Prospecting Greatness with Jason Bay

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I'm excited, man. I know you're picky about who you bring on as a guest, so I'm looking forward to your grilling me today, dude.

I mean, you know my style, too. We're going to grill, right? Because this is a topic that is important because it's an area that obviously a lot of people struggle. Reps struggle, team struggle, companies struggle. And it's unfortunate because I think there's this unique balance between not knowing what to do, which is one part of it, but then just not doing it. And so we're going to talk about both of those today. So, like, when we think about execution, I'm going to start with a different angled question. What are the things that you see people doing in outbound that they shouldn't be doing?

Ooh, where to start? I think it. I sort of think about things. I'm really big on frameworks and keeping it super simple. So if you kind of step back, I look at outbound as, you know, kind of. Your life gets a lot easier when you're doing Outbound if you do these three things pretty well. One is identify. So are we going after the right folks? So are these the right accounts? Am I going after the right Personas? And is this based on traditionally where we've had the most success? And then two, it's engage. So once we know who we're going after, how do we start conversations with them? That's our messaging, that's our sequences, that kind of thing. And then convert. So how do we take someone that responds to an email, someone that picks up the phone and we call them, how do we convert that into a meeting? So if we kind of look at it in those three buckets, the identified piece where I see people kind of struggling is there's this big problem right now. You've seen all the stuff with Bridge group where it's harder than it's ever been to get someone's attention. And there's like an inverse proportion or inverse. It's inversely proportionate. I guess I'm not a mathematician here. Of the number of touches that it takes to get a conversation. It keeps growing, right? The number of times that we have to reach out to in order to get a quality conversation. And really where it starts is how do we find a balance between mass blast and customizing every single word of everything that we say when we call someone or when we email them? And I think that's where it starts is, are you segmenting properly? I see people that, I mean, you probably hear this that are like, oh, what we do is industry agnostic kd. I'm like, oh, God. Like when someone says that, like, really, you're not even thinking about what that feels like to get that outreach. I think number one is they have this we can do everything for everyone type of approach. And they haven't clearly created segments either by industry, by business case, whatever it might be. And finding that balance of how do I get the volume and the quality? It's about both. It's not about one or the other. And I'll go ahead and pause there. If you want to dig into that, we can. That's the very first thing that I want people to do is get crystal clear on who they're reaching out to and make that based on where they've seen the most success. No guessing here. Look at your company CRM. Look where you've closed the most deals, who's been a part of those deals, all of that stuff. That's where you want to start.

I think you just touched on where I was going to go with that next. Right. It's like, you know what to look for. Right. So if I'm a rep who's just starting and kind of going like, well, I don't know, I haven't had success yet. In fact, that's part of the problem is why I'm listening to you and kd, man, I don't know where to do so, like, what should they look for for when identifying accounts to go after?

Yeah. So there's kind of three areas that we look for. I have another framework. I call it the Perfect Fit Identifier. And typically where people stop with segmentation is they say, right account and right person. And what they don't look for is values. Values is that kind of third part of the equation that we can dig into. So from an account standpoint, if you're listening to this or watching this, you're probably in one of two situations where you're either given accounts or you have to go find your own accounts. Or like someone in our outbound squad, he was just given a list of leads. I was like, really? You sell something that's 100,000 bucks and they gave you a list of leads. You didn't get accounts to go after. Just a list of a thousand people. Kind of crazy, right? So first, what you want to do is look at the last six to 12 months of where do you guys. Who's the easiest to sell to. So if you're an sdr, talk to your AES, talk to your manager, whoever who have, who have you guys sold to that has the shortest sales cycles, highest closing rates, the people that just kind of get what it is that you're doing, that's where you want to start first. And then the other thing that I'm thinking through is in order to get someone's attention and want them to take a meeting, they're going to want to see content, case studies, white papers, all that kinds of stuff. So I'm also looking at where has our company had the most success. And typically where you want to start is case studies. And if you're at a decent sized company, you probably have a ton of case studies and success stories. I want to be able to, when I'm reaching out to company, you know, if I'm reaching out to, just to use an example, if I'm reaching out to companies that sell marketing automation software, I want to reach out to companies that are in a similar type of vertical as them. So that when I say, hey, we do work with companies like xyz, they're like, oh yeah, that's a company like ours, right? So I look where case studies are strongest, where you have the most success stories. That's where I want to start on an account basis and want to create some segmentation there. On the Persona side of things. What I'm looking at is, and I don't know why people don't do this with prospecting people reverse engineer deals and they do these like, you know, deal reviews and things like that. You can also do that with opportunities. So I really want to look at in the CRM that data should be accessible, the deals that we've closed, what are all the job titles that are typically a part of that deal and in what order? A lot of times the approach with companies, it can be different. Maybe it's top down, maybe it's bottoms up, maybe start in the middle with a director or a vp, whatever that approach is, that works pretty well. I want to know what order of people to reach out to and who typically my AE is going to want to take a meeting with first. If I'm in SDR or bdr, I like that.

