Cold Calling Is Not Dead with Kevin Hopp

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset, goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Vidyard. If you aren't using video in your sales process, I promise you, you are leaving money on the table. I personally have been using Vidyard with my teams for years now and we use it every everywhere. Top of funnel to book more meetings via email and LinkedIn. Middle of funnel to improve show rates to demos, post demos to do proposals and follow up and close deals faster. Using video allows you to connect better with your prospects, bring your personality, energy and enthusiasm across every single time, and they have a much more impactful and memorable experience for your buyer. So again, if you're not using video, you need to be. And if you are using video, you should be using Vidyard. Check out vidyard@vidyard.com and with that, let's get back to the show. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And the topic of the day is one that is just so near and dear to my heart. Cold calling. Now, I might have just lost half of the audience even hearing those words put together because the cold calling world right now is, is not going the right direction and people are afraid of it. They say it's dead. They say it's gone. They say almost to the point we shouldn't even be doing it anymore. Which when I hear those words, one, I hear a massive opportunity. Because if people out there truly are not leveraging cold calling, that's an opportunity for everybody that will. But the reason why so many people do not do cold calling is because it does not work. Because they do not do it the right way. Is anything done poorly will not scale and will die over time. Which is why I'm so pumped to have an outbound sales alchemist. The head of sales at Vorisk, Kevin Hopp on the podcast Today and we are going to go deep on cold calling. And what's fun about Kevin's background, it's rather unique in terms of he's done enterprise selling, VP of sales development, now head of sales for a company that does outbound for companies, which is a whole nother beast when it's not even your product that you're selling. So you need to have a formula, you need to make it repeatable. And that's what he has done. Kevin, hot, my man. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. KD followed you for many, many years here since your days at Snack Nation, believe it or not. I knew a few folks that worked there and really happy we got to connect on this. And we're talking about a topic that as near and dear it is to your heart. I've lived on the phones for the past five, six years here, so happy to dive right in.

Yeah, let's do it, man. Right. So you've been living on the phone the last five to six years. What's changed? What's different now with cold calling than maybe five, six years ago?

Well, let's talk about the obvious. It's getting more difficult now. Why is it getting more difficult? All you have to do is unbox a new iPhone. The new iPhones not only have this anonymous email feature and like double tripling down on this email spam thing where it's getting harder and harder to land in an inbox and then they're blocking read receipts. But they also have features now on your iPhone where it won't even ring your phone if you're not in that person's contact book. And when I saw that, I was like, oh crap, it's getting harder. Also, the FCC is cutting down on robocalling. I promise you, every single person listening to this right now has had their phone buzzed by a stupid robocall that says, hello, I'm calling from the dealer service center, calling from the warranty, blah, blah, blah, blah. So robocalling like that has gotten very, very, very prolific. The FCC put out the new stir shaken mandate that makes it so you can't have automated things going on in calls. So all that that happens on your phone and buzzing it with the dealer's warranty thing, that's very, very illegal. Cold calling is still not illegal, which is great. But all of that traffic on the phones that people hate makes them less and less likely to pick up a cold call. So that is really what has changed. It wasn't like that in 2014, 2015, when I was making my first cold calls.

I still remember when local presence came out, and this was seven, eight years ago. And I thought it was the greatest thing ever, right? Because I'm cold calling. And the first day I used first day I set seven meetings, the first day I used local presence because my conversations quadrupled. Now that's also gone. That's played out now. People don't answer anything. So then, now that's a really interesting way to start a podcast about cold calling. Because it's like, all right, well then what do I do about that? People aren't answering the phone. I'm getting blocked. I'm getting moved over to the voicemail. So then what can we do? Or should we just throw in the towel? Should we just say, no mas.

Look, for everyone listening, cold calling's dead. Don't cold call, all right? And you know, KD and I look at each other, wink, wink here. Cold calling is dead. Please don't call. Because if you don't call and you send more emails or LinkedIn, salespeople really only have these three channels, right? Outbound salespeople really only have email, LinkedIn and phone. And then MQLs are great. If you happen to go to a conference and collect a bunch of business cards, that's amazing work, all of that stuff. But those three channels, if you lean into the other two, I'll take the phone. Now. The reason being there is a way to do cold client scale. It's not picking up your iPhone, tapping on it 10 times, putting it to your ear and listening to the phone ring. There's a lot of people right now. There's a lot of reps that are probably listening to this. They're like, well, that's what I do all day and I hate it. Cold calling sucks. Maybe Katie, we lost them in the first 10 seconds when you said we were talking about cold calling. Yeah, I agree. Cold calling the old fashioned way is so dead, it sucks. I was a rep when I was an SDR at a venture backed software company here in San Diego. We had a consultant come in that turned our SDR team, like 12 dudes into a pit. Old fashioned boiler room pit. We stood up, weren't allowed to have chairs in the pit. We had to have headsets on. And all we had was a phone and a laptop. And we would just pound digits, not even click the dial right. So that's the world that I came from. And I kind of got obsessed with this idea of there is a better way. There's got to be a Better way. You know, it's like I felt like we were rolling a boulder uphill with our hands and I'm like, yeah, we can get it there, but we're going to like, you know, people are going to quit because it's a terrible work life balance, it's aggressive, it's boring, it's monotonous. We didn't have a script, so without having a script, I noticed how everyone was all over the place. So I don't know, man. That kind of led me down the journey to get to where I am today. At Voris, we're a sales advisory group. We help teams internally develop and build best practices around this. Right? So we work exclusively with venture backed companies that are looking to build outbound sales. We help them do it the right way. There's all these questions you have around tech stack enablement. How many people do I need? What are good KPIs these days? And now I just kind of preach the gospel of there is a better way. All right? Use technology, use a structured methodology. One list, one Persona, one message. And it actually works. And we see it time and time and time again. So, yeah, to sum it all up, cold calling is dead. Give it up. Don't call, because I'm going to be calling instead.

And in real time, y', all, you can see my camera. We got a likely phone call coming through on my cell phone right now. Like, this is what happens, right? So obviously I'm not going to answer this call. And so let's take this next step then. So what is the new way, right? Like what? Like, because I want to talk on each one of things. Tech list and messaging. Let's start maybe on the tech side of like, then how can we leverage technology, I guess, to get through technology, right? It's almost like it's we're competing with other tech now. It's not even the other person on the phone. It's my phone just blocked. Whoever that was. Whoever it was. So we talk about this new way. What do you mean?

So let's go back to the Boulder rolling analogy, which I like to use because there's an element of outbound and STR work where you got to have a little bit of that. Ronnie Coleman. Yeah, buddy. Here we go. Lightweight. Let's lift these weights. No one's going to do it but us. Ain't nothing but a peanut. And I get really hyped. And you got to have energy because if you're going outbound and you are flatlined energy, like it's not Gonna work. You gotta bring the energy, right? So that energy can be all 100% used to push the boulder. And the pushing of the boulder is the pounding of the numbers on the phone and the clicking on 16 Things to Find your person on the list. If you're diving through a lead view in Salesforce or something, God forbid you don't have a lead list actually built. Like, oh, so this, this new way of doing it is to, instead of push the boulder up the hill, I want my, I want my SDRs, I want my AES full cycle. I want people that want to talk to cool prospects to use a boulder pushing machine. And their job is to push the machine. All right, Software, technology. What is old is new again, right? Technology makes that whole process of, okay, I want to call Kevin Dorsey. How do I, you know, back in 19, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, I had to go find a yellow book or, you know, white pages, whatever it is, open it up, find your number pound ten times and wait for it to ring. Well, now they have technology that does all that for you, right? So it's the, it's that structure around the list building and you put it into technology that calls people in rapid succession. And that's just one part of it, right? So technology to make the dials, an auto dialer is basically a must if your reps are going to do any calling. And you know, I've got hot takes around this. A lot of people say, well, my product's strategic and it's complicated and long sales cycles. Enterprise mostly relationship building. I understand 70% of your phone calls still won't get answered. I don't care if it's, you know, but there's some markets where it doesn't make sense. And the markets where it doesn't make sense are. I've worked with some teams where they have a 90% pickup rate. And I'm like, holy cow, 90% pickup rate. We don't need automated technology to make the phone calls. I just need to give you click to dial and your connect rate's really high. But in the standard B2B mid market enterprise, it's like 70%. 70% of the time. Imagine all that ringing that you're listening to. Oh my God, right? So even if you're going after target accounts, even if you're doing abm, even if you're doing this very, very unique approach that's relationship based, we gotta get to the conversations and you gotta get away from listening to the phone ring and waiting for things to happen. So the way you do that is you maximize it with technology. Yeah.

Okay. And so now with the auto dialers, right. Cause funny enough, I was one of those. Right. Like at Servicetitan couldn't use an auto dialer. Right. We're calling, you know, home services companies. The front office picks up, picks up every single time. Right. So, like, it was. It didn't, like, help us there. Right. But one of the things that I've tried several of the auto. I'm actually close with a few of them, and you can name drop who you're using if you want to as well. But what I always noticed was conversations would go up, but the conversion rate would go down. Because I do track these things. I track. We get in touch using the auto dialer. We always saw a drop in the conversion rate on the conversations that's oftentimes almost offset the increase in conversations. So how have you managed that side of it in the process to make sure, like, you know, whether there's a delay or a click or whatever, people want to talk through that, that conversation actually turns into the meeting?

Yeah. So a lot of that. And I will name drop one. Technology we're heavily partnered with here is Aurum.

Okay. Know them well. Know them. Yeah. I knew them when they were Dialbot. So funny enough, they came to Service Titan when they were Dialbot, and I spent a lot of time with them, helping them craft what it needed to do and what it needed to be to be successful. Then they went on to become Aurum. So very, very familiar with them.

Awesome. Yeah. Colin, Jason, Terry, Patrick, over there, they're all my guys. They went to UC Santa Barbara. So did I. So we're gauchos. I brought them into a bunch of companies at this point. And the reason I like Aurum is I can look at the reporting and figure out this conversion thing. So I think one of the things to look at is not every connect is the same.

Right, Right.

So I've seen that, especially with other dialing technologies, if you treat every connect the same, then you can't hold the same. You can't hold the same metric to a connection where you find out it was the wrong number or a connection where it wasn't the right prospect. It was. Hey, you're calling about cybersecurity? I don't do cybersecurity. You could never in a million years set a meeting with me, because I don't care about that. But you got to call Bob. Right. I don't count that. So there's a. There's a metric that I brought to the table when I was at sales gig and we were doing outbound as a service. Sdr as a service. Pay us a flat rate, we'll do all the cold calling for you. That was last year. And we had a metric that I, that I used for the SDRs to measure them, and that was winnable. Winnable calls. So of all the dispositions, a block of them are not winnable. A bunch of them are winnable. Right. And you are sort of counting on the reps to disposition the call properly. Right. This is going. This is using the technology, but also structure. Right. And this is why the answer is not technology. It's not, how do you fix cold calling technology? No. Well, you throw tech at a. At a process problem. Not going to work. Right. So it's the tech with process and structure and then teaching methodology. Right. The way you have the conversations has to be very different because it. Whether using Aurum or Concert or Connect and Sell, whatever it is, you're getting beeped into a call. Very awkward, very different. It's a different feel than if you're calling up your buddy. Right. Then you got to teach the SDRs the whole nine yards around. Like, yeah. When they ask who you are and you say, yeah, it's Kevin with Voris, you leave five seconds of dead air. Cause you expect that you mean something to them, which you don't. You're in the darkness. There's all these things you gotta look at. So the answer to your question is, I have not really experienced that because I've always tried to sort the data that way. Meaning of my winnable conversations, I need you to win 5 to 10% there. The best reps always got closer to 10%. But anyone converting less than 5% on winnables was someone that we needed to either coach up or get rid of. Right. Like, that was like the metric. So, I mean. And I haven't ran. You probably at Service Titan had more scale than I did. The biggest team that I've ran on A dialer is 12. Okay. So, yeah, it's interesting that you experienced.

That because I've used it at every company I've had, so I've tried it at Human Snack Nation, Service Titan, and I'm actually in a trial right now, again with, with Aurum at Patient Pop on an attempt. Because from the math, it makes sense. From the process, it makes sense, but it's, can I maintain that quality of conversation? Right. If the numbers go up, but the quality comes down for whatever reason, how to optimize for, for that. So let's talk about that next stage. Right. Okay. So you know, you're making more dials to having more conversations. How do we make sure those conversations turn in to meetings?

Right.

Like, what are some of the best practices conversationally to actually get that prospect to say, hey, no, sure, I'll take a meeting, let's do this.

Yep. So I think that there are, there are two things that are sound simple that a lot of outbound teams and a lot of people that cold call kind of take for granted and don't do. And they're so basic that everyone's going to go, well, duh. But these two things that I highly recommend that are so critical to cold calling success is have a script. You have to go off a script. And the other thing is follow up. What follow up? I'm cold calling today. Yeah. But every cold call is just to get that person out of that stage in their prospect life cycle, which is cold into awareness. And once they're aware, then all of a sudden they're going to be thinking of the business problems that you have if you follow up. Right. There's a saying that Ryan Reissert introduced to me. Fat stacks in the circle backs. Okay. And a lot of my clients, I tell all my clients this because I say, hey guys, you guys are running your follow up list every day, right? And they're like, oh, well, I did it yesterday, do I do it today? I'm like, do it every day. Follow up with them every day. You have to follow up. The difference between the good sales guy and the above average sales guy is the above average guy follows up. Don't get so caught up in chasing new, new new that you forget that every impression you have with someone. And by the way, when you connect with someone on the autodialer, you know that that number goes to that person and they will pick up their phone. That's different. Right. Think about the idea that if you have 100 names and numbers on a list, the fact of the matter is there's a big portion of them that will never pick up their phone. Right. That goes into list building strategy. We should talk about that in a minute. But let's go back to this idea of a script. Right. A lot of people say, I can't use a script. I'm going to sound like a robot. It has to come from the heart. I got to say what I feel. It's so robotic. I hear you. Here's my answer to that. And I go through this with all of my clients a script is a handrail. All right? The visual looks like this. You got a door right here. This is our conversation. Right. The conversation goes up and down. That's why it steps. Our script is a handrail. What does that mean? When you're a new sdr, you're getting beeped into conversations. This is hello, right? Hello. You're getting into the conversation. Your goal is to get to meeting set.

Right.

How do I get there? Well, it turns out it's not by chance. It's not random. It's not like, oh, I got lucky and the guy was in the market for it. There's a way to lead the conversation. Right. And this is one of the basic tenants that make sales conversations different than any other conversation.