Outbound Squad

We love what sales leaders are saying about Outbound Squad 🫶 #sales #customerappreciation

"Our BDRs have Outreach licenses, but our AEs don't. And we expect our AEs to self-source 30-50% of their pipeline." ☝️ This is more common than you'd imagine. Are you evaluating new sales tech & renewals for H2 2024 and 2025? Don't make these mistakes. ⛔️ 1) Not investing in sales engagement tools for AEs If you want your AEs to self-source more pipeline, don't make it harder than it needs to be. If your BDRs have Outreach seats, every AE should have them. If outbound is hard and manual—don't expect your AEs to do it. ⛔️ 2) Unnecessary consolidation The big 5 (ZoomInfo, Clari, Outreach, Gong, Salesloft) are now playing in sales engagement, revenue intelligence, conversational intelligence, deal management, etc. You'll be tempted to consolidate into a single vendor. This MIGHT be a good decision, but don't do it to save money. Example: The sales engagement platforms across these vendors are not created equal. Some are better than others, depending on your team's unique needs. Don't sacrifice productivity by consolidating into an inferior tool to save money. ⛔️ 3) Neglecting basic sales needs For an outbound-focused org, these are the basics: - CRM - Sales Engagement Platform (Sequencing, etc.) - Data (phone numbers, emails, etc.) Everything beyond this is a luxury. Don't make the mistake of investing in the latest and greatest AI deal management solution—and cutting your data spend. Your reps can't outbound without emails and phone numbers. ⛔️ 4) Using tech to fix a people or process problem Your org might be better off investing in more Rev/Sales ops support vs. more tech. You likely have enough tools but lack proper workflows and rep enablement to utilize them. Example: Do your reps have a good workflow for reaching out to past customers who are now working at companies that are not customers yet? I've encountered one sales org with a great workflow that didn't require reps to hop between 5 different tools to pull this play off. Tech is only as good as the workflows and the people executing them. Invest in your ops or enablement teams to help with this. ~~ What would you add to this list? #sales

In today's SaaS landscape, categories have hit a stage of maturity where nothing is new anymore. Most target accounts already use a competitor, making 'rip and replace' sales significantly different from 'net new' sales. You need to convince the buyer to take a meeting, even though they’re in an active contract with a competitor. And moving a buyer away from a competitor requires way more work than selling a net-new solution. Join us live on July 24 with Anthony Iannarino, Ralph Barsi, and Ryan Oosterveld to learn how to land meetings with buyers and displace your competitors. Save your spot here: https://hubs.ly/Q02G2trN0 #sales #SaaS

In this episode of Outbound Squad, Caitlyn McCrimmon, CFA, Elmer Lopez, and Mitch Thomas share how to create a culture where Account Executives excel at pipe gen, regularly hit their activity targets, and self-source their best opportunities. Listen to the conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gHqHb_EH #sales #outbound

Garbage Outbound Tactic: Send an automatic calendar invite to prospects who don't reply to your cold email Dude... Who the h*ll thought this was a great idea? This feature is built into a popular sales engagement tool (won't mention them). Here's how it works: - An AI agent called "Auto-Pilot" runs an automated cold email campaign - It filters for prospects opening, but not responding to cold emails - Then an automatic email is sent letting the prospect know a calendar invite was sent - Automatically sends the calendar invite To be clear, a calendar invite is sent to a prospect who never agreed to meet. This garbage has to stop. This is why cold outreach is so hard. Because of stupid sales tech like this allowing sales teams to spam their prospects at scale. Sure, this might work on 1/100 prospects. But it'll p*ss off the other 99. Many will never ever take a meeting with your company. And you'll never earn the respect or attention of an executive. This is a 911 emergency if your sales org is doing this. Don't gamble with the reputational risk or having your domain flagged as spam. Agree or disagree? #sales #outbound

Shoutout to our incredible customers! We are grateful for the opportunity to serve you and are committed to providing the best experience possible. #sales #customerappreciation

Win rates drop by 27% when reps focus too much on ROI (Gong) Here's what to do instead 👇 Use relevant before/after customer stories everywhere. In cold emails, cold calls, discovery conversations, demos, negotiations, etc. The catch is that these stories have to be similar companies, in similar stages, and similar size. And the rep has to know the story inside and out. The problem? ⛔️ Reps are unfamiliar with deals they didn’t personally close ⛔️ Customer stories are buried in use case sheets or long case studies on the website ⛔️ Customer stories aren’t sortable by persona, industry, and/or use case In other words, reps rarely use customer stories because they’re so hard to find. Here’s the key idea: eat complexity for the reps. Reduce the amount of time, effort, clicks, etc that it takes to find and use customer stories Here’s the simple solve (that’ll take a few hours to build) I call this a "Customer Story Cheat Sheet" ✅ Create a Google Sheet or Excel doc owned by enablement ✅ Create these columns - Customer company - Persona - Industry - Use case or solution - Problem - How you helped + result - Bonus: unique insight behind the approach At most, the problem + how you helped is 3-4 sentences ✅ Start by repurposing existing long-form case studies or use case examples into this format ✅ Tighten up the language with a few of your best AEs ✅ Rinse and repeat once per quarter or more with the best, most relevant new logos landed ✅ Bonus: Create 1 sentence snippets reps can pull into cold emails, sales follow-up emails, etc. ~~~ Your sales team will absolutely eat up this resource. And it’s a great onboarding tool to quickly get new reps up to speed. Get your reps to tell more customer stories and focus less on ROI. My clients who do this see amazing results after implementing. #sales

SDRs: When you set a meeting for your AE, it’s like setting up a blind date for your prospect. So get your prospect excited to meet with your AE! Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. You get a call from someone you don’t know, from a company you haven’t heard of. They do a decent job in the call and you’re intrigued. And then… They set you up for a call with someone else. This process feels like a nurse handing you off to a doctor. Who will then ask you the same exact questions the nurse did. Not a great experience. Let's do better. Here’s how to pull this off: ✅ Tell the prospect what they’ll learn First, ask your AE what prospects learn from their first conversation. This excludes any language about platforms or dashboards. I’m talking education around “why change?” Second, watch a recorded disco/demo from your AE. Or ride shotgun in a few sales calls if your company doesn’t record them. Here’s an example of what this might sound like at the end of a cold call: “I’m really excited for you to meet with __________. You mentioned that staffing welders and figuring out how to automate high mix/low volume parts are top priorities. My Account Executive will walk you through how other manufacturers are solving these two problems so that you’re not having to push back orders. You’ll also walk away with a plan for how you can tackle traditionally tough to automate products.” Don’t mention “demo” at all. ✅ Humanize your AE Talk about your AE’s experience. Hype them up. After you tell the prospect what they’ll take away from the call with your AE, you could end with: “Oh, and ____________ has about 7 years of experience walking the plant floor. Not to mention, he’s had dozens of conversations with Operations leaders in the last 6 months. There are some really big trends we’re seeing and everyone’s dealing with the labor shortage right now. You should get a few ideas you can bring back to your team." --- Lesson here: Take that extra step at the end to talk up your AE and get the prospect excited about them as a HUMAN + what they can learn in that first call. ~~~ This is a great way to improve show rates. #sales #outbound #prospecting

2024 has been a challenging year for sales organizations, with a decreased reliance on inbound leads and a growing need to shift towards a world-class outbound approach. Join us TOMORROW with Kyle Vamvouris, Megan Huston, Daniel C., and Jack Reilly as they discuss transitioning from an inbound-led to an outbound-led sales approach, the mechanics of a top-tier outbound motion, and the essential skills for landing new logos. Secure your spot here: https://hubs.ly/Q02C4d2Q0 #sales #outbound

Garrett M. Graston, 2023 Zoom Top Sales Manager, has two guiding principles as a sales leader - making his team better and making his customers better. In this episode, Jason and Garrett discuss what it takes to become a top-tier sales manager and the four key lessons Garrett has picked up during his career in sales. Listen to their conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gYvdpztf #sales #leadership