Breaking Down the Prospecting Playbook with Alex Newmann

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Thanks for having me. I'm ecstatic, man. I love talking about this stuff. This is my jam. So I'm excited to dive in.

It's dangerous and I'm a little bit nervous because the goal is always to try to keep it around 30 to 40 minutes. But, like, I think we are gonna struggle to keep this safe.

We'll see. I've been known to run over once or twice in my life.

Same, same. That's why. But we're gonna prevent that because what we always do on the show, no backstories, no fluff, we always get right into it. So we. Right before we actually started recording. I love something that you called out, which is, you know, there's different things that go into prospecting other than just scripting and emails. And so what if you think about a playbook, what should chapter one of a prospecting playbook be?

So I think actually number one is understanding the mental game and understanding the game itself. I think so many times when we're talking about prospecting, it's what's the right message? Like what exactly? The words that I use to write this email and so on and so forth, forth. But no one tends to think about like, how does this, how does my day or how does my week look like if it's a quota driven thing, like, how do I set up my entire year to be able to go after and attack my quota and really just my personal goals. So I look at it from a lot of things, from the mental aspect of it, like, what are going to be the highs and lows, what can I anticipate? And then a lot of it is around time management. I think in general, salespeople really, really, really struggle with time management. One of my favorite words is no. And that's something that salespeople really need to kind of embrace to be able to say, no, I am not going to do this or I'm not going to do that. And I'm going to solely focus on my top two top three priorities and go after that and understanding that holistically of your role and what you're trying to accomplish. You are not a pawn. You are not just a doer or a task go getter. Prospecting is the thing that is the lifeblood of a business. And without it, there is no business. There's no revenue, there's no customers, there's no nothing. So I look at it and say, whether you're an SDR or an AE or whatever sales role you want to call Yourself, prospecting has to be in your blood. It has to be understood. And it starts with the mental side of it.

And I love that call out as Chapter one, because it is. So much of it is a mental game. There's a few things I want to unpack there, which I actually don't think enough people do, especially as sales reps. How do you recommend someone works backwards to figure out how to get to your quote, that was very subtle and it's very clear. But, like, if y' all caught it, he said, work backwards across a year on how to get to your quota. Yet everyone wakes up trying to get to their quota going, okay, I gotta go forward. And they never work backwards. So, like, how do you work backwards? How do you kind of figure out those numbers or that process so you know what you're actually trying to do?

Yep. So the first thing I do is I say, I don't really care what my quota is, but let's talk about what my personal goals are. Is it to buy a house? Is it to pay off your loans? Is it to buy a car? Is it to go on a trip or an experience or whatever it is that you're trying to do? What are your personal goals that you actually care about? Because a quota is something that a company or a group of people have said, this is what I need you to do, which is great, but I'm going to blow your quota out of the water. I'm just going to pass it by as I'm going to achieve the personal goals that I want. Typically, when you see a lot of comp plans, you're going to have some kind of a kicker after you hit your quota. Some type of an accelerator that says you can make, you know, twice your commission or one and a half or whatever it is, and that's where you can really make money. The part that I see is these reps will go, oh, I want to hit quota. I have no desire to hit my quota. I want to crush my quota so far out of the water, because I want to pay for my house, my second house, and my third house in cash. And so if you're only going to your quota, you're kind of doing yourself a disservice. The company's happy because they hit the goals that they want, but you're only kind of shooting yourself in the foot. So I look at it and say, help me understand what my personal goals are. Let me understand, what is it going to take in order to get there? So average deal size, number of deals that it's going to take not the median of the deals, the average deal size. Don't do any of this. Like I'm just going to go big fish hunting and I've been there for six months. Like understand what are the different types of deals? What type of deals are you doing? SMB, Mid market enterprise. Understand the sales cycles with that, if you are starting the year and it is February and you have a calendar year as your quota or your goals and you have an enterprise sales cycle of six months, like you better get going now because you're about to run out of room. You don't have a full year of fully selling and that's the difference between a fully ramped person and not. So I look at and say if you understand the formula of what it takes number one to hit your quota and and number two to hit your goals. So I would try to put some type of quantitative number to my goals and work back and say what does the formula, what is the recipe and the ingredients that I need in order to hit my goals? Then I will break it down on a month by month basis and I will factor in seasonality. So if you are struggling or if you're focused on you know, holidays or the summer or you know, beginning of the year and kind of like spring breaks and things like that, like understand where your hot times and where your slow times and factor that into your year, then what does the actual conversion rates look like? If you're brand new, use what the average is inside of your company. If you've been there for a little while, understand what your conversion rates are from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the funnel. And the bottom of the funnel is if you're an SDR meeting set or opportunities created. If you're a full AE then it's all the way to the end. Understand what that formula looks like and understand those conversion rates work all the way back to what you can control. I cannot control you to buy something every single day, but I know that I can put out X number of activities, quality activities on a week to week, month to month basis. And I try to formulaically go what do I need to do that is in my control in order to hit my personal goals? And I look at that each and every single week. That's how I know that I can get myself set up to actually have any chance to achieve what I want to achieve. I'll pass by the company goals and I'll achieve what they want. But I'm going after what I want.

We literally could stop the episode right there. And that is worth everything in terms of time spent, because it's still just mind blowing to me how many people don't actually know how to get to quota. They know what they want to do, hit quota or hit their goals, but they don't know how. They never break it down, say, all right, I need to set this many meetings, or I need to run this many demos, or I need to average this deal size to get there. So for y' all listening, if you don't actually know how to get there, you need to sit down and figure it out. Because otherwise, Alice in Wonderland, right, where she asked the cat, like, which way should I go? And he goes, where are you trying to go? She goes, well, I'm not sure. Well, then it doesn't matter.

Well, then it doesn't matter.

You can go whatever way that you want. So I love that call out, and I'm glad we got to dive into kind of how to work backwards there. But I want to go another layer deeper. Right. So we've done that. And you mentioned time management. Right. And so can't remember where I read it, but it was a twist on it, said, there's no such thing as time management. There's only focus and energy management. I really loved that.

Right.

In terms of, like, to think about it. So, like, what is your advice to people to better manage their time, focus and energy? Because we all have the same amount of time. But there's always a big gap between, like, when people are productive versus not. So, like, what's the advice on how to do that better?

Well, so I think it starts with when you understand that formulaic way to hit your goals, then you have specific priorities that are set in order to be able to achieve those things that are inside of your control. When you break them down into a weekly or monthly basis, you can go and say, all right, those priorities need to be accomplished either weekly or monthly. What do I need to do? Those are the things that I'm going to go after I think about it. I have five, six days a week, depending on how you actually like to work. And you look at it and say, when and how long does it take me to accomplish those things? And I would put them and actually place them into my calendar. So is it something that you have to do every single day? Is it something that you can do two days of the week? And I would focus and actually schedule that into my day because that is the most important or the most important things that you need to do in order to achieve your goals. That means that you get to say no to these other things. No more LinkedIn just bouncing around and randomly looking. No more Facebook. I'm totally guilty of being on ESPN and randomly reading something for too long. What I would do is I actually build in, like, waste my time, like, buffer time where I actually can go read whatever I want. I'll buffer in social media time. I'll buffer in going for a walk with my wife or around the block or whatever you got to do. Like, those are the types of things that you want to put into your calendar. Inside of that, you get to say, all right, what gives me energy and what drains me? And when you look at those two things and then I look at and say, what's the type of person I am? I personally not a morning person. Like, if you want me cold calling in the morning, it's probably not going to sound that great. It's just, it doesn't come with energy. It doesn't come with that same, like, allocation jazz that I can usually bring. So I look at it and say, how can I strategically go prospect in such a way throughout my week that I can control where I'm going to get the biggest bang for my buck? I know that I have a lot of energy in the afternoon, so I'm going to call in the afternoon. Maybe I'll write my emails in the morning and I'll have them scheduled to be sent out at a specific point in time if I deem the morning the right way to do things. So I really try to control what happens throughout the week and throughout the month. So I am focusing on those top priorities and I get to say no to everything else. I know that customer calls are going to happen. I know that internal meetings are going to happen. I know that there's training and coaching and admin work and things that I have to do. Schedule that you know, all of these things that are going to happen. So there's no reason that you get to the end of the week or the end of the month and say, I had no time to prospect. Like, that is a bullshit excuse. You have deemed other things more important. That's why it doesn't get done.

I read somewhere too it said, like, never say I didn't have time. Replace it with, I chose not to. And it really starts to change how you think about, oh, I didn't have time to exercise. I didn't have time to spend with my wife, I didn't have time to spend with my kids. When you reverse that and say I chose not to.

Right. Ooh.

Does that wake you up real quick?

Yeah, real fast.

There's some ownership there. And I chose not to. So I love that because it's so important that then you stay on task. You've used this word a few times now, already, which is so important, which is prioritize. Got to prioritize. Make sure you're focusing on the big things and getting them done. And I love that. And like, remind me if we have time at the end to talk about chronotypes. Because I learned this lesson as too, because I'm the opposite. I'm early. So what do you think? I always tried to have my teams do right away.

Early.

Early because that's how I worked and it took me a while to understand. Wait a minute.

Yep.

People operate on different waves and so we'll, we can, we'll dive in that. We don't have time for that. We don't have time.

Yeah.

Okay, let's keep stacking kind of chapters here. So we've talked about the mental game, we've talked about working backwards, getting clarity. Now we've talked about time management. Right. So now let's assume I have those things in place. What's the next step in being a world class prospector?

Understand who the hell you're going after.

Oh, yeah.

Understand your customer. And I don't mean that your team has a Google Doc or a Google sheet and you read it or a one pager and you read it. I mean, do you actually know who the heck you're going to after? What do they think about? What do they talk about? What do they read? What do they think about on Sunday night? What is their day to day? How do they get promoted? Like go and read. Go on indeed. Or LinkedIn and read all the job descriptions of the roles and the ICPs that you're going after. Read the books that they're reading. Yes. Like go where they're going and think what they're thinking. How can you possibly be helpful if you don't actually understand what they want to do? You don't understand what they deal with. You don't understand what they're trying to achieve. You don't understand when they get really excited and you don't understand what is the blockers. Understand those things, understand the lingo. One of the things that Katie, you and I can talk about and we can use acronyms forever is because we're both in the same space. So we can talk about it forever. You go talk to someone who's not in sales and they're going to go, I have no idea what you're talking about. It's the same thing when you're going in and you're selling. You have to speak their language, use their lingo. Do they? And understand their tone. What is the typical demographics? Male, female, Are they older, are they younger? They live in the city or they live in the suburbs. Like, what is the average amount of money that the typical role that you go after makes? Are they driving the Aston Martin or are they driving the Kia? Or maybe they don't even drive a car because they take the train to work or whatever. So I think the key is, is when you can truly, absolutely understand them, understand their roles. When they bang their fists against the table and say, I don't want to do this anymore and this sucks and I hate this. Like, what is that thing? What is that thing that drives them? And it's not, I need to save 50% ROI on such and such a whatever. Like, that's such bullshit. Yes. Like, nobody talks like that. We don't talk like that. Like, that's not how it works. It's the emotional thing that they're just banging their heads against. That's what you want to understand. You understand your customers and prospecting, literally all the doors just got swung wide open. It makes your messaging, it makes your plans, it makes your channel, it makes every single thing now attainable because you actually have an understanding of what you're trying to do.

As you were talking about this and going through it, it's like kind of like dawned on me for a second, just a realization is like, how much we've lost. This over, I would say really, like the last 10 years, especially as we've really specialized is like you used to have like lifelong sales guys, like they sold the same thing forever, which meant they did get to understand the customer. Whereas now, right, like no one stays in a role for more than three years. They're changing companies and it's always about the product and not about the prospect. It's like, we've lost that. Actually, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Jake Dunlap. He's like, when I first got into sales, you know, I got like a four ring binder and everything in it was about the industry. It was about like, they didn't even call them Personas then. I was like, the industry, the prospects, what they talked about, their metrics and we've just, you don't do that enough. And so outside of like the job descriptions. I love the. Read what you read. What else? Like, how else can you get into kind of the mindset of your prospect or Customer?

Get on LinkedIn. Look at all. Look at everything that they're doing. Look at what they're posting. I think that there's the voice of what they say, how they speak. I think that's really popular. I think if you get on some of the communities, figure out what communities they're involved in, newsletters that they're reading. It could be even TV shows and things that they. That they like. Is. Does the industry. Does everybody tend to be in a specific part of the world or part of the country? Hey, everybody's in Chicago or everybody's in LA or on the West Coast. Like, what does that mean? Is that that's a different type of tone that you speak with somebody kind of on the California coast than if you speak to somebody in New York. And so I think that the more that you dive into that I think is really important. And then I think there's. This is kind of the home run hitter. And I know Katie, this will be up, right, right up. Your jam is. It's called what would the customer say? Oh, wonder where I got that one from.

Weird. Where did that go on? This is. This is enlightening.

