In today’s issue, I’ll share 3 triggers I use every day to start conversations with prospects, based on their online activity. If you can identify and use these triggers in your outreach, you’ll start a lot more conversations, and you’ll book more meetings as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Trigger 1: LinkedIn post like/comments

This is the ultimate low-hanging fruit.

Your first step is to understand what kind of problems your prospects are trying to solve, and to identify influencers/thought leaders who speak about these problems on a regular basis.

When you have identified these influencers, you can follow them, and create a routine of checking their posts regularly, so you can select the ones that are useful to your prospects. Here’s an example.

When you find someone who fits with your ICP, you can export them with Amplemarket (or manually), and use the post as an excuse for reaching out.

Example:

“Mary, saw you also liked Kyle’s post about the new SDR/AE hybrid role.

Opposed to seeing how I helped 10 SDRs at Amplemarket do just that?”

Trigger 2: Champion left company

This trigger is my favorite because I can use it to contact two prospects, and potentially create two separate opportunities. It works when you’re working on a deal, and your champion leaves the company.

You can contact them to ask about their new gig with the following message:

“Josh, saw you recently left the company, how’s the new gig? Would it be a bad idea to hop on a quick call so you can tell me more about your goals?”

You can also contact the ATL (Above The Line) of the old opportunity and ask them about the project:

“Mary, heard that Josh is on his way out. Should we chat about the SDR training project he was working on, or is it leaving with Josh too?”

Trigger 3: New job

This trigger works well with people you already know. It can be from previous collaborations, lost opportunities, or active opportunities. I recommend avoiding lengthy emails, and simply asking them about the new job.

That’s how I start most of my conversations with people I didn’t speak to for a while:

“Harsh, how’s the new gig?”

I found that most people will reply, and they’ll immediately jump in to a business conversation if the timing is good (just like Aaron did below):

In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact system I follow to create a Reciprocity Resource. If you follow these steps, you’ll tease the curiosity of your prospects, and you’ll start more conversations. More conversations = more meetings.

The biggest challenge salespeople face with prospecting is the lack of replies. They send tons of emails, LinkedIn messages, or calls, but all they hear is crickets. That’s because they focus on booking a meeting, instead of starting a conversation.

Humans are curious by nature. If you use this natural trait in your prospecting, you’ll start a lot more conversations.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Find a publicly available marketing resource

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I always insist on finding your prospects’ problems in details, before starting your prospecting sequence. When this is done, you can start looking for a publicly available marketing resource to solve a part of this problem.

For example, a lot of VP of Sales spend way too much time navigating complex sales dashboards, which prevents them from making simple decisions, because of the information overload.

This article would be a good resource to help them focus on a simple set of metrics, and solve a part of their analysis paralysis.

Now, go to the resource center on the website of your company, and find a few articles, blog posts, or webinars that could help your prospects solve a concrete issue they have. If you can’t find it on your website, go check your direct competitors’ for inspiration.

Step 2: Convert the resource into a checklist

Most marketing resources on your website are useful for prospects who are further down the marketing funnel. They help them validate their problems, but they can’t be used in this format to tease prospects’ curiosity.

That’s why sharing case studies, white papers, and eBooks makes no sense when prospecting.

Instead, pick a resource, and convert it into a checklist. For example, the article I mentioned earlier could be converted in a checklist with the 5 metrics, how to calculate them, and a benchmark for each metric.

If you need a more detailed guide to creating a reciprocity resource, you can check this one I wrote a few months ago.

Step 3: Tease the resource

Now that you have a checklist ready to use, you need to get it in the hands of your prospects. You could be tempted to send it right away in your prospecting message, but this would prevent you from starting a lot of conversations. If you share it right away, prospects won’t need to reply to get access to it. Instead, use a template like this one:

“FirstName, curious to know how you’re avoiding spending too much time staring at an overly complex sales dashboard.

If you’re interested, I can share a short checklist on 5 prospecting metrics you can’t afford to ignore.

Sounds interesting?”

And these are the 3 steps you can follow to create a perfect Reciprocity Resource. With this resource, you’ll get a lot more interest from your prospects (if you know their problems well), and your reply rate will shoot up.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share a 3-step system you can follow to optimize your LinkedIn profile if you work in sales. Most salespeople I see on LinkedIn have optimized their LinkedIn profiles to find a new job, not to help prospects start conversations with them.

If your LinkedIn profile is filed with details about your sales achievements, how many times you went to President’s Club, and how you managed to extract money from difficult clients, then you’ll have a hard time booking meetings on LinkedIn.

Here’s how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, step-by-step:

Step 1: Update your banner

See the banner below:

In today’s issue, I’ll share a hidden LinkedIn feature you can use to book more meetings. I recently polled my LinkedIn audience, and 39% of the poll participants shared they weren’t getting replies because prospects didn’t pay attention to their outreach:

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share why LinkedIn InMails are terrible for prospecting, and what you can use instead. Prospecting on LinkedIn is the easiest way to book meetings (if your prospects are active on it), but you have to know which tool to use, and how to be creative to stand out.

Let’s dive in:

Why InMails suck

When you google InMails, the first sponsored result looks like this:

In today’s issue, I’ll share 5 prospecting metrics you can’t afford to ignore when you’re working in sales. Most salespeople I work with have a hard time understanding what metric to focus on. They either track too many, or too few.

I’ll share 5 metrics I’m obsessed with, and why you should keep a close eye on them. No matter your job, individual contributor, or manager, these metrics will help you understand your prospecting performance.

Let’s dive in:

Prospects added to sequence

Prospecting is about starting conversations with as many prospects as possible. Some of these conversations will end up in meetings, and some of these meetings will turn into opportunities (and closed won deals). That’s why you need to keep a close eye on the amount of prospects you add to your sequence.

To be clear, adding prospects to a sequence doesn’t just mean building a lead list. You have to add them to the first step of your sequence, and actually contact them. If you don’t know that number, you can check my Sales Process Calculator.

LinkedIn connection acceptance rate

This metric is so important if you’re using LinkedIn for prospecting. InMails tend to perform poorly, which is why I recommend sending connection requests to prospects, instead of directly pitching by InMail.

Connection requests are the first step to a successful LinkedIn sequence. But if most of them aren’t accepted, your sequence performance will be drastically reduced. If you need resources to write great connection requests, you can find my free guide here.

Here’s how to calculate it: (#connection requests accepted/#connection requests sent)

Reply rate

By far the most important leading indicator of success. Getting replies is the goal of a prospecting sequence, because it’s the start of a conversation with a prospect. If you can get prospects interested enough to reply, you’ve done the hardest part of the job.

Here are some resources to help you get more replies:

• A Tactical Guide to Booking Meetings on LinkedIn
• Email subject lines: The last guide you’ll ever need
• My 4-step framework to consistently get a 38% reply rate

Here’s how to calculate it:(#replies/#prospects added to sequence)

Meeting booked rate

This metric is often the obsession of sales development leaders. It’s a great indicator of performance, but it’s a lagging indicator. You can’t act much on it if you don’t track the 3 other metrics I mentioned above.

I recommend fixing this metric only when you have fixed the 3 previous ones. Here’s a resource to help you do that.

Here’s how to calculate it: (#meetings booked/#prospects who replied)

Show-up rate

Finally, this metric is often underestimated. I recently had a reader sharing that he had a 30% show-up rate, meaning that most of his prospecting efforts ended up in prospects not even showing up to a meeting they had agreed to.

If you can book meetings but prospects decide not to show up, it means you’re either booking meetings with the wrong people, or you’re so pushy that people prefer saying yes than having you objection handle them. Here’s a resource to help you navigate a conversation and turn it into a meeting.

Here’s how to calculate it: (#meetings actually held/#meetings booked)

And these are the 5 prospecting metrics I’m obsessed with. By tracking them on a regular basis, I have a good idea of the performance of my prospecting sequences, and what I need to optimize.

If you need help with strategies to fix any of these metrics, hit me up on LinkedIn and I’ll send a few resources your way.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 5 types of prospecting you can use every day to book more meetings. Salespeople often confuse prospecting with cold outreach. They believe they should only book meetings with total strangers, who have never heard of them or their solution. Focusing on cold outreach only is a recipe for disaster in 2024.

That’s why you should mix different types of prospecting, so you don’t loose your motivation. If you can integrate these types of prospecting in your daily Power Hour, you’ll start more conversations, book more meetings, and build a healthier pipeline as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Inbound prospecting

Inbound prospecting is the easiest way to book meetings. You receive a request for a demo or a call from a prospect, and your job is to be quick enough to book the meeting. It’s the type of meeting we all love booking, but here are few challenges:

• You can’t control how many inbound leads you receive
• When they come inbound, they are typically already speaking with other vendors
• Most of inbound leads do not make decisions, and sales processes tend to be longer

However, if you can get some inbound leads on a regular basis, you’ll book a good amount of meetings, and you may reach your sales targets on these meetings alone (but the flow of leads could stop at any time).

Discovery prospecting

Discovery prospecting is a great type of prospecting when you’re opening a new market, or when you don’t have a product-market fit. Your goal when using this kind of prospecting is to get the prospects to join an interview so you can learn more about their problems.

It works so well because it helps salespeople go from pitching their solution to asking questions about the prospect. Here’s a simple tactic you can use to do some discovery prospecting.

Nearbound prospecting

Nearbound prospecting is all about using your network to get some introductions. It’s incredibly powerful because prospects tend to be more receptive to introductions from people they know, compared to purely cold outbound. Door-to-door salespeople use these tactics all the time, and there’s a lot we can learn from them.

For example, you can create a list of existing customers and ask for introductions to people they know. You can also create a list of inactive customers, opportunities that didn’t close, or partners and ask for introductions.

Trigger-based prospecting

This is my favorite type of prospecting. Trigger-based prospecting uses the digital footprint of your prospects to start a conversation with them. For example, if a prospect engages with a post about a problem they have on LinkedIn, you can use their engagement as an excuse to start a conversation with them.

I wrote a full guide to doing exactly that on LinkedIn.

Account-based prospecting

Finally, a lot of Enterprise SDRs are hired to do some Account-based prospecting. With this type of prospecting, you have to book meetings with prospects in designated accounts. This can be extremely challenging because some designated accounts may not have a problem you can help them solve.

However, I found this tactic to be really helpful when focusing on opening a key account.

And these are 5 types of prospecting you can use to book meetings. The secret relies on mixing them to stay motivated. If you have a target of 20 meetings per month, having zero conversations because everyone ignores your cold outreach is hard to sustain. Find some low-hanging fruits, get some easy meetings in, and everything will be easier.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share 4 simple steps you can follow to keep prospecting as a busy Account Executive. If you’re in sales, no matter your job title, you have to prospect. Your job description may lead you to think otherwise, but you’re never done prospecting as long as you stay in sales.

The good news is that, if you do it right, prospecting isn’t something particularly challenging or time-consuming. You just have to follow a precise system.

Here it is, step-by-step:

Step 1: Put a recurring blocker

This step is 80% of your success in prospecting. Audit your day to find the time when you’re the most productive. For example, I am always more productive in the mornings, from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM.

When you have determined your most productive time, find a 30 – 60 min slot when you don’t have meetings and set a recurring blocker. This blocker allows you to protect your time from colleagues, managers, and team meetings that prevent you from doing your job (most of team meetings do).

By having a recurring blocker, your colleagues will know your prospecting rituals, and no one will be able to book any time in your calendar during this block. This is how mine looks like:

In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact system you can follow if you want to poach your competitor’s audience. These steps will help you use the marketing efforts of your competitors to find qualified prospects, and reach out to them.

If you follow these steps, you’ll find an (almost) endless source of leads, you’ll learn how to start conversations with them, and you’ll book more meetings.

Let’s dive in:

Step 1: List your competitors

If you don’t have a list of competitors, this step will be a good opportunity to build one. You can go on G2 and list the competitors in your space. Ideally, focus on the ones that have important marketing budgets, as they are more likely to invest in LinkedIn ads (which we will use as a source of leads).

You can also create a second tier in your list, with partners and companies that aren’t directly competing with you, but serving the same types of customers. For example, I could include Amplemarket, as we are partners, and we serve the same types of customers, without ever competing. I can also list all their competitors to get even more lead sources.

Step 2: Go to their company page

Now that you have a list of competitors and partners, you can go to their LinkedIn page and do a quick audit. If the company page is only filled with company announcements, or updates about their new offices, then they are not a fit.

But if the company has posts that get a good engagement (check Amplemarket’s LinkedIn pages for some fun content), or sponsored posts, then you have a good lead source.

Step 3: Find their organic posts and/or ads

You have a shortlist of great companies, now is the time to go and find some leads. Scroll through the organic posts and check if the people who liked these posts fit with your ICP. For example, ZoomInfo recently shared a “Day in the life of an SDR” video on their LinkedIn page, and it collected over 100 reactions and comments. A quick scan of the post reactions and I can already see a few prospects fitting with my ICP.

But the most powerful option is to find the Ads posts from this company. Just go to the Posts section and filter by “Ads”. You’ll then see the ads this company has been running.

For example, this ad about making it to president club without cold calling is a great magnet for prospects who fit with my ICP.

In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact steps I follow to personalize my outreach. These steps will help you understand where you can find personalization elements, how to link them to your prospects, and how to turn them into triggers.

If you follow these steps, you’ll get more replies, and you’ll book more meetings as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Step 1: Know your prospects’ problems

Before diving into personalizing your outreach, make sure you know why you’re reaching out. If you’re prospecting with the goal of selling something, you won’t get much replies. Instead, focus on understanding the type of companies you’d like to contact (Ideal Customer Companies), as well as the type of individual inside of these companies (Ideal Customer Title). I recommend building an ICP Matrix to do so: