In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact system I’m using to restart my prospecting as I’m back from the holiday break. If you can replicate these steps, you’ll already be ahead of your fellow sales reps, as they are emerging from the holiday season without a plan.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Define your ICP and their problems

Start by building your ICP matrix. The ICP matrix is composed of your Ideal Customer Company (ICC) in columns, and your Ideal Customer Title (ICT) in rows. Your ICC is the type of company you’d like to go after, and the ICT is the type of job title you’d like to go for.

When your ICP matrix is done, focus on understanding the problems of your prospects. If you need to go further, I recommend checking the Cold Message System.

Step 2: Find where they hang out

Humans are social creatures, and they typically hang out with other humans who have the same interests. Nowadays, they mostly do it online, on social networks.

For most salespeople, LinkedIn is a great place to find prospects, and identify triggers to help them start conversations.

I recommend following these 4 steps to identify where your prospects hang out, and create personalized messages at scale.

Step 3: Enrich data

Now that you know where to find your prospects, you need to find the correct emails and phone numbers of your prospects, on top of their LinkedIn profiles. You can use the Kaspr extension to do so (+ you’ll get 25 free mobile credits when you sign up with my link).

Step 4: Build a problem centric sequence

You now have all the information you need to start reaching out to your prospects. Before doing so, you need to build a sequence to maximize your reply rate. I did a quick video to help you create a sequence from scratch, with ChatGPT.

When the sequence is ready, you’ll need to use messages that stand out from the hundreds of outbound touchpoints your prospects have to deal with. Here’s a collection of top-performing templates.

Step 5: Restart your daily prospecting routine

All these steps will result in nothing if you don’t create a daily prospecting habit. This step is by far the most challenging, since humans have a hard time building and keeping healthy habits.

I recommend doing the following:

• Step 1: Identify the time when you’re the most productive
• Step 2: Put a recurring blocker of 60 minutes
• Step 3: Follow the steps in this short guide
• Step 4: Repeat until it becomes a habit (at least 21 consecutive days)

You can also try my New Outreach System if you need a more in-depth guide.

And these are the 5 steps I am currently following to restart my prospecting for 2024. Here’s a quick video example if you want to learn more.

 If you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be in good position to grab your prospects’ attention, engage them in conversations, and book meetings with people who are trying to solve a problem you can help with.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my sales resolutions for 2024. With this last newsletter of the year, I’ll share what happened in 2023, what are the lessons I learned, and what I’m planning to do in 2024 to reach these goals.

Let’s dive in:

Resolution #1: Grow my online course sales to $75.000

2023 was a pivotal year for my family. We moved from Berlin to South of France with my wife and my son, and I wanted to find more time to focus on what I love doing; take care of my family and grow a business where I can choose what I do with my time, without having to worry (too much) about money.

Doing so means having options, and online courses are a good way to create value for my customers, while decoupling this value from my time.

I started selling online courses in October 2021, so I have over two years of historical data to forecast 2024. In 2022, I did over $29.000 in online courses, in 2023, over $47.400, and I’m planning to reach $75.000+ in 2024.

Here’s how I’ll do it:

• Keep offering The New Outreach System, The AI Outreach System, The Cold Message System to people who are looking for a specific prospecting outcome (grab these courses for 50% off with code “NEWYEAR” on checkout)
• Launch The Prospecting Engine to reliably equip salespeople with the knowledge and systems necessary to start conversations, book meetings, and generate a healthy pipeline in 2024 and beyond.
• Offer different support options for people who buy my courses (1:1 coaching, peer-to-peer community, monthly office hours)

I’m pretty excited for 2024, seeing the growth in online courses I saw between 2022 and 2023.

Resolution #2: Support my students with a community

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may remember my community, The T-shaped Sales Community. It started as a Discord group, before being rebranded Selling Advantage, only to loose momentum and stop after about a year.

At the time, I didn’t have the systems and the knowledge to run a community that would be useful to salespeople.

But in 2024, being able to exchange with peers on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to booking meetings is essential. I want my courses to produce tangible results for everyone who purchases them, and a lot of my customers need more than just videos to apply their learnings.

This community will be different from the previous one. It will be focused on getting students who purchased my courses a place where they can interact with other students, with monthly group office hours with me (and the recordings if they can’t make it).

If you’re intrigued by it, then join the waitlist of The Prospecting Engine. The Community and the course will go live on the 31st of January 2024.

