Cold Calling Is Not Dead with Kevin Hopp

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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 you. I have 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. 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 red 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 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 mask.

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. And 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. Cool con sucks.

Maybe.

Katie, we lost them in the first 10 seconds when you said we were talking about cold calling. Yeah, I agree. Like, 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. 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. 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, you know, 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, yeah, like, 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, ugh. 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 Service Titan 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 aut, 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 know them when they were Dialbot. So funny enough, they came to Service Titan when they were dial bot, 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. 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 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 takes. 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 Forest, 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. Right. There's all these things you gotta look at. So. 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 diet and 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 the 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, the auto dialer, 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 conversations you have in your life. Right. That's why I think opinionated people make great salespeople. Because if you don't have the opinion that your product changes the way that these people are going to do their work, live their life, get things done, make money, whatever it is, then you're not going to have good conversations. So the script's a handrail. So when you're a kid, meaning you just started cold calling and you have to get up the steps, what does every kid do when they get on steps and they're going up? They hold on to the handrail and the script's going to take you there. It's designed, I design scripts as a, as a path through conversations that lead to predictable outcomes. It's not mistake, it's not chance, it's not, I know my universe. We understand all the things they could possibly say, right? And when you know everything that they could possibly say, you can craft an actual path for someone to go through a conversation. You're asking them the same questions, they're going to give you a either binary answer or an open ended answer. And you know where to take it from there. Because you're calling about a certain topic and you're calling a certain person, once again, it's not random. So just like kids always grab the handrail when they go up, adults sometimes don't. Right. Like when you get really good at it. Like when you, when you, when you go to your friend's house, you've been there 20 times. Those big steps that used to go up when you guys were, you know, 10 years old, now you're 14, you gotta skip two steps and you jump. But what ends up happening is you get to the same outcome. So people say that they can't use a script. And I get pushback on this from time to time, like, well, scripting is going to be robotic. They're going to know I'm a cold caller, this and that. Look, dude, you don't have to use every word of the script. In fact, I don't want you to use the word, the script, word for word. After your first or second week, I need you to flow the script. The script is just a handrail guiding you along your path. Right. I think a lot of teams out there don't use scripts. If they do use a script, it might be like from marketing. And don't let a marketing person write a sales script like a call script. Right. It's not marketing, Schlix. It's not a pitch, it's a conversation. But you have to have a guide rail to it. So scripting and following up is like basic stuff, but geez, people don't do it.

I think it's so funny when people fight back on scripts because everyone uses a script. Everyone uses a script. It's just whether or not it's written down and if it works, if you are saying something that is your script, that is your script. That's what you're saying is the delivery of your script. Just most people change their script on every call or they don't track it, or they don't have an intention behind it. They don't have the best practices you talk about.

Right.

So touch on that real quick. If you think about a script, what are some of the best practices? Right. Maybe there's two best practices I'd love for you to touch on. The intro and the asking for the meeting. Because if you don't nail the intro, you don't get to go up the steps. Right. You don't get to have the conversation. But also at the end, a shockingly high amount of reps never actually ask for the meeting. They hope the prospect will say, yeah, okay, so what do we do now? Or can we set something up? So let's talk about the intro first. Right? Like how do you earn the right to keep the conversation going? Let's talk maybe best practices on, like how to ask for the meeting.

Absolutely. And this is, you know, one of these, this is One of these LinkedIn talking head debate pieces that I love, you know, like Morgan Ingram. Morgan and I like heavily disagree on intros and I'm going to be on his Muffins with Morgan podcast talking about that pretty soon here because I'm a huge fan of clearly stating who you are and asking them how they're doing today.

Right.

And that's Controversial. There's people that are screaming at their phone right now saying, dude, that's stupid, Kevin. Don't ask them how they're doing. You know, there's a hundred ways to do it. The reason I do it this way is I know that it works using the systems, right? So the other thing that I have to touch on here is the way that I teach cold calling is using technology. My list building methodology, then my script, it all is connected. It's not by chance. It's not. Yeah, use whatever here and then like throw a list in the dialer and then I'll use this script. It all has to line up. So we're using a dialer that gets you beeped into a conversation, means you're going to have way more conversations that day because you're skipping all the people that aren't picking up, which is amazing. I start with, hey, this is Kevin from Voris. How you doing today? You say that very genuinely, the more genuinely you say that. The analogy I use with the reps is pinball. All right, so that pinball of, hey, how are you doing today? This is Kevin with voice goes into their head and it goes, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Now what do we know is going to happen? It's not going to hit green anywhere. It's not going to be like, I know Kevin, I know Voris, I'm doing great today. That's not what's going to happen. And I love that because it's a predictable outcome. So what comes after that 99% of the time is, I'm okay, who is this? Or they just skip to, where'd you say you're calling from? Or, yeah, I'm all right. What would you say your name was again? Which I love. What do they. So they go ding, ding, ding, ding out the other end and the pinball comes back out and says, who are you? And then you restate who you are. Yeah, it's Kevin with Vorace. And then I'm a huge fan because we're using a dialer which makes automated follow ups really easy. And sequencing technology, which makes it so you never have to put someone back into a sequence. It just keeps them in there. I'm a big fan of asking for permission, which again is another hot take. Talking head to LinkedIn. There's a hundred ways to do it, by the way. You don't have to do it my way. I'm just telling you the Kevin Hopp Vorace way of doing it. Ask for permission. Hey, I know I'm an Interruption. Do you have 30 seconds? I'll tell you exactly why I called and what their brain is. What? When we say that to them, their brain is going to click and say, I'm too busy. No. And if that's the case, I love that. Awesome. Bye. You hang up on them, and then they're back in your sequence the next day, and the next day, and then you'll catch them again if they're busy. Don't pitch. The worst thing that we can get in a cold call is a false negative. A false negative is I'm not interested. That's like, you know, rep will look at me and say, oh, they're not interested. And I'm like, why? What are they doing today? How are they solving that business problem? You know, oh, we didn't have a conversation. Oh, you didn't have a conversation with them.

Hmm.

It's false negative. Right. So anyways, their brain is hungry for that information. Yes. Like the two things that every single person, every single person on every call ever wants to know. Who are you and why are you calling me? Who are you and why are you calling me? So you have to give that to them right away. But then I'm a fan of acknowledging the interruption. And by the way, this asking for permission thing became much bigger deal during COVID because you hear the dogs barking in the background, you hear the kids screaming. You hear something going on. And if you respect people's time, they'll respect your pitch later. Right. So ask for permission and then get into it. And then when you do your pitch, you have to tell a story about how you help people like them solve business challenges and ask them about what they're doing to solve those business challenges today. Right. Instead of pitching your product, hey, I'm with ACME Corporation. It is fantastic. And do you want to buy? Now, that's not a pitch. Right. So that's what I do for openers. And that's because of the beep. And it's because of I teach that, hey, we don't need to have pressure to make this call happen right now because it's in the dialer. It's in the sequence. Like, I will talk to whoever's ready to talk. And I'm just going to wait till you're ready to talk. And if you're not ready to talk every time, then you're just going to keep hearing my name. And eventually curiosity is going to kill the cat and you're going to say, why do you keep calling me? Because I want to talk to you can I have a conversation? I've had that happen a few times where people keep saying, no, I'm busy. No, I'm busy. No, I'm busy. All right, I'll keep following up. That's what sets my reps apart. People I teach follow up. That's very unusual. Don't call someone once and call it a dead lead. Like, geez, man, when it comes to asking for the business, I could not be more passionate about anything than I am. What I'm about to say. The worst line in sales. Kd, what's the worst line in sales? The worst line sales that if every salesperson eliminates from their vocabulary forever and ever and ever is, I would love to. I just, ah, makes my skin crawl. Right, so imagine you have this great back and forth conversation. I'm like, oh, yeah. All right, Kevin, I would love to get you into a demo of our solution. Oh, geez, are you serious? You know what I say back to that? What I say to every person that hits me on LinkedIn with a I'd love to get 15 minutes on your calendar. The response is, I bet you would. I bet you would. Yeah. It's not, serve the prospect, don't serve yourself. All right, I would love to is the laziest thing a salesperson can say. It's old fashioned. It's used cars. Eat used car salesmany. It's trash. Throw it out of your vocabulary forever. Everyone's listening to this. Never say in a sales conversation. I would love to. I would love to get 15 minutes to show you what I got. I love this. No, put it in perspective for what they said. Now how does that sound? That sounds like, hey, Kevin, you know, from what I'm hearing you say, it sounds like it would make a lot of sense for me to connect you with an expert on my team to have a high level discussion about this. You got 15 minutes next week to have that discussion. Ooh, that's different. Wait, so you're telling me that you're using my, you know, you care about what I said and you're. You're going to solve my problem or help me learn something new with someone next week. Oh, okay. You know, I'm a big fan of using, using. Using words like, why don't we do this? Why don't we do this? I can put you together with a product specialist next week who's going to answer the questions that you were just asking me that are a little bit more in depth and technical. A lot of the clients that we have were in your scenario. And my guy Steve is going to help answer those. You have to make a logical connection between something that they said on the call and the meeting. The meeting has to satisfy or satiate something. It can't be. And I watched the rep do this yesterday where at the very end they went back and forth with this guy on the phone. At the very end, he tried to go for the close and he tried to go for the clothes. And the guy laughed and said, no, that doesn't make any sense. And then he hung up on him and the rep sitting there. And I'm like, hey, why would he take that meeting? And the rep was like, I don't know. I was just going for the close. And I'm like, but it needs to make sense. Right? If someone tells you I understand the business problem you're trying to talk about, I've already solved it. I just made a move with another provider and I'm very happy with what I have in place today to solve that business problem. Go away. So it's a different way of closing. I'll write a book on it one day. I'm going to call it prospect first prospecting or something like that. I'm pretty sure someone already wrote that book. But gosh, like, I hate. I despise the term. I would love to.

Ugh. So I'm gonna. I'll go here with you because I just think it's funny because I also love passion over things like this. Is the problem the phrase or the problem what comes after? Right. So for people listening. Because what I don't want to have happen is I don't want people to miss what you actually said. Was the real tip here. The phrase I'd love to. If it was followed by what you said. I'd love to connect you with an expert who knows more about your industry to have a high level conversation around how we could solve XYZ pain point. Do you have 15 minutes? Wouldn't that still work?

Yeah. Yeah.

I just, I just. Because here's what happens and I can speak this personally. People will hear that.

Yeah.

And they'll miss out on what the actual point was, which was justifying the meeting for a reason that benefits the prospect. So I just didn't want to get your messaging lost in the passion around. I'd love to. Because this is where people do this. They get passionate around that phrase. Right. Morgan can be passionate about saying, how are you doing? Like, we'll get passionate about pieces when the actual reason why shit doesn't tend to Work is what comes after them. Right? So I just wanted to, like, that was. The point was very well taken. I just didn't want it lost in the. I'd love to being the. Throw it away. I mean, you can, but if you followed it up with everything you just said there, I think it probably still works just as well as anything else.

But the one caveat to that, when you are writing, and sales people do a lot of written communication tend to do it poorly because they do it quickly. When you are writing, write the words. I would love to reread it. And I challenge you to write something else. Think you gotta. Gotta, like, do that, like, creative exercise of, like, what's a synonym? What's the way I could say this without saying it? What's a way that, like, decompose what you're trying to get at and put it in terms that makes logical sense for the prospect instead of what serves you, don't serve you commission breath. Right. It's the worst. It is.

There we go. So then how do you get good at a script though, right? You can. You have the greatest script in the world, but if you do sound robotic or you don't commit it to mind. Right. How do you actually get good at a script?

That's a great question. And I'm actually with you on this. I saw you posted something about this the other day, actually, which is don't practice on prospects.

That was this morning. Like, literally this morning. That was top of mind for me. But yes.

So practice, practice, practice, practice, practice on your mother, your brother, your friend, your sister, your wife. You've got to internalize and metabolize it, right? It's got to become a talk track, right? So I think of, you know, I want my reps to think of the script way less of a script and way more of a talk track. And I demonstrate that by when I read the script back to them. Like with Voris clients, we help them build a script, right? And then I demonstrate the script. A lot of times the reps will catch. They'll say, you said a few words in there that weren't on the scripts. I said, yeah, but did the whole point come through?

Right?

Yeah. Did it sound conversational? Yeah, it sounded like you just were, like, talking. I'm like, it's because I want you to add in the way that you speak, as long as you don't add everywhere. All right? Take out the ums are. Ums are not what we're looking for, but adding adjectives, adverbs, things like that. In your, in your pitch, in various places, really important. But practicing and practicing with people that are going to give it to you straight, right? I think one of the mistakes that, you know, training, like standard training is all about like best case scenario. And in cold calling, it's one of these weird scenarios where it's like, dude, your ego is on the line or you make cold calls, you don't normally get the phone slammed on you all the time, you know, and no one likes it. It's super uncomfortable, right? I mean when I was growing up, we had to, I was on, I played high school football and we had to do this like, you know, card thing. So it was like a discount card that if you paid 20 bucks you got this card you presented at businesses around town, you got discounts. A Mustang car is what it's called, right? And we had to go door to door to sell these on one night a year before the football season. And I was terrified.

I hated it.

