Ep 33 Outreach without the Spam
Increase your sales with this trick!
Outreach without the spam.
You need leads, but you don’t want your outreach to be super spammy! How do you do it?
In this episode of the Tiny Marketing Pod, we’re talking to Dan Englander about sales prospecting… the right way.
Show Highlights
03:56: How to find information to create personalized outreach.
07:00: How to handle follow-ups when prospecting.
34:37: How do you master prospecting when you’re a solo entrepreneur.
Dan Englander of Sales Schema
Dan Englander is the CEO and Founder of Sales Schema, a fractional new business team for marketing agencies and B2B service companies. Since 2014, Sales Schema has secured thousands of opportunities between clients and skeptical prospects, who include the leaders of the largest companies on earth. Dan hosts The Digital Agency Growth Podcast and he's the author of Relationship Sales At Scale and Mastering Account Management. Previously Dan was the first employee Head of New Business at the animation studio IdeaRocket. He lives in New York and in his spare time he enjoys hurting himself via Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Transcript Outreach without the Spam
[00:00:00] Sarah Noel Block: You need leads. You have a business, but you don't want your outreach to be super spammy. How do you do it? I'm Sarah Wall Block, and this is the Tiny Marketing Pod. Today I'm talking to Dan Englander and he's going to tell me how to balance personalization and scale to keep your pipeline full and still keep those prospects happy.
[00:00:21] Sarah Noel Block: Some highlights you can expect for today are how to balance that personalization and scale to keep your pipeline. And not be a spammer, how to de-risk conversations. So those highly skeptical prospects are saying, okay, I'll have a conversation with you. Hint, it's not stealing boring, publicly available information.
[00:00:45] Sarah Noel Block: And then last divide specific prospecting and sales duties so you can avoid burnout. Not everyone who is great at prospecting is also great at closing sales. It doesn't have to be the same person, so stay tuned.[00:01:00]
[00:01:01] Sarah Noel Block: Hello and welcome to Tiny Marketing. I'm Sarah a block and I teach small marketing departments that are tired of feeling overwhelmed and under-resourced. How to build and manage effective and efficient marketing strategies that work for them. Get ready. It's time to dig in and get a big impact with your tiny team.
[00:01:26] Sarah Noel Block: First, we're gonna be talking about how to conduct outreach without being super spammy. , which I thought was impossible. So I'm pretty stoked to talk about this topic, .
[00:01:38] Dan Englander: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on Sarah. And to give you know, a little bit of context, I think what I saw in the early days of my career in sales selling creative services into big companies was just like everyone playing in numbers game.
[00:01:52] Dan Englander: And I still think that's how. , 99% of people are doing it and it's just if I put enough people through this process and I break some [00:02:00] eggs, like some good stuff will come out the other side. Yeah. I think the problem with that approach is first you could offend people and you could hurt your reputation and all that, but even if you don't care about that, even though that's, sometimes that fear is a little overblown.
[00:02:12] Dan Englander: Aside from that, there's just a lot, there's pretty high opportunity costs cuz there's maybe a lot of people that you could have won over had you just done things the right way. , what does balancing into personalization scale means? It means, on one hand we have to go in tastefully and personalize enough so that pretty much everybody that gets the outreach doesn't think they're on a list, right?
[00:02:31] Dan Englander: On the other hand if you just do the you see a lot of advice for people that are like, all about grand gestures, right? Send this peop someone a really personalized gift, find out what they're into and find out what football team they like and send them a helmet for that team.
[00:02:44] Dan Englander: The problem with that is, for one it's just, Really hard and expensive and really hard to get that data and hard to, and I'm not saying don't do that, by all means. If you're excited about doing that, give it a shot. That definitely works as you'd expected it to. [00:03:00] But the reality is a lot of us are also running companies.
[00:03:03] Dan Englander: We're doing a million things, conducting those campaigns. And also if you get those campaigns wrong, like you send something to the wrong address, you get the data a little bit wrong, then you've wasted a lot of time and money. You gotta balance this idea of personalization and scale. So what does that mean?
[00:03:18] Dan Englander: For us, in our clients and for context, we're looking to help our clients get meetings or usually, or our main specializations agencies trying to get meetings. In mid to large companies. We're finding strong commonalities between people that could mean they're from the same hometown, they went to the same college.
[00:03:34] Dan Englander: They both have experience working at the same client company or working with the same clients. And then if you're phrasing that in the right way, it's a strong enough commonality to open up that door. , but you're also maybe sending to 30, 50, a hundred people per day and getting a lot of meetings. So that's what I mean by that, if that makes sense.
[00:03:51] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. How do you get that specific information? What's your process for that? The
[00:03:56] Dan Englander: short answer is there's not one way. Internally at sales schema, [00:04:00] we're doing a number of different things depending on the campaign, and we've around 15 list builders and scrubbers that we draw from. And if we're like, the craziest thing we did for example, is we found people that used to play tennis in college cuz our client did that.
[00:04:13] Dan Englander: And we're like, okay, we're gonna look at these accounts. They want to reach these people they want to reach. And then Vinn diagram, their total addressable market. with the people that chair that commonality. And that meant we had list builders going on, like scraping bios on a bunch of company webpages and then putting that data together.
[00:04:28] Dan Englander: I don't want this, I want this to be valuable beyond just the prospect of hiring us. So I think if you're listening to this, like one thing that you could do pretty easily is look at a bunch of companies that maybe went presented at a trade show you went to a year ago. And I. Instead of just trying to find anyone you could work with, start with that cohort and maybe that's 50 companies and then you're saying, Hey, I attend Zach trade show.
[00:04:52] Dan Englander: What did you think of this speaker? That was really cool. By the way we're doing this work, we've done a lot of work in your field. Can we connect, or even just people, not even companies, but [00:05:00] people that are in from your same hometown, like that data's pretty easy to get or from, or just in your geographic backyard.
[00:05:06] Dan Englander: So it takes a little bit more time on the front end. , but it's a lot less time on the back end cuz you're not playing this game where you're chasing people and saying, Hey we need 10 touch points to break through. It's yeah. Those metrics to me, and I know I'm going on another tangent and I'll give you the floor in a second, but , those metrics to me are so wrong and they're over optimizing for the wrong things where it's just, These numbers, but you're not really thinking about the opportunity cost of that.
[00:05:32] Dan Englander: Of just like chasing people and saying, I need this many touchpoints to break through. Where it's like maybe if you've just been a little more tasteful at the beginning. You could have just had one touchpoint, which is what we look at. So that's how we're doing it, if that makes sense.
[00:05:45] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that you actually do it the opposite of what I expected you to do. It. You have that thing that you're going to look for that commonality first, and then you find the companies that would be right to work with you. [00:06:00] So you narrow it down a lot more.
[00:06:03] Dan Englander: close. It's a little bit different than that in that we're first starting with the, not the total addressable market, but something close to it.
[00:06:10] Dan Englander: The overall market. If you do the whole TAM at once that's a lot of companies. But anyway, our clients are proving the companies they wanna reach the people that they wanna reach, and then we're finding which people share a particular commonality. And then going after those people in a more, more specific way.
[00:06:26] Dan Englander: The thing with that is people will ask what about everybody else? What about the rest of the pie? And our whole thinking is for one, we'll probably find a way to get to those people eventually through a commonality, but you may as well start. With the low-hanging fruit, the people that are more likely to talk to you.
[00:06:43] Dan Englander: And then there's a lot of reasons that I can talk to you philosophically about why that is and so on, but that's how we're thinking about it though,
[00:06:50] Sarah Noel Block: in a shorter sales cycle, you said that instead of 10 touch points, it's taking one touch point too to move to the next phase of that sales cycle.[00:07:00]
[00:07:00] Dan Englander: In general. Yeah, we might do a little follow up, but not a lot. And that kind of makes sense if you think about yourself and all of us and like how we like getting messages. If you see a message and. You weren't interested at the beginning. Okay. Maybe you were just busy. Maybe it's worth another follow up a week from now.
[00:07:16] Dan Englander: But at some point it's like, all right, the timing is I'm, if you're not gonna have the call, you're not gonna have the call right then. Yeah. But the whole point is if you come in tastefully and you can de-risk that opening conversation, It becomes a lot easier and then you have that relationship.
[00:07:33] Dan Englander: I'll talk about what outbound is though a little bit cuz like you mentioned sales cycle and it's almost impossible to know where in the buying process somebody is when you reach out to them. You, we sometimes get lucky, but if you think about the market as this big like bell curve, right? There's people that on one end that will never work with you cuz they're happy with their solution.
[00:07:50] Dan Englander: Et cetera. And then there's people maybe 10 to 20% of the market at the other tail end that are actively looking for a solution, right? You can hit those people outbound, but also [00:08:00] those people are gonna convert, they're inbound, they click an ad, they get referred, et cetera. But then there's this whole rest of the market that's vaguely dissatisfied.
[00:08:07] Dan Englander: Like we all are like my podcast platform could be better, my this, or that could be better, but I don't really know what else is out there. And then those are the people, which is most of the market, maybe 70, 80% of the. That is prime to talk to you if you get in the right way. That's what outbound does.
[00:08:23] Dan Englander: We don't know where they are in the cycle. They could be ready to go right now. They could be ready to go later. Your sales process could expedite that depending on how you're doing things, but that's what the way we're thinking about it. .
[00:08:33] Sarah Noel Block: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. There's a lot of people that are, ugh, this could be better.
[00:08:38] Sarah Noel Block: And they're willing to listen to an alternative solution. Yeah.
[00:08:42] Dan Englander: E. E, exactly. Do
[00:08:44] Sarah Noel Block: you have any specific tools that you like to work with when you're working on this? Personalization while also reaching out to people at scale.
[00:08:53] Dan Englander: Yeah, we're a little bit of a special case just cuz like everything, like the sending platforms we use are proprietary and [00:09:00] we've, there's a lot of technical reasons for that and a lot of the list building processes are as well.
[00:09:05] Dan Englander: But what I'd recommend for people starting out on this is there's a number of different ascending platforms that are just for outbound. And I would think about doing that as opposed to a newsletter platform or don't use like a MailChimp. So there's a bunch of good ones.
[00:09:19] Dan Englander: We hear good things about Apollo. Apollo seems to be very popular right now. There's other ones like Reply io we've used a lot. There's Limbless, there's Airborne, which is for bigger teams doing this. You're welcome to search those out. If you have something that works for you really well already, I'd say stick with that and that, that's pretty useful.
[00:09:40] Dan Englander: And as for research tools and data I think that it's better to be agile and better to think about what you want to do and what you wanna accomplish as opposed to buying a big expensive data platform that you may get that and then find out that it doesn't do what you needed to do. So I think it's better to have optionality there cuz you may, for example, say, I actually want to get [00:10:00] just this niche list on this type of buyer.
[00:10:02] Dan Englander: And then if you've already invested so much on a big data platform, it doesn't really work as well. So there's a lot I can get into there, but those are a couple ideas Basical.
[00:10:10] Sarah Noel Block: Okay. So a platform to be able to do your outreach outside of your typical like email marketing platform and then a data tool to be able to do some research on them.
[00:10:23] Dan Englander: Yeah, and there's lots of tools that will scrape LinkedIn and stuff. We don't use those ourselves. Cause again, we have our own processes and stuff. But I think one that I've used in the past is lead iq. They're pretty good. And LinkedIn sales navigator will get you a lot of the data that's like the hammer and the tool belt that's if you don't, if you're not on sales navigator just pony up.
[00:10:44] Dan Englander: It'll tell you most of what you need to know. But for us the, what we're doing internally, we're more sophisticated than that. But I think that if you're starting out. With this on your own and you're ready, you want to DIY some of this stuff on a smaller scale, just being able to like, go on there, do a [00:11:00] search, find the people that are local to you is one great idea.
[00:11:03] Dan Englander: People that might have gone to the same university. You, if you wanna get fancier, you could find out who are the people that used to work for a longtime client account. Like you've done a lot of work for Coca-Cola. And then maybe there's people that have gone on. Pepsi or whatever.
[00:11:17] Dan Englander: That's another great way in. So there's a few ideas there. Yeah,
[00:11:20] Sarah Noel Block: I like that one a lot because you might have already worked with them before, established trust with them. It's a lot easier to get in. People bring their vendors
[00:11:30] Dan Englander: all the time. , I would also just say one of our most successful campaigns that we do is a referral-based campaign, right?
[00:11:36] Dan Englander: So it takes more work than going direct to a prospect, but it also produces much bigger dividends. So most of us especially if we've built agencies have built ourselves up on referrals and the sort of referrals. Referrals that come to us. So on one hand, that gives you more trust than you could ever imagine.
[00:11:56] Dan Englander: But the problem with that is they're sporadic, they're hard to predict. You're [00:12:00] reactive in that situation. So what we do is just a much more focused referral campaign and we go to our clients, we're like, First we're building that target account list. Everybody they wanna do business with rough titles, et cetera avatars.
[00:12:12] Dan Englander: And then from there we say, okay, let us know everybody in your network, like export your LinkedIn first degree connections and tell us everyone that you actually know. Not like the fake connections we have. Right? and. And then yeah, include everyone. You would be cool with connecting with again to get referred.
[00:12:28] Dan Englander: So if they're like, ah, I don't want to connect with my longtime friends, you would think it was weird if I just hit 'em up like this. Great. Take 'em off the list. You can contact them on your own if you want. But then there's this middle segment of people that are like, You but you don't know them that well.
[00:12:42] Dan Englander: Maybe even connected in a few years, whatever. And then what we do is we do outreach those people, Hey Lisa, I hope you've been well. I'm working on some new business stuff here at Acme. . Would you be open to, Connecting on a short call. And then five minutes before that call, we show our clients how to map [00:13:00] those people's connections to those accounts and those titles and that list.
[00:13:05] Dan Englander: So then they're getting on that call saying, Hey, I know I saw a few people I saw the C M O of Microsoft. Would you be willing to make a connection for me? And what we found is like our clients are very specific and they make it easy and. and honest about what they want. A lot of people will help them and then they're getting referred like right into the right company.
[00:13:24] Sarah Noel Block: Makes it so much easier. That's so brilliant. . Yeah. Okay, so you talked a little bit about LinkedIn and sales Navigator. What is your favorite medium for connecting or for doing outreach? Email, LinkedIn calls. .
[00:13:43] Dan Englander: Yeah it's a really good question and there's some nuance to it. I think that philosophically like the way, and we're a little bit different we think channel, the channel does matter, but I think it matters a little bit less than.
[00:13:56] Dan Englander: The connection that you have with the person that you're contacting. Like [00:14:00] for example, all the things I've just talked about, those referral connections, the strong commonalities. If we sent the same message on LinkedIn, it would probably work pretty comparably as well. So I think that's the more important thing that said in terms of outreach, we like email for a lot of reasons.
[00:14:16] Dan Englander: I think it's easier to set up, it's easier to track. It's where we do business, right? So in our inboxes, we're all planning things. We have our calendars right there, we're getting things done. LinkedIn not always the case. That said LinkedIn can be effective and it can work really well sometimes. Because you can see someone's face and you can see what they're about.
[00:14:34] Dan Englander: And that can be intriguing in and of itself. But I think the issue with LinkedIn is it's harder to track. It's harder to get things going. And there's just lots of noise. There's lots of people reading things, reading articles, there's lots of spam. Yeah. Frankly as we all know on LinkedIn there's also spam on email, right?
[00:14:50] Dan Englander: So the, it's, we're dealing with distractions everywhere no matter what. But we like email for those reasons as far as phone goes. I just wanna caveat everything by [00:15:00] saying there's somebody somewhere making this work. I don't like saying, yeah, this doesn't work, or it's dead. For example, if I was contacting restaurants, I think the phone's probably the way to go.
[00:15:09] Dan Englander: I don't think there's a lot of restaurant managers or owners like reading email all day. They're probably running around. But for our world, it's sales schema. It's more white collar. So we will use the phone or our clients will, when. Actively interests or there's somebody that maybe wanted to talk, they got busy that fell off.
[00:15:25] Dan Englander: That's where kind of having these lukewarm calls makes sense as far as dialing for dollars, cold calling. I think it's just declined more's
[00:15:34] Sarah Noel Block: dialing for dollars. That's the,
[00:15:36] Dan Englander: yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense because the whole world's gone remote, so finding that data is harder and more expensive than it used to be.
[00:15:43] Dan Englander: And what happens when you get a call from a number you don't have? I do not answer. You don't answer. I don't answer either. But if you've sent emails and they've, you've responded. . Oftentimes that data's getting synced to the phone. You're saying, oh, reaching out to me. I recognize that name.
[00:15:58] Dan Englander: That's where it makes more sense is [00:16:00] like kind of mid-funnel or further down the funnel. Yep.
[00:16:02] Sarah Noel Block: Okay, so that was going to be my last question, but I just thought of something. Since email is your preferred outreach method, what is your thoughts on those personalized videos that go out with emails? I think that's,
[00:16:19] Dan Englander: Good question.
[00:16:20] Dan Englander: Yeah, so overall, I'm agnostic on this stuff. I think there's, I've talked to a lot of people that have made that work really well and I think it give it a shot and if it works. I think the issue that I see with it is, for one, on a technical level, I think deliverability is harder. When you have videos and that kind of thing. Also there's this kind of arms race of, I'm gonna see if I can phrase this or explain this the right way. , it might, may not work, may not stick to landing here, but there's this kind of arms race that's I'm gonna find out a lot about you, the person I'm contacting, and then show you that I know a lot about you.
[00:16:57] Dan Englander: Sometimes people are doing that genuinely. Other [00:17:00] times they're using like AI or software tools to make it seem like they do. Does it come out awkward then ? It can, but it can work too. But I think the issue is that's just like half of the equation. The other half is you and the cinder and like your connection to that person.
[00:17:15] Dan Englander: Not just on a company level, but on an individual level. So I think what happens is like even when you. Show that you know a lot about the other person. If there's no connection to you, that only goes so far. And the person. be happy. They might be like, thanks, I'm glad you did your research. That's cool, but it might be less likely to get you the appointment compared to if you close that loop and you're like, Hey, I have a connection to you.
[00:17:39] Dan Englander: We have this thing in common. That's what becomes a lot harder to fake and that's also more timeless in my opinion, cuz it's more tribal. For better or worse, it's more like it stands the test of time versus I did all this research and I show that I know a lot about you. So that said, I think video.
[00:17:56] Dan Englander: Can be really effective. I think that especially like [00:18:00] later in the sales process or like midway through and so on, and there's people having a lot of success with them at the top of the funnel. But that's just been our experience with it anyway. And that's to shamelessly plug, that's a lot of the philosophy of relationship sales at scale and book that.
[00:18:17] Dan Englander: Shamelessly plugging .
[00:18:19] Sarah Noel Block: Oh, don't worry. I have it in my notes to shamelessly plug it. We're gonna be doing it anyway. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on to topic two. And we actually talked about it a lot in this and that's how to de-risk the conversations. What is something that a lot of people are getting wrong when they're doing outreach, let's say on their own?
[00:18:41] Sarah Noel Block: You are the expert on. when people are doing it and trying it out on their own. What are they doing wrong?
[00:18:49] Dan Englander: Oh God. So many things. . I think the biggest one is Not being consistent enough with it. I think foundationally it's like a, who's doing what problem? So [00:19:00] nobody's, you're not perfect at this about, you're not perfect at anything when you start.
[00:19:03] Dan Englander: But I think what's happening a lot is like somebody, people have the wrong mentality going in, so they're like, oh, this is gonna be an easy win. I'm gonna buy a list. I'm gonna send a message to the list. And then, A bunch of money's gonna come out the other end. The reality is it's a sales and marketing channel.
[00:19:17] Dan Englander: Like anything else, like seo, like pbc, it's a skill. You gotta put in time and effort, you gotta get good at it or hire somebody else that knows what they're doing to do it. Hopefully us , but if I'm just kidding. So that's the first thing, is the right expectations. Going in beyond that, I think what people are getting wrong is, They're like considering it like they're in marketing land.
[00:19:39] Dan Englander: And I know that you do a lot with inbound marketing and with newsletters and it's a slightly different tone when you're doing outbound versus like when somebody's on your newsletter. So I think that, yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of overselling. I think nine times outta 10 when we look at the copy the clients want to use and they're like, Hey, we wanna use this.
[00:19:59] Dan Englander: And then we have to like [00:20:00] diplomatically shut it down. Yeah. It's because it's too salesy. It's because it's telling people things that they do not care enough about. Yet to actually listen to it doesn't mean those differentiators and those things aren't useful or valuable, it just means like they don't care enough to hear them.
[00:20:15] Dan Englander: Like you've gotta get them further into the sales process. Yeah. They're not there yet. They're not there yet. So it, a lot of the times, like the conver the copy that we're sending counterintuitively looks. Very conversational. It's not too cheeky. It looks boring, honestly, and professional.
[00:20:31] Dan Englander: It's emphasizing it, it looks custom. Sometimes there's even typos. Sometimes it's wall of text. It looks like the sort of thing that you might casually send out to somebody you met at a networking event a few days later. That's probably the bigger thing. . Beyond that, there's probably like a plethora of other issues.
[00:20:48] Dan Englander: Technical stuff, people get wrong deliverability issues, trying to, just like I talked about earlier, over optimizing for the wrong metrics, looking at click rates, [00:21:00] having too many calls to action, like the call to action that you want every time is. Get on the call with me I'm not trying to put you through a bunch of stuff.
[00:21:07] Dan Englander: Yeah. That's not to say that collateral won't come up later, but the main call to action is let's get on a 15, 20 minute call. That's what we're going for, so the list goes on. But those are a few of the top things we see. Yeah. It
[00:21:19] Sarah Noel Block: sounds like the biggest thing is making sure it sounds natural and not like marketing copywriting.
[00:21:26] Dan Englander: Exactly. And, And a lot of the times, like where the company description is happening is like that second paragraph and it's more describing something that's very pointed and specific about what you do. It's like when you, imagine you're walking down the aisle at CVS and you wanna buy shampoo, and there's all these ads that.
[00:21:46] Dan Englander: This has alovera, this does this, and this does that. At some point you need to know if you're looking at shampoo or you're looking at lotion, or you're looking at conditioner, right? Imagine that times a hundred because somebody's scanning through their inbox. At some point they need to figure out like, what [00:22:00] does this person do?
[00:22:01] Dan Englander: And
[00:22:02] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, that is, that's a good point. But what do you actually
[00:22:05] Dan Englander: do? Exactly. And that's where people. get it wrong. And they they sell too much. They wanna stand out, but it's this isn't the time to stand out. This is the time to de-risk a conversation. And that's the, that's all you want to do with that first outreach.
[00:22:20] Sarah Noel Block: So you are reaching out to someone, let's say it's a big company and they're getting a ton of outreach. They're pretty skeptical and they're usually deleting. , all of the emails that sound like it might be outreach. How do you reach those
[00:22:34] Dan Englander: people? Yeah that's the simple and hard problem.
[00:22:39] Dan Englander: So the first thing is they have to think that you wrote just to them. If somebody's in that situation, thinks they're on a list, they're not gonna take the call. The second is finding that strong commonality that you share, right? So if and I'm making this up, but if I reach out to you, Sarah, and I was like, Hey, I saw that you are marketing consultant and [00:23:00] you have a podcast, can I sell you this thing , this software widget that helps marketing consultants may or may not take my call unless you were actively in the.
[00:23:09] Dan Englander: And actively looking for a solution and the stars aligned and it hits you just the right time. You're probably not taking that call. Yeah. That magic
[00:23:15] Sarah Noel Block: moment is rare .
[00:23:16] Dan Englander: Exactly. It happens, but you can't really bank on that. But if I reached out to you and said, Hey, Sarah by the way, I saw that you're in the, I know you're in Illinois, you're in the Illinois area in XYZ Town.
[00:23:28] Dan Englander: That's really crazy cuz my grandmother. Was mayor of an adjacent town to you, Springfield, Illinois, let's say. That's really cool and also like we've done a lot of work with podcasts that I think you might know about including X, Y, Z. By the way, we're this company, we sell this widget. How would you feel about that outreach compared to the first one?
[00:23:47] Sarah Noel Block: That was good. I'm not gonna lie. I'm gonna buy your widget .
[00:23:52] Dan Englander: You might not buy and you may not even take the meeting, but you're at least probably gonna respond. And at the very least, you're not gonna be mad at me. And maybe you're, you'll [00:24:00] respond on, and a week later when we say, Hey, wanted to follow up on
[00:24:02] Sarah Noel Block: that?
[00:24:02] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. I wouldn't automatically delete it. Normally .
[00:24:06] Dan Englander: Exactly. And by the way, that's literally a campaign we just ran for a client that is in the the selling to giant companies, right? And it's worked really well. And we're, we had to interview them to find that commonality. So I think in response to that some people, the objections we typically hear are like, great, am I gonna get a bunch of networking calls?
[00:24:25] Dan Englander: And people that don't ever wanna buy, is this just gonna be some meandering calls? So on one, Sure. Sometimes we don't know what stage of the market they're in, but at the end of the day our clients are looking at the accounts they wanna reach, they're looking at the titles. Don't you think it's worth having conversations with those people, with the people in your market?
[00:24:43] Dan Englander: So there's that. And also like we're still talking about what our clients do. If those people are getting on that call these decision makers, , they're not dumb. They know they're entering a sales situation, but it's de-risk. They know they're not gonna get like hard sold because we're coming in [00:25:00] tastefully.
[00:25:00] Dan Englander: We're not like beating them over the head with a pitch. So they're like, I'm not gonna wat my time wasted. So that's the vibe we're going for, if that makes sense. Yeah, that does make sense. And that's something that I always, I do have a lot of lead generation. People reach out to me or more prospecting, and that is always the concern.
[00:25:18] Sarah Noel Block: Am I gonna waste my time on calls with the wrong people or people that aren't ready to buy? And you make a good point. If you're doing the research right, then you're having the calls with the right people, even if they aren't in the right stage of the buyer's journey. That's an opportunity to network and get to know them.
[00:25:39] Sarah Noel Block: So that's not a lost opportunity or a waste of
[00:25:41] Dan Englander: time. Yeah, exactly. And I think that what's going on psychologically is and this is all my hypothesis there's some like data a little bit to back it up, but it's mostly just my experience on this is that there's this ancient dynamic going on that I think is tribal, right?
[00:25:57] Dan Englander: And we're am I gonna cross paths with this [00:26:00] person again? Are they in my world? And so on. And I think there's a lot of ways to check that box using the. Terminology, like if you're selling to doctors versus manufacturers versus whoever. There's certain terms of art that you might use, but there's a lot of other ways to do that too.
[00:26:17] Dan Englander: Some of which I I talked about earlier. And that's ultimately what you're trying to do is if the person's eh, I might, this person's in my world and I'm probably gonna run across them at some point, might as well meet their acquaintance now. That's really what we're going for with all these campaigns.
[00:26:32] Dan Englander: Okay.
[00:26:32] Sarah Noel Block: This is my last question on this particular topic. , how much research do you do on each of these prospects before you reach out to them?
[00:26:41] Dan Englander: Yeah it's a good question. So it's not like we're doing like this full dossier on each and every prospect. What we're typically doing is a version of that actually for the sender or for the salesperson, where we might be meeting with them for an hour or multiple calls, sometimes interviewing them, finding out what their background's looking at their LinkedIn [00:27:00] and then finding.
[00:27:01] Dan Englander: just one particular strong commonality that is gonna unite them with a big cohort of their prospects. And then that commonality we might find that it didn't work so well, and then we move on to something else. Or we may find that it work goes off like gangbusters and then we find ways to double down on that.
[00:27:18] Dan Englander: And then from there that might last a few weeks to a few months, then we're moving on to a different campaign and a different commonality to, to unite them with a bigger, with a different or bigger cohort. Of their total addressable market. So that's how we think about it, is actually more of the research is being done on the salesperson compared to the prospect, if that makes sense.
[00:27:36] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, that does make sense. So you figure out a couple different things that might work for that particular client of yours where you could find a commonality and then narrow down your search based off of that this person was that content marketing world. And these people on their list were also there.
[00:27:57] Sarah Noel Block: We can use
[00:27:57] Dan Englander: that. Yeah, exactly. [00:28:00] Or even like a person in common, like if there's somebody else in the company, where do we do a lot of those campaigns, like where there's a salesperson, then the CEO has a million connections to everybody, but the CEO doesn't do sales. So being able to say, Hey, I saw your Bob Smith, our ceo.
[00:28:16] Dan Englander: That's really great. and you that you've known each other for this many years. I want to be a resource to you, . We're doing these things. That's now that, that really de-risked that call in a lot of ways, and it just takes a little bit more deliberate work and data building at the beginning, but then you're chasing a lot less after that.
[00:28:35] Dan Englander: Yeah.
[00:28:36] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. That makes sense. All right. Let's talk about dividing the prospecting and the sales. So your people don't get burnt out. Yeah.
[00:28:46] Dan Englander: That's a really good topic. And I actually think that's probably like more important than any of the tactics I've talked about so far. Yeah. Cuz that, that's honestly the biggest problem, is the who's doing what thing.
[00:28:56] Dan Englander: And depending on the size of your organization, it's gonna be. Different, [00:29:00] depending on where you are. So just go to the beginning of time. I think the first thing is that if it's just you or you have a few people, you might be handling everything, right? You might be doing prospecting in sales until you can get the resources to get help, but at least what you're doing is wearing different hats and separating your time accordingly, right?
[00:29:17] Dan Englander: You're thinking about prioritizing your time from bottom of top of funnel. So of course if somebody's like at a proposal stage, they're getting more of your energy than somebody that's further up beyond that. The way that we think about the prospecting duties is it's actually a few different skill sets, right?
[00:29:32] Dan Englander: Cuz you have. The creativity, the copywriting, all that sort of thing. You have the systems thinking of list building and data and software and what comes when. And then you have hustle, right? So if you can of think and like following up with somebody, you get the call booked and that kind of thing.
[00:29:48] Dan Englander: So you could separate those duties out eventually, but, and that's what we're offering in a team capacity or fractional capacity. But if it's just you're dividing up your time between those three things. And that [00:30:00] might mean you're spending an. Tinkering with software and delegating things to list builder, you're spending another hour following up with prospects that you know might have dropped off for whatever reason.
[00:30:10] Dan Englander: You're spending another hour writing copy, thinking about an angle of a way in and that kind of thing. And before any of that, you're prioritizing the later funnel, like opportunity stage people. So that's how we think about it. One of the biggest mistakes we see is even in bigger companies, even in companies with dozens of employees is like the owners have done sales historically.
[00:30:33] Dan Englander: It's been mostly referrals and inbounds and that kind of thing. And then they're like, I don't wanna do sales anymore. I'm gonna go hire salesperson. So they hire that full stack salesperson, that's probably really good, like in an existing infrastructure. And then x months later, that person's failed. They might move on to somebody else and then they're, then, if they do that enough times, they're like, Nobody can sell but me.
[00:30:52] Dan Englander: We're special snowflake. Nobody can do this but me, . And the problem with that is like there's no process. There's no systems, there's [00:31:00] no scripts. There's no lead generation machine for keeping that salesperson fed, right? Those things have to be built first. So if you're in that ownership and capacity and you have the resources to get help, Start with top of funnel.
[00:31:12] Dan Englander: Start with you could hire a company like ours, you could hire a junior level salesperson. You could just DIY that process to get meetings teed up consistently. Once that's happening, then you can plug in. that closer, which is something we're in the middle of right now. And like my job half the time is really like sales trainer slash sales ops manager, which is basically like getting our salesperson filled up with leads, so we're not sending that person off into the cold saying, go get his business. We're like making sure they're really well supported, cuz that's, What you need to do, basically. So that's a lot. I know that's long-winded, but that's how we think about it. Let's talk about that typical sales prospect or process.
[00:31:54] Sarah Noel Block: What steps are there in a typical sales process, and how many [00:32:00] people do you think that a typical client might need as part of their team to make it? .
[00:32:07] Dan Englander: Yeah it's a really good question. So our, my domain expertise is b2b and generally a more complex sales cycle. So it's really gonna depend on your offer.
[00:32:16] Dan Englander: It is gonna take a lot of trial and error. What I recommend doing is starting with a simpler sales process and then linking it from there as you need to, I think. Alex Homoe has actually, the, has a lot of really good stuff on offer creation. If you dig into that. He's made the, a really good point, which is that like you could have a boom market and get everything else wrong and still do really well.
[00:32:40] Dan Englander: Yeah. So if you're in that situation you can make the offer better and then you're like really going crazy and growing and that kind of thing, or you could. A normal market and a normal offer. And then from there stems the salesperson and their performance. So it's like the order of operations is market most [00:33:00] important offer and then salesperson and their skills and that kind of thing.
[00:33:04] Dan Englander: So the reality is most of us have normal level markets that are mature or whatever. And then, and most of us have either normal offers. Worse, bad offers. So then the thing is to really work on that offer and make that better as opposed to just prioritizing sales skills.
[00:33:22] Dan Englander: Sales skills matter a lot. They do. It's not that they don't, but they're only gonna get you so far. If you have an amazing salesperson, they're super great. But your offer sucks. It's gonna be really hard to make them successful. So that's changed my thinking recently after digging through, through Alex's stuff.
[00:33:36] Dan Englander: But with that in mind yeah, it takes trial and error. It takes recording the calls that you're on or that your salesperson's on person is on. I think investing in a sales coach does, is really worth it. It doesn't have to be really expensive, but if you are, if you think about it in the B2B space, , these are big deal sizes.
[00:33:55] Dan Englander: If you're getting like a small single digit boost in performance, that could be [00:34:00] millions of dollars so it's worth the time and so on from there. So there might be more to that question, but those are like a few things that come to mind for sales process. .
[00:34:09] Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. That kind of goes right into my next question is what do you do when you're part of a small team?
[00:34:15] Sarah Noel Block: A lot of the people that watch or listen to this show, they range from agencies all the way down to solo printer. So let's look at it from the perspective as a solo printer. Would you recommend then that they hire a sales coach and learn how to scale their process and do it themselves or outsource?
[00:34:37] Dan Englander: Good question, and it depends on who you're going after and the exact process. I can't say it just depends on your market and the size of it and what you're doing and that kind of thing. But no if you're content being a solopreneur, I don't think you necessarily have to get more help, whether it's out of house or in-house.
[00:34:54] Dan Englander: I think that's up to you, obviously and what you wanna do. But I think the main thing is [00:35:00] prioritizing. top of funnel first and making sure that there's like systems for getting in those prospects. Even if you don't wanna grow infinitely. If you're a solopreneur, there might be a cap on your time or your scalability, right?
[00:35:12] Dan Englander: But at least you can get to the point of having a wait list or being able to choose your clients instead of the other way around. One book that I think is more conducive to. Is oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley wrote that book and it's about getting to the point of yeah, being oversubscribed and having wait lists and that kind of thing.
[00:35:31] Dan Englander: So I'd be thinking more in that way. I like that it's somewhat choose your own adventure. I just think that. In our world if you're hiring for that sales role, you want that person to have a machine that they slot into as opposed to go off into the cold and make up my sales process for me, and this isn't just the sales, like an issue in the sales pro process, I think it's also that's a common entrepreneurial error is I'm gonna.
[00:35:59] Dan Englander: Delegates something that I [00:36:00] haven't really thought through, right? or something that's bigger than the pay grade that I'm signing up for. That is such a good point. And actually the interview that I did right before this one, we talked about the same thing where you can't just outsource something and not have any oversight over it.
[00:36:17] Sarah Noel Block: You need to have a process in place. You need to be able to completely understand what's happening. if it's working or not. And if that system is built to work you could have built a broken system, .
[00:36:30] Dan Englander: Yeah and I won't lie like it, it can be tough hiring for that cuz you have to know.
[00:36:36] Dan Englander: what makes for success in an area that you may or may not have domain expertise in. And that's that's the cha the challenge. But at the end of the day, this isn't like an obscure angle of the business. This is like how you eat, right? This is how you win new business. Yeah. You've gotta figure it out to some extent.
[00:36:54] Dan Englander: You could have people slot into roles, like we slot into the outbound role with our [00:37:00] clients all the time, but at the end of the day they're the ones closing the business, doing the stuff that only they can do and so on. Yeah.
[00:37:07] Sarah Noel Block: Let's talk about your book. Can you tell me what it's about and how people can
[00:37:13] Dan Englander: buy it?
[00:37:14] Dan Englander: Yeah, totally. So it's about a lot of things I've talked about, but overall I, I wrote, Pretty much to scratch an itch. I just think. The wrong things are being optimized for when it comes to sales and specifically sales prospecting. So it's about how you can do a lot of the things that, that I talked about, balance, personalization, scale, come up, assign the right roles on your team, get in the door, tastefully de-risk conversations and all that stuff.
[00:37:39] Dan Englander: It talks about academically why I think this stuff works and the stages of market sophistication and. Stuff. But if that's boring to you, you can always skip those chapters and just go to getting stuff done, . But anyway, it's called relationship sales at scale. It's on Amazon. If people wanna get a link to it, it's and check out the first chapter and [00:38:00] get some more info on it.
[00:38:01] Dan Englander: It's at sales schema.com/rsas. That's RS sas. And hopefully that's useful.
[00:38:06] Sarah Noel Block: We'll put that in the show notes and the description wherever the show. and we'll also put the link to Amazon so you can get it either way and can you tell everyone how they can work with you and find you online where you hang out.
[00:38:25] Dan Englander: I appreciate that, Sarah. So sales schema.com is the best place of see what we're up to. I'm on LinkedIn, Dan in Englander email, dan sales.com and I'm always happy to casually nerd out with people. So I look forward to hearing, hearing from everyone. .
[00:38:40] Sarah Noel Block: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Dan, and thanks to all of you for listening today.
[00:38:46] Sarah Noel Block: This wraps up this episode to reiterate those highlights from today's episode. We learned how to balance personalization and scale to keep your pipeline full. How to de-risk those conversations so skeptical prospects will [00:39:00] actually have a conversation with you and. That you don't have to be everyone in the sales process.
[00:39:06] Sarah Noel Block: You can divide up prospecting and sales duties so the right people are doing the right job, and you can avoid burnout. If you had any questions about this episode, go down to the show notes page and make sure to ask that question. There is a form where you can go there and insert your question via text or you can send us an audio clip of your question.
[00:39:33] Sarah Noel Block: I would love to hear your beautiful voices and know that I am not alone talking to my mic in a room right now. I'm talking to all of you. All right, I'll see you next time.
[00:39:54] Sarah Noel Block: Hello, and thank you for joining Tiny Marketing. I help tiny marketing departments create consistent content [00:40:00] that builds trust with their audience. Look done for you content marketing@sarahnoelblock.com. Don't forget to follow right and review the podcast on your favorite podcast app. See you next time, friends.
