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Jason got into sales by accident. When he was in high school, he wanted to be a forensic scientist. He even had a mentor but lost interest after discovering that the job involved sitting in a lab all day.
While in college, someone came into his classroom to talk about a company through which he could run a house-painting business and make some money during the summer holidays. Jason signed up without realizing that the job also involved marketing and door-to-door sales. He knew nothing about sales at the time, and although the average cost of a paint job was between $3,000 and $8,000, Jason did very well. He sold $100,000 worth of paint jobs over the summer. After that, he loved sales!
The biggest learning curve in Jason’s sales journey happened the following year, in 2009, when he returned as a Sales Manager. He taught other people how to sell, yet he had limited experience selling and prospecting.
Jason spent the next six or seven years with that company and started an outbound call center for them. That was how he got into the inside sales game.
Since 2013/2014, Jason has been working in the corporate space, consulting with companies to help them with their marketing and lead generation. More specifically, with Blissful Prospecting, he has been helping people land their first meeting.
Jason helps people with their emails and assists them with gaining more confidence on the phone, handling objections, and getting good qualified meetings by reaching out to people proactively.
Much of Jason’s target market has become hard to reach lately. People have been getting tons of emails, calls, and all kinds of ads, which makes it very hard for salespeople to get meetings right now. There are currently two ways in which salespeople attack that problem:
- They are determined to email and call as many people as they can. Although their outreach volume is high, the meeting quantity is usually low, and the quality of the meetings not good. As a result, there is often a lot of rejection.
- They customize everything for each individual in their target market. Although that sounds like a quality approach, it takes a lot more time than is necessary. So even though the response rate will be higher and the rejection lower, the volume of the meetings will not be there.
To find a balance between the two, you need to have a quality-first approach. Quality first means picking out a subset of individuals in a similar industry with similar job titles and a common use case or set of technologies. That will allow you to templatize three-quarters of your approach because you will be reaching out to people with similar problems, similar businesses, similar roles, and working on similar things. Then, you can customize the last bit.
When you optimize the volume, people will feel like it’s for them, and you will get quality meetings.
Outbound is about approaching a target market first and then putting something in front of them (like emails, phone calls, etc.), rather than putting something in front of people and waiting for them to come to you.
Jason does not recommend doing outbound with companies that do not have good inbound engines.
Your priority is to have excellent content and to know how to get your people to do something without having a salesperson calling them.
Outbound is all about how to take your great content and thought leadership and proactively put it in front of the people who will not come to you organically.
Think of ways to have a one-to-one conversation with someone and share things with them without them having to download anything. It is all about frictionless sharing. To know what to share with them, you need to think about what they are focused on, what they are working on, and what their priorities are. Then put content in front of them that will align with those.
The process in a nutshell:
- Ask your prospect what their top two priorities are and what problems they are having. (That will be content for top of the funnel that will help you get a meeting.)
- Consider how to control your prospect’s experience when you sell to them and deliver a personalized experience at scale.
- Create great content around those things.
To create great content from a sales standpoint, you need to think about curating content specifically for your prospects. It has to be relevant and credible, and your prospect needs to know that you took the time to curate what you thought would be helpful for them.
You will notice some clear patterns after asking more than a dozen people in various roles what their priorities are. That will help you provide context when you reach out to them as prospects and engage with them.
You need to move in the same direction and at the same pace as your prospects. To do that, get in front of them with something that they care about. Guestimate (make an educated guess) what their priorities are, and then do some research to back that up. Then you can have an intelligent conversation about something they truly care about.
The tools that Jason recommends are:
Jason uses a three-part framework:
- Identify
- Engage
- Convert
Identify: Identify your ideal client profiles and your personas in the empathy piece. You need to understand the path of these people. (Jason calls it the Prospect Path.) Those are their priorities, problems, and their desired and undesired future state.
Engage: This is your messaging, comprising of your email, phone, and sequencing. You need to have a good multi-touch/multi-channel strategy. Keep your sequencing simple. Data shows that you need 10-12 touches before you can get hold of most of the people you reach out to, so use Jason’s Weekly Touch Pattern for 3 weeks in a row.
Jason’s simple Weekly Touch Pattern:
Day 1: Use the Triple Touch – Email, call and then send either a LinkedIn connection request or a voicemail. The message is focused on priority #1.
Day 2: (Do this two business days apart.) Call and email. Your email is a reply to the first one that says “Any Thoughts?”
Use short emails and then call. Follow that same pattern for 3 weeks in a row. Week 2 will be focused on priority #2. Week 3 will be focused on priority #3.
If you are doing full cycle sales, you need to think about segmentation.
- Create a strategy to tier your prospects.
- Don’t treat all your prospects equally. In other words, don’t spend the same amount of time going after a C-level VP person as you would a manager.
- Make sure that you spend your phone time on the people with whom you want to get meetings.
If you are not doing much in terms of outbound, think about how you can supplement what you are doing. Adding an extra meeting or two to your calendar each week can do a lot for your pipeline!
If you are a full-cycle rep selling enterprise, and your deal size is between 40 and 200K, you will need to spend about an hour a day on your productivity piece. In those 5 hours each week, if you spend time on Monday doing your research, you should manage to reach out to at least 2 or 3 companies per day. If you reach out to 10-12 companies per week and make contact with 2 people at each company, you could get 1 appointment per day.
Jason on LinkedIn
Blissful Prospecting Website