Because people would be like, no, no thank you. I'm not just saying no solicitors, no solicitors. Hang up, close the door. And I'm like, stand here. I'm like just a 15 year old kid trying to make money from a football team. So I thought I'd never be in sales. Cause I was like really scared of. Wasn't until I interned at a company called Invoca MarTech company up in Santa Barbara and I did a customer success internship. And I could hear the fun that was going on in the sales side of the building. Customer success is over here, sales is over there. And then we were all quiet and boring and like, you know, and then I'd hear that like noise and John Barrows came in there and I got to meet John Barrows. And then I started following John Barrows and. And then I was like, oh dude, I need to be in sales. Like it matches my energy. But that, that fear of like, oh geez, like I'm gonna get hung up on, they're gonna tell me they're not interested. What do I do? We gotta get over that. You gotta practice a lot.

And is that the. Cause that would be the kind of the last question I wanna get to before we wrap up with the final two is how do you get over that fear? Right? Because to your earlier point, and I know tech helps with this too because when you don't have to pick up the phone to make the dialogue, well now it doesn't weigh as much, but if every time you got to pick it up and every time you're pushing the buttons. That gets heavier and heavier to do. But how do you work with your SDRs and your AES, right? Like this, is anybody right? To get over that fear to make the cold call? Because that's what's actually so funny. And I talk about this with my own team. 70% of the calls aren't answered. And less than 10% of the calls, I believe, actually end harshly, right? Where it's like, don't you ever call me again. Right? Like that. That's less than 10%. The vast majority aren't answered. The next chunk is like, you know, we're not interested. I'm not the right person. Now is not the right time. Like, they're not harsh. And then you have like the harsh ones, but we fear those harsh ones so much that we won't even take the steps to do all the other ones. So how do you work with your reps to get over that fear to actually make the call?

I think this is this tap. This taps on, like the psychology of cold calling, something I'm also obsessed with. I was a psychology major and I always, I always joke with my wife. I'm like, you know, I'm basically a doctor, okay? I have a BA in psychology. All right, like, listen to me, all right? Like, I know what I'm talking about here. And the joke is my wife has a doctorate from usc, so she loves it when I, when I say I'm a doctor. Sure she does. Yeah. But you're tapping on the psychology of cold calling where the phone can feel like it's £5,000. That's why I do what I do, man. Like, that is why I do what I do. It's process structured technology with a methodology, right? It all needs to be in place the way that I do it, right? If you're, if you're someone who's sitting at your company right now and you've got little to no enablement, but you got to make calls. You're responsible for generating pipe. You can't do it the whole Kevin hop way. There's some small things you can do, right? Number one, time blocking. All right? Don't look at your calendar and say, I'll make calls today. Put it on the calendar. You gotta do it, right? Put it on your calendar. It's like brushing your teeth. Like, we're gonna make calls today. And then the other piece of that is you have to prepare, right? If you're not prepared, if you don't have a script, like, I guarantee you there's someone who's listening to this and I have these people reach out to me on LinkedIn all the time. Hey, you know, I just started working at this commercial real estate company. Hey, I just started working at this like software reseller company or you know, IT tech thing. And I'm like 24 and I'm trying to make cold calls but I have like a, like a notebook with my script on it and I've got, you know, Microsoft Dynamics is my CRM. And I'm like, look dude, you have to make your own process. You have to have that script. I don't care if you write on paper, word, doc, whatever. Create a talk track time, block it out and grind, right? You got to get out there and do it. So any SDR that we ever work with has, has KPIs. There's an activity KPI and it's, it's a bit like the, bit like the, the old banister handrail here. Like I will show you the way. The truth and light. You don't have to do it. We have a rep right now, one of my clients for Voris and He makes like 20 cold calls a week. He hits his number, I don't care, right? At the end of the day, sales is a results driven business, man. Generate the pipeline, close the deals. No one's going to give you shit, right? I'm not one of those guys going to give you shit. But I'm going to give you a whole processing methodology and you got to go do it and you got to hit KPIs of numbers, call outbound attempts or produce your own way. Right?

And I hope people catch that because that's always the argument. They come back, it's like, well this rep isn't that reps hitting their number? Yeah, conversation over. You like you do that and hit your number, you're good too. But guess what? You're not. So we need to find a different way to get there. And I think that's something that does get lost sight in a lot of this is people have pushed back so much on activity because it has been like just given out blindly. Just do more, just do more, just do more. Versus here's the reason why, here's the math behind it. If you have a better way to do it, God bless you, do it.

Yeah, but you have to produce 100%. And let me just say this. When I was an sdr, I got promoted within six months. And I know I'm like the cold calling guy now. I use cold calling as probably 20% of what I did. That's SDR. I was a savage. I was like before Sendoso, I was using coffee sender. I was sending $10 Starbucks cards with my own money because we couldn't get any money because it was like red tape. Internally. I was using Twitter, I was using LinkedIn, like a savage email and calling because that's how I had success. Omnichannel effort.

It's so important. And that was where I tell this even to my own team. Internally is like, that's why I actually got good at all the other things, right? Even I don't enjoy cold calling, but I'm good at it. But that's also the beauty of all this. And I hope people take this away as a message. The better you are at something, the less you have to do it for the same results. If you are great with your messaging and great with your tone and great with objection handling, you don't have to make as many calls as someone else who isn't. So getting good at this is actually the key to doing less of it, not avoiding it. That is not what drives it down. So, man, this is great. This is really what I was hoping to get into the moment he said, cole, come. Like, yes, this is going to be a fun one, but we got to wrap with this question, right? Because the name of this podcast is Live Better Sell better. So I have this weird idea that if we also took better care of ourselves, had more energy, had more fulfillment, enthusiasm in life, the sales also would improve. What would your live better advice be for people listening?

Move your body. Geez. This is my whoop strap.

Nice, right?

So I'm a whoop guy. So I get pretty into tracking how my body's being strained on and then recovering. That's the big thing, is measuring screen and recovery. Kyle jokes with me all the time. I start my day at 7am so that I can hit the gym every day at 4pm and he'll like hit me on slack and he'll be like, hey, can you jump on? And it's like 3:58. And then I text him, I'm like, you know where I am, right? So he knows I go to the gym every day. Move your body, right? Like you have to make time for the gym. When I was at Venture Back Startup here in San Diego, it was such an aggressive culture. I didn't make time for the gym and oh, dude, everything in my life suffered. You know, I gained weight, my back started hurting, I was grouchy, My girlfriend and I were fighting more. I was drinking all the time. Because it's like happy hour culture. Go to happy hour twice a week with the boys and on the weekends I just wanted to lay down. So you have to. To your point. I love this movement that you're pushing here. My biggest thing is move your body and find what works for you. What works for me is circuit training. I go to a gym where I don't have to prepare. Like it's. I found the perfect thing for me. I've been going to this gym like four to five days a week, every week for years. Years. Like, I just renewed for my third year. I pay up front for the whole year. And what I do is I Show up, it's 45 minutes, high intensity intervals. They design the workout and they blast loud music and that's it. And I leave and I'm sweaty as can be. My heart rate just went like this. Which is really healthy for you. High intensity interval training. And I haven't really gained or lost a pound. That's good for me. Like, I like that because I can just. I drink a lot of craft beer and stuff, so.

Craft beer is delicious, right? That's why we do the exercise, so we can enjoy the other things. So no, I think that's huge. And I do love that you called out movement. It doesn't have to be exercise, but at least move, get up, move, do whatever. Movement works well for you. So, Kevin, man, this was phenomenal. Where can people get more of you? Get more of what you're putting out there, Find you Voris, like, where can they get more Kevin Hopp in their life?

Yeah, LinkedIn's probably number one, right? So LinkedIn on there is my cell phone number. If you click. So one of the things on LinkedIn that I can't believe people don't pay more attention to is that there's a little sound thing, icon you click. And then you can also put a video on there. Like all my stuff's customized. If you want to know anything about Kevin Hopp, go to my LinkedIn profile. You'll figure it out real quick because it's like right there. But click that little sound icon if you're wondering how to get in touch with me. I tell people how to get in touch with me.

Me.

And they still send me cold LinkedIn DMs. I'm like, I just don't respond. I either don't respond or respond with some funny gif, right? There's a gif of Dave Chappelle going like this. Nah, man, like this. And I send that to everybody and they're like, I'm sorry, Kevin, does that mean that you're interested in the conversation next week at 3 o'? Clock? And I'm like, oh God, silly. So go to LinkedIn, you find me there and lots of ways to contact with me. I'm happy to talk with anybody about Outbound and if you're, you know, early stage SaaS company figuring out do we need an SDR team, how do we set KPIs, what do we pay people, what is structure and process look like around Omnichannel outreach? How do you build a modern SaaS go to market team? That's what we do here at Vorus. So it might be worth having a conversation.

Hell yeah. Love it, my man. Well, I appreciate you, I appreciate your energy and your insight. We'll definitely have to have you back for round two on this sometime as well, but thank you so much for this, man.