Kyle Coleman, who built SDR teams at Looker and now leads growth at Clari, shares the 5 by 5 by 5 outbound framework: five minutes researching a prospect, five insights uncovered, five minutes to write one personalized email. The method balances volume with quality and generates early wins that boost remote team morale.
All right. Hello everybody. I am Christina Brady, the president at Sales assembly and I am here with another study break presented by our friends over at Vidyard. Today we have Kyle Coleman over at Clary joining us. Kyle, tell us a little bit about you and your role and Clari.
Sure thing. So I lead our growth and enablement team at Clary, which is sort of a non traditional combination of a few different departments, including demand generation field marketing, sales development and sales enablement. So a lot of teams that are responsible both for creating and accelerating revenue for the sales team. And prior to Clari, I was early at a company called Looker analytics company based out in California. I was a sixth employee, grew the SDR team up to about 65 people globally. As the company got to about 800 or so globally company got to about 100 million in revenue and roughly about 45 million of that was outbound generated. So we're going to talk a little bit about how to build up the outbound engine right now.
That's amazing. So you are certainly a pro at this and as a pro at this right now, thinking about people who are sales producers, especially in the B2B sales landscape, what would you say would be a good tip to give people right now that everyone could really use?
Yeah, so I think it's hard to hear some sort of advice right now about selling in the COVID era without hearing the word empathy over and over and over again. And, and empathy is extremely important. But I don't want to focus on empathy. I want to change the kind of reframe this a little bit and focus more on strategy. Because a strategic approach to your outbounding is how you're going to develop a true empathy for the people that you're selling to, for the accounts that you're trying to work within. So my answer to your question, Christina, is the framework that our team finds useful is what we call our 5 by 5 by 5 framework. You take five minutes of research to find five key insights on a person or an account and then you take five minutes to write an email based on one of the insights that you found. So five by five by five. And this is way, way easier said than done. So it's going to take a little time to get used to this. When you start out, it'll probably be more like 15 minutes of research to find the five insights and then 15 minutes to write the email and that's totally fine. But aspirationally, if you can get down to 5 by 5 by 5, that is how you scale personalized Outreach. And that is how you make sure that you're only doing that research once you're finding those five insights and you're writing an email about one insight at a time. So you basically have your whole sequence or your whole cadence prepped for that personalized outreach just in a five minutes of research.
I love that. How did you come up with that methodology? I think not only is it easy to remember and think about, but it's obviously successful. So where did that come from?
Yeah, it's battle tested and just kind of evolved with various SDRs. We would see who was really good at doing research, who was really good at writing, what the different strategies were to help scale, and basically just an amalgamation of all the various things that worked for various people over the seven or eight years that have been leading SDR teams and just crystallized it into this really memorable framework. As you said. Again, not an easy one, but a memorable one and an aspirational one. And it's just nice. And so when you're running programs or workshops with your team or, or if you're personally, like, set a timer for yourself and really challenge yourself to do this and do this well, because in this environment you have to do both quantity and quality. The quantity game is unavoidable. There's just so much noise out there. You have to play that game. But the quality side is way more fun and it's way more strategic, as I mentioned before, and it'll make your job much more enjoyable. But you can't spend all day writing three emails because that quantity component is still there. So 5x5x5 is a nice framework that's been useful to help our teams find success.
Very snappy. I love that. And the last question I have for you is what have been some early wins that you've seen of people who have adopted this five by five by five strategy?
Yeah. So it's so rewarding when you put in the work to research somebody, research an account, craft that email, and then you get a response that says, this is the best damn email I've gotten in a long time. It's just like that's the kind of thing that keeps people energized, that keeps people motivated. Those are the types of things you can share in your Slack channels when everybody is remote and then you just see the reactions to that Slack message you send. It's motivating. It builds that camaraderie. So there are wins every single day with people that are writing these messages and getting really positive responses from prospects. And it's just a great way to keep kind of that the sales floor alive in a remote setting.
I love that. And I imagine this is good for people who are just starting in their sales career, but also veterans as well. People have been doing this for a while. Never hurts to have a new skill.
No doubt.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking time for a quick study break once again. I'm Christina Brady with Sales assembly, here with Kyle Coleman from Clary. We want to thank our partners over at Vidyard one last time. And join us next time next week for another study break. Thanks, everyone. Sam.
