As we approach the end of the year, I’ve been reviewing what has worked and what hasn’t in my outbound prospecting.

In 2022, I have experimented with 10 prospecting plays, and here’s a deep dive into 3 of them that performed better than the rest, with a 60%+ meeting rate.

Play 1: The Roundtable

The Roundtable is a play where you organize an online event with a limited number of Above The Line buyers. Your goal is to gather insights on what matters to them.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Plan a 30-minute online event

   • 30 min online event on Zoom

   • 5 to 10 participants

   • VPs/C-level only

   • Short survey sent before the event

      

2. Build a sequence to invite prospects to the event

   • Invite existing customers first

   • Then ongoing opportunities

   • Then lost opportunities

   • Then prospects

    

3. Create FOMO

   • Namedrop participants’ names as they accept

   • First few participants will be the toughest to get, but it will become easier as you name drop

    

4. Send a pre-event survey

   • A few days before the event, send a short survey to the participants:

     • What happened in H1?

     • What are you challenges/expectations for H2?

     • What are you key initiatives for the rest of the year?

    

5. Run the event

   • Present the results of the survey and act as an event facilitator.

     • Ask participants to develop their replies

     • Write down challenges they have

     • Ask them how they plan on fixing these challenges

    

6. Follow-up with participants who have a problem you can help with

   • Drop a thank you note to all participants after the event

   • Tease a potential solution to those who shared a problem you can help with

Results: 42% reply rate, 60% meeting rate

Play 2: The Graph

With The Graph, your goal is to create a visual representation of a challenge your prospects are familiar with, and include it in your outbound messages.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Identify a key problem of your prospect

   • Think about a quantifiable problem ($/€, %, absolute numbers) that your solution is impacting

    

2. Create a visual representation of that problem

   • Now that you have a problem, think about a graphical representation to this problem

   • Line charts, pie charts, column charts are great visual representation to use

   • Insert some example data to represent the problem

   • Create the chart

    

3. Add an explanation

   • Now that you have a chart, add an explanation of the problem and why it’s a problem

   • You can then do a screen capture of the graph

    

4. Insert in your sequence

   • Introduce your graph with a text/LinkedIn voicenote or video

   • Here’s a LinkedIn voicenote I used for that play:

     John, many sales leaders I’m speaking with have sales forecasts looking like this thing below (insert graph of typical u-shaped forecast). Tons of opps in early stage, tons of opps in late stage, nothing in between.

     If you’re into it, we’re gathering other sales leaders to discuss what they can do to prevent this.

     Want to learn more?

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share my 3 steps to fixing an end-of-year pipeline.

If you can replicate this process, you’re going to have a clear understanding of your real pipeline, and you’ll stop working on opportunities that have no chance of closing.

Unfortunately, most reps waste a good chunk of their time working on opportunities that will never close, resulting in missed targets.

Building a pipeline that closes is about disqualifying hard

Without a simple qualification process, a few challenges arise:

Challenge 1: You don’t know if you are spending time on the right opportunities.

Challenge 2: You spend a ton of time and effort on deals that may never close.

Challenge 3: Your pipeline looks good, but your results aren’t good enough.

You can overcome all of these challenges by answering the three following questions.

Question 1: What is the quantified cause

When you start working with a prospect towards closing a deal, you need to understand the reason why they are speaking with you, and get an idea of that number.

It’s often referred as their “Why” and it’s an important element to find out if you should invest more time working with this prospect, or disqualify them immediately.

For example, I work with VPs of Sales who have sales targets for 2023. They speak with me because they have a specific goal to reach, and my job is to uncover that number.

Example: CFO has a 2023 gross margin target of 80%.

Question 2: What is the quantified problem

After uncovering the quantified cause, you need to find out the size of your prospect’s problem. You can do it in many ways, but I love to use a simple tool from ProActive Selling to do that. It’s called Time Traveling.

Instead of asking a question like “What are your goals?”, attach the goals to a point in the future, like “As you look in 2023, where do you think you’ll stand compared to your goal?”.

This formula helps your prospects travel to that point in time, and it increases your chances of finding a gap.

Example: CFO is expecting to only make a gross margin of 65%.

With that example, the CFO has a gap of 15 percentage points. If the company is expecting to sell €100M next year, the quantified problem is €15M.

Question 3: What is the quantified solution

Now that you have calculated the problem, you can start speaking about the price of your solution.

In our CFO example, the problem is €15M. If you can make an impact and bring their expected gross margin from 65% to 70%, you are solving a €5M problem. If your pricing is €500.000, then the investment is a no brainer for your prospect.

And this is how you can fix your end-of-year pipeline. Go to your opportunity overview, and find out if there’s:

• A quantified cause

• A quantified problem

• A quantified solution

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

PS: The tool I just mentioned is called Q3, and it’s part of the ProActive Selling methodology. If your team is having difficulties moving deals forward, then just book a call with me and we’ll chat about what we can do to help.

Most sales reps fail to generate expansion opportunities. I personally failed to do it for years, for the following reasons:

• I felt uncomfortable asking for more money when I had already closed a deal

• I was only incentivized on new business

• I didn’t know how to approach existing customers without sounding pushy

Sounds familiar? I have something for you.

Below are 5 steps you can follow to build an expansion sequence from scratch:

Step 1: Generate a list of existing and past customers

A good prospecting sequence always starts with prospects. In some cases, finding relevant prospects is challenging, but not there.

Start by listing all customers who are currently in contract with you. They will be your Tier 1.

Then go to all customers who are not in active collaboration with you, but who were in the past. They are your Tier 2.

Finally, list all the prospects who were in conversation with you (open opportunities), but didn’t do business with you. They are your Tier 3.

You should have an interesting list to reach out, with different triggers for contacting them.

Step 2: Build the structure of your sequence

Having an action plan for each Tier is critical. This will help you maximize your reply rate, and know when to stop if you don’t get a reply.

Using 3 touchpoints over email and LinkedIn is preferable because it helps you preserve your relationship, without being too pushy. Remember, you already had a conversation with all these prospects, so you don’t want to annoy them with an intense outbound sequence.

Here’s an sequence structure example I run: