a car. You want them working together, moving in the same direction,
So you get this and not this.
There’s 4 layers, or stages: Tools, Traffic, Client Acquisition, and Post-Sale. We’ll go over all of it in future videos, but in this video we are discussing SDR, in the Client Acquisition layer, on the Sales side of the map.
So when you look at the Client Magnet System map you may wonder why the sales role is split into two different roles: SDR and AE.
It’s simple. Sales is a big job and it’s a vital role for a business.
A typical salesperson has to find, prospect, qualify, follow-up, meet, demo and close prospects. It’s a lot of work.
For most of the day however, salespeople are following up on prospects and are meeting, demoing, and presenting their offerings.
What happens over time, however, is they aren’t prospecting and their pool of leads dries up.
So they have to go back to prospecting to find more leads to follow up with. This creates a rollercoaster of feast and famine cycles that repeat over and over.
The problem is, businesses need predictability and consistency.
In order to achieve this, businesses have begun to split the role of the salesperson into two roles.
A hunter who continually prospects for new leads – called an SDR or Sales Development Representative
And a harvester who closes deals – called an AE or Account Executive.
Now the reasons for doing this are:
It makes it easier for salespeople in each role to hit their quotas, because their tasks are limited, SDR’s get really good at prospecting and AE’s get really good at closing.
Plus, It increases inbound leads, speeds up the sales cycle, and closes more customers.
This may seem strange and new at first to split up the role of Sales into two roles. It’s not often implemented but the idea has been around for a while. Oracle adopted this sales strategy in the mid Eighties.
Where Leads Come From
My last video was on Research. Which, along with Data Pools is where all the new leads come from.
And it is the role of the SDR to find leads amongst the data pools available and research those leads to find if they potentially qualify as a fit to do business with and to learn more about the people in the roles at those companies so you can personalize your outreach to them.
Make It Work
Here are a couple other reasons you want to split the sales role. But they all come down to consistency.
The problem even billion dollar businesses ran into when they adopted this strategy was they handed over their lead facing message and the sales process to 22 year old recent college graduates.
And the Sales team ended up being all over the place. No one really knew how to sell, and no one was saying the same thing … so instead of increasing, sales took a dive.
But you can avoid this in two ways:
First, have a clear message and script that salespeople have to use verbatim.
If a new objection comes up, for instance, the response is workshopped, perfected, put into the script and trained. It keeps everyone on the same page, saying the same thing.
Second, instead of relying on salespeople to prospect and follow up as they choose, we use sequences of activity to ensure every lead and prospect is contacted the same way with the same number of calls, emails, attempts, and the same message.
This way, you can easily test and measure response rate and conversion rate.
Because everyone is saying the same thing in the same way and has the same base line activity levels, you can quickly and easily identify reps who are underperforming in a variety of areas.
Prospecting – Outbound Activities
So to recap, your Sales Development Reps (SDR’s) will find and research leads and contact those who look like good prospects.
That contact is planned to continue over a certain period … and we call it a sequence.
Simply put, a sequence is a certain number of contact attempts over a certain time period.
So if you have a 5×7, that means a salesperson makes 5 attempts to contact a lead over 7 days.
The best way to explain sequences and everything you can do with them is to use the Insidesales.com (Now Xant) sequencing model which covers five dimensions of a sequence.
- Attempts
- Media
- Duration
- Spacing
- Content
Attempts
Attempts count the number of times are you going to try to contact someone. The more attempts, the more work, but it takes between 9 and 12 attempts to make contact with 70% of the people on any list.
Media
Media is the method of contact. You can choose from phone, email, linkedin, texting, direct mail and more.
Duration
Over how many days will you attempt to contact someone?
Spacing
Do you try to contact someone every day for 5 consecutive days in a row? Or, do you skip even days (2, 4, 6, etc.) or use some other pattern of attempts?
Content
What are you going to say in each of these attempts? Do you have the phone script, the email template, or whatever you need for the entire sequence?
It’s best to plan it out and create sequence templates and scripts you need for every communication attempt.
You can mix and match these five variables to create many different types of outreach sequences.
Sequence Example
So I want to give you an example and talk you through it and all of the ramifications of implementing it.
Also remember, this is only an example. Many organizations who use sequences like this have 12, 15, or even 25 days planned out in advance – like our Chicago sequence we call the 25 or 6 to 4.
So in this example, we have an 8 x 7 sequence, of 8 touches over 7 business days.
If we connect with the lead and have a conversation, this sequence stops.
On day 1, we call the lead and if we don’t have a conversation, we leave a voicemail and email them.
On day 2, we connect with them on LinkedIn. We don’t send a spammy connection request, we say as little as possible, or even just use the default connection request.
On day 3, we email them again.
On day 4, we call them and leave a voicemail.
On day 5, we do nothing.
On day 6, we call them, leave a voicemail and email them.
And finally, on day 7, we send them an email.
Simple right?
Here’s what you need to know.
You have to limit how many leads you add into this sequence. If you add too many, and you add leads every day, by day 7 you will have an impossible amount of work to get done.
The best way to look at it is this, over 7 days you will make 3 calls, send 3 emails and connect on linkedin once.
So, if you add just 10 people a day to this sequence, on day 8 – which is how long it takes to ramp to full activity, you will be making 30 calls, sending 30 emails and making 10 LinkedIn connection requests each day.
That’s doable. But imagine how much work you create for yourself if you add 20 people a day to your sequence, or you have a 15 touch sequence over 15 days?
You could easily be making over 150 calls a day, and sending 150 emails.
Lastly, realize that you have two outbound options:
The old school way is to get a list of a couple thousand prospects and call them all once each month. This method isn’t effective anymore and you can’t build a business on it.
The new, better way is to have a small list of 100 – 200 highly targeted prospects that are likely to buy and you add to the list when someone drops out.
In other words, the most effective way to do outbound prospecting is to spear fish prospects in a small pool, not randomly shoot a shotgun into the ocean and see if anything floats to the surface.
Aligning with Marketing
SDR sales team members can also easily align with Marketing through process, data and content.
Let me show you a couple of examples:
Sales Enablement Content
In addition to the scripts and personalization you use in your outbound sequences, there is another type of content you need. We call this Sales Enablement content.
We are going to go deeper into this content in the next video, but essentially it is content you need in order to sell something.
Examples of these are brochures, presentations, sell sheets or one-sheets, lead magnets and even the sequence templates and phone scripts the sales team uses to prospect with.
It’s all content that helps educate and inform the lead.
Sales enablement content should be created by the Marketing team in coordination with the Sales team to ensure they are targeting the Ideal Client Profile/Persona with the right message and using the value propositions that persuade across all of the content.
Connecting To Marketing – Working MoFu & BoFu Leads
In addition to content, another way to align Sales and Marketing is through process.
You can connect CRM’s and Marketing Automation tools together so that when a new lead is created in the marketing funnel, they are added to the CRM as well and assigned to an SDR.
Whether the lead is in the Middle or Bottom of the funnel, the SDR can engage them and use the different forms of Sales Enablement content and outbound sales sequences to move them through the funnel toward the sale.
I’m not talking about data here…I’ll save it for another time.
When you split the sales role and align Sales and Marketing you can build a lead generating, outbound prospecting machine that exponentially increases top line growth and makes generating clients easy.
Easy to do the work; easy to measure, track and analyze; and easy to understand what’s working, where to invest more resources and where not to.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week.
Make sure to like, subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications when we put out new videos … we’ll see you in the next one!
::: Articles Discussed in the VLOG :::
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