Aaron Ross, Co-CEO - Predictable Revenue

The there that foundation is, one of the big ideas was outbound prospecting. And there was another big idea around sales role specialization. You can't really have effective outbound prospecting without specialized salespeople. What that means is, I say like salespeople shouldn't prospect. Salespeople should be focused on signing to customers, not cold calling or cold emailing. Maybe a little bit. And really the prospecting should be done by a dedicated person. A prospect who's doing all the prospecting. Who can do one thing and do it really well. So those two ideas really have changed the way Silicon Valley designs their sales teams. So not only in terms of growing their business through lead generation, and to a large extent through outbound prospecting. But setting up their sales teams like a sports team. Like I said, I don't know any sports teams where the coach will say, all right, I'm saying soccer. Everybody get out there and score and defend. You've got attackers, midfield defenders and goalies. But in sales, the culture's been, everybody prospect, sign and manage customers. And respond to website leads. And, and, and. You put too much on their plate and they juggle too much. So there's really nothing that can change a business. If you have a sales team, a B2B business, there's nothing that will make that business run better to start with. And specialize in your sales people so that prospect is prospect, closes close, and customers are managed by a separate team as well. Well, yeah, it's interesting. How do you stand out from the crowd, right? Whether it's email or any kind of content you're creating, really. Or even if you're creating an app, because the world, the nature of the world is it's busy. And it's only going to get busier. There's more apps, more channels, more messages, more content, more everything. And so people's attention is getting sliced into smaller and smaller pieces. So if we're talking about how do you get your email noticed in an inbox, it really starts by also knowing who your best customers are. Because sending emails to the wrong kind of customer is not going to help you or them anyway. So it's not even about the email first, it's who, who needs you. And for that specific kind of customer, what do they care about? How can you get into their mind to know kind of the language they use and the thoughts they think? So when you do write an email, it feels like you're speaking to them. Whether the email is a template, whether it's personalized, it's really do you know who your best customer is. So what I found over the years since the predictable book, predictable revenue book came out is that the main problem people struggle with in getting their company ready to grow or getting outbound to work is they hadn't, when they struggled, they hadn't nailed a niche. Or maybe here you say niche. So that's why that became the first entire section of the sequel, the From Impossible book. And what that stands for is, even before worrying about cold email and cold calling, what kind of customers need you the most? And how are they different? They're the ones where you're nice to have. And what language, what jargon, how do you communicate to them so they feel like you're speaking to them? Rather than broadcasting about all your features and functions, stuff they don't care about. Your customers don't care about what you do. They only care about what you can do for them. It's interesting today where there's a lot more ways that salespeople can communicate and reach out to prospects. Salespeople can send emails, make calls, send letters. They can blog. They can post on LinkedIn. They can message on LinkedIn. They can send emails with video links, handwritten notes. So there's more and more ways that salespeople can reach out. And what I've seen is that there's some of the classic techniques like email and phone calls can pretty much be used successfully by everybody. But as you start to get to more social media type practices, again like taking video or posting your thoughts, it's harder. Fewer, a smaller percentage of salespeople can be successful with that on their own, cuz it takes more personality, it takes more creativity. They can't just kinda follow a system. So it's, again, every company and even salesperson has to be willing to try out these different channels to see what fits their style. Some people are gonna be amazing at, for example, video. And some people are gonna be honestly horrible at it. Some people are great at writing emails and some people are horrible at it. So you're looking not for, there's not like a magical system. You're looking for what fits that company, what fits the target market, what fits the salesperson. So I know for example, there's a lot of companies that have, let's say based on facilities management. So a lot of the employees are not in office, they're out on the road. And they're just not gonna take phone calls or emails very well compared to at certain times of the day. Like if I leave my office at 730 to go on the road and I'm traveling, it doesn't matter what you do. I'm probably not gonna really respond or check anything between 730 to 5. So again, it goes back to knowing your customer. If it's a relationship based, like a services based, brand based business, video is probably gonna hopefully be better because it's better conveying a lot of the intangibles of who you are. So again, it's not only gotta know your customer and know yourself and try things to see what's gonna be the best fit for your, again, your customers, your market and for that one person. Yeah, personalization has changed a lot since Predictable Revenue came out in 2011 because there's so much more information on social media. There's more databases, there's more opportunities to find out about companies and people before you reach out to them. And there's more ways to do that through different forms of social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. So one problem is there's more opportunity, yet there's also probably, I would say, even more confusion and frustration because there's too many options and to figure out what works on Instagram or LinkedIn. It's like, which channel do I use and how do I figure that out? So it's often, people don't realize how much trial and error it can take to get one channel to work in a repeatable way. So you have to sort of pick your battles for what you're gonna experiment with and hopefully be methodical about