https://www.listennotes.com/e/46837109a9e94b1bb93b70cf370c54f8

Well, folks, welcome back to unfuck my startup. I'm Pete Crowley. I'm the head of growth here at rb2b. Adam is on an airplane right now coming back from our executive off-site but today we have a fantastic guest with us. I I really view him as, like, a true sales scientist. The way he breaks down everything, the way he looks at sales and marketing. he's built teams at Zoom Info Gong. He's trained over a thousand sales reps. He was the audience's favorite guest of 2024. We did not get more requests for a recording from a show than we did for Jason Bay last August. The show has changed a bit since Jason's been here, but he is back to take that crown again for 2025. We're so thrilled to be joined today by Jason Bay. Jason, welcome back to the show, my friend.

What's going on? Good to be here. I a lot of pressure I gotta live up to today, apparently, so thanks. For having me, I'm looking forward to it.

Someone was asking about the show today. I was like, actually, this should be an easy one. This guest just came with such a punch last time that I'm feeling, it takes all the pressure off me, but I hope that doesn't then put it back on you. So, Jason, since the last time you were here, we started doing a couple of audience segments. So audience, we're going to do the pitch slap section. If you are new here, audience, we have a, somebody from the audience come up every week and they pitch their company to all of you. The purpose of the pitch is the purpose of most pitches is to get a demo, to get some intrigue, to get some meetings on the calendar. Today we have Curtis Tribber. Curtis is going to pitch us supersend.io Curtis doesn't look like is here yet. if he's not here in one second. Or maybe Samantha. Samantha here from super send. If not, we will. Oh, Sam, you are here. Well, Sam. Okay, Curtis should be on. Let's give it another second. We'll do a little fill a blaster. Can we promote both Sam and, uh, and, uh, Curtis to, uh, to panelists, John. And folks, if you would like to pitch next week, if you would like to pitch the audience, email producer@rb2b.com, I'm dropping it into the chat right now. I'll look through everybody. What I go off of is just how much of a fit I think you will be to this audience. If someone's selling to, you know, a bunch of e-commerce businesses or whatever, construction contractors, yeah, it's just a disservice to everybody. So, Sam, or not Sam, Curtis, sitting in Sam's seat, I believe. Curtis, how you doing? Oh, can you hear us? Hold on. We're working on it. Let's see. You're muted now. And folks, I just dropped in the. Oh. I can't hear it. It says you're muted. No, muted now. It went like unmuted, then back muted. I wonder if I can like unmute you from here. I can't. There we go. Better? There we go.

Okay, cool.

There we go.

All right, we did it.

You're Curtis, right? You're not Sam.

I am Curtis. I am not Sam.

Okay, okay. Well, Curtis, welcome to the show. Sam was so kind to set this up and have you pitch. I'm going to drop the super set email or not email, URL. I just dropped it right into the someone said 20 seconds left. Thank you, Richard. I just dropped the super send URL right into the chat here. And then Sam has dropped in your calendar invite into here as well. So you're all ready to go. You can feel free to share your screen if you'd like. What we will do, we're gonna give you two minutes to pitch. and we'll run a poll about halfway through that says, would you buy, would you not buy? Of course, if you get over 60%, we're gonna send you this awesome hoodie and some good swag. At the end, too, we'll have people drop in demo. We'll basically try to book you a bunch of demos. A good pitch usually gets between one and two dozen demos. So just so you have a good gauge. But, Curtis, I will turn it over to you. Tell us about Super Send.

Yeah, thanks, Pete, for having me on. Huge fan of what you guys are doing, especially the product and not only the show here. It seems like I came on a good show also because Jason Bay is going to be talking. It sounds like kind of about a space that we're heavily involved in. So I think you matched that up perfect. I appreciate you having us on. Super Send, it's basically everything you'd love about cold outreach from the tools you already know and love combined into a single platform. So we help teams that are doing, we help teams that are trying to scale outbound across three specific channels, email, LinkedIn and Twitter. But the sauce there is we do it all in a single sequence. So rather than trying to duct tape a few different tools together to execute your email outbound or your LinkedIn outbound or your Twitter outbound with super send, you can do it all in a single sequence. and it keeps the outreach really consistent. So it looks like it's coming from me, Curtis Treiber, whether it's over email, Twitter, or LinkedIn. I'd say the things that make us a bit unique aside from the multi-channel sequence is, especially from a cold email perspective, I know Jason will probably be bringing up some key things to know about cold email. And I think a lot of people watching this show know the pitfalls, but We're a cold email platform that layered in these other channels. So what you can expect from us is things like warm-up, multi inbox rotation, all of those things that make cold email really, really scalable. And I think by having all of these channels in a single sequence, you not only lower the complexity for teams and users, but you also increase your ability to get replies. because you can hit people from multiple angles at scale in a single platform. So that's Super Send in a nutshell. I'd say for any customer or somebody that's interested in learning more about the tool, come and get us a demo and we also help you set everything up. So there's no weird trying to figure out inboxes and domains. We help all of our customers get everything from demo to first live campaign.

Beautiful. There was a question in here, how do you prevent LinkedIn blocking slash banning with automation? Do you guys, is there, do you just have like a really low threshold for how much automation you do daily or?

Yeah, so I think safety is obviously the biggest concern with LinkedIn because people's LinkedIn profiles are very valuable. So yes, we do have two things. One, obviously we're going to limit the number of connections to a really safe limit and likes and profile visits and those sort of things. But the other thing is, is we, every LinkedIn profile that we connect or that our users connect get their own dedicated mobile proxy. And so you essentially, as far as anybody else is concerned, it's just you in your house logging in on maybe your cell phone or your iPad sitting at your desk. And so we just make that to the people that look, it looks as if you're just in your house logging in on your iPad.

