Dear starving sales peeps and marketing macaroons,

You clicked on this post because you’re dying of boredom and thirsting to know… What could an Intergalactic War Lord, the swag-a-docious Honey Badger (who still doesn’t care btw) and a Resume Hoarding Tech Giant possibly have in common?

[Editors Note: Scroll t0 the bottom if you’d like to skip the preamble and get down to bullet points and brass tacks]

Welp— I am going to tell you, but before we fire up the starship and blow your toupee back, I have a couple of questions of my own:

  1. Sales Peeps- Despite spending 90% of your waking day prospecting, why is your meeting calendar STILL emptier than the 49ers parking lot circa 2015? 
  2. Marketing Friends- Why aren’t your marketing efforts feeding your sales peeps?

It’s hard out there my dears. Some of ya’ll would probably crawl through a storm drain primed with steaming sewage to secure a list of pre-qualified leads. Why? Generating enough leads to hit your audacious revenue goals is a most likely RED-LETTERED priority for you.

Good news— Within this post, you may find the missing intel required to right your ship and assuage furrowed eyebrows at your next board meeting.

Let me set the stage…

To understand why your hot leads remain sparse, you MUST start by putting yourself in both the minds and the inundated inboxes of the people you are ruthlessly email blasting and ask yourself…

“Do I enjoy being solicited, disrupted and badgered by hundreds of tactless advertisers during my RIDICULOUSLY busy day?”

HELL NO.

 

“Do I feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of marketing emails, Facebook ads, mobile pop-ups that make it damn near impossible to browse on my smartphone and wade through the pool of digital sales puke that prevents you from getting things done.”

YUP. During EVERY Frick’n weekday that ends with “Y”.

Yesterday, I cooked up the email below and sent to my Sales Team following an invite-only Social Selling Conference at the Linkedin headquarters in downtown SF.

Off we go…

“You may have noticed that I exited today’s All-Hands early.

Reason being, I committed to the Linkedin Social Social Selling conference over a month ago, met with our main contacts and returned an hour ago. With Q1 coming to a close and all of us chomping at the bit, I put a high premium on this lead-gen focused event.

Linkedin’s new office is on 2nd and Howard. Great space. Next time you are in the Pacific Heights Room (SF office) at Growmobile SF, you can see Linked’s new building if you look south-east.

It’s the big black one stamped with their logo and I am fairly certain that Darth Vader built the place (looks that way at least).

85% of you will not read this email all the way through. It’s long. I get it.

However, carving out a few minutes now, could save you some serious time and reduce prospecting pain on the backend.

I’ve looped in our AMs, Bryan J and Brian J to shed light on how we sales-peeps spend the bulk of our days and because you receive regular solicitations from vendors. Your input is appreciated.

BDR Team- Take what you like and leave what you don’t.

Let’s start with facts, because the facts set the foundation for why these tips work. Please note: Some of these tips are theoretical, but most are tested and proven and all are labeled accordingly.

Facts-

  1. 90% of decision makers say that they never respond to cold outreach
  2. 5.4 people are now involved in the average B2B buying decision
  3. 75% of B2B buyers now use social media to be more informed about vendors
  4. Prospects are 5x more likely to engage with sales people via warm intro than cold outreach

Tips-

  1. Your Summary: Get rid of all of your job-seeking oriented jargon in your linkedin summary. Replace with copywriting that will attract our target market (NOT RECRUITERS) and add a call to action (what do you want your visitors to do next). Checkout my linkedin summary when you have a moment. Not perfect, but you’ll see what I mean. After all, your profile is essentially an advertisement that your prospect will survey following your initial outreach. Makes sense to post the Growmobile promo video and Grow Features/Benefits at the forefront of your ad (tested successfully). 
  2. Your Job Title: Change your job title from “Salesly McSalejerk Job” or whatever to “Mobile Ad Specialist” in my case. If you sound like a pushey sales-puke, people will not want to connect with you for fear of you badgering and puking on them. Think about it, when you try to connect with a prospect on Linkednin, they look at… A. Your Picture (better be quality), B. Your Name, C. Your Job Title >>> Next step, add a feature or benefit that speaks to your prospects pain points or needs (see above).
  3. Leverage 1st Connections: Use your common 1st connections to preface an important outreach attempt to a 2nd or 3rd or non-connection on linkedin. “Sara, how’s things. I was just about to reach out to Joe Schmoe at Businessly and noticed you are a 1st connection. Do you mind making an intro? I have already prewritten the message to save you time. Feel free to modify as you see fit and let me know if this is possible. Thanks, B” (tested successfully).
  4. Thoughtful Messaging – Don’t Be A Badger: Look at your target’s interests and Alma mater then create customized headline and content like “Go Bruins” or “30 Year aged whiskeys” – “Hey Prospect, I noticed that you have ‘whiskey tasting’ as one of your interests. Venue X is having a whiskey tasting this Thursday. Any interest in joining? Seems like we may have some mutual business interests worth exploring. If not, no big deal. There will be rare whiskies and good times of the plenty. Any interest? Bryce (tested by panelist/not tested by me).
  5. Tagging Not Bragging- Tag prospects in articles that relate to their interests (not yours) and repost them. Follow up with an email explaining why you tagged and reposted (tested by panelist/not tested by me).
  6. Be A Groupie- Join groups where your prospects live on linkedin. This allows you to message them without using up your inmails (linkedin messages to non-connections). Interact with group posts in a geniune (non-salesy) fashion as well (tested).
  7. Unhostile Takeover- Become an admin of the groups to which your prospects belong and thoughtfully solicit business by posting quality industry content by Growmobile 20% of the time max, other non-Grow content (80/20) rule (tested successfully) and provide value to your prospects 100% OF THE TIME. To not abuse this privilege and of course… DON’T BE A BAGDER!

Closing Thoughts-

  1. If 90% of decision makers will not respond to our outreach and there are typically 3 people involved on the buying side (5.4 is not our average), we may want to prioritize low to mid level manager targeting. Needs to be tested and tracked. 
  2. Personally, I feel that my privacy is violated when I receive sales calls and find it overly invasive. For this reason, you’ve probably heard sales authorities say “THE PHONE IS DEAD”. Solicitations are at an all time high. We are constantly interrupted by people trying to sell us stuff. I think sales emails are becoming the new un-welcomed/annoying phone call if you will. Ad Fatigue is a real thing. Calls and Emails are attempts at soliciting business (ad units).
  3. For this reason- personalized messages, warm intros, indirect intros (common linkedin groups) are the way of the future. More time consuming, but less common and thereby more effective ultimately.
  4. To reiterate, I realize that Lead Gen 2.0 is a a lot of work on the front end.

We’ve all had our noses to the grindstone and have been relentlessly prospecting. Thought I’d share some industry facts and insights from the Linked Conference and my personal experience.

Please weigh in and share what’s working and what is not working for you.

Thanks,

Bryce”

I hope that you got a lot of this linkedin post friendo. Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

Your linkedin buddy,

Bryce Anderson