Sin #2: Focusing on your offering only

When you start a new job as an SDR or as an AE, you’re trained on your offering, its features, benefits, USPs, why it’s better than your competition, and so on.

You’re almost never trained on the problems your offering is solving for your customers, however. And this is the explanation behind all the crappy cold outreach prospects receive.

When you focus on your product or solution, you bore prospects out and they end up ignoring you.

Your prospects have been hired to do a job, and there’s almost always a gap between their goals and reality. Reducing this gap is what they care about. They couldn’t care less about what you are selling, but they’ll care about solving their problems.

What to do instead?

Leading with the problems your prospects may be facing is how you improve your reply rate.

Think about how infomercials are focusing on problems before proposing a solution. There’s always a black and white part where the narrator focuses on how the current product leads to terrible results.

Your goal is to create the same effect by leading with typical problems your prospects may be facing. Google “{Prospect} problems 2022” to find typical issues your prospects are trying to solve.

(Note: You can also check The Cold Message System if you want to discover the messages that get me a 38% reply rate and a 27% meeting rate.)

Sin #3: Inserting a meeting link too early

Finally, a cardinal sin I see too often is the premature use of meeting links in cold outreach.

Your job is to start conversations, not to book meetings at all cost. A meeting link (think Calendly, Chili Piper), is a productivity tool. Something you use to facilitate the process of booking a meeting when both parties agreed to it.

When you use a meeting link as a call-to-action, you’re asking too much from your prospects too early. It kills your chances of starting a conversation.

What to do instead?

Ditch the meeting link in your cold outreach messages. You can use the following framework to:

1. Explain why you’re reaching out

2. Show prospects you understand their problems

3. Tease a potential resource

4. Ask to reply to access the resource

When you get a reply, navigate the conversation with a reciprocity resource and only share your meeting link when the prospect agreed to a meeting.

In conclusion

Getting replies from cold outbound messaging is harder than ever. You need to optimize the content of your messages, as well as the format. It’s all about your prospects and their problems, and never about your offering.

So keep in mind:

• Write short messages

• Focus on prospects problems

• Ditch the meeting link

I hope this helps!

This first step allows me to create momentum as each follow-up is done quickly, which gets me motivated (I love having the feeling of achieving something).

Daily effort: 5 minutes

(Quick hack: I love drinking coffee in the morning, so I created a habit of preparing one, putting it on the next to my computer, and drinking it only when my follow-ups are done. As I like my coffee hot, I’m extra motivated to get this task out of the way!)

Step 2: Find 5 new prospects

Now that all my follow-ups are done, I’m ready to find new prospects to contact.

I have calculated that contacting 5 new prospects per day would allow me to book 2 outbound meetings a week, which is what I need to reach my targets.

I start by finding prospects who fit with my ICP in the people who visited my profile, my recent followers, or people who commented/reacted on my posts.

It’s sometimes enough, but in most cases, I cannot find 5 people. When that happens, I look for influential people who speak to my ICP, and I locate interesting prospects in the comments/reaction section of their posts.

I did a detailed article about this tactic a few weeks ago.

Daily effort: 10 minutes

Step 3: Add them to my sequence

Now that I have a list of potential prospects, I add them to my sequence.

Adding them means sending a first touchpoint, based on our connection level on LinkedIn (1st or 2nd), and using a trigger to justify my outreach.

If we aren’t connected, I’ll drop a connection request mentioning why I’m reaching out. If we are connected, I’ll drop a prospecting video or a LinkedIn voice note.

In terms of message content, I typically use the following structure:

• Trigger: A problem-oriented piece of information – John, noticed you also liked Charlotte’s post about boring hybrid events.

• Question: A question related to the trigger – What do you think of the solution she proposed?

Daily effort: 10 minutes

And these are the 3 steps I used to structure my daily prospecting block. I’ve been running it for almost 2 years, and I get a consistent, 38% reply rate and 11% to 27% meeting rate (it varies based on the time of the year).