That'S beautiful. And you do the warm up and all of that, the inbox rotation, which as we all know is a huge part of email infrastructure these days.

So Curtis, I'd say sender profile rotation for us because you may want to rotate some LinkedIn profiles in there too.

There we go.

I like this changing of the nomenclature to a company that you're the changing of the market. So that's good stuff, man. I like that. Curtis, we're going to send you a swag box. We'll send one out to Sam as well. You guys have been fantastic. folks, audience, audience audience. pleaselease dro in the word demo if you would like a demo with Curtis. Sam has been so kind you'll see Sam Novac to drop in that calendar link. Look at that Three demos Come on, there'sta be more Le's girl's gotta be more There's gotta be more. Le's talking to all of you. There go. All right. Ah, yeah, Cartis, thank you so much for joining. Uh, love what you're doing and, uh,. Have a great day. Thank you.. All right. well, that's the pitch slap folks audience, if you would like to pitch next week email producer@rb2b.com and let's talk to Jason Bay folks, huh? Let's talk to Jason Bay. Jason, you put out a fantastic LinkedIn post maybe three weeks ago or so and you would stated a few things. You said, you know, the answer to your outbound problems is an AI, it's not more volume, it's not more relevance, It is your offer. And I could not agree with that more. This is something I tout all the time to people in our community and elsewhere. Can you explain why the offer is so critical, especially maybe if a buyer isn't actively shopping?

Absolutely, yeah. It's the thing that helps all of the messaging really punch through. And to give me a little more context, what I would love in the chat, can you let me know, what are you doing related to cold outreach? Are you a rep that's sending out cold outreach? are you making cold calls? Are you a sales leader? Are you a founder that's maybe doing some founder-led sales? Has a sales team? Drop it into the chat for me. I'd love a little bit of context on who you are so that I can customize this as much as possible. So the irony, if we think of a cold email for a second, the irony is that the thing you want the most is a prospect's time. You want to book a meeting, but it's the worst possible thing you could ask for. in an email. So statistically, we haven't even released this data yet, but Gong did a really big study for a cold email course that we're creating. They found that when you ask for a meeting, your reply rate goes down by 44%. Your reply rate goes down by 44%. So if you think about why that is, time and a demo of your solution is not valuable in and of itself. if a prospect like the people that dropped demo into the chat today, it sounds like you're probably actively looking for something, but statistically only 3% of your market is in active buying mode. The rest of the people might be experiencing a problem that your solution can help with, but they need to be nudged a little bit more in order to take a meeting with you. So the offer is a great way to get in touch with that 97% of people that are not actively looking for a solution like yours. So if I was to share my screen here, let me show you. a little visual that you can use to think of this. So, like I said, there on the right, asking for time reduces reply rates by 44%. A compelling offer will actually increase your reply rate by 28%. There's three types of offers. So what you can think about here to make this a little more tangible for yourself is that graph on the left where it says value and effort. That is the value to the buyer. the prospect and the effort that they have to take in order to engage with your email, your cold call, etc. Okay. So what that green line shows is that everything above the green line in the upper right quadrant there, once we hit something that is enough value for the buyer and the effort is kind of in that sweet spot of like it's not like a ton of effort. And if it is, it better be a ton of value. those three offers kind of fit into that sweet spot. So I'll go through those, Pete, and then we maybe open it up for questions if you want. So the easiest offer to implement right away is what I call the blind date. So a bunch of you guys had dropped in the fact that you're in SDR. I saw some account executives in there. Essentially what you're doing with a blind date is you're pitching the expertise of the person they would be meeting with. So I'll give you an example. I just wrapped up an engagement with a company that sells an automated welding solution. It is both hardware and software as a service. The SDRs would say things like this. Pete, I'm going to put you in touch with Adam. He's been an account executive with us for close to a decade, and he's worked with trailer hitch brands like X, Y, and Z. And what he's going to be able to talk about is how some of these welders are using automated welding to automate some of those really, really hard to automate parts. who, right? If you're selling cybersecurity as an account executive, you probably bring in someone that is a sales engineer, someone that has much more technical expertise than you. If you're setting meetings for a founder or if you're a founder doing this and you maybe need to talk about your experience, like sell your experience, what are they going to get from that meeting? Even if they decide not to actively go through a buying process with you. the second is one to many offers. So these are like industry reports, benchmarks, et cetera. These are really great in emails too. A one to many offer sounds something like this. I had an e-com client, sorry, they sold to e-com businesses. So they had their marketing department work with a third party and they mystery shopped 300 e-com companies and their whole thing was like outdoor brands. So it was like North Face was one of their clients, et cetera. So what they did is they mystery shopped and what they had this third party do was analyze the channels in which they do customer support, the average response time, et cetera. So they could reach out and say, Hey Pete, I was on the website. I'm reaching out because we actually mystery shopped you, North Face and Columbia, and we found that you have the longest response time to chat and email messages. You got a minute for me to share the reason why I decided to give you a call.

It's Jason.

So that's a really hard thing to say no to when you pick up the phone, right?

That's what I'm asking for the time. You're still asking for the time, but it's through this other mechanism that just creates a far more irresistible offer to at least take that call. It almost makes the call look like a gift. Exactly. Yes.

So you got to think about what is the thing that they would take away from that call with you? that would make it valuable even if they decide not to purchase your solution.

That is huge. That is huge right there. What are they going to get? How can you almost present as if they're gonna rip you off for your expertise in that 30 minutes in a way?

Exactly. And if you're thinking like, hey, we don't have a marketing asset like this, like ChatGPT, you can use deep research to help you gather and find a lot of these insights. So it can be industry reports, benchmarks, best practices, et cetera. and then last but not least is the one-to-one offer. So I'll use another example. We have another company that we work with that sells to also e-com companies, but what they do is a site audit. So they'll actually go through and load up something in the cart. They'll check to see if they get an automated message when you don't check out the cart, like a cart abandoned email. They'll go through and look for upsell opportunities, et cetera. And their offer is, you know, Pete, we did a full audit from start to finish, purchased the product through your website, and we noticed three things you're not doing right now that are affecting average order value. And again, that one-to-one offer could be a cybersecurity benchmark assessment against their top two competitors. I mean, there's just all kinds of stuff you can do one-to-one, but that is a custom offer just for that client, our prospective client. That's like an enterprise type of move there.

That'S what I wanted to ask. So that, that would be more of a, you know, if you have your list of a hundred hottest clients that you're like, we need to get these people. These are going to be the, you know, whether it's top enterprise, you're almost going ABM with them. That would be what that move is for. To basically have a super custom, just irresistible offer for that person.

Yep. So the other thing too, a one-to-one offer also could be like an executive dinner that you organize in a city where they can meet up with a lot of their peers. and get some insights. I mean, there's just all kinds of stuff that you can offer, but you got to think about what is the thing that we are giving to them and promising during the time that they're going to meet with us so that they will get value during that time.

We have a, so just to, let's contextualize this. You threw an example from the question. So Jeff says, how would you do that? for, say, a productivity software. We sell a reporting software to help PE funds collect data from their portcos.

So Jeff, my thinking would be if you sell reporting software to help PE funds collect data from their portcos, what data are they collecting and can you anonymize it and put it together in a really cool report? So I don't know, this could be average, I don't know much about that industry. It could be average profitability, average time to close a deal. How profitability has changed since COVID I mean, there's just all kinds of data points and reports that you could put together where you pull this data across your client base. And then what you could do from a marketing standpoint is you could interview half a dozen of them, right, and share some of the best practices, put that into a report that you go over in that first call or take snippets from that report and go over. So do you want to just go through and answer some of these? There's some good questions actually.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Guys, we're not going to be able to get to every single example just because, I mean, look, we're in the world of sales and marketing. Everything has to be contextualized with the market and the product and the audience that you're doing. But we'll rip through a few of these. Is there some examples that you see here that stick out to you, Jason?

Yeah, so Hoffa says, Katie, say more about dinner invites. How have you seen that work? Any tips? Yeah, we just did one actually in Austin back in February. So we set up like an exec dinner for sales leaders. So my advice would be do something that is unique. We actually did a top chef competition. Adam came to it. We had, I think a dozen and a half sales leaders and a couple of other people and we had four chefs that hosted like an Iron Chef style cooking competition. So that was pretty cool. Like if you can do an event or something that's a bit unique, and then center it around one of your clients, let's say that's well known or established or works for a well-known logo. That's like really, really good value. But what I would do is I would make it unique. I wouldn't just do like a fancy dinner. Like you don't have to spend as much money for these things as you think that you do if you, if you want to do it on a budget.

I like this, like, it's almost like interactive social proof is really what it is. It's like we have this guy who's going to be our guest, you know, or whatever, at this cooking event. He's a known customer. He's also also known in the market, and we're going to put these other people around them. If we're talking, if somebody in here is starting out, has a lower budget, do you have an example of how to kind of do that same type of social proof using a, using an existing high profile client that they can convey digitally somehow? Is there a, I mean, yeah, of course, case studies and the basics, but yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you could also do like a lunch and learn virtually and just give people like a $30 DoorDash type of thing or a $50 DoorDash, whatever you want to do. The topic and the speakers and the social proof is the most important thing. People are asking, so for those of you that sell services, I sell services, there are free audit. My best offer is an outbound performance audit. And basically the principle there is like, Hey, I'll benchmark your team's performance against top top of class sales brands like Shopify, Zoom, Gong, et cetera. I'll help you identify a couple areas where you're losing meetings and you'll walk away with a game plan to land more meetings and build more pipeline this quarter. So that's how I leverage it. Software development, if you sell that, an example of something you could do is, I think everyone wants to know about AI right now. You could take your existing clients and interview them or send out some sort of survey that says, Hey, across our 100 clients, Here are the ones that are using AI. Here's what they've replaced. There's so many interesting data points. The questions that you can answer through that content, think about the stuff that kind of fits into these four categories. What are the priorities of your buyer? So what are the OKRs, the objectives and key results that they're in charge of that they want to accomplish? What would go on a whiteboard if they had it right behind them? Two is current solutions. So how are they taking action on that right now? So if it's cybersecurity and they want to get more visibility into their manufacturing environment, maybe they're using spreadsheets and they have people manually go in there and do their thing. Third is what's the problem with that? The problem is that none of it's real time, right? All of the data that they're looking at is old that exposes them. They don't know if something was exposed between now and the last time that they did an audit. And number four is aspirations. so what do they ultimately want to accomplish? And what I always ask my clients, I ask this in sales calls too, is something along the lines of, let's say that you brought us in and you hired us to do a training with your, with your team, six to 12 months from now, if you were looking back and said, I'm so glad we brought an outbound squad. It had such a great ROI. What would have to happen in order for that to be true? And they'll give you all kinds of good stuff. So priorities, current solutions, problems, aspirations, that'll give you all of the messaging that you need to know in order to create a really great piece of content like this. But there's an endless amount of things. Those are the things that people want to get from an audit, what they want to get from a piece of content, et cetera.

Do I... Forrez just dropped in here, he said a why now. That's a huge component of an offer. And I think a common theme through all the offers that you've taken us through, Jason, whether it's the examples in here or the slide you were sharing before, is like, what are you giving? Right? It's like you need to give something before they're going to give something back. And since you are the vendor, you are the seller, it's your responsibility and like your duty essentially to be the giver or be the first one to extend something outwards. And that's just a commonality. I mean, to your point, when there's folks who are just like, Hey, I saw that RB2B does X. I'm talking about emails I get in my inbox. you know, would you mind sitting down for 15 minutes? Like, yeah, I kind of would. Like, I don't really know how this is going to help me. I'm not going to get anything out of this. Like, you might get something. Maybe I'll. I'll come across a good tool, but usually I find tools through. I have a need. I honestly ask Google Gemini, what's a good solution for this tool that helps me shop? And then I evaluate from there. No, that's my own personal thing. But just this whole idea of, like, yeah, I've really never seen a sales cycle work. at least not a modern one that doesn't have some extreme give at the, at the front end. So let's do, I think what we'll do, let's do our unfuck my startup section. So, audience, we're gonna call up somebody. We already have somebody for this week, but audience, if you would like to be on the unfuck my startup section next week, uh, we have Eric Sue. He's a SEO, I guess guru. He hosts a podcast with Neil Patel, CEO of Single Grain. Just to give you context, if you're struggling with that area, email producer@rb2b.com, we will pull you up. Today, we're going to bring up Louis N. Twistle. He's from getresponding.com Louis, are you here, my friend? Give us a little hand raise if you are. We'll promote you to panelist and that, oh my gosh, he's already here. And then what we're going to do, We're gonna share the screen. We'll give you a few minutes to like two minutes to tell us your problem and everything. And then we'll have Jason and myself if I have any good advice on how to help you out and get responding trending upwards again. So yeah, let's start that timer. Let's just do two minutes and then we'll kind of open up for discussion. So I'm also going to share my screen. I'm going to drop in getresponding.com, the URL for Lewis's website, right into the chat here. And I will share my screen very quickly, as I like to do here, because it's just easier for everybody. And while I'm sharing Lewis, where are you based?

There we go. I'm in the UK, so across the pond from most of you guys on the call today. But yeah, Pete, I really appreciate you. Having this call, I know a lot of people kind of pay a lot of money for this type of info. Really appreciate what you and Jason have been doing. So thank you, first of all. So a little bit of context as to what GetResponding is. We have built this business, it is my startup. We have specifically built Evie, which is an AI assistant. The best way of explaining what Evie does is she gets dropped into your business, works with your sales and marketing team to save them 20 hours every time you respond to an RFP, RFI, or tender. We have built this out of the pain point of me experiencing the traditional process, which typically looked like searching through past content, writing the responses out manually, loads of copy and pasting. Through this process, we've spoke to over 100 businesses. The average time frame to get to a first draft is a week. Complex deals can take a lot longer. With our platform, we can get businesses there in 90 seconds. EV can understand the ins and outs of your business and write a tailored first draft response to an RFP in literally 90 seconds, a couple of minutes. We have had some amazing feedback so far. We know there's a good market for this. A lot of businesses are taking off. One of them is YC funded as well. And the biggest problem we have currently isn't demos. We're getting a lot of demos in. Obviously, you would always love more, but it's converting the prospects from that initial demo to a one deal. We're a new startup. It's my first major business. We have just onboarded our first customer. I have two more looking to go live in the next quarter and would really appreciate some advice around what I can do to get clients from that first initial demo to a one deal.

So are you, is your issue right now the top of funnel? Like, you can't get, you're not finding enough people to talk to to actually get them into the pipeline. Or is it that, hey, we get a lot of people who have intrigue, but actually getting them to close and start using it is the issue, or is it both?

It's more so the latter. It's getting the close. So I have come from a delivery background. I spent the last 12 months in enterprise sales, but since building this business, it's all new to me. I'm learning from scratch, making the mistakes, learning as I go along. We've done a ton of changes and improvements which have helped me reduce that cycle and make more progress in the pipeline, but would really appreciate from yourself and anyone else what tips and advice they would do to close the enterprise sale faster.

I'm going to share the screen again. I'll give you my two cents first and then I'll let Jason chime in and the audience too. By the way, audience, audience, you guys have been so great during these sections giving advice to the folks joining like Louis today. We just have such a collective power behind the hundreds of people who are in here. So please, please give your advice into the chat. Everyone's super valuable here. My two cents to start, and this is sort of like, so I'm a huge believer in just prodding pain points. like into oblivion. And I don't, in this specific, you know, kind of like landing page marketing website that I'm looking at, I don't see you yelling, like really poking those too hard, which leads me to believe maybe that's also not happening further down the sales cycle. The clearest example I can give of this is turn proposal hell into one deals. So I'm just wondering, like, what is proposal hell? And like, I've worked in sales and marketing for over a decade, right? Like I, I mean, I get where it can be annoying, but I'm not quite grasping the specifics of the problem that you're trying to latch onto. And I could see where, if that vagueness carries itself further into the sales process, further down the pipeline on those future calls, I could see that making an impact, a negative impact for you. But curious if Jason has any thoughts and the rest of the crowd here.

Yeah, a couple things. So if you haven't yet, I would think about, because this could be a prospecting problem too. Like, are we speaking to the right buyer in the right company? So if you're selling it, what's your average? What's your ACB?

So for each deal average is coming at about five and a half thousand dollars. It's 4200 pound for a five person team.

That'S an annual contract.

Yeah. Okay.

So that's not an enterprise sales motion. That is, that's like an SMB sales motion. That should be really, really quick, right? So, like, what I would be thinking is, are we selling that solution to the right companies? And then the second one, are you speaking to the right person? So, like, what the, the messaging on the site feels very below the line. It feels very much like what you would send to a rep. reps aren't buying the solution. I think if you kind of chunk up and let me share my screen real quick, this exercise is super helpful if you haven't done something like this before. This is one of the first things we typically do with a client is we create a messaging matrix. So we basically say, what is the business goal that our solution helps with? Yours is revenue, right? It's not operating expenses. What's the objective of the buyer? My assumption would be that you're selling to like a VP of sales, if it's a smaller company or maybe a head of sales, or if it's a larger company, it'd be someone in like some type of rev ops role. Like what are the objectives and key results that they have? How do they get the job done now? What are the problems with that? And what are the aspirations? I think if you can map to that, my hunch would be like, if you had to just guess right now, what percentage of deals are you getting access to power? Like an executive is in that deal, like they're a part of the sales process, et cetera. What percentage of deals are you guys getting access to that executive buyer?

In its entirety, since starting the business, I would probably say less than 10. In the past three months, I'd probably say 30 or 40%. We've changed the initial approach out of the last 10 initial first demo calls. seven of them, eight of them maybe have been with the key decision makers. So, svps, sales directors, the people that would be making the decision, signing it off.

That's great. So my last piece of advice then would be. And I don't know what you're saying or what the messaging is, but I'm wondering how you're chunking up to what that individual cares about. Like, I think the thing that I would have them pull is like, like their win rate when, when they have to RFP.

Yeah.

The average reply time. It's like if you can quantify the.

Cost.

And then give them some sort of ROI analysis on like, Hey, typically we're increasing win rates by 10% or 20% or whatever it is. If you can quantify the cost of inaction, I think you can put something in front of them that is much more compelling. But that 90 seconds versus one week thing, I think is really big. And actually I got one more tip. I don't know how closely you're taking a look at closed loss reasons, but that's something I would, if I was working with you guys, want to look at too. Like, why are you guys losing deals? Do people already have a solution in place and they're just sticking to status quo? Do they end up going with a competitor instead? Do they not have budget?

Like, that's going to tell you a lot too. The biggest reason why they get close lost is the deals fizzle out more than anything. They have the initial calls, give some good feedback, then it just goes quieter and quieter until they ghost me.

That.

So there was a comment in here that you guys are, first of all, just being audience. You guys are being fantastic with all the feedback. Louis, after, after. Yeah, you hop off. Definitely scroll through all of these. But somebody who said, yeah, thanks, people. Dana said, small agency here. Proposals aren't a pain point. So for Dana, that's just. So, I mean, going back to Jason's first question, really identifying exactly who is over, like. who is actually going through proposal hell? Like, what does that mean and who is experiencing it? Cause I personally haven't really experienced it. Like, I've always been able to stay on top of that and especially with AI being able to like handle more of proposal generation and organization.

So.

But there's gotta be somebody, I mean, I don't wanna say gotta be. One would think there's somebody out there who's really drowning in this problem and it's just a matter of Oh, Taylor says logistics software vendor. Taylor, you're drowning in a proposal hell. There we go.

One other thing too is like, I have clients that sell a lot in the US to sled and federal. There's a lot of art, like it's mandatory RFP, you know, for those types of, so I don't know if you have a way of targeting people that have a bit more of the pain, but dude, the number one reason for ghosting is usually we're not getting to power and two, when we get to power, we're not attaching to a business outcome. It's like, it's easy for me to say outbound sales training, but it's like, dude, the business outcome is you just launched a new product and your sales reps need to go outbound in order to get this additional product in the hands of existing customers and new customers. Like that's the business priority I attach training to. So that chunking up, I'd be curious to see what that is for you that you guys chunk up to and can attach to.

Yeah, perfect. That sounds great. We did a big exercise a couple of days ago. Um, every demo, I spent 10-15 minutes on discovery, understanding the pain points and frustrations. I've done a big load of work around chunking these up to see what are the most common pain points against certain roles. Biggest ones, time consuming, looking through past content, curating the best responses, dealing with inconsistent writing styles when there's five to ten people involved. So I've got much better clarity on this and I've not updated my website since doing this. I've just updated my outbound campaign to really target this first decision makers.

So someone asked on just one last thing, Pete, someone asked, can you define chunking up? It's chunking up is taking pain. Proposals take too long to write, chunking up to a business outcome. We're not closing enough business. We just launched a new product and our win rate is XYZ. We're losing too much to competitor XYZ. Like that's a business outcome that we can chunk the pain up to something that affects the entire business.

There'S a few good ICP hints, I'll.

Say, in the, in the chat here. Someone says they used to have this pain a lot in Consulting. Kirsten said in supply chain Logistics, rfps were unorganized, lengthy, and then in all caps. Hell. Taylor said, Logistics software vendor confirming this. I hear you. All of this. So, yeah, Logistics, uh, rfps are a headache. Nuance questions, lengthy is lengthy AF. I don't know why, whatever, censored that we're called on my startup over here. But so regardless, I think. And then are you zoning in on one specific type of company yet, or you're still in the exploration mode where you're a little bit General on your ICP right now, Louis?

ICP is mid-market businesses, so typically 100 to a thousand employees across software, IT services, marketing and Logistics. so we've narrowed it down to that. I am thinking about niching down even further, but we're getting interest from all those areas.

Yeah. I mean, if.

I mean, you know, way more than I do, but it seems like Logistics is getting a lot of love here. I've been on the sales marketing side for a marketing software. Less of an issue over here. Now, that's one. That's literally a sample size of one. So that's anecdotal. Okay, that's just one little anecdote there, but.

Yeah.

Yeah. Niche down as small as possible, I would say. That's always my advice starting out. Like, as small as small as possible, and then you'll be able to Bubble up from there or bubble out. And it's usually very clear what the next thing is, too, from there. But, Louis, thank you, my friend. Thank you for coming up.

Perfect. Really appreciate it.

It's nice and sunny over there in the UK. I'm sure that's sometimes a rarity, so life is pretty good. Thank you for joining, Louis. And go ahead and read through some of these things. There's a lot of good stuff in the chat. I know. I can't even keep up with it. It's like a overwhelming amount of value being provided by the audience here. So that's great. Jason, do you want to talk more about the offer? Do you want to get more into channel tactics? What's working for the sales folks that you work with?

Yeah, I think we're good on the offer. We'll probably get some of the other stuff.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, I started my career over a decade ago. We were doing really spray and pray, high volume, both phone call and email. Now, you know, sometime around, like, 20, I don't know, maybe, like, right after covet or something or, or during. it seemed like there was just this monumental shift in how people were finding predictable revenue or how that kind of old predictable revenue model was working. You talked a lot about going smaller, kind of those one-to-one offers. I'm curious, what is sort of work and we can kind of chunk this up by persona type if you want to bucket it out, you know, but I'm curious, what are the things that you are seeing kind of most replicable company to company today when it comes to cold outreach, whether that's channels, tactics, you know, within that channel and so forth?

Definitely. So I kind of think about this in four parts. There's four ways to capture attention. One is through volume. Two, we've talked a lot about offer. Three is relevance in messaging. and then four is delivery. So delivery is, you just can't discount, you know, everyone's had that person they've hopped on a sales call with where you're just like, like this, this man or woman's got so much charisma that it's just like, it's hard to say no to type of thing, you know? So if we look at volume, volume has been the play since sequences came out. I'm, I'm old enough to send cold emails back on a time where we didn't have sequences. I had to send all of the, like, I could, I could merge tags, send the first email, but I would have to manually bump the email. So when sequences came out, it felt like a little bit like a, you know, easy button. Volume only works in channels that are not super condensed and super overwhelmed with existing volume. So like after COVID came and everyone was in office, like email just exploded, right? Everyone was getting emails. Emails are incredibly crowded. inbox, right? Calls are actually kind of coming back. Fewer people are getting calls. I rarely get cold calls these days. I might get a couple per day. Most of your buyers don't get a lot of cold calls. So volume, the way we have to think about it is we have to be multi-channel and like phone, you have to do phone. Phone is only dead if you suck at it. Okay. The stats show that top reps will book 16 to 25% of the connected calls into a meeting. It's really about like being very strategic with it. So the ideal weekly touch pattern looks something like this from a volume standpoint. You want to reach out to someone about 12 to 15 times over three weeks. It's going to be six phone calls, six emails, three social touches. And that's a good starting point. You can adjust depending on what you see personally. each week, you're going to do a third of that, right? Over three weeks, I'm going to call someone twice, email twice, one social touch. So when I call someone, what I'm going to do if they don't pick up is leave a voicemail and we're going to point them to the email. And instead of asking for a call back, I'm going to say, just sent you an email. Um, we've been working with XYZ competitors. And one thing that we found is that they're Increasing average order size by XYZ by doing a couple of things I mentioned in the email. Go check it out. Subject line is XYZ. The cool part about voicemail is that even if people don't pick up the phone, leaving voicemails will double your email reply rate.

Leaving voicemails got a lot of- Leaving.

Voicemails double your email reply rate. Yep. So there's some really, really cool data that Gong did, and they looked at sequences that had voicemails, calls and voicemails versus ones that don't. and voicemails will double your email reply rate. The idea there again is I'm not gonna ask for a call back, I'm.

Just gonna point them to the email.

That I sent them. So that's a sample of what a weekly touch pattern could look like is I might call on a Tuesday and then I'll immediately email and hit up on LinkedIn. And then on a Thursday, I'll bump that email and then I'll call again. And I'm just gonna follow that same touch pattern for three weeks.

Let's clarify there's some conversation in the chat. Clarify the number of touch points over the time period. Could you give that to us one more time?

The 15 touches over three weeks. I'll drop it into the chat.

15 touches over three weeks. And that's divided evenly amongst email, phone, and social.

Yeah.

So basically you're gonna do six email, six phone, three social.

There it is, guys. I'm dropping that into the chat right now. And then there was somebody else said, oh yeah, Jeff said, Jason, I'm terrified of doing too much cold outreach in case all my emails end up in a spam folder and damage my domain. What is a safe amount of cold emails to send daily? Well, I guess this is a little bit more of a loaded question than I thought, but regardless.

So with email deliverability, it's a totally valid thing to not want your domain to get the NSPM for register a new domain. So for me, it's outbound squad.com, I might register outbound squad.co to send all my cold emails through. And then I'm going to warm up the emails. So when you warm up a new email and domain, like you don't want to send a bunch, you don't want to register that domain and just start blasting a bunch of cold emails. It takes two to three weeks to warm it up. So you're going to start a new email address and you're going to subscribe to newsletters, you're going to send emails back and forth to people that you know and get a reply. and there's tools that will actually warm this up for you. One of them, you know, the dude pitched earlier today, right? So like this stuff is built into a lot of tools now, but that's the best way to think about email deliverability. You really don't want to send more than 50 emails per day from one domain.

From one domain. From one domain.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think too, like, so by the way, Nathan's dropping in some good Some good name.com, getname.com, yeah, any variation of your website is most likely to be pretty cheap if you're using alt domain extensions or adding get, dash, or whatever it might be. So you can kind of get a bunch and warm them up at once. And then from, okay, so you're really talking about all of these, you're not thinking of social touches, email, phone in kind of separated silos. These are all a part of one attention grabbing, awareness seeking camp, you know, really effort towards a specific person. In that same idea, I've done some campaigns in the past where depending on the product of the audience I'm selling to, I'll rope in other people who may be champions of the deal, but they're not going to be, I know they're not the economic buyer, they're not the decision maker, My goal there is just to have more, like basically have another level of awareness, hopefully to hit that key decision maker. Is that something you think about too?

Yeah.

So what I would look at is everyone's sales process and cycle is going to be a little bit different. Look at your last like dozen closed one deals and look at who the first meetings were. Like for me, what I love to do first meetings with senior VPs of sales and CROs, yeah, but at a large company, it never starts there. It rarely starts there unless it's like an introduction. So I'm going to want to get a meeting with like the director of sales. That's a really good first person for me to meet with a director of sales development, a head of sales enablement. Those are the people I'm typically starting with. So depends on the size of business that you're selling to, but if you're selling mid-market or enterprise, it's probably going to be with someone on the power line at a director level that you're going to get that first meeting with. if you're selling SMB, like start at the top, get the meeting with the owner of the company if possible.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Also, I've always tried to be.

Very.

Focused on who exactly specific campaign is going out to. So if I'm whatever, launching a new campaign, we launched a new feature and I have four different personas all with the goal of reaching the same economic buyer. My offer towards each of those four people is going to be slightly different because let's say I'm going, I want to talk to a VP of sales, but I need to get through an AE first. Like I'm going to have some like pretty sweet AE offer that that VP of sales isn't really going to care about. It might not be really related to the end thing that I'm trying to sell, but what it does do is sells awareness or sells progress down the pipeline. and I think that's the, you know, when, when you, when you think about your offer, think about who it's going to and what the goal of that offer is. I mean, if you have a multi, multi-call sales cycle, just because that's what your product requires. The goal, the first call is just to sell the second call. I mean, the goal of your email is just to sell a meeting. Like, that is it. Like, do not try to sell more than that. Otherwise you're gonna Cloud the message and, and, and that's that. So let's grab. We got about 10 minutes left. There's a ton. of questions in here I want to get to. I'm also going to check the Q&A section two to see if there's anything in here. Oh, we already answered that one, so that's easy. Jason, what would be a great open rate for an email sequence? Do you have a benchmark that you look at?

Yeah, 40 plus percent is sort of the guiding North Star. Do you want to be higher than that, but it's open rates, They're turning into a bit of a vanity metric because it can be thrown off by spam filters. So it's going to register and open when you email most companies now. Like their spam filter is going to open that thing and look at it and it's going to throw off your, your email like open rate. But generally, if you saw something below 40%, it would be a little bit of a red flag from a deliverability standpoint.

Yeah.

Okay. Actually, I have a question about, well, I'll answer Sam's question here. Is each week's topic different here? Building on the previous Sam, each week is pretty different, but we're a sales and marketing show. We're trying to get revenue in this show. That's what we do. I have a question about phone spam. So the last time I ran phone campaigns was probably 2021. This was kind of mid-COVID, depending on where you lived, and no one was really in the office. We were talking to folks who generally would be in the office, and we were experiencing, there was just this, I remember this like very big inflection point where all of a sudden one month, let's call it like June of 2021, we could not like every new number that we got would get picked up as spam. So I'm curious, is there infrastructure similar to the way that we just went through on email where you need to be warming up domains, you need to be, you know, doing inbox rotation, Sending a small amount of, you know, no more than 50 emails, as you said, per day. Is there a similar kind of type of best practices that exist in phone just given the, I mean, our phones are pretty good at picking up spam now.

Yeah.

There's all kinds of different tools out there to get phone numbers, but one of the most basic things that you can do is when you set up a dialer on the computer, just call your cell phone and see what pops up. if it pops up as spam, you need to change it. But in general, what I would do is you want a sales engagement platform or dialer that allows you to change the phone number because you get significant diminishing returns calling a person from the same number after the third or fourth dial. Like, the pickup rate goes down dramatically. So you want something that ideally we're running that three-week sequence where they get a couple calls from us each week. It should be from a different phone number. each week.

Yeah. Okay. I like that. And not. So there was this, man, I can't remember when it was, but when the dial out local thing came about, I think this was, like, 10 years ago, that became. That was huge. All of a sudden, we were all picking up, you know, calls. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Albany, New York. Like, who's calling me from my childhood Hometown? And then I think that became a sign that it was spam. Is there. Are there any like practices there? Someone also asked what dialer tool you recommend. So anything in the tool space would be. Yeah.

So what you want to do with local dialing is just test it like everything else. It's going to depend on what you sell, but OraM, they did a really, and OraM is the tool that I would recommend. They are a sponsor of mine, by the way, and I do partner with them, but they're the best tool out there from a dialing standpoint. They commissioned a really big study. They looked at millions of outbound dials. And what they found is that when they used local phone numbers, the pickup rate was actually a little bit lower. when they use those local numbers. So that was across a really big set of data. I would just test it, see if it helps the open or the pickup rate or not. Most of the time it doesn't.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Is that one of those tools where it's dialing multiple calls at once or is it just powering through kind of singular, the singular number, but you know what I mean? Like there's some that'll dial six numbers at once and then whoever picks up, it'll hang up on the others.

Yeah.

So there's different types of dialers. So there's a. And it'll do all of these. Click to dial is literally, I'm opening up the contact and I have to click on the phone number. It'll dial through the computer. Power dialing is I can set up a list and it'll just, without me having to click on it, it'll dial. If they don't pick up, it'll hang up, it'll dial the next one. But you're gonna hear it ringing. Parallel dialing. This is where it has multiple phone numbers going out. So it might have dozens of phone lines open up at the same time. And then when someone picks up, you don't even hear them say hello. because it takes a bit of a second to attach the phone call to you. You hear a little beep and you just start talking. So that's something that you could check out. Those tools work really well. I would say from an enterprise standpoint, it's a little tricky to use a parallel dialer because you want to be able to have some research that you've looked at and said, and you can load those into fields with a tool like Aurum, but you just want to make sure it's a lot of upfront work to be able to do that. the other thing that I would say to someone asked this, when does the phone not make sense?

Yeah.

You guys might be reaching out into a, an industry or customer base that responds really well to email or social. Maybe you don't have to use the phone, but statistically, your contact rates can increase by 3.1x. Sales Loft did a really big study on this by using multiple channels, by using phone plus email plus social. so the idea with phone is that don't use low pickup rates as a reason to use or not use the phone because you have voicemails and voicemails will increase the reply rates. So just test it.

Do you ever do on LinkedIn and socials? I know you interact with folks. Do you do? Let's just use LinkedIn as an example because a lot of the folks in here are B2B. do you do, like, LinkedIn voicemails, LinkedIn embedded videos, in mail? Do you do anything in terms of Outreach in there? And if so, is there any specific route you've seen work better than others? I know it's gonna be.

I run the inbound. Yeah, I run the inbound led outbound kind of thing that you guys talk about a lot, right? Where someone engages with a post and I'm like, I might send them an email or send them a GM and LinkedIn or pick up the phone and call them. For me, I love the phone because it Everything happens way faster over the phone and I can, I can show my personality and convey expertise and all of that kind of stuff in a matter of seconds. Um, I don't use voice notes really. I've have not personally found a lot of success with them because the people I'm reaching out to are pretty busy and listening to a 60 second voice note takes a lot longer than skimming an email that takes about five seconds. That's me personally. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try it and see if it works. Video, however, can be very effective depending on what you sell. So in the example I gave earlier around the e-comm solution and doing like a cart analysis, video enhances that message because I can visually show them the cart and what I'm looking at. So I would think about with video, if it enhances the message, give it a shot, see how it works. If it's just you talking head like this saying hi, that in my experience has kind of gone out of style. That was really cool in 2018. That was like all I talked about in 2017 and 18 was sending videos in your in your prospecting outreach. People have seen this now and there's also ways to fake it with AI. So it's not such a novel thing to get anymore.

Agree with that. And someone asked about AI tool to leave voicemails in your own voice at scale. Do you do any automation there? Is it all kind of pretty manual? I know some of the dialers Will you can record your voicemail and then have it drop that automatically. Is there another tool you've used for that?

I'm not aware of an AI tool that will record the voicemail for you using your voice. That's pretty fucking scary. I know there are tools that will do that with videos. I'm kind of like, from a morality standpoint, I really don't like using fake AI stuff and pretending like it's real. That's just me. that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. A voicemail drops can be really effective though, too. There's a way, there's an art to leaving a voicemail that is like templated, that doesn't sound templated, where you don't even say the person's name, but you could drop the subject line, let's say in the voicemail and use the same subject line across a big set of prospects. And it sounds like it's customized. It's really an art. So yeah, I would recommend using that. I haven't tested this. If there's AI tools that do that, like, Yeah, give it a shot. Why not?

Yeah, why not? But by the way, we have the same fear. It's, I'm like, man, AI is already, well, for lack of a better term, ruined a lot of email. There's still 99.9% on email. But in general too, I mean, you know, I know a lot of people here follow Adam on LinkedIn or some of the other people that post from our company. Everything is manually written. I mean, yeah, I mean, I, For the most part, yeah, I mean, virtually everything's manually written. It's just, there's this, like, there's still this, there's still this gap where people can sense something if something is AI, whether that's a photo, a video, especially people who are probably in this, you know, attending right now, like, I don't know, B2B SAS tech people, like probably more sensitive and have a better, you know, a better radar for that kind of stuff. Lastly, what was that phone tool you mentioned, Jason? I want to pop the URL right in here into the chat.

O-R-U-M. O-R-U-M. All right, guys, I'm going.

To set the URL into here. O-R-U-M. There it is. Heck, yeah. All right, I'm dropping O-R-U-M in here. This is too long of a URL. I don't know what's happening. Sorry. okay, well, guys, the recording to this show is going to go live probably tomorrow, maybe. Maybe two days. Jason, you are a freaking killer every time. Just. Just such great info. Where can people find you? Check out more. If they wanna. They wanna learn more from Jason Bay, LinkedIn.

You know, you can search for Jason Bay, outbound squad.com. it's the best place probably to find us. It's got a bunch of free content in there. It'll tell you all about what we do and who we help. if they're, if you run a company or run a sales team and you heard something interesting today and you're like, you know, I'd like to see how I stack up against some of the Shopify's and gongs of the world, reach out to me. You can do it via the website and would love to chat with you. It's what we help teams with day in and day out. Some of our trainers are best in class. We have previous, you know, heads of sales at Outreach, previous presidents Club earners. We hired the best of the best from a training standpoint, so. Let us know if we can be of help.

Heck, yeah.

And I was just reminded by John, our video producer, he says the replay on YouTube starts immediately. So you can head over to our YouTube channel, YouTube slash retention Adam, and check out the recording there. Next week we have Eric Su. He's a CEO of Single Grain, SEO, total guru, co-host of podcast with Neil Patel, one of the biggest marketing podcasts out there. That is sure to be a good show. Come on back next week. Jason, you were the freaking man. We have to have you back. If you're willing, we would love to have you back yet again. Thank you so much for joining, man. Really, really appreciate it.

Cool. Thank you for having me.

Thanks, team.