Cold calling is one of the most feared events in a salesperson’s day, and even in their career. The chance of connecting is low, and the opportunity for rejection is high.
Why is that? After studying more than 10,000 sales calls ourselves, we noticed that most salespeople make the call about them – ‘Let me explain what we do to you.’ ‘Let’s meet so I can show you how our product/service works.’ Or the ubiquitous, ‘Use this link and get 15 minutes on my calendar so we can see if I’m a good fit.’
The reason messages like that meet with such a high rejection rate is that they’re all about the salesperson, rather than the prospect they’re supposed to be helping. We sat down with Jason Bay, an expert in the art of prospect-focused outreach, to learn how he systemizes prospecting in a way that’s all about helping the prospect rather than the salesperson.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: Before reaching out, you need to be clear about the value you’re offering in your product/service and in your outreach. Value is NOT a demo of your slide deck or product. Instead, this is something that your prospects can take with them and use regardless if they work with you or not.
How do we find that kind of information and turn it into value? If your company is generating content, you can share it and phrase it as ‘The Top 5 Ways Companies Like Yours Are Owning Hybrid Selling.’
If you don’t have those kinds of resources prepped and ready to go, you can go to third party insights. Many companies are developing content on the state of your prospects’ industries.
Being able to say, ‘I spoke with a dozen folks with your job title over the last few months, and one thing we’re sharing with them are the insights we’re seeing that’s allowing their competitors to capture more market share in a post-pandemic world,’ could make the difference between getting the meeting or not.
R – Repeatable: In order to create prospect-focused conversations ahead of time, Jason recommends first thinking about ‘What are they going to take away from this conversation?’ Distill that into two or three bullet points. Next, build that into your call to action in emails and voicemails. The titles of your emails and their content can then be phrased ‘Would sharing how companies like yours are solving XYZ be helpful?’ You can then state a reason why they may want to meet with you.
All of your omni-channel outreach to prospects can be focused on those bullet points and the value they provide to prospects like the one you’re reaching out to.
I – Improvable: To ensure your talk tracks and prospect-focused value remain relevant, Jason recommends looking at your reply rate on a weekly basis from folks who are engaging with your messaging and want to know more. Is you notice a certain bullet point/talking track is getting more results, shorten your outreach cycle by frontloading that point into your cadenced outreach to new prospects.
M – Measurable: How many people reply to your messaging is one thing Jason recommends measuring, but perhaps more important are the number of meetings you’re landing.
Without knowing what your conversion rate currently is with your prospects, it will be difficult to determine if a prospect-centered outreach campaign was an improvement – so make sure you’re tracking your conversion now even if only for a short period of time.
Once a baseline has been set, Jason recommends measuring response rates on a weekly basis and only after getting a new baseline should you change anything and make those changes small so you’ll know what part of the update created different (and hopefully better!) results.