Where.

What does that mean?

You should be recording your conversations with your customers. Have conversations with all of your customers. Record the conversation. They will all say they don't care. Go ahead and record it and watch them, study them. Watch them over and over and over again. Have naming conventions for the different types of calls, the different types of products that they bought, the different offerings that they have, the different titles even. Watch what they say, watch what they don't say. Watch their tones, watch their feedback. There is single. That is probably the single greatest thing that you can do to truly understand your customer. We implement it with all of our clients. It's part of our playbooks that we implement with all of our clients. And probably the number one, if not number two thing that every single new hire is like, that was awesome. Like, that made it click. Like, the thing made it click. Because they're seeing from the beginning, it's not just talking about ideal customer profile and process and systems and KPIs and all that jam. I'm actually hearing it from the horse's mouth what they like, what they don't, what they struggle with.

It's just gold, man. It's gold. And I'm glad you made the call out there too. Like, I love Having new hires do that. Absolutely love it because it gets them up to speed so much faster. And it really does invigorate.

Right.

It keeps them motivated, like, oh, yeah, we are solving a problem. This is great. I understand how they talk and what they try to do and so what the customer says. Because also too funny enough, especially when I'm joining a new industry, you know this, I do my customer interviews, I go deep. But also I listen to a lot of the gong calls, the demos, knows the cold calls, but I don't listen to the rep site. I'm listening to the prospect. What do they say? And a classic example of this was actually when I was at Patient Pop, where we talk a lot. We even have a tool called the competitive scanner.

Right.

Which would show them, like, how they, you know, stack rank against their competition in the local area, blah, blah, blah, blah. Guess who never says the words competition.

Interesting.

The doctors never say competition, we say competition. And that was a very interesting, like, light bulb moment for me. It's like, wait, wait, we gotta stop leading with, they don't talk that way.

They don't see it that way, or they don't think about it in that light. And it's not you need to necessarily educate them and be like, oh, you need to think about this as competitors. It's not you need to do that. It's understand play in their world.

Yes, Right. It wasn't like, it was like, oh, why are we saying that? Like, oh, you know, we need to beat your competition. That's not how they talk. You can learn so much from listening to how they talk. What are their keywords, what are the things that they go for? And that changes everything, which is the next step. How do you use this information? All right, so we got the right mindset, we know our goals, we've broken it down, we've got a plan. Now I'm starting to understand, I've done these customer interviews. How do we apply that knowledge into our prospecting channels?

Yeah. So this is where you start getting into like account mapping and prospect plans and running different types of plays. I think about it and say, what's the right message to the right person at the right account? And so it depends a little bit about exactly how your company does it. But for example, if you have an account based strategy and you have 100 accounts, you should not have 100 random accounts. They should have as much in common as you possibly can. And then each rep should be able to understand how their book is different than another person's book. So it could be for patient Pop. It could be something as simple as these are all in LA and these are all in New York, right? It could be something as simple as that. Everything else is the same. Or it could be, hey, this is Fintech and this is insurance and this is hr and we sell to those different industries. It could be, I sell to the manager, I sell to the director, and I sell to the vp. Now all of a sudden you're getting into a little bit of a leveling play and understanding what message goes to right? Level, what level and understanding how that, how that's put together. Then you think about what is it that you're trying to accomplish? Are you trying to accomplish a call? Are you trying to accomplish a click? Are you trying to educate? Are you trying to get them to attend a webinar? A lot of it has to depend on the type of company that you are, especially stage. So if you're a newer startup, you don't have the same brand awareness as Salesforce does. So you're more in education mode, you're more in, do you have this pain mode, you have more of, hey, do you know that this even exists? Versus if you're Salesforce, you can just call them up and say, hey, I'm a Salesforce. Salesforce. We sell CRMs, like, do you want to buy this or not? Right? And so you think about it and you put a plan together that identifies what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And I typically lead with what I call a pain focused approach. So I focus on leading with a pain. I don't like to lead with features and benefits and we save you a bunch of roi, blah, blah, blah. If you can go with an emotionally driven focus message in the beginning, throughout the rest of the actual plan, maybe you move to more of a logic or rational basis, that's fine. But I always start with an emotional pain and see if that actually resonates or not. And I test, I always test different types of messages, regardless of channel.

And I love that. I love the call out. On leading, like with pain, I try to lead with problems because the joke I always made with people is, you can't tell someone something hurts. Like, I can't poke you and be like, I bet that hurt, but I can ask you, are you getting poked, right? And like leading kind of with that problem. Because I think oftentimes we do. Like, we try to lead with a pain, but it's actually on them to tell us if something hurts. We have to make them aware of Maybe what's happening, going through and I just want to double tap on something you said there because I think this is important because we have a lot of people that are early stage in startups. Right, what do you think is best in terms of that education process? Right, like how do you educate a prospect on something when they haven't heard of you? Right. They're living their life, they're going through it. Right. Like what are some of the best tactics around that education based prospecting?

I think a little bit depends on what the pain or the problem is. But for example, like we have a client who has much more of a visual product and one of the things that they do is they will sell different types of apparel that goes in line with a specific brand. One of the things they don't do is they don't sell T shirts and hats and hoodies because they want to be somebody different. Well, I, one of the ideas that we came up with was to say, hey, why don't you get on Vidyard, take a video of their specific website of their shop and say, hey, do you see how you only have T shirts and hoodies and hats and now you don't have any of these other things and your competitor is crushing you or is this even a pain to you? Do you even care? And so the visual comparison is a great idea. I'm always a big fan of what Intercom did and drift when they take screenshots of people's websites and say, hey, I have a question right now. How do I get ahold of somebody right this specific second? Well, if you don't have a chatbot, you don't have a choice, right? I'm going to send some random email into a black hole. So I think the key is understanding what's the best way in order to educate. If you're brand, brand brand new, it could be something as simple as a one pager. It could be something as you create your own video. It could be that you have found a really good like HBR Gartner article that talks about that specific pain and see, hey, does that resonate with you? And it's more of a conversation versus I'm trying to sell you something.

Yeah, I think that's just so important because it's one of those things that people talk all the time about like lead with value, lead with value. And it's just like they can't use it, it's not valuable. So like if you're trying to educate them, they need to be able to.

Use that Information, you gotta have a use case, right?

So, okay, so now here we go. We're going down all the layers here. So, all right, so now I'm starting to kind of. I know my prospect. I'm starting to lead with that problem, lead with that pain point. Let's talk about then, how to actually get the meeting. I'm gonna take one quick step back. So you also mentioned this too. I hope y' all caught it. Rewind it to hear it. How he mentioned it's not always about booking the meeting. Maybe you're trying to get a click, maybe you're trying to get a video to get watched. Maybe you are going for a response. It's not y'. All. If it was as easy as sending emails and saying, can I get 30 minutes of your time? We wouldn't need salespeople. We wouldn't need salespeople. I could sit back, load it up in Marketo and just blast it out and wait for all the demos to come in. It doesn't work that way. You have to be very intentional with what you're trying to achieve. So let's talk about this last step, so to speak, is then how do we actually get to the point of asking for the meeting? When does that make sense? How do you structure that? Like, how do we actually then get that person to a meeting?

Yeah. So I mean, I think overall it's inside of a cadence or sequence or a series of repeatable steps that you need to figure out exactly what's the best way to do it. Now you look at it and say, I'm a pretty big fan of a multi channel approach. So when I say multi channel, I do not mean phone call and email only. That is not the only two channels that you can use. Now, they are popular for your. For maybe B2B enterprise selling, but they are not the only ones. We have a client that uses SMS and it crushes it and direct mail and it crushes it. And we never get on the phone with people. So understanding the channels in which the buyers of that specific offering need to be, that is part of figuring it out. If the company's been around for a little while, take a look at it and see what are other people doing to be successful. Look at the top sales reps, look at the historical top performers and go, what are they doing in order to be successful? Most of the time you will find that they are not using one specific channel. It is a combination of channels. When you think about it that way, it says, okay, let's put together A series of different types of channels and run different types of plays inside of my cadence. The example I like to use is you're not going to see Tom Brady just hail Mary the ball over and over and over and over again. Well, he's going to sit on the sidelines now. Somebody else will do it. Right, but you're not going to see that happen. Sometimes they run it, sometimes they pass it, sometimes they throw it deep, sometimes they throw it short, sometimes it's to the right, sometimes it's to the left. It is a series of different plays in order to get to the end zone. Every single time is a little bit different. What you want to do is you want to figure out probability wise or statistically what plays can I run in a repeatable fashion in order to have the best chance to get to the end zone over and over and over again. So you start to do a little bit of testing. Is it call first? Is it email first, is it SMS first? It's a variety of things. So I like to try different types of messaging. I like to AB test and I like to isolate everything except one variable in the beginning. Oftentimes email. And you will focus on an open rate. Why do I care about the open rate is because I don't care if you respond to it. If you never open it, like I don't have a chance. So I'll test subject lines, I'll test the hook, the first four, five, six, seven words of an email as it's in the preview and that will help determine whether it's been opened or not. So I formulaically figure out what are the things that I need to do in order to be able to generate an open or a connect or a hey, I'm going to read or review this. I'm going to look at and understand what part of the company maturity cycle am I in? Is this an education play? Is this a very well documented, well known problem that they're going to hear from me and they're going to know exactly what I need to do so that I can ask for the meeting right away because they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Or maybe I send over an article or I send over a video or I send invite them to a webinar that the company is hosting or maybe a recording that we've already done in order to educate them. So I'm focusing my first handful of clicks or excuse me, plays on clicks and reads and opens. Yes, yes, then never ask for the meeting. You will never see. Hey, you have 15 minutes. Hey, we should talk for four hours today. It's step six is the ask. When you've built value, when you've shown that you understand it, when they've acknowledged and had a couple of signals that said, wow, they're really clicking on all of this stuff. Hey, they're really reading this. Oh, wait, all of a sudden they shared it with some other people inside their office or their teammates. All of a sudden that's when you can go, all right, now I'm going to make my ask and you go from there. And it's a little bit of AB testing analysis to figure out if that's the right play. Obviously you can figure out, hey, can I bump that up a little bit earlier so that I can shorten the number of steps? But understand that it is about getting to the end zone. And if you go too fast, you're going to have to go back in time anyways with them because you have to educate them. Live buyers are too smart now. They're doing their research. They're figuring out all the things that they think that a sales reps never.

Going to tell them 100%. And I'm glad that you talked about testing them and broke down some specifics on how to do it because salespeople are horrible at testing, right? Salespeople love the number one. If it worked once, right? Oh, I could do, I got this magic line. Or if it doesn't work once, they try it once and it doesn't work, it's thrown away and they never come back to it, right? So like when y' all are testing things, you have to give it a good run. You have to give it enough attempts. But also catch what he said there. You have to test one variable at a time. You can't change the subject line and the first sentence and the call to action. That's just a different email you're not testing now. At this point, you had four new variables show up, so you don't know what's working well. And I just got to call us out real quick because everyone loves to do this one. And you nailed it. People love to harp on open rate, right? They say like, oh, well, open rate is just a vanity metric. And I'm always like, so how many emails have you responded to that you didn't open?

Right?

Like, you gotta open it. And so actually, let's touch on that real quick. What drives a good open, Right? Like, what are some things in the emails that drive a good open rate?

A lot of times if it's something that's like on their LinkedIn profile. That's a good one. A joke is always a good one. I also, lately I've been doing a lot of writing subject lines that are either 1, 2, 3, 4 words, but also all lowercase. Not. Not even the first letter is even capitalized. For everyone who capitalizes the first word of each of the words in the subject line, please stop. Like, that doesn't work. Like, you are just screaming like, hey, I want to sell you something. So, I mean, I think there's different ways to do it. I like to keep it short. I'll put a question, I make a joke, tie it to if they wrote something, posted something, did a podcast company said something I like. I like to keep it pretty simple though. Like, don't, don't write a sentence or a book.

Yeah, no, I think that's so cute. Like, I'm still, I'm still shocked, still shocked that the level of personalization is so low. Like, I get next to no personalized messaging. And I am easy to personalize for.

Like, I'm easy.

You got years of content you could look at to personalize. And even I don't get personalized messaging. I would say probably less than 10% of the time, less than 10% is the messaging personalized to me. And I just, it still just blows my mind. It's not even that hard to stand out. Like I almost said, it's so hard to stand out. I actually think it's the opposite. It's actually easy to stand out. We're just not willing to do what it takes to stand out.

And let's talk about what personalization is, right? It's not just like high first name. It's not just like insert industry name. Today alone, I have received three different messages around because I'm in the IT industry, I'm in the information technology industry, or I'm in the real estate industry because that was a former company that I did a while back. And I'm like, none of those are true. Well, kind of true, but also, like, has nothing to do with anything. Like, what? Who cares? Oh, I help other IT professionals. Like, what in the world does that mean? Like, you think you're personalizing because you put a bunch of random, like generic dynamic tags. Like, that is not personalization.

Yeah, no. What I try to tell people is personalization. Only the person could read and understand.

Exactly.

Customization is Persona based. So it's custom to a Persona or custom to a company, but personalization only. I could read that and Ha. Actually makes sense. That's when it's personalization. Hey, kd, I love that you always rock an LA hat that's black. You could not get that email and have it make sense. Right? That's personalization, y'. All, so. And now I'm looking up the clock. I knew this was gonna happen because I'm not done yet. We're already at, like, like it. I like it up here with kind of like the two final questions. I like to try to end the show versus the big three. Right. So we've covered a lot here. If you think about the three key takeaways you'd want people to have from this episode, what would those three key takeaways be?

Probably saying the number one thing you want to understand is what you're getting yourself involved in when you're prospecting. You need to hold yourself to a high level. Prospecting is the true lifeblood of any company and really any role. My uncle used to say, learn how to sell. You'll never go hungry. I've evolved it to learn how to prospect. You'll never go hungry when you can generate your own business. You will always, always make money when you understand how it fits into the larger scheme and you can create a system and not just drive yourself nuts for a year that you can sustainably control, understand the game and understand what you're getting into. You're not going to be perfect and swing 100% of the time and hit it 100% of the time. Like, understand that mental side two, have a freaking system. Like, there is a platform for everything these days. You can formulaically get there. Your tools will help you get there. A tool is not the system I'm talking about. You need to have a prospecting system. Understanding your ideal customer profiles, understanding your game plan, understanding your messaging, understanding who you're going to say and what you're going to say, how you're going to say, and hold yourself accountable to what you need to do on a weekly or monthly basis. That is a system that will drive the results that you want. I think the last thing I would say is, this is fun. Like, prospecting is a fun thing. You get to literally talk to people all day long. And if you are dreading every single day when you wake up and you're like, I hate doing this, I hate doing this, and I can't wait to get promoted and I want to be the manager so that I could just tell people what to do and then I never have to prospect again. Like, this is the wrong World for you. Like, prospecting is in my bones. It is something that I love to do. The look on somebody's face when I can help them solve something that they absolutely hate and cannot stand. It is the greatest feeling in the world and it makes me want to do it again. That is fun. If you wake up and you hate it every day, go do something else. Life's too short.

I love it. I told my team this many times, if I could change the title from sales development rep, I would. I would change it to Professional Prospector. Because Sales Development rep as a title people try to move away from versus Professional Prospectors, a skillset that you're building. If you build this skill set like it literally can change your life. This is no exaggeration. You will be a better business owner, you'll be a better ae, you'll be a better leader. Like all of that, because you know how to prospect. And so, funny enough, behind me, one of the gifts my team gave me is a custom decanter. And on it it says pipeline over everything. Pipeline over everything. Because that was like our motto, like, if we can open it, we can close it. Right? But we got to open it first. And so. Okay, last question here before this turns into another two hour conversation. Right? The name of the podcast is Live better, sell better. Because I have this strange idea, this strange concept that if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, more joy, more laughter in our lives, the sales we'd get better as well. What would your live better advice be for people listening?

Move your body every day. Kiss your significant other every day. Spend time with the people that matter to you most. That's it.

Yeah, simple.

I mean, it's business and that's a part of your life, but it is not your entire Life. When you're 80 years old, you're not going to go, oh, man, I blew that sail that one time 78 years ago. Never going to happen. You're going to go, I didn't spend enough time with the people that I love doing the things that I love. Make time for it.

Yeah, make time.

Integrate. Integrate into your life. Don't just say it's one versus the other. It's all a part of the life. It should be fun. Be happy. Life's cool. Let's enjoy this thing.

It really is.

Let's stop fighting with each other and stop doing stuff, stupid things. Let's just enjoy it.

I think that the truth, right, and that's a whole nother topic right now. So that's a different podcast what I was hoping it would be, expecting it to be. Where can people get more of you, find more of your content if you got things out there? Like, where can people get more of the good stuff you're putting out?

Yeah. So website. Alex Newman.com with two ends. I got a prospecting playbook course. I also got a sales playbook course. And then I post on LinkedIn every day. So that's where you can find me. Follow me, engage. Would love to hear from you.

Hell yeah. Well, my man, I appreciate you. I appreciate your insights. We're aligned on so many things here. Trying to make prospecting a better thing for everybody. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Hell yeah. Sam.