it. And realize it to start a new channel, again, whether it's even a way of personalization plus a channel. So again, you can do it over email, social media. It could be months before you feel like you've got a system down. And the best part about that is as soon as you get a system down, maybe it keeps working for a few months and maybe it doesn't. You never know when things are gonna change. And Google changes their algorithm for email management or on Instagram. If you post content, they change that out. My 16 year old daughter posts on Instagram and so she's our algorithm expert, but nothing ever stays the same. So first I'd say that I think you're also looking for short and sweet. There's different ways to personalize. So for me, let's just take email. So you should email the typical structure to keep it short. The first line, there's three parts. There's the first part and each one might be one or two sentences. Some sort of bridge or personalization to sort of introduce the fact who you are while you're reaching out. The second part would be one or two statements of value around what do you do or why should they care. And the third part's to call the action. So with personalization, ideally, there's so much difference in what's out there about people. So if it's someone who publishes content, that's great, because you can just refer to the content they published. If you wrote me an email about the article on why salespeople shouldn't prospect, I'll probably at least read that. But a lot of people don't publish anywhere. So if they don't have that, then you gotta go to maybe look at LinkedIn to find something in commerce, something interesting about them you can refer to, or about their company. So kind of in personalization, what you're looking for is sort of like best case, middle case, worst case, ways you can personalize. If you can find information, if you can find a little bit or you can't find anything. People love to see their own name or their own stuff. So I think what you're trying to find out first is things that they've written about, posted about. And after that, something about them that is different. I'll give you one more example would be, if I got an email about where I went to high school, and it had to be real, or where I went to college, I don't really get that many emails about those things. So I'm more likely to at least look at a read about it. If someone said, hey, I saw you went to Stanford and they had some real question about it. Okay, it got me to read it at least. So you're looking at what are some of these, I wouldn't say rare, but things about them you can refer to that they wouldn't see every day. So let's say that you actually have customers that are bigger companies. And by bigger, I mean, it could be even a couple hundred people, 500 people on and on up to enterprise. And one of the biggest mistakes I see that salespeople, and especially prospectors, is that they give up too fast. So let's just take prospectors or salespeople who are doing the outreach. And we're gonna target a big company, like we'll target Mercedes-Benz. Let's pick one. Right, they kind of have this idea, until they've really navigated around big companies, they'll go out, reach out, let's say you're targeting the VP of Marketing, or the CMO, or like whoever the head of marketing is. And you reach out to them and they say they're not interested. Okay, I'll move on. Wrong answer, because big companies, and again, even a few hundred people, often have multiple, the functions are spread out, it can be. So there might be a head of marketing for one division, but there might be 15 divisions with 15 marketing people. And even in a bigger company, you might have 50 people in marketing. So the CMO might be too high. Like they might be two levels away from what's happening. Like let's say you're doing email management or video marketing or like the tools, it might be two or three levels away from the tools. So you have to be ready to talk to multiple people, like to go higher, to go lower, to go divisions, go sideways, to try email, phone, what all these techniques are to really understand who the, at that one company, is there a relevant situations and who the right people are? Because it can be really hard, the main bottleneck I found at Salesforce is finding the right people. So if you can find the right people at a big company, and it's usually more than one, or it can be, then you can kind of methodically find out from each one, is there an opportunity or not with their group, their group, their group, their group. Before you say, you know what, there is nothing here. I'm gonna move on to the next account. So again, it's the people, especially prospectors, just give up too soon. They don't learn how to navigate big companies, find all the opportunities, and really kind of dive deep into those bigger accounts. I think a lot of salespeople are disconnected, they're not disconnected from the product they sell. It's better if you were in a place where like one of the things that made Salesforce successful is you had salespeople using Salesforce to sell Salesforce so they can eat their own dog food, they say in the states. You can't always do that. So the more that you can get your employees to use your own stuff, right, if you do video marketing, to use your own technology to do video marketing, and so on, that just adds an extra step. You don't have to, you're saving yourself work from having to do extra ways to stay in touch with a customer. What salespeople don't have, typically, is the connection to the customer. So they have a connection to the product, they don't have a connection to the customer the way the customer thinks and speaks. Every company that we go into for me to assess kind of like their growth opportunities and create a growth plan, or that we help with an outbound prospecting success plan, all their messaging, like their emails and phone calls are usually pretty rough, confusing. So it's this constant practice to keep it simple for what you're trying to say, to communicate to customers and speaking in their language that find it's just not natural for humans, and so you need to practice it and practice it and keep practicing it. It's hard to make it simple. Right, there's that famous quote, I would have written a short letter, but I didn't have enough time. Well, I would have written a shorter email or done a shorter video, but I didn't have enough time because it takes, it's hard to make it simple and short.