Resolution #3: Close highly profitable sponsoring deals to help my students

In summer 2023, I started experimenting with sponsoring options for people and businesses who wanted to get their products in front of my 41K+ audience. I initially offered sponsored LinkedIn posts and sponsored newsletters.

This was a simple way to monetize my content, but I’m now working on longer, more profitable sponsoring deals with people and business who can create immense value for my audience and customers.

A good example of that is a sponsoring campaign including multiple sponsored LinkedIn posts (still tactic with a specific outcome), multiple newsletter sponsoring, and a co-branded lead magnet.

If you’re interested in discussing these options, go check my sponsoring page.

And these are my 3 sales resolutions for 2024. I’m really excited to keep building Tactical Selling, and I want to wish you a Happy New Year.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my top 3 prospecting tactics of 2023. I tried over 23 different outbound messages and tactics in 2023, and the following ones got me the most replies and meetings.

Let’s dive in.

Tactic 1: Direct Approach

The Direct Approach can be used as a LinkedIn connection request, a direct message, or even an email. I personally booked 12 meetings with this framework, when I was looking for sponsors for my content.

Here’s how it is structured:

• Trigger: {First Name} mentioned that your worked together on {Common Work}.
• Opposed: Would you be opposed to {desired outcome}?

Example:

• Trigger: Joe, Morgan mentioned that you worked together on a campaign.
• Opposed: Would you be opposed to putting Kaspr in front of my 40k+ audience?

This framework is effective because it begins with a personalized element (the trigger), piques the curiosity of the prospect by presenting an opportunity to solve a problem, and encourages a response if the prospect is interested.

Tactic 2: Do the maths

Do The Maths is an amazing framework, inspired by a post from Kaitlin Conner.

Here’s how it is structured:

• Trigger: {First Name}, noticed {quantified public information}.
• Quick pitch: We help {similar businesses} reduce {key metric}.
• Calculation: With a typical {cost of key metric}, this would mean going from {current state to better state}, resulting in {quantified savings}.
• CTA: Worth a chat?

Example:

• Trigger: Mary, noticed you have over 50 open positions on your job portal.
• Quick pitch: We help tech scale ups reduce their new employee churn from 30% to 10% or less.
• Calculation: With a typical cost of mis-hire around $30,000 per employee, this would mean going from 15 mis-hires to 5, resulting in $300,000 saved.
• CTA: Worth a chat?

This framework works so well because it shows your prospect that you have done your homework, and you have a quantified idea of their problems. If they are trying to solve this problem, your message will stand out.

Tactic 3: PS

PS is a framework I heard about in this post from Charlotte Johnson.

Here’s how it’s structured:

• Question: {First Name}, curious to know how you’re preventing {problem with negative consequence}.
• Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a {resource to solve negative consequence}.
• CTA: Sounds interesting?
• PS: Saw you’re {personal information on LinkedIn profile}.

Example:

• Question: Eric, curious to know how you’re preventing your new hires from taking too much time to go through their onboarding.
• Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a short, 3-step playbook on fixing your onboarding process.
• CTA: Sounds interesting?
• PS: Saw you’re also a sommelier. Big fan of wines from Languedoc-Roussillon myself. Ever tasted one?

This frameworks is really powerful because you can mention something personal in the PS, without having to worry if it is relevant with the problem of your prospect. It humanizes your outreach, and makes you stand out.

These are my top 3 outbound prospecting tactics of 2023. They contributed to the following outbound prospecting results in 2023:

• Prospects contacted: 633
• Prospects replied: 294 (46.45% reply rate)
• Meetings booked: 66 (22.45% meeting rate)
• Opportunities generated: 34 (51.52% opportunity rate)

If you’re interested in discovering the exact system I used to get these results, then join over 130 salespeople in the waitlist of my 2024 course, The Prospecting Engine.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 steps you can follow if you’re trying to build a solid lead list for 2024. If you follow these steps, you’ll find the right type of prospects, enrich their profile with all the data you need to contact them, and set yourself for success in 2024.

First, let me introduce you to a tool called the ICP matrix (you can find it the New Outreach System):

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share exactly how I reached at 57.5% win rate in 2023, so you can get some inspiration and increase your win rate as 2023 is coming to an end. If you follow these steps, you’ll start more conversations, turn them into meetings, and create momentum to close your deals faster.