TL;DR:

• Step 1: Start with follow-ups

• Step 2: Find 5 new prospects

• Step 3: Add them to my sequence

Hope this helps!

Thibaut

(Note: If you’re interested in running these numbers, go check my Sales Process Calculator).

Step 3: Divide it by the number of days remaining to work

Having a clear activity target is good, but knowing exactly how many prospects to contact daily is better.

The third step is quite simple; find out how many working days remain in the quarter and divide the number in step 2 by that number. Make sure to deduct days off and public holidays.

For example, at the time of writing, there are 58 working days remaining. I have planned 3 weeks of holiday until the end of the year (including Christmas), which gives me 43 working days in Q4 (58 – 15). With the example in step 2, I would need to contact 20 prospects every day (855/43 = 19,9).

Step 4: Protect your schedule

Dedicating some time to prospecting can be challenging. Between internal meetings, customer calls, and incessant notifications, you waste a ton of time and energy on secondary tasks.

I recommend protecting your schedule with time blocks. Find the time of the day when you’re the most productive, and put a 30 – 60 min blocker. Make sure this blocker is at the same time every day so your colleagues and manager know you won’t reply during that time.

Ideally, your blocker should be at the beginning of your work day, around lunch time, or towards the end of the day.

Here’s an example:

Trait #2: They prospect every day

Prospecting isn’t super glamorous. It’s a lot of repetitive tasks, yet it’s the lifeblood of every sales organization. If you can’t create enough activities, you won’t book meetings, and you’ll lose motivation.

Filling your time blocks with a constant flow of prospecting activities is how you avoid that problem. I recommend dividing your monthly goals into daily activity to get more control over your outcomes.

For example, if you’ve identified that you need to create 600 touchpoints (calls, emails, LinkedIn messages, etc.) per month, you need to divide it by the number of working days (in general 20 per month). In our example, you’ll need to create 30 (600/20) activities per day.

It’s a lot simpler to deliver 30 touchpoints per day every day than skipping days and having to play catch up.

Trait #3: They focus on the basics

There are a few basics when it comes to prospecting; knowing your Ideal Customer Profile, understanding their problems, and using them in your messaging.

A lot of SDRs I meet have no clue who their ICP are, what problems they are trying to solve, and how to communicate them properly. They end up pitching about their solutions, focusing on features, and getting no responses.

I recommend SDRs to build and ICP matrix (the type of company, and the job title), list problems and symptoms for each type of prospect, and use them heavily in their messaging.

Open your prospecting sequences and check if there’s any mention of what your solution does. If it’s the case, you’re most likely focusing on features, and killing your reply rates as a result.

(Note: Go check The Cold Message System if you need to create messages with 38% reply rates).

Trait #4: They document their journey

For a few years now, more and more SDRs have been documenting their journeys on LinkedIn. Sales leaders are realizing that employing reps with an audience is a great way to build brand awareness, start more conversations with prospects, and book more meetings.

Think about 5 sales influencers you’ve recently heard of. Chances are most of them are/were SDRs. I’ve interviewed many of them and they all attributed building a personal brand as the key to their success.

Documenting your journey as an SDR is great way to build an audience. Quite simply, it helps people who are a few months behind in their careers, and they engage with your content. As a result, it gives more visibility to your profile, and gets decision-makers familiar with you.

As an example, my brother has been working as an SDR for 3 months, documenting his journey every day, and he’s already receiving requests to coach SDRs by people who follow him.

Trait #5: They keep experimenting new tactics

Finally, successful SDRs understand that the tactics that work now, likely won’t work in the future. As they get discovered, they quickly get adopted, and prospects become numb to them.

A good way to avoid losing your edge is to create an experimentation system for your sequences. I recommend following this structure:

• Define the scope of your experiment
• Define one metric that you want to influence with your experiment (e.g. connection request acceptance rate)
• Define your assumptions for the experiment
• Define success thresholds
• Run your experiment in 2 weeks sprints

Here’s an example of my Prospecting Experiment Canva: