Best Sales Prospecting Power Tips

In a recent post, I shared the calling strategy from Ryan Reisert that proves how your math of sales has been lying to you. If you are a sales leader that says more calls equal more meetings, that is not true. Ryan proves that time and time again.

 

Ryan knows cold calling. He demonstrates live cold calls daily on LinkedIn Live. In our post, Ryan introduced a simple concept that works better than just massive dialing. Check the post, Your Cold Calling Math of Sales is Lying out if you didn’t see it the first time, then come back here. I’ve modified the transcript so the video will sound familiar – and those who don’t want to take a few minutes can skim the basic concepts here.

 
Every lead is not created equal.

 

We talked about the idea that if you're going to be able to get people into conversations, you must do maybe 50 to 100 activities just to get 2-3 conversations on a daily basis.

I know AEs that don’t even get 2-3 conversations daily. They are not full-time prospectors, and they are looking for better ways to connect. SDRs and BDRs who dial all day every day need this mindset too.

 

Listen as he explains in his own words here:

 

 

 

Last time, we showed you that if you take your call list and you're able to identify generally who picks up the phone and who doesn't, you can completely change the math of your sales.

In fact, you can go from having a conversation every 20 to 30 dials to having a conversation every 4-6 dials. If you miss that, you should go back and check it out here.

This one change is really fantastic because If you only call people who pick up the phone and you can have a conversation every 4-6 dials you solve a huge issue.

 

  1. Conversations equal pipeline, so conversations create revenue    
  2. You learn a lot quicker.

 

How many of us spend so much time researching to find people we think we want to get in touch with and we spend weeks or months just to get to “No, I’m not interested. Not me, not now”.

 

It is very frustrating because we think these are our best customers, yet no one's really interested. If you can quickly get to conversations within a week, you can get the same amount of learning done that might have taken you weeks or months to get to. By calling those who pick up the phone, you learn faster. You also learn in two ways:

  1. Are we targeting the right people? Is our list correct?
  2. Are we saying the right things? Is our message resonating with future customers?

So it's either “the right message with the wrong person” or “the wrong message with the right person” We can now adjust those levers. There's actually a lot more to this as well. Because what we're doing right now with sequencers or cadence tools can actually put you in a position to not only lose out on potential opportunities but also more waste in the funnel.

 

Ryan explains:

Last time we covered in this list, if we were to work this list of 500 records, we would have had to do 3000 activities just to get to 111 conversations. Said differently, we’d have a conversation every 27 dials versus if we were able to identify who picks up a phone to become a phone-ready lead versus who doesn't. We would get a conversation from this list every four dials. There is a big efficiency gain here.

 

Additionally, there's also all of this lost effort. In fact, if we split out those that didn't pick up the phone from the 111 conversations, there were 2500 activities of the 3000 that went to simply nowhere – to your “needs attention” list or to voicemail.

 

85% of our efforts on this list on the phone were wasted trying to get to a phone-ready lead.

 

The first step, split it up, only call the people. So 15% of our efforts go here. We get into a lot of conversations faster. We learn faster. We hone our message and we can get to market in a position where we start seeing that long-term success.

 

What about all these other efforts? What do we do with it?

 

Well, the sequencers today, will tell you, you load this list of 496, you call them, you leave a voice mail, you send an email, you follow up three days later. You hit their phone, email and social.

 

Well, the first step is let's figure out who picks up the phone.

 

The next step would be to know who can we reach on social and potentially over email. The same process should continue and this is where the sequencers have it wrong.

 

So let me just show you a couple of tactics around what you could do to change the game on how to operationalize your data to continue the same level of success and efficiency gains across multiple channels.

 

If you bucketed your data, the way we talked about in the last video where you're only calling phone picker-uppers - the first thing that's going to kind of blow your mind is these folks should put be put into a sequence or a cadence that only has phone activity. Nothing else.

 

In fact, if you add voicemails and emails behind a phone picker-upper (a phone-ready lead) you actually hurt your chances of that person picking up over time.

 

I did a test with this running a campaign just a few weeks ago and my connect rates on the first two passes, making calls, dropping voicemails, and sending emails were in the 20-30% range.

 

But by the 3rd and 4th attempts that connect rate went to zero. That really baffled me. When I eliminated the voicemail and the email behind this the connect rate went back up.

 

I'm happy to show you all if you want to look at that live at some point in the future. What I'm telling you is if you have a list of people who pick up the phone, only call them, don't add the extra touches. You're hurting your chances of getting them into a conversation.

 

The next step is that we want to know what to do with the people that we haven't been able to reach on the phone, but we potentially can start to activate the other channels. What do we do with these?

 

These are the ones where if they programmed their name and their voice mail, you may want to call and leave a voicemail because now you get that opportunity to build your brand. Thought leaders will talk about a voicemail is kind of an ad, right? It may get transcribed thru your phone or they might listen to it if they've taken the time to put their name on voicemail, you certainly might want to leave that voicemail. Remember these will not connect at a very high rate. So you're actually starting to use multi-channel outreach on this segment of your data that is validated.

 

You'll also before you want to go and set up a 27-step sequence, you want to just send an email to validate, and you want to check social to validate. What does that mean? Have an initial couple sentence email simply to see if the email is deliverable and if they're an opener for social. Are they active?

 

Is this someone who you should be following finding content for or not? If you have steps down the road that tell you to do those things, you get to their profile and they don't even have a picture, plus they have been active since 2008 - It's probably not worth adding that to your future sequence.

 

Next: What do we do with the not validated data? Will not validated data has phone numbers that work. We get to a voicemail but we don't know if it's that person or not. With these individuals, we may want to send emails to validate and check social to validate, but it may not be worth making those calls at all.

 

Again, if you're calling already, you've got a “call only” sequence for your phone-ready leads. You have multi-channel like voicemail,  email and social to validate leads. For “not validated” leads you may want to send these for just email and social only. You should validate before you keep going down that rabbit hole or if you're going to put these on as fully automated and just kind of see what you can get – go ahead.

 

And then finally those leads deemed "need attention." These are ones that you need to take a look at. These are bad data from a phone perspective, but you want to look at this information and determine what channel you might want to engage them with or replace them and get them back into your funnel in a true Account-Based sales and marketing program.

 

These are some ideas on what you can do to activate your data and when you start to do the same thing we did with phone going back to this data, 85% of our efforts to get somebody on the phone are wasted spending all our time and voicemail.

 

What happens then when we can start to look at the other 30% in this particular list that's validated in this multi-channel approach - and maybe that 20% that's not validated. We've got about half of our list that we might be able to start to activate and other channels via phone or via email and social.

 

But we do that in an intelligent way. We don't just treat every lead equally. Every lead is not created equal. But with this methodology, you can quickly identify from uncontacted into working, which leads may have the highest propensity for activation conversation engagement connection in a very efficient way.

For more about Ryan Reisert and his “new math of sales” follow him on LinkedIn or here to learn more about Phone Ready Leads™

For a speaker on multi-channel outreach, sales prospecting, or on building strategic referrals, follow Lori Richardson on LinkedIn or here to learn more about offerings.

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Lori_Richardson_President_Score_More_Sales

Lori Richardson is Founder & CEO of Score More Sales, a top B2B sales strategy firm helping mid-sized companies grow revenues by solving key sales issues - like recruiting, retention, building an inclusive sales team, process, pipeline, and leadership. Lori is also President of Women's Sales Pros - a community created to get more women in sales and sales leadership. She speaks at CEO groups on topics of sales growth, the power of mindset, and the importance and value of strong sales culture. Clients include companies in the technology, telecom, manufacturing, distribution, and professional services industries. Salesforce named Lori a Top Sales Influencer in 2021 and LinkedIn named Lori as one of the  15 Top Sales Influencers to Follow in 2020. Watch for the "She Sells Summit" on Nov.3rd

 

Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals. Develop Sales Leaders

 

email lori@scoremoresales.com |My LinkedIn Profile | @scoremoresales

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