Let’s dive in:

Part 1: Refined my triggers

In 2023, you need 3 things to get replies from cold outreach: creativity, relevance, and timing. In the past, creativity and relevance were enough, but nowadays, you need to reach out to a prospect right when you find a trigger.

Here are two examples of triggers I used to start conversations:

Example 1: Product announcement

Back in October, I received a product announcement by email from Mixmax. The announcement was about an AI composer they had just released. Here’s the message I sent and the reply I got:

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share a simple system you can use to book meetings when you’re too busy to prospect. If you can follow these steps, you’ll become less dependent on inbound leads and SDR-sourced opportunities, and you’ll set yourself for success in 2024 and beyond.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: If you’re too busy to prospect, you’re doing something wrong

When I became a manager (I was also carrying my own quota), I thought I was done prospecting for good. It was a mistake. I ended up without pipeline and missed my personal targets 2 quarters in a row.

As prospects have more and more tools to protect them from spammy salespeople, it’s getting harder than ever to start conversations with them. You need more skills, more experience, and better systems to book meetings. And relying on SDRs who often have limited sales experience is a good way to loose control over your pipeline.

If you’re in sales and you don’t prospect, you’re doing something wrong.

Step 2: Block some time in your calendar, every day

Knowing that you need to prospect isn’t enough. You need a system.

The first step to building a prospecting system is to protect your time with a recurring prospecting block. It can be as short as 30 minutes per day, or as long as needed to reach your targets.

For example, I prospect from 08:30 AM to 09:00 AM every morning. No one can book me during this time, it’s my sacred prospecting ritual. Doing it daily helps me stay in touch with my market and keep conversations flowing without delay.

Step 3: Start with follow-ups

Let’s be honest. Prospecting is no fun. It’s the one thing I dread the most when waking up, yet it’s the best thing I can do for the health of my business.

A good way to get over the initial reluctance to prospect is to start with follow-ups. For example, I start my prospecting block by opening my prospecting tracker, finding prospects I need to follow-up with, and getting rid of the list of follow-up tasks I have for the day.

This helps create momentum, because it’s so much easier than looking for prospects, finding a good trigger, and crafting a solid outbound message.

Step 4: Find 5 prospects

With your follow-ups done, you are now warmed up to work on the most time-intensive part of the prospecting process. I personally go after 5 prospects, because I found that it is enough for me to book 2-3 outbound meetings a week, but you can calculate that number with my Sales Process Calculator.

There are countless ways of finding prospects. My favorite is using prospect’s LinkedIn activity as a trigger.

Step 5: Contact them

This part of the process is like filling up the tank of your car. By adding new prospects to your sequence daily, you make sure you have enough fuel to keep your prospecting engine running.

You need to make sure your first outbound message is creative, contextual, and personalized. Here’s a resource to help you do just that.

And these are 5 steps to booking meetings when you’re too busy to prospect. I’m currently working on a whole new prospecting course for 2024, and I’m going to build it in public. If you’re intrigued, go check it out and join the waitlist here.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same, and what you can do about it. If you can accept these changes, forget scale, and focus on starting quality conversations, then you’ll book more meetings, and create more opportunities as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Reason #1: Email Service Providers are cracking down on mass emails

If you opened LinkedIn in the last few days, you may have seen an email sent from Outreach to their customers. In short, it shared new limitations from Outreach to protect the deliverability of emails, imposed by restrictions from Google and Yahoo.

These new limitations mean that if more than 0.3% of your emails are marked as spam, then all emails sent from your domain will be blocked by Google and Yahoo.

This is excellent news. It will translate into less spam for prospects, and leave more space to good emails from salespeople who take the time to do their research, and focus on starting conversations.

What you can do about it:

• Rebuild your Outreach System with a focus on getting replies
• Focus on prospects’ problems and use them in your messages
• Double down on LinkedIn prospecting and cold calling (but stay focused on quality)

You can use my New Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #2: AI is making salespeople exponentially efficient

AI (and specifically ChatGPT) have brought massive changes to the world of sales. Instead of replacing salespeople, AI allows them to become more efficient. For example, you can use AI to:

• Search for a specific trigger in a 10-K report
• Find personalization elements in a LinkedIn profile
• Build cold outreach messages from top-performing templates

These tasks are common for salespeople, and they often take hours to perform. With AI, salespeople are able to do this in a few minutes, so they can focus on tasks that require them to be creative, or interact with customers.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with common AI use-cases for prospecting
• Work AI into your daily prospecting system
• Find out what not to do with AI

You can use my AI Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #3: Data is (almost always) freely available

This last point is the main reason outbound prospecting has changed forever. In the past, salespeople didn’t have access to much information about their prospects. They typically knew about their names, phones numbers, and emails.

Nowadays, you can find a ton of “digital footprint” online. You can go on LinkedIn, see what posts prospects reacted to, gather data on their companies, find out their company headcount, and countless other data points. You can then use this data as a triggers in your cold outreach.

Yet, most salespeople ignore these triggers and put prospects into cookie-cutter sequences. And this brought us to the situation we are in right now; prospects don’t reply anymore, and SDRs are being laid-off in droves.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with triggers you should use in your outreach
• Stop sending automated sequences
• Focus on starting conversations

I’m currently working on a course to help you book more meetings, and create opportunities from outbound in 2024. Join the waitlist if you want to learn more about it.

These are 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same. You can choose to ignore this and keep using the same old playbook, or you can adapt to the seismic shift we’re going through.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share why I built a Prospecting Template Assistant, and I’ll show you how I use it to make any top-performing email, connection request, or cold call script my own. If you can replicate this process, you’ll be able to turn any cold message example into a message you can use to book your meetings.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Download my Swipe File

If your LinkedIn feed looks like mine, you should see a ton of brilliant examples of cold emails, cold call scripts, and connection requests you can use for outbound prospecting, on a daily basis. However, applying these examples to what you sell can be challenging.

That’s why I have created a Prospecting Template Swipe File. It’s a collection of top-performing emails, messages, and cold call script templates. I update it every week with the examples I find on LinkedIn.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact 3 steps I follow to turn ChatGPT into my personal sales assistant. If you follow this system, you’ll stop using ChatGPT for futile use-cases, gain efficiency, and focus on standing out in the mailbox of your prospects (which is hard in 2023).

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Give ChatGPT custom instructions

A few months ago, ChatGPT introduced custom instructions. This feature is extremely useful for providing context to ChatGPT and training it to respond in a way that best suits you. By clicking on your name and selecting “Custom instructions,” you’ll access the following screen:

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share why you don’t need more than 7 fields in your CRM to get started with prospecting. A lot of salespeople I meet have analysis paralysis. They spend 80% of their effort evaluation tools, learning about new tactics, and mapping fields in their CRMs, and 20% of their effort on actually reaching out to prospects.

We have a problem with CRMs

CRMs were initially designed to help close deals. They allowed entire sales teams to work together, and capture data in one place (at least that was the goal).

However, selling is not as simple as it used to be. Between sales engagement tools, AI tools, and new prospecting channels emerging, sales teams have to rely on increasingly complex tech stacks that break all the time. Look at any sales organization and you will see:

• Reps wasting hours to keep CRMs up to date and organized
• Managers wasting hours telling reps to update them
• Executives wasting hours building reports

That’s why I recommend drastically simplifying CRMs, especially for beginners. If this resonates with you, here are the only seven fields you need to monitor in your CRM to get started:

Category 1: Information fields

These fields help you identify and contact prospects.

• Name: This one is pretty straightforward. Can be Full Name or split into First Name and Last Name.
• Job title: The job title is important to help you build your prospecting messages. If you reach out to different types of buyers (Below The Line and Above The Line), this will help you adapt your messages based on their problems.
• Email: Important to get it right. There are tons of different tools out there, but you’ll need a combination of 2 or 3 to get almost all emails right.
• LinkedIn profile URL: This one is critical. I recommend using it as your Unique Identifier, as each LinkedIn profile is unique (and easy to find). It’s also a great source of data if you want to find triggers.
• Phone number: If you’re cold calling, this one is important too. I typically don’t track it as I’m not using cold calls to book meetings, but this can help if your prospects are not hanging much on LinkedIn.

These information fields are really basic and easy to find. With these fields, you can start prospecting, run multi-channel outreach sequences, and initiate conversations. You won’t need to spend much time filling in each field, allowing you to focus on prospecting rather than managing your CRM.

Category 2: Progress fields

These fields help you keep track of your activity on each prospect.

• Stage: This field allows you to monitor each prospect’s status. You can track both your prospecting and opportunity stages in the same field. Alternatively, you can separate them into two fields: Prospecting Stage and Opportunity Stage. Here’s how I structure mine: