CHAPTER THREE
Building Your Platform
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”
—MUHAMMAD ALI
NO ATHLETE WINS AT THE ELITE LEVEL WITHOUT THOUSANDS OF hours of pain, suffering, blood, sweat, and tears. As a cyclist, I know you must build a base of fitness or you’ll suffer like a dog and fail when the time comes to deliver a marathon performance in the searing heat. I’ve bonked on a bike (no sex involved), and it was brutal. Bonking is the sudden fatigue and loss of energy caused by the depletion of the body’s glycogen. You just have nothing left except a tortured vacant stare, and it’s caused by getting behind the nutrition and hydration curve in extreme sport. You suffer knowing there will be no quick recovery, no matter what you do.
I’ve also competed in karate and seen people freeze and fail because they did not invest the necessary hours sparring with gusto when there was no crowd watching. As a sport aircraft pilot, I practiced forced landing by turning my engine off at 500 feet above the airfield to perfect emergency landings. Every overnight success spent many years in quiet discipline to be ready for their moment in the spotlight. When I won my first President’s Club working for BellSouth, I knew I’d earned it.
You must build the platform on which you can achieve success. The previous chapter was about earning the right to engage. Once you have understood your buyer and built a value narrative to carry a conversation at senior levels, you then need a brand and network that empowers you. In addition to this, you need massive leverage created from using the right tools and scripted content to choreograph every move. Only birds and amateurs wing it. The very best salespeople instead execute repeatable winning combinations.
Beyond COMBOs of multichannel outreach where the social phone is the weapon of choice, we’ve addressed the COMBO for having the right narrative: 1) leading with insight, 2) stating why it matters, and 3) positioning a hypothesis of value. We’ve also talked about the COMBO once you’ve initially broken through: 1) engaging the most senior person, 2) being sponsored down, and 3) building consensus and a compelling business case.
Here, we will explore the COMBO for creating a powerful personal platform, which is: 1) a strong personal brand, 2) a network that empowers, and 3) tools and templates that enable high performance. Later, we will cover the COMBO for knockout success with: 1) trigger events, 2) referrals, and 3) customer advocacy. Finally, we will cover the COMBO for the close, which is: 1) setting the right agenda, 2) creating trust and confidence, and 3) devoting yourself to commitment and leadership.
Let’s now focus on your brand. Study the work of Michael Hyatt, who wrote the book Platform. Every salesperson needs to become a micro-marketer, so also read the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. Essentially, your personal brand as a thought leader on social, especially LinkedIn, can start the process of building trust and setting the agenda on value before your utter a single word. This is because the majority of people who consider responding to your outreach, whether via voice mail, email, InMail, video mail, text message, Twitter, or a personal note or message, will Google you or look at your LinkedIn profile. This is where you evidence your credentials of insight and value and where you show your personal values and the quality of your professional network.
Building a strong platform will accelerate and compress a sales process because it establishes you as someone worthy of trust who solves real business challenges for similar clients. Ninety-eight percent of salespeople with 5,000+ LinkedIn connections achieve quota,1 but it can take a seller up to five years to build a LinkedIn network with that many connections. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t just grab 300 business cards at a conference or blitz LinkedIn connections and think you’re done.
Creating Your Online Brand
Your social media pages are yours, but never write, post, or upload anything that is not consistent with your employer’s brand or your professional profile. As John Smibert says, “It takes a lifetime to build your brand but just a moment to destroy your reputation.” Treat everything you publish online as if it will be there forever, and only publish content that you would be happy for your next potential customer or mother to read.
If you’re a leader or salesperson, you must transform the way you use LinkedIn. Stop treating it as an online CV for securing your next job, and stop using it as a marketing page for your company. Instead, make your LinkedIn profile shine as your personal brand website where the value you provide and the values by which you operate are front and center.
At the time of writing this, there were well over 500 million LinkedIn members, with 2 people joining every second of every day. The overwhelming majority of people you need in order to be successful in your professional life are all there. According to IDC Research, 75 percent of buyers use social media to research sellers before engaging.2 Add to this the research from both Forrester and Corporate Visions that revealed that 74 percent of buyers choose the seller who first provides insight and value.3 This begs the question: What do potential customers see when they find you online? Do they see a Porsche driving, quota crushing, transactional, pushy salesperson with a profile aimed at their next potential employer; or do they see a warm and friendly professional offering insight and value relevant to them and their industry?
No one wants to be sold to, but we all value assistance in making the right buying decision—we all want to manage our risk and ensure best value. Here are the essential things you need to do with your LinkedIn profile to create a credible digital personal brand that paves the way ahead to accelerate engagement.
First, settings: Go into LinkedIn settings, and disable notifications to your network. Do this after logging in by navigating to account/settings and privacy/privacy/sharing profile edits/select “no.” This is important because you will be making many changes within your profile, and you don’t want to bombard your network or give the wrong impression that you are updating your profile because you are looking for another job!
Second, photo: Ensure that your photo is a professionally friendly head and shoulders close-up. It needs to be in focus and well lit. Always avoid high-contrast bright backgrounds. Also avoid the Zoolander Blue Steel look, glamour shots, power pics, wedding shots, mug shots, sporting shots, trophy shots, and pictures taken more than five years ago. People form an opinion within a second, and your photo and headline is what will most influence them.
Do you appear to be credible or arrogant, friendly or cocky, approachable or unprofessional? Make sure your photo has the right background, which means there should be a soft image behind. Not your cubicle, which makes you look like you don’t deserve to meet with a CEO, and certainly not a stark wall that looks like it was taken at the police station. Never hide your photo from people viewing your profile: Check LinkedIn settings under Account/Settings and privacy/Basics/Showing profile photos/select Everyone.
Third, headline: Instead of your title and company, have a headline under your name that describes what you do for customers or those whom you serve. What is the difference you make for clients? Avoid passive words such as helping, seeking, enabling, etc. Instead, make a positive statement such as “Transforming customer experience for retailers” or “Delivering process efficiency for the mining industry” or “Placing customers at the heart of strategy and systems” or “Creating memorable events that deliver results.” Your headline should describe the results you create for your customers, but not in a way that makes you look like a complete tool. Avoid clichés, acronyms, and over-the-top phrases.
Fourth, URL: Personalize and shorten your LinkedIn link (the URL that takes people to your profile). View your profile page by clicking on the small thumbnail of your photo in the upper right, then on the right side of the screen as you begin to scroll down, select Contact and personal info, then click on the small pencil icon, then click again on your LinkedIn URL (maybe LinkedIn will have made this easier by the time you read this!). Then change to something that is not already taken by another member with your name. Don’t forget to save, and this link should be included in your email signature.
Fifth, contact details: Complete your contact details. If you are in sales, forget privacy, and instead make it easy for people to contact you. Whenever you change employers, always remember to update the website links. View your profile page by clicking on the small thumbnail of your photo in the upper right, then on the right side on the screen as you begin to scroll down select Contact and personal info, then update details as appropriate.
Sixth, summary panel: Create a summary that describes the business value you deliver and the values by which you operate. Write it in the first person, and neither be too over-the-top nor hide your light under a bushel. This is where people can get a sense of what you believe and how you operate. This starts to create trust and set the agenda on value even before a single word has been spoken. Your summary can potentially start with “I believe . . .” and then go on to talk about your vision for your customers. One of my clients, Emma, gave me permission to showcase her summary on LinkedIn. We designed it to support her outreach with the heads of government health departments, and it worked. We also changed her “expressive” LinkedIn photo with an office cubicle background to one of her dressed as the senior manager she is and standing in front of her CEO’s high-rise office window with a harbor view. We took the photo with my iPhone, so don’t use the absence of a professional photographer as an excuse.
The healthcare sector is modernising the way services are delivered with technology and consumer expectations transforming the delivery of both public and private sector healthcare. I work with government, health and peak body organisations to achieve better outcomes through digital transformation. I help them translate their policy initiatives into business strategies, and build evidence-based business cases that make the best use of health sector funding.
I am passionate and committed to deliver for my healthcare sector clients, and I have two decades of experience in senior government, not-for-profit, and private sector roles. With a diploma of health science, 10 years’ experience as a registered nurse, and a bachelor of business, I have both understanding and empathy for the challenges facing the healthcare sector. My extensive experience in human services, and the quality and reach of my professional network, enables me to provide positive influence with a wide range of senior stakeholders within government and industry.
This worked along with personal coaching. Emma was immediately taken more seriously and began securing meetings with senior executives who had previously ignored her. She was also promoted within her company seven weeks after the makeover. By changing your LinkedIn profile to be a mini personal branding site, you enhance the way you sell but without any downside for a future career change with potential new employers. They will be attracted by the way you intelligently use LinkedIn to engage prospective clients.
Seventh, references: Getting recommendations from people who have engaged you in current and past roles is a way to powerfully build trust. These recommendations are ideally from loyal customers or partners and evidence your positive values and the results you deliver for them. Simply use the request feature within LinkedIn to ask trusted relationships to make a recommendation. You will have the opportunity to review it before adding it to your profile. LinkedIn Recommendations are far more powerful than Skills and Endorsements within your profile, and they focus on listing those skills that are valued by your customers.
Eighth, education, qualifications, volunteer experience, and accomplishments: Within your LinkedIn profile, provide details about your credentials but avoid bragging or coming across as a “quota crusher,” as Jill Rowley famously says. It is especially important to show credibility in your ability to deliver for customers and to list any philanthropic activities that evidence your positive personal values. If you achieved number-one performer status, then you could provide a description like this: “Highest performer of the year. I achieved this by working closely with my customers in the manufacturing industry to enable them to benefit from substantial improvements in supply chain efficiency.”
Again, the focus with your LinkedIn profile is to speak to customers rather than potential employers. Create an authentic narrative that shows how you can help customers deliver results through your insights, experience, positive track record, personal network, and credentials. Make sure you convey the fact that you can do something worthwhile for them, rather than being a salesperson seeking to sell something to them.
Beyond first impressions and everything above, publishing content is a big differentiator for salespeople as they build strong personal brands. But how do you publish content without detracting from selling time or from the essential COMBOs that drive pipeline creation and sales success?
Publishing Insights That Set the Agenda
Let’s face an awful truth: Very few salespeople are good writers. Add to this the imperative that sellers go all-in with COMBOs for prospecting during prime time, and you can see we have a problem.
I do not advocate that salespeople write content during business hours; they should instead pick up the phone and dial prospects and customers. All sellers should, however, self-educate and do research. Then they should create their own insights, which enables them to carry the right conversations with senior people in their target marketplace. As a result of this activity, there are two types of content that can be created within your LinkedIn profile:
1. Posts (updates) are short and often for the purpose of sharing other people’s content, which is relevant to your audience or customers. This is where you need to subscribe to a content-sharing tool such as Buffer, which has a plug-in for your web browser. It makes the process of capturing content and scheduling it for publication on your social media extremely easy.
2. Original articles (blogs) may be shared. They are typically more than 400 words and embedded with images or videos.
Let’s cover posts first because anyone can do this, even if you have poor writing skills. Anytime you come across content that will be appreciated by your customers, simply click the Twitter share button on that content’s page or the Buffer icon in your browser . . . bingo! It is queued and ready to go without you needing to give it another thought. Sign up for the free version of Buffer, and install the web browser plug-in.
But where do you find this content? Every professional stays current by reading the latest articles, journals, blogs, and publications relevant to them and their patients or clients. The best salespeople do this, and those who struggle with reading listen to podcasts. If you sell into an industry vertical, or if your market is defined by a particular demographic, or if your buyer is a particular role or persona, then you can identify the places where they learn online. Ask your customers that very question: “Where do you go online to stay up-to-date?” You could also ask: “Who do you follow as a leader in your industry?” or “Which analysts or commentators do you rate most highly?” Then find those people online, subscribe to their blog (RSS feed), configure a Google Alert for their name, and follow them on Twitter. Now the information you need comes to you! Technology is now serving you and making you highly efficient for content sourcing and learning about the things your customers care about.
This is how you build a platform for sourcing and sharing content that will be of interest to your buyers. If your marketing team can help you with a corporate tool similar to Buffer, then use it, but do not share corporate propaganda. It will be perceived by your audience of potential customers as spam, and they will probably disconnect or ignore you. Your LinkedIn profile is your domain, not your employer’s—you choose the content you share or publish. All of your content must be of value for your target audience.
Your goal is to be seen as an aggregator of high-quality, relevant content for those who are too busy to source it for themselves. If you were selling a cloud software solution for accounts payable automation, then your primary target audience is the CFO. You would investigate where they learn online about outsourcing and find the analysts and journalists who write about the latest trends and research for transforming the finance function within corporations. What are the major conferences? Who are the speakers? Which research has been published? Sharing this kind of content and associating yourself with credible brands is a smart thing to do. Therefore, seek to connect with the industry influencers and leaders who publish the best articles and papers.
Original articles or blogs require more effort, but they are massively powerful for proactively dealing with objections and setting the agenda on value and risk mitigation for customers. At a minimum, everyone should have three articles that they have published within their LinkedIn profile, and these articles should be 600 to 900 words, which is just over one page in a typical Word document.
The first topic to write about is proactive objection killers. This is a self-learning exercise that beats any sales training because it creates clarity of message with a narrative that has the power to avoid objections altogether! List the common objections you receive, and then adopt the positive counter position. As an example, I have worked with recruitment companies where salespeople commonly receive this objection from a hiring manager: “If I met with every headhunter that wanted my time, I’d never get anything done. I’m too busy to meet, so just send me a CV if you have a viable candidate.”
To deal with this, I’ve helped recruiters write articles about why investing 20 minutes saves 12 hours and dramatically reduces hiring risk. In this example, you take the excuse for not wanting to meet and make it the reason to engage. The seller creates an article in LinkedIn Publisher that supports this narrative:
It’s because you’re busy that we need to meet. It’s not enough to screen based on skills, qualifications, and experience; you must also eliminate anyone early who is not a cultural fit. This is because that’s where most of the risk is with a new hire. I define value by how few CVs I send, and I’ll invest the time to understand how you personally define cultural fit to significantly de-risk your hiring process. That’s why I need 20 minutes with you to understand how you personally define the culture of your team. Twenty minutes together will save you 12 hours and give you the right result. When can we get together for 20 minutes on Thursday?
Instead of leading with the product of supplying candidates for a role, the seller is leading with why a conversation matters. The reason for a conversation is that the seller can help the buyer save time and reduce risk; and that’s what is being sold initially—a way for the buyer to save time, reduce risk, and protect the culture they have built into their team, so they can achieve the necessary results.
Writing an article and finding research to reference, even a funny video to embed, enables you to hone your narrative and deliver the conversation with relaxed authority. No script is necessary because you genuinely know your stuff. Start writing after hours; it will change your professional life! Find someone to be your editor before you publish, and always ensure that you are consistent with your employer’s brand and values.
In addition to positive proactive objection killers, sellers should develop insights that hook the buyers’ interest. Again, this is highly valuable sales training as it forces research into the customer’s world. It should be done outside prime selling time and treated as homework in the evenings. What are the trends, risks, disruptive forces, innovations, or case studies that potential customers need to know? How are their customers or markets changing? Beyond information, what are the insights or lessons to be learned? What are their biggest risks concerning commoditization or disruption? The people you follow for creating posts are the sources for these articles you can write, and it is not a difficult task to create an article that quotes several experts. You can then add your own commentary before posing a question to your audience to create engagement.
Chris Beall believes salespeople are the smartest nonreaders on earth but that they need to become readers in order to write with strength. He says, “Listening, especially while driving (which provides a calming activity to absorb some of that native sales restlessness) lets them hear written language and begin to transform into a writer. Even if their writing ends up being spoken into Siri, cleaned up by Grammarly, and—if they’re really smart—run through a friend. If something is worth writing, it is almost always worth a light editing pass.”
Every seller needs to be a capable micro-marketer, and if you’re serious about creating a stellar personal brand and embracing social selling, you must read David Meerman Scott’s book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. As you build followers, who aren’t necessarily connected to your profile, you can start to share insights such as short quotes, statistics, pithy phrases, and, especially, provocative questions. This will create threads of engagement where you can start building your network (again, outside prime selling time) with anyone relevant who views your profile, posts, or articles. These can become leads you can call, and it’s a conversation starter to call out that they just looked at your profile.
When I first came across Jack Kosakowski, I noticed he had some amazing techniques for notifying prospects when a social action happened. One way he did this was to call them after they just added him if there was a number shared on their profile. There are other ways to connect to prospects, but first it’s important to build a following. At one stage, the best way to build followers (audience and connections) was to be highly active in groups, and then it was about writing original long-form articles in Publisher, which would occasionally be picked up by the editors of Pulse Channels and pushed to a larger audience. Then LinkedIn almost killed the notification stream to first-degree connections, which created a big hole for many seeking to build a following. LinkedIn subsequently decided it needed more engagement in streams of content just like Facebook, so individual posts (previously called updates) became the key to attracting followers.
Let’s review what needs to be done up to this point with your brand. You’ve created a professionally attractive profile within LinkedIn and enhanced it by showing insight and value in what you publish. You’ve identified the thought leaders who are relevant to your target market that you will begin to follow on LinkedIn and Twitter. Then you can curate their content and share it with your network. You can begin to be a “forager for the tribe,” as Michael Hyatt describes it, which means being a content hub for relevant, quality information about a topic, domain, or industry. Then there is a reason for people to connect with you—because you provide insight and value relevant to those in your network.
Nurturing a Network That Enables You to Thrive
You cannot be successful on your own. Add to this the fact that a trusted referral is the shortest path to success, and you may begin to grasp the almost nuclear power of a high-quality network loaded with friendly human nodes of influence.
Yet I have heard it argued that we can only manage up to 70 meaningful relationships in our lives at any one time. Some people have told me that they only accept LinkedIn connection requests from people they would recognize on the street. You’re reading this book because you’re in sales, so forget that rubbish. You need an extensive and powerful network if you are to be successful. By all means reject connection requests from hookers, scammers, and competitors, but accept any connection request from any other credible professional. Reject competitor connection requests because you’re opening up your relationships to them.
Accept connection requests from anyone who is a peer or above in your world. Especially seek to connect with potential customers and those they respect and admire. Associate yourself with the analysts, journalists, bloggers, and leaders in your target market. Praise their articles and blogs, share their content, comment within their posts. Quote them and include their Twitter handles. Type their names into your LinkedIn posts so they are notified of the post. Associate yourself with strong brands so that you have both quality and quantity within your network.
If you have fewer than 500 connections in LinkedIn, then your profile highlights that fact, and you look weak. Your first goal is to build more than 500 connections, but don’t stop there. You need a minimum of 5,000 LinkedIn connections because networks are built on nodes, and sellers with 5,000+ connections on LinkedIn have a 98 percent likelihood of hitting quota.4 The human brain can remember about 150 connections. This is something called the Dunbar number, and it pertains to the folds of the neocortex and is evident in chimpanzee societies. None of this matters to you, but what will matter is building out the nodes on a super-connected social network that rains down warm leads and gets you one or two degrees from every rock star you need to secure referrals. Buyers are five times more likely to engage if the outreach is through a mutual connection.5
There’s been a ton of research written about the strength of weak ties. Basically, if you only network within your company for 20 years and then lose your job, those people are insular to that silo and are unlikely to help you be placed elsewhere. Therefore, to be antifragile (Taleb: stronger the more chaos there is in a system), you need to cultivate a vast array of strong and weak ties on LinkedIn. Five thousand strangers are more powerful than 500 power brokers in this case because of the millions of mutual connections they unlock in your prospect base.
In the early days of LinkedIn, I noticed a dashboard (no longer available unless you use Sales Navigator) that showed my 3,000 connections gave me access to 18,000,000 second- and third-degree contacts. Connections can be made like crazy, but here are some rules as you build your network.
Build your connections in your own time. Don’t allow LinkedIn or other social platforms to take you away from hard-core prospecting and outreach in the prime-time selling hours. Turn the television off, and stop watching inane content on YouTube; instead, use the evenings to build your network and personal brand.
Never ask to connect using the generic message that LinkedIn generates. Always tailor your request by writing something like: “I was talking with Mary Jones recently, and she mentioned your name. Good to connect here on LinkedIn, and congratulations on your career!” Or: “I really enjoyed reading the article you published, and great to also connect with you here on LinkedIn.” The golden rules for connecting are don’t sell and don’t ask for anything; just request to connect and provide context so they are likely to accept. Get yourself into their orbit so that when you call them in the future, it won’t be a cold call.
Connect to everyone who can help you succeed. This includes the people above and around you within the hierarchy of your own organization. Also connect to your suppliers and anyone who can provide you with a referral. Go back through your records, and connect with past and present clients on LinkedIn. Later, you can give them a call and ask them for a referral. Build your network professionally by always providing context for a connection request, and then build value for the other person in any information you share. Always stay positive as you interact by commenting on posts, articles, or topics within groups.
Creating Effective Scripts and Templates
Salespeople need to be efficient and effective in everything they do. There is no point being brilliant at climbing a ladder if you lean it on the wrong wall. Quality and quantity both matter when it comes to social marketing and modernized selling, so templates for content are essential. Simply create a document in Evernote, Google Docs, or Word with your outreach scripts for every situation so you can quickly cut and paste, tailor, and then hit send.
Here are some script examples:
Hi [name]. It was great meeting you at the conference earlier this week, and I was impressed to see what you’ve achieved when I looked at your LinkedIn profile. Good to connect here and looking forward to talking again at some stage.
Hi [name]. I was speaking with [common contact] earlier this week and your name came up. After having a look at your profile, I thought it would be good for us to connect here on LinkedIn.
Hi [name]. Thanks for sharing/commenting/liking [use as appropriate] my recent post, and great to also connect here on LinkedIn. Please let me know if there is ever anything I can do for you in sharing or promoting your content.
You can also create outreach templates to use in your emails. The value narrative you have already created should be used as the basis of emails that follow any voice mails you leave for potential new clients.
Later I will go into very specific detail about how to execute all this, but the key is to drive “youuuge” levels of effective activity with the right narrative through the best channels. You must use punchy COMBOs of tailored content that is relevant to the person with whom you are seeking a conversation. Phone, voice mail, email—do your triple in less than two minutes. Add a SMS message and LinkedIn InMail for first-time outreach. The key is to use templates for every channel so that you can make it fast.
The optimal voice mail message is between 8 and 14 seconds.6 Eighty percent of calls go to voice mail, and 90 percent of first-time voice mails are never returned.7 Voice mails need to be short and without any kind of pitch. Under no circumstances should you talk about your products, services, or solutions. Talk instead about the reason they should meet you and the value you can provide in a conversation.
You need your own scripts for these purposes:
Phone narrative for requesting a meeting and that leads with why it matters rather than what you do or sell
Voice mail message that is short and focuses on the reason to meet, which is in line with your phone narrative
Email request for a meeting that is consistent with the voice mail message you leave
Email confirmation of a meeting that anchors the reason to meet and sets the agenda on insights you can provide and what they will brief you about; this reduces the likelihood of them cancelling, not showing up, or delegating you down to someone else
LinkedIn connection requests for every common situation, including: you met at a conference, met them today, talked on the phone, left them a voice mail, heard their name mentioned by someone in common, were referred to them by a common connection, work in the same industry, or admire what they publish on social
Empathy email concerning excuses or objections, with links to your objection neutralizer article or evidence supporting the reason they should meet rather than push you away
It’s not that you will read scripts to anyone, but if you cannot make the conversation look compelling on paper, you only worsen your odds of success. Just winging it will not work. In creating your templates, design your own process flow so that you are clear about when you will use your content. Think like an email engineer, and A/B test all that you do . . . then refine, refine, refine. Build decision trees with “if this, then that” logic. Salespeople must be innovators in how they manage various buyer personas and outreach channels to identify what works best. Then hone the message and the cadence for COMBO strategies that hit the mark with their target audience.
Once you identify a message that is “authentically you,” hammer it relentlessly for maximum effect. Only change an approach or script when required by the market—not because you feel bored. Lee Bartlett in the United Kingdom crafted the world’s most concise, efficient script ever:
Email Subject Line: Revenue Growth
Body: Lauren, I have a product that’s very relevant to your work; do you mind if I tell you a bit about it? We help X, Y, and Z Companies achieve [insert amount]% (measurable) revenue growth. When’s a good time to talk?8
This message, slightly tailored to your industry and existing clients, is lethal live on the phone or via voice mail, video mail, LinkedIn custom invite, or InMail.
Selecting the Right Enablement Tools
Tools will not make you techno-magically successful, and an idiot with a megaphone is just a more annoying idiot. Tools without the right strategy and professional use are of little value. To be successful, you must have the courage to move out of your comfort zone and face rejection. Fumbling and failing for a little while is okay as long as you learn quickly and become masterful.
Regardless of the tools you use, you need discipline to do the right things at the right time in the right way. You must use tools and platforms to show positive intent by relentlessly seeking to help your customers achieve a better state of affairs and always acting in their best interests. You must carry the right value narrative and technique for delivery, where you focus on client outcomes and lead with why a conversation matters. Finally, you must possess a positive attitude and have rock-solid values. This is all essential because you are the ultimate tool! Maybe I should phrase that differently . . . who you are is your most valuable instrument.
At minimum, and in order of importance, you need these tools:
A smartphone for both talking and accessing the Internet and mobile apps
LinkedIn Sales Navigator, best used on a laptop
Sales intelligence tools that provide direct-dial phone numbers and email addresses
Email and voice mail configured properly with a complete signature and upbeat, credible greeting
CRM with integrated marketing automation for lead nurture
A content curation and scheduling tool such as Buffer
If this were about managing existing qualified sales pipeline, then the list would be slightly different and CRM would be higher on the priority list. But this is about personal ownership of the vitally important task of consistently creating your own top-of-funnel sales pipeline.
Intelligent phone activity is the most powerful form of engagement because so many salespeople have stopped dialing and have become passive screen jockeys. It’s not a good state of affairs in many sales organizations—spreadsheet jockey sales managers and screen jockey social sellers doing way too much research and digital connection and way too little actual H2H engagement.
If you want to set yourself apart today and drive the best results, combine social and the phone. It is also important to use technology wisely. These are some of the best specialist tools to support research, persuasion, data-driven email tracking, and lead nurturing:
Social prospecting: Examples include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, KiteDesk, Nimble, Contactually, and Altify.
Sales intelligence for direct phone numbers and trigger events: Examples include LinkedIn Sales Navigator, DiscoverOrg, Rain-King, ZoomInfo, Data.com, Inside View, Avention, Seamless.ai, and Lusha.
Artificial intelligence: Examples include Salesforce Einstein, Seamless.ai, Complexica, Troops.ai, x.ai, Nudge.ai, Node.io, and Slackbot. It’s possible to automatically sync data to Salesforce and have a virtual sales assistant schedule meetings for you.
Automation and sales productivity: Examples include Outreach. io, Groove, DataFox, Engagio, and SalesLoft, with outbound orchestration tools to keep SDR teams engaged.
Email tracking and CRM sync: Examples include Cirrus Insight, YesWare, ToutApp, and ZynBit. See when prospects open your email, how many times, and on what device, which is lethal for the perfectly timed follow-up or customer service issue. There is a correlation and causation between opens and acceleration of stages in the funnel.
Predictive modeling and sales intel: Examples include Lattice Engines, Node.io, InsideSales.com, and Salesforce Einstein. These identify which leads are most likely to convert and produce revenue based on AI that algorithmically crunches big data.
Internal social collaboration: The best examples are Salesforce Chatter and Slack, which is the granddaddy of internal social productivity tools. I recommend you all use these and endeavor to move as many of your internal interactions as possible off email threads.
The most important thing about tools is that you must invest the time and energy in learning how to use them effectively. It amazes me that so many salespeople have virtually no understanding of how to construct a basic Boolean search to find the person or thing they are looking for. Equally, how can anyone call themselves a professional and not know how to configure their basic settings within LinkedIn? If a builder arrived to renovate your house and fumbled around setting up their workbench or power tools, you would begin to lose confidence. You would be terribly concerned if your doctor could not use the machine that measures your blood pressure or if your dentist was unable to adjust the chair in which you were sitting.
Be a professional by knowing your subject and knowing the tools of the trade. Configure all of them in a way that makes your brand shine. It staggers me when I call someone and their voice mail just goes “beep” or a telco-bot says, “Your message will be converted from voice to text.” No confirmation I’ve called the right number, no voice of the actual person I want to talk to, and no professional image! When I tell people about my experience, they usually say, “Yeah, I can’t seem to figure out how to change that.” If that’s you, you deserve to be fired! Imagine a carpenter saying, “Yeah, that bench I built for you could have been better but I can’t seem to figure out how to sharpen my tools.”
Just as annoying is when you want to call someone and they’re not in your contacts, so you open a recent email from them thinking that their signature panel will have their contact details with a mobile phone number and . . . nothing, just their first name! Every email system should be set up with your email signature. By all means remove the signature block to reduce scrolling for people when sending a thread, but include your contact details as the default to make it easy for people to contact your cell or look at your LinkedIn profile. Your tailored LinkedIn URL should also be in your email signature and, unless you’re a megastar, your phone number should be in your LinkedIn profile. You are in sales, so make it easy for people to contact you!
Every salesperson should know their way around their CRM and marketing automation platform. How can you possibly be productive if you don’t embrace the tools provided for you at great expense by your employer? How will you inspire confidence from those above you if your data is always wrong? If you want your employer to invest in Sales Navigator, earn it by becoming masterful in the use of all the other tools they’ve already provided.
This leads to the next point, which is to use and contribute to your company’s knowledge management systems. Marketing invests a huge amount of time, money, and resources in seeking to assist sales. Learn where to find content and contribute to the pool of case studies and market intelligence.
Nurturing the Machine That Feeds You Leads
Referrals are king, but no salesperson can make their numbers on referrals alone. Nor can you exceed sales target without the assistance of others. The passive-aggressive war between sales and marketing must end, and marketing departments must own sales targets for lower-value commodities within the portfolio. As a seller, you can lead the way by relinquishing the busy fool activities of selling cheap commodity offerings in highly competitive sectors. You can move to value with elevated relationships and a strong narrative and agenda. You can engineer value and own the relationship rather than merely winning a sale.
I’ve sat with salespeople and helped them do the math for their year ahead. Divide the sales target by the current average deal size, then divide that by 11 months (allow 1 month for annual vacation and public holidays). I see people go white with fear. Are there even enough hours in the day to do that many deals? The solution is: 1) proactively drive larger opportunities strategically by engaging early with senior people, based on trigger events or insights, and help them build a business case for change; and 2) work with “the machine” of your own organization to feed your pipeline with opportunities that can help you transact to keep the wolf from the door.
The elements of the machine are:
Marketing generated leads from content publishing, websites, events, and alliances
Sales development reps (SDRs) who are doing outbound like you but typically at a lower level in the target accounts and smaller-size prospects; they are sometimes called market development reps (MDRs) or inside sales reps (ISRs) and may seek to move leads from marketing qualified (MQL) to sales qualified (SQL)
A formalized referral program with rewards for staff and customers
Outsourced lead-generation and appointment-setting companies
Your senior company executives or board members who have quality relationships and who can introduce you
Partners and alliances who can provide you with referrals
Create a business plan for your own success. Analyze your territory, the suitability and market fit for what you sell, the competition, the resources available to you, and then create a plan in partnership with your sales manager and marketing team. Work the numbers backwards, from your sales target to average deal size to number of deals required to number of selling days available. This tells you how many deals you need to do in a week or month to achieve target. Then calculate the number of qualified pipeline opportunities required based on your proven conversation rate. You will need somewhere between two and five times the sales target in qualified opportunities. Then calculate how much prospecting activity is required per available day to achieve this in terms of emails sent, phone calls made and live conversations had with real decision-makers. Now you know how much prospecting activity you must do every day. If the number does not scare you, you botched the calculations.
Make sure the SDRs or outsourced lead-generation company can actually carry the conversation for proactive outbound by sitting with them and making calls together. Help them with their own COMBO strategy for blends that elevate the conversation and improve response rates so they can provide better quality leads for you and others.
What results should SDRs be generating? Luckily, we have some decent surveys to rely on, thanks to Trish Bertuzzi and The Bridge Group. These are the averages, blended across SaaS sales development teams, surveyed in 2016:
Twenty-one meetings per month
Sixty-two percent conversion rate from meeting-to-opportunity
Thirteen opportunities per month9
How many social and email outreaches plus phone calls are needed to achieve these results? Again, do the math for your own business based on your own stats, and then discuss with your SDR team to agree on what’s needed and what’s acceptable to drive the necessary results. No one understands the metrics and disciplined process of predictable prospecting better than Marylou Tyler (co-author of the books Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting), and you should follow her online. If your in-house SDR team cannot deliver the results, then consider outsourcing to meeting setters such as Frontline Selling. There are many others in your part of the world who will deploy software and sellers on your behalf to land qualified meetings. They are so worth it and they also bring powerful databases!
The leader in my opinion is ConnectAndSell, which operates at 1,000 dials a day and provides on-demand outbound with transparency. Every dial, conversation, and outcome is available online for inspection and listening. Chris Beall is a visionary for outsourced sales and deploys a team that sets 30 solid meetings a day for a client while also closing deals. The team uses four tools: ConnectAndSell, email, LinkedIn, and ZoomInfo. They embrace COMBO principles and underpin the activity with a research group. Can you see why you must become masterful yourself or face becoming redundant?
Let marketing know what resources and support you need to be successful, what events you need to attend, and what content will best attract early-stage leads. Be the fulcrum for sales and marketing actually working well together; treasure their MQL leads, and obsessively use the CRM and marketing automation platform. Sirius Decisions published research stating that salespeople speak with less than 9 percent of MQLs. This means that 91 percent of the marketing budget literally goes to waste. Not because the MQLs are bad but because they don’t answer the phone or email in the limited number of attempts made by salespeople. I can’t imagine giving up on trying to reach a legitimate MQL. Be the one to ferociously follow up and close the loop with marketing in the CRM.
The most fundamental marketing automation play for pipeline creation is web-to-lead programs based upon early funnel content initiatives. This is where sellers can play a role in working with their marketing teams to identify the topics that will attract the right kind of leads. The foundational element is incredibly difficult to create—content publishing. You should be researching your potential buyers and customers to identify the hot issues, so create a list of content topics for marketing to work with.
Truly appreciate those who can create high-value articles, papers, videos, and other content with which marketing teams can attract and nurture leads to keep your prospects swimming around the boat. Every business needs a platform that brings marketing, sales, service, support, and stakeholder engagement together. This is because customer experience (CX) is the single biggest point of differentiation, and it should be targeted as early in the buyer’s journey as possible.
A lead called within five minutes of requesting information is over 10 times more likely to answer and 4 times more likely to qualify.10 I once downloaded a state of sales report from the Salesforce website as part of my research for being a keynote speaker at one of their events. I was called within the hour, and they did it well—no hard sell. They simply asked what my interest was in the report and if there was anything else they could help me with. I am now in their sales and marketing database and being profiled for future contact as appropriate. Salesforce drinks their own champagne when it comes to sales and marketing automation.
The point here is that everything must work together: sales and marketing, insight and value, old-school content and new-school channels, humans and machines, and—dare I say it again—social and the phone.
The most important questions that marketers must ask when seeking to create high-quality sales pipeline are:
What trigger events occur in the customer’s world to start them on their buying journey?
What do my buyers look for online before they know to look for me?
Where do they go online to be educated about their problems and the opportunities?
These questions are important because they can create “blue ocean” leads, where buyers are motivated by their problems or opportunities but they are early in their journeys and you have little competition. “Red ocean” is where the competition is abundant like a dozen piranhas in a goldfish bowl. “Blue ocean” strategy requires you to identify topics for articles, papers, videos, and other content that your marketing team can create to attract leads. Reflect all of this in your own publishing within your LinkedIn profile, and be an industry thought leader. Have someone in marketing be your editor to make sure your content shines.
Also work with your sales operations team so they can help you with optimizing the way you use CRM and marketing automation for lead nurturing. Focus strongly on role-based trigger events from their social monitoring tools to go beyond what you are personally doing with Google Alerts, Twitter, and Sales Navigator. Remember, the most powerful trigger event for anyone in sales is when a buyer role changes in target organizations. Picture the scenario when your senior contact leaves and goes to another company:
She can bring you into the new company where she now works, and she will have been hired there to effect change. You’re in as a trusted adviser on the ground floor.
Your current customer will hire a new person to back-fill, and you could influence who secures the role or you can win the heart and mind of the new person when they start. This is an opportunity to upsell and provide greater value.
The new person joining your customer will have left their previous role at another company, which could be another opportunity for you at their old company.
Trigger events create a domino effect of opportunities. What you are looking for is what you see in life, and you must be wired to see opportunities every time there are role changes, mergers or acquisitions, changes in regulations or compliance obligations, economic shifts, changes in technology, and shifts in disruptive competition. Start to see the world through your customer’s eyes, and use technology and the other resources in your own company to feed you with leads.
Account-Based Everything
The concept of account-based marketing is actually not new, but some nuances of it are. Key target accounts or named accounts have been a priority for sellers for ages, especially in the enterprise. You pick up your bag and get your book of business, let’s say 25 to 50 accounts in a vertical like financial services, and off you go to make magic happen. The expectation has been: “We point you at the accounts, and you go close deals—easy, just like shelling peanuts.”
Making your sales target is quite a mission impossible if you get a bad book or too few accounts to qualify the buying window. I had this happen when I worked at SAP back in 2000 when they gave the “white space” of the construction industry vertical. I had to fire my boss since he would not give me additional viable territory to sell into. I think all sellers should get a mix of 50 enterprise and 50 mid-market accounts and work to stack-rank prioritize the top 50 that they work on each quarter. This is what’s best for the business. Skilled hunters can qualify-out quickly and pursue the opportunities in the pipe that are 1) suited for early strategic influence based upon the right triggers or 2) closest to decision, with the strongest compelling reason and alignment with value and ability to win.
Peter Strokhorb has coined the catchy term “smarketing,” which is where sales and marketing extend an olive branch and declare a detente. They work together for account-based engagement incorporating marketing, sales development, and account management executives. They all hunt on a named set of accounts—that’s the simplicity. Companies like Engagio automate this expertly as does Salesforce. Marketing can do targeted advertising to very specific accounts or types of accounts. SDRs can target only the right ideal client profiles (ICPs), and account executives can automate drip campaigns and follow-up. SalesLoft Cadence shows another great example of setting a finite set of targets and going after them.
What’s remarkable about account-based engagement is that it’s really just target prioritization. Can everything be automated and account-based? Probably not, as you would be lowering your hit rate if the prospect can sense you’ve created a template. I’d advocate for software like Outbound.io or SalesLoft, or even tasks in Google calendar or Salesforce, so you can keep track of where you are. It takes anywhere from 5 to 12 touches to unlock a meeting, and we know average salespeople typically follow up only twice, and when they follow up it’s alarmingly single threaded. You must know who’s who in the zoo, identified by advanced searches within Sales Navigator. Select only 50 names per quarter, find six to eight stakeholders per account (two must be C-level), and fire COMBOs on all of them five to eight times with phone, voice mail, email, text, LinkedIn, Twitter DM, likes, Comments, and shares.
The entire goal of account-based engagement is accurate pre-KPI forecasting. You can actually tell your boss: “Acme Corp is not looking at our minority report interface solution until quarter 3.” This is game-changing when you take the attitude that you will be maximally rejected at machine-gun speed. Prospect every lead, situation, and opportunity. Get it embedded at your core that your entire goal is to hear the sublime word “no.” If you push hard enough, dominate, and cut through the space at that level, some “yeses” will unlock. It’s just like shaking the proverbial tree. You will not only rattle the low-hanging fruit, but also some prize apples peacefully sitting out of reach of predators in high branches waving in the breeze.
The book Predictable Revenue was written by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler and is a case study about the early scaling period at Salesforce. It articulates the problem that start-up revenues, nowadays based on recurring as-a-service models, are fundamentally tough. This is because when you sell “curve jumping, paradigm shifting technology,”11 it’s difficult to get traction. Sales cycles go long, pilots are inevitable, and strategic partnerships ultimately abound. But securing a beachhead to land and expand in time leads to a more mature, predictable company.
The theory in Predictable Revenue is a Henry Ford model for selling. Break your sales team into SDRs for landing meetings and AEs for closing. There’s even a market development rep (MDR) concept of a rep that solely converts inbound interest as rapidly as possible, based on studies that show rapid response time creates exponential success at converting warm inbound leads to real opportunities.
Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision-makers than firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37 percent of companies respond to queries within an hour.12
The problem is that junior sellers get fobbed off or delegated down, so the idea that appointment setters, who have never been on a phone or written unique value propositions, will land meetings with C-level decision-makers is high risk. The best person to carry the conversation with a customer C-level executive is an experienced salesperson or executive. No amount of training can create genuine gravitas. What I’ve seen more often is scorched earth with prospects writing back asking to be taken off your list. There are only so many accounts one can close, so your team has to be smarter.
Predictable Revenue talks about sending targeted B2B emails in massive blasts, and then, based on that format, a certain amount of prospects ask for meetings. But anyone who responds to a mass template email is probably a talker or blocker. The Challenger Sale breaks this down into talkers, blockers, and mobilizers, and it rightly points out that the folks most willing to talk to you in the account are often powerless. Skeptical C-level buyers are hard to coax out of the corner office, but they are the most powerful and rewarding to pursue.
So how do you do it right? Part of the answer is to hire fewer people, but they should be more senior and experienced—respect your elders. Go out and find folks who can create and deliver the value narrative. Position less-experienced sellers to run full sales cycles on lower-value transactional sales. SaaS is a great example because you can break the market into SMB and mid-market, more forgiving segments in which to hunt. I would rather hire fewer salespeople who carry higher quotas, deliver better results, and backchannel like crazy than hire 10 salespeople and cut 7. This is a Draconian yet surprisingly common corporate practice.
The argument of Predictable Revenue is that sales is like sport. Why bog down a home-run hitter with the pitching tasks? Just have that guy slug it out. The problem is this isn’t actually Moneyball. Sales is the transference of belief and creation of value and trust between two people. You are the first impression of your company’s brand. This is why you see the owner of the restaurant on the Champs-Élysées standing out front after 30 years and 3 Michelin stars. Because he is the opening; he is the entrance point to the experience. He’s there throughout the meal. He remembers you when you bring in the grandkids.
As the trusted adviser, you are metaphorically the shepherd—perhaps even the ship’s captain who will navigate the coming storm of self-disruption. Customers are looking for a single point of contact and continuity as a lifeline. This is why some successful start-ups are contrarian in their stance on role multitasking: The account executive lands the meeting, runs a full cycle, negotiates, closes, and then even upsells and cross-sells with some technical help from an account team. This is a move away from growth hacking, account-based marketing, and predictable revenue’s “sales machines.” Buyers are peripatetic and fickle, and the modern sales cycle looks more like a Jackson Pollack than a paint-by-numbers. It’s very difficult to follow and needs intrepid sales detective skills like those of John Dougan.
Congratulations on reading to here. Now it’s time to buckle up as we explore exactly how to execute your COMBO Prospecting strategies.