And it's just. And one of my favorite words right now, I've kind of been obsessed with it almost for the past year now is intention. And most people just aren't intentional with who they're going after, whether that's the accounts or the titles. There's no intention it's just like, I'm gonna do all this because it's interesting. I actually, you know, I met. Talked with Bertuzzi a little bit about this. Right? There's this. You know, it's harder and harder for us to break through. Right. And more and more touches are required. But also, you've been in this game for a bit. I've been in this game for a bit. The messaging is also getting worse and worse. So is it really actually that hard to break through, or is it just people are just blasting templated emails all the time now and hoping to get through, you know what I'm saying? Because there's also a correlation there. I look at the emails that I get, and I'd be curious how it happens to you. I am easy to find. Right. I am easy to. There is so much content I put out there that you could personalize a message to me on, and less than 10% of the email outreach that comes to me is personalized. So, of course it's harder to break through because the messaging isn't strong. So, like, is that where then messaging for you is engaged? Like, talk to us. The engagement part. How do you stand out in a world full of really bad messaging?

Yeah, Well, I think it does start with values and understanding what's important to. So once we've identified the account and the people that we want to reach out to, there's kind of three areas that I look for that sort of drive the personalization approach. One of them is what do these folks brag about? So what are the outward things that they brag about? Either on a LinkedIn profile, if it's an individual, or a company. So examples of this are awards that they win. I work with a company that sells sort of outsourced, like, customer support. They don't like the word outsource, but that's essentially what they're doing. So the company needs to value providing really excellent customer service, which not all consumer brands do. So what do they brag about? What do they educate their customers about? So if that's a B2B kind of company, what are they pumping out in their content? Blog articles, podcasts, webinars, that sort of stuff. And then look for what do they spend money on. So that's hiring tools that they use, Mergers, acquisitions, et cetera. So I'll give you another example. It's just right before this, I was on a training call with a company that sells an automated robotics solution. It's fucking badass, dude. So there's a software component to this welding solution. So it's a SaaS product and it's also hardware as a service. So it's subscription. We'll put this automated welder into your manufacturing plant. So what we're looking at is what did these companies really care about outwardly talking about that would make them value automating this welding solution. So there's a couple things. So one big higher level thing to understand in the industry is that there's a shortage of labor in welders. The demand for labor is going up 4% every year and the supply is decreasing by 7%. Right. So there's this really big gap. So what do these companies care about? We started looking at this manufacturer was purchasing other companies and these other companies were adding something to their product mix. So they were doing trailers and all kinds of complicated shit to manufacture that's traditionally very hard to manufacture and traditionally very hard to automate. It's what they call high mix, low volume. Without getting too technical to answer your question about messaging, if I don't understand what these companies value and what they're trying to accomplish and something bigger picture about how my solution would tie in from a business standpoint, it's kind of hard to write a good message because the very first line of that cold email is hey KD saw that you guys just purchased XYZ company and you're going to be adding a lot of complex products into your manufacturing mix. Personalization. And then the second piece. So this is part of our reply method. So the second piece is empathy. That's the end reply. Typically when people are doing this, they run up against a couple issues. One, I saw you guys are hiring a lot of salespeople. So the demand is increasing and it's becoming harder to fulfill that demand in a sustainable way because it's really hard to find welders to produce this right now. People are having to turn away work or push back job orders and it's affecting revenue. Relevant result. Next line. And this is the same kind of thing I would talk about in a cold call as well. Same kind of messaging pattern. The way that we're helping manufacturers that produce these types of parts is helping them overcome the labor shortage by looking for ways to completely remove that from the equation. Interested in learning how? That's basically it. That's kind of the fundamental message. If we use something like very tactical messaging wise. And I think again to step back the big challenge. I just wrote a post today, I don't know if you saw it about objection handling on cold calls and where people tend to really go wrong is when someone says, oh, kd, I'm already using a CRM solution. We're already using robotics, let's say, just to keep with this example. And then we start to go into, well, hey, does your thing do this, does it do that? We talk about, in sales, they say, talk about how you're different, right? Don't talk about how you're better, talk about how you're different. I'm like, well, you're keeping the conversation at the features and benefits level. I want to get a step above that and talk about the bigger problem at hand is there's a huge labor shortage of labors that's affecting you whether you want to admit it or not. And they already know this. But you don't know how to fix this problem. And I know what you're doing right now is not working if you don't understand that bigger picture thing. Objection. Handling becomes pretty easy because I say, hey, I figured you probably already were doing some sort of automation or robotics and that actually wasn't the reason I was reaching out to you. The reason I was reaching out to you is that people tend to come across a lot of problems with the types of trailers that you guys are manufacturing, that high mix, low volume, where they have trouble automating all of the aspects of the manufacturing process. My guess is that you're probably manufacturing or automating about half of the process. And I wanted to set you up with my account executive so and so that's got seven years of experience working on this. And he's going to tell you how manufacturers are overcoming this labor shortage and things that you could be automating right now that you aren't just based on the limitations of your technology. And I promise that'll be worth your time to sit down and speak with us. That's how you handle that. Objection. You don't make it a. Well, hey, does your thing do this.

Does it do that?

No, no, no. Like this is strategic. It's the strategic advisor that everyone talks about. Reps are not thinking in that way. And I know that's kind of hard to do maybe in your first six months as an SDR or bdr. But you got to fucking educate yourself, man. Like you got to get the bigger picture of what is going on industry wise that that C level executive is going to care about. Because they don't give a shit about automation, man. They really. And they don't care about welding. They care about, dang, this is going to be something three years down the road that we're not going to be able to hit our sales targets because we can't keep up with the demand. That's the type of stuff that they're thinking about. So I know there's kind of a lot there. But that, that's how I think about messaging and really making it pop. That's going to pop in their inbox, man, when you're talking about stuff like.

That, because it's, it's speaking to them at a more specific level. Right. It's not even about personalization as much as something they can resonate with. Right. And you were putting things in there, you know, resonate or relevant.

Right.

Like, okay, I saw you bought this company. But then what I work on with my reps and we talk about a lot is you gotta connect the dots. You can't just say like, hey, like, saw you bought this company, we can help you. No, no, no. You gotta connect the dots of like, okay, so what's the problem? What's the impact of that problem? Then you can get into a little bit of a call to action or a suggestion of like, what could maybe be done about it and then start the conversation from there. And I love how you pulled the objection not to, like, the product, but the reason, the problem they're trying to solve. Right. Like, we already have a CRM. Well, yeah, I would hope so. Yeah. And that also is a good pattern break. Right? We're like, well, of course you have. Yeah, I know you have something. That's why I'm reaching out. But then moving it to something bigger than just, oh, but we have a blue button. They have an orange button. So I really, I really like that framework. Right. So I think. So I caught it briefly. Right. So it was like, reply. So R, E, P, L, Y is the framework there. So what is the E L? Now I can't spell it without doing the hollow. R, E, P. Yeah, there we go. P, L, Y. What are those?

So this is the way you kind of backtrack into this is these are kind of like the. There's an order that you could do it, but really I think of it more like a checklist. So what are the fundamental pieces that a good message needs to have? So the R is relevant results. So that like, what is the thing that you can help them do? And it's got to be related to, like, saving time is not something a lot of VPs and C levels care about because they're not doing the actual thing. Right. So you got to understand what is the result that they're driving. And typically we can do that through, you know, making statements like really simple, we can make that problem go away or we make it to where people don't have to worry about that anymore. Or we can help you overcome that thing. It doesn't have to be percentages and dollars and all that other stuff necessarily. Case studies, success stories, those things are really good for that. The E is empathy. And this connects to. I'm really big right now and I think that people can be overly focused on problems and the wrong types of problems. So I think it's one step in the right direction. If you're talking about problems instead of talking about what your thing does and talking about problems they have. But you can't talk about stuff that is too low level. Like I love Skip Miller's selling above and below the line. That concept, you know, the below the line, the managers and the directors typically more tactical, day to day, week by week kind of thing. And your VPC levels, you're more strategic and with the problems really if you in front of the problem talk about a priority. So typically when I talk to VPs of manufacturing, they're trying to do one of three things, right? They're trying to keep up with the labor shortage, but they've tried using robotics and it's failed. Whatever, right? It's like, what are you trying to do? And then what gets in the way? Typically those things need to be coupled together in the messaging. Unless you're doing something that's more below the line, which I think you can get more tactical with. Oh, do you ever do this thing kd where you try to export a report and then the spreadsheet's not formatted correctly and you end up spending all day doing it? Like that is a little bit more for someone that's below the line kind of folks. So that's your E, P is your personalization, L is laser focus. I find that the laser focus piece is the advice I'm giving is even shorter emails these days. It used to be keep it under 120 words. And now I'm like, if you could get something that's like 50 to 75 words, that's three sentences. Probably ideal because in the the not the feedback. But sometimes people are like, well, what if the email's really good? I've seen people do 10 sentence, 12 sentence emails. And I'm like, well, you're not an entertaining storyteller. I wouldn't even be able to write an email that long and have it be entertaining. So laser focus, keep the message short. And then the why is you oriented? So am I talking about you and your versus I. So I kind of think of that like a checklist to look at an email or just a message that we might drop into a cold call.

Yeah, no, I really, I really like that because also just big fan of frameworks. They're easy to remember, right? Just like, okay, this is just a checklist to go through and to make sure that you're crafting it the right way. Because it is like so many messages just miss. You can tell they have no idea, no idea what it's like to be a VP of sales or what it's like to be a founder of a company. When they're reaching out, they're just throwing things out there and then that gets them in trouble. Right? So now is that similar then to like on the cold call? Relatively similar. So that's a good email check. Checklist when you're making that call, right, you get someone on the phone, right? How are you teaching people to keep them right? Like, you know, oh, hello, this is Kevin. And be like, oh, shoot, they actually answered.

Oh shit.

Right? Like, it's so funny. And we've all been there too, where just, you know, it's call number 42 of the day, no one's been answering and all of a sudden someone does. You're like, oh, shit. Like now what is it a similar framework there, like with the intro and everything else, or do you have something different that you'd like to cover there?

Yeah, same type of messaging. So obviously with a cold call, you gotta be more on your feet and you don't just like drop a bunch of shit on the person and then like wait for them to say if they're interested or not. So I was just making cold calls earlier today for a client, which I don't do a ton of cold calling for my own business anymore because I get a lot of inbound. But I like to do it every week for one of my clients. That's typically a consulting type of thing. Keeps me sharp. So the way that you want to think about the cold call is there's an intro, there's a hook, and there's a close. The intro in that first 30 seconds. What I'm a really big fan of, just remove the surprise and do a permission based opener. I know that people are like, oh yeah, don't. Don't say your first name at the beginning. You sound like a salesperson. I'm like, well, every. I Listen to hundreds of calls on a monthly basis and just doing a very simple. Hey, kd, Jason with blissful prospecting. No, I probably caught you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and then you can let me know if you want to keep chatting. That works. 90% of the time the person says yes. So unless you got something else to deviate from that and it works better than 90% of the time, use it. But I think people give a lot of shit to a really just basic permission based opener. It's about your tone and the enthusiasm that you have. I never get told no when I do that and I have a little bit of fun with it. Hey Katie, I know I probably got you in the middle of something here. It's nine o' clock in the morning on a Friday, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling? You can decide if you want to hang up or not. And I had a guy earlier today, he's like, oh no, no, I don't want to hang up. What do you got? You know, and he was from the south too, so that might have helped. He's real friendly. So from there in that intro, I'm going to do that priority. I'm going to drop those priorities in there. So what you really need to be aware of, you talk about this a lot, are what are the two or three things that are top of mind for the people that you're reaching out to right now where you can get that information? Again, I don't find that a lot of people do this. That robotics company I'm working with right now, what I did before I started working with them is I said, hey, I want to listen to like eight discovery calls with your AES. And they do killer discovery calls, man. Like, it's super educational. They're really good at like engaging these folks and finding out the problems and all this other stuff. But their SDRs didn't do that at all. I was like, I want you to listen to these recordings. And they start figuring out what these priorities are. So that's where I'm going to drop the priorities in there. And I'll give you. Because the client I'm calling for is that CRM client they sell into higher ed. So I'll give you that. So it sounds something like this. Hey, great, Katie. Thanks, man. Typically when I talk to directors of admissions, I hear one of two things. Either, hey, enrollments are going really good right now. We have so many Students applying for our school, we don't even know what to do with it. And it's more a matter of how do we get the right people in the right programs. Or two, I hear we could definitely use more leads. And right now we need to get some of those leads. But it's really about like, how do we get more students applying and the ones that apply, how do we make sure they don't slip through the cracks and potentially go to a competing university? Which one of those two situations are you dealing with right now? And it's high enough level to where I'm able to filter. That's the goal of the intro. I want to filter the conversation into something that they're working on. And what usually people will say is, well, hey, we could always use more enrollments. But I want to say that at the very beginning, it's disarming for me to say, hey, you might be one of those universities, you got everything figured out right now and you're just getting bombarded. You're having your best year ever. But it's like, how do we keep up?

Right?

So that filters the conversation for the.

Middle part, the hook.

Now I can start poking and prodding around problems that people have. And again, I got to throw gong under the bus a little bit. And I love their stuff. But they said don't ask open ended questions in cold calls. I'm like, dude, no, like you gotta ask an open ended question or two. There's nothing wrong with closed ended questions either. But the example they used was, so what are your biggest priorities this year, kg? Of course you wouldn't ask a stupid question like that on a cold call.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Yeah, of course you wouldn't ask that. So if someone's like, hey, we have so many enrollments, we don't even know how to deal with it, I'm like, hey, interesting. I'm actually hearing that from a couple other universities that we're working with right now. And usually what that creates is this huge amount of manual backlog for their team and they don't have time to go through and pick out the best students for those programs. I'm curious, what kind of tools do you guys even using to keep track of all this? Oh, we're using Salesforce CRM.

Got it.

I figured you were probably using a CRM and I'm really curious, when your reps are working through these leads, how do they know what students to prioritize and which ones that maybe aren't the best fit for you? Oh, I don't know. We just, we kind of respond to everyone. Oh, interesting. I mean, do you know how much time you're spending on students that are not a good fit that keeps you from talking to the right ones? No. Interesting. Well, I'm really glad I called you. How about we do this and then you go into the close. Can I make a quick suggestion?

Yeah.

And in the close, what we want to do is secure the meeting, right? We could talk about how to do that in a second, but I'll go and pause because it dumped a lot of information on you there. But that's kind of the framework there.

I don't know. I love it though, because it's like. And I don't know where it's one. There's a lot of things that get preached in sales that like, sound good but have no backing, right? So like when people say, like, not to ask permission, not to use words like potentially probably, or possibly not to use open ended questions, avoid filler words. Like, there's all these things that, like, are just easy to try to call out that aren't true. A warm, true, genuine opener will beat anything else of like, hey, you got 27 seconds for me to tell. Like, if you don't sound natural saying that 27 seconds, it'll never work. Versus, hey, like, I was just reading one of your articles.

I was hoping we could just chat real quick.

You have like a minute for me to ask a couple questions, see if it's even worth us continuing that tone as well. Like, really carries things through. And then I do. I like how you get to the heart of it that. I can't remember how you phrased it, but just, you know, basically putting a couple of things out there, right? Like, people are struggling with this. They're kind of struggling with this. Like, and then I call it the blow up. You had it. You call it a different way. It's like. Or maybe you already figured it out already and you give them kind of that alternative of choice of like. I mean, because if you've got it perfect, just tell me. But if not, maybe we can keep talking. It just keeps the conversation going. So I really like that framework and I hope people are taking notes on this because also, y', all, it's very close to what I teach too. Like, it works. It works. And it's an easier way to sell. It's a more natural way to sell. So let's say you made it to that point, right? So, because also too, you said, you know, you ask for the Meeting is what comes next. But you also know very well most reps don't even ask for the meeting. They get to the end and they hope that the prospect says, well, now. Now what? Or, yeah, I'd like to see. Right. Like, we don't even ask. Right. So let's talk about how to ask for the meeting the right way.

That's like approaching, you know, back when we were single, approaching someone at the bar. You have a really good time and you wait for them to ask you for your number. Yeah, just like, take some initiative, Matt.

So what do you think? And then it stop. It's just. It's awful. Right? But that is like reps, they do, they get to the end and they're.

Kind of like, I didn't think I.

Was going to make it this far. Now what? Right. So how do you coach to actually ask for the meeting in a way that not only again, feels natural or doesn't feel like a push pull, but also so that they actually show up to the meeting? Yeah.

So one of the things I actually heard Tim Grover say. Do you know who Tim Grover is?

Sounds super familiar. You're a big Kobe fan.

He is Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan's personal trainer.

Oh, relentlessness.

Yep.

Okay, got it.

Okay. I've been really into him lately. He said this thing I thought was really good. And he said, because he just came out with a book called Winning, and it's about the mindset behind winning. So it takes relentless in kind of a different direction around the mindset of winning. And one thing he talked about is that winners expect to win, and they're not surprised when stuff don't go their way. So when they mess up and something is out of character, they're expecting things to go the way that they want. They're expecting to win. But when things don't happen, it's like that feels out of character for them and they're able to not identify as an individual with that thing, with that failure. So how does that connect? The way that this connects with the cold call is that I think a lot of people, you shouldn't be surprised at the end of the call. You should go in that meeting, into that call expecting to get a meeting. If that person's a good fit, you're open to them not being open to that. You're willing to accept that, hey, they might not be interested, but you're expecting to get a meeting, so don't be surprised. Bilal, he's a friend of yours? I'm good friends with him. Um, he. I love what his advice around. You gotta be the person to cut the call off.

Yeah.

So when you start getting some juicy little bits and they're in there three or four minutes into the call. Hey, Kevin. Dude. Good stuff so far. Can I make a quick suggestion? Yeah. Here's what I heard. I heard that enrollments are going pretty well, but your team's getting really bogged down with manual work right now. Did it? And then I might say something else after that. Did I miss anything? No, that's about right. Well, how about we do this? I'd love to unpack this when I'm not calling you in the middle of the day out of the blue here, because it's definitely something that we can help you with. Do you have your calendar, Andy?

Love it.

And then go right into scheduling and confirming you don't need to do any kind of value prop statement or here's what we do or whatever. It's. Hey, here's what I heard. You notice the entire middle hook of the call is all about the prospect. When I go to close, it's about the prospect. I'm summarizing what I heard them say. And then when I go to set the meeting, I'm going to do what I call a triple confirmation. You've talked about this a lot in your podcast. I'm going to get them to accept the calendar invite on the call. I'm going to reiterate and confirm the agenda. So the agenda is going to be, hey, just again, what we're going to talk about in this call is XYZ problems that you're having and how we might be a good fit to help you. And then the last part is, if the meeting's more than a day or two out, what I'm going to do is set the expectation, I'm going to send a confirmation email, and then I'd like them for them to respond to it.

I think the only thing I try to do extra there is get them to accept the calendar invite on the call.

On the call. They have to.

Yep.

You got to do that.

Hey, I'm sending you a calendar invite right now. Could you accept that for me, please? Yep, that's it. Like, and that again, we have to, as salespeople, just have to get better at asking for what we want. Right? Hey, I'm sending an invite. Could you accept that for me real quick, please? Yeah, right. And especially if you're following what Jason's talking about here, right? Of like, when it's about them, when the meeting is for them not about us to discover or for us to teach versus like, hey, we want to show you some things that might help, you might not. That's what we get to have the call for, right? We can see if it's worthwhile to discuss. So I really like that confirmation at the end to get them to show. Now real quick on that confirmation email. I think it's important what goes in that confirmation email because a lot of times people send confirmation emails that are just like, hey, confirming for tomorrow.

Yeah, I'm going to drop the agenda that I put into the calendar. Invite the notes that I took in the call. I'm going to drop that. Hey, I have us down to talk about bullet point number one, two and three. And oh, by the way, here's a case study or piece of content relevant for them. Looking forward to chatting with you. One thing also I want to reiterate with cold calling that's so, so important is, dude, you got to have that conviction, man. And if you're an SDR or BDR setting something up for an ae, what you're doing is you're setting this person up for a blind date. So think about what that's been like in your personal life. If you've been set up for a blind date or you've been a part of setting someone else up for a blind date, how do you usually talk about that person? Oh, dude, you gotta meet kd. He's really awesome. Like, he's really into like personal development. He takes care of himself, he's very successful. You talk that person up. So with your ae, get them excited to talk to that person. Hey Katie, I'm so excited for you to talk to so and so. He's actually got seven years doing XYZ and he's actually walked the factory floor at a lot of these manufacturers. And like, you're gonna learn so much. I'm so excited for you to talk to him. You can use that when you're objection handling too. And one phrase that I love using lately and you have to mean it, is, I promise it'll be worth your time. It helps you push past that. No, when I was making cold calls for that CRM company, this guy gave me like three objections. Hey, we're already using a CRM. I already kind of gave that example and I just said, hey, I want to share with you Nikhil, who you're going to be talking with. He's going to share with you. I don't know if you know this, but the average student right now applies to about a dozen universities, and that's three times more than it was five years ago. So what we're going to talk about is trends that we're seeing in admissions and enrollment departments to make sure you're not losing students to competing universities. I promise you, it'll be worth your time. You're like, well, you know, I just, I don't know about this. And I was like, let's put 20 minutes on the calendar. I guarantee you're going to walk away with some tidbits in there. And you said at the beginning of the call that you want to stay up on enrollment trends and what's going on, let's make it happen. And you need that level of conviction. And this is actually one of the bigger deals in their pipeline right now because people are always like, well, that's not a. If you had to push that hard, it's not a good lead. They're not ready to buy right now. That's the other issue I have with Outbound, is that this whole Bant thing, man. Okay, really? So I don't even think Bant is like this terrible framework. It's more how people execute it that it is so atrocious. So basically an SDR's job is, let me just find the 2 or 3% of people that happen to be in a buying window and then qualify the fuck out of them and then set them up for a meeting. What about all the other people that if they were to get to that demo or that ae, they'd be like, oh, wow, I didn't. I didn't really think we need this. You know, selling a project or software or whatever to someone that already has budget carved out. That's easy, dude. Any salesperson can sell that. The stuff that's hard is when people create budget. They don't have budget and they create it for your thing. You're not going to get people to create budget for you unless they're doing meetings where the AE has to sell. You know what I mean? What happened to like selling people versus just taking all the gimmes and the, you know, the easy stuff.

People forget one, how old Bant and medic are and the world that those actually came from, right? If you look at how sales was even done, it's called even. 25 years ago, sales was significantly more account management. You owned your accounts and you worked them through. So then it made sense for a band or a medic, right? It's like, okay, who within my pool currently has budget? Who's the Authority person, what's the need? And then the timeline. So you're not wasting ones on that they don't buy until Q4. You're on them in Q1, but for outbound, that's always killed me, right? And I hate, like, I talk to SDRs and they tell me, like, yeah, like, you know, they get DQ'd because they didn't have budget. No, that's not. That's not. You can't do that. Like, you can't DQ something cause they didn't have budget or because they weren't gonna make a decision in the next 60 days. Like, no, that's on. That's like, oh, the timing. Oh, the timing's off. Like, I. Like I. My team knows this and we live it like, we will demo anybody, anywhere. And the only reason something can be DQ'd is if literally they can't use our product. If they can't use it for a legal reason, for a contractual reason, that's it. But we're still running that demo. Even if someone's under contract, we're gonna run it because that's what's opening your future pipeline up. Just waiting till they have budget. Your competitor got in beforehand, because by the time they have budget, someone else convinced them they needed it and you're already behind.

And you can't tell me that all your AES have so much going on right now that their demo calendar is just filled. Come on. Come on.

Ridiculous. It's ridiculous. So. Holy cow. So we've already been riffing for 40 minutes on this, so we're going to have to wrap this here real quick. So I got two last questions for you. So first one called the big three, right? Because like, we have. We've covered a lot and you've gotten really tactical, which I really appreciate because nothing drives me nuts more than just like theory based, like, oh, you know, just, you know, be confident, do anything for anybody. Right? So with all the things you've covered, if you think about outbound, what would the three key takeaways be? Like, you'd want people to walk with to improve their outbound, you know, effectiveness. What would those three takeaways be?

Yeah, one key habit is you got to go from this me first mindset of what do I need to. You first, me second. So everything you need to do, you're constantly thinking about what's in it for the other person. That's a really, really simple mindset shift that you need to do. That's number one. Number two is you need to get really really in tune with the priorities and the problems of the people you're reaching out to. If you don't know that, you need to listen to calls with your AES, you need to look at case studies. There's a handful of other things. I mean, customer interviews is something you could do. You need to get really in tune with what those people are focused on. And then third, what I would say is you need to figure out from a high level standpoint, you need to do a little bit of research into what are some of the macro trends going on that people are thinking about. And really simple ways that you can do that is any of the Deloitte McKinsey, any of the big, I guess, consulting firms, whatever you want to call them, they're putting out a lot of macro trends on what's going on. And you need to kind of know what the bigger picture is.

Yeah.

So if it's selling to universities, it's knowing that students are applying to three, four times more universities than they ever have and there's a ton of competition. If it's welders, it's the welder shortage. Nurses that I work with a lot of companies to sell into healthcare, there's a huge nurse shortage right now. You need to understand those things because you have to tie your thing into some of those bigger macro trends if you want to get meetings at the C suite and the VP level.

I love that. It's so true. And speaking with a woman earlier today of like, there's so much content out there right now that salespeople are consuming, but it's the wrong content. They're consuming sales content. Right. And that's what they're going to LinkedIn for. That's what they're going to YouTube for. They're trying to get more sales content versus consume the content your prospect is or should be consuming. Right. Because they're probably not. And you can share it. I just, that, man, we can level up so fast. If the people on LinkedIn sales reps on LinkedIn were consuming just as much content from their prospects world as they were from the sales world, God, their sales would be better just, I mean, almost immediately. So. Okay, and the last question for you here, man, I'm pumped to hear where you take this because the name of the podcast is Live Better, Sell Better. I have this really strange idea that if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, if we got more fulfillment, if we had more joy in our lives, that the sales would also improve from it. Right. So what would Your live better advice be for people listening.

Yeah, the live better. I know you're a big fan of therapy, man. So I. I've gone to a lot of therapy. I got into couples, all kinds of different stuff. And the big thing, whether you do that through therapy or you read books or whatever, is one of the things that I realized. And I've been. Sales is the only adult job I've had. So my first sales job was at 19 going door to door selling house painting services in 2008. I consider myself to be pretty good in sales. And a couple years ago, what I realized is that I don't really have, like, empathy. I have it, but I don't really understand it. Like, really understanding. Hey, when I show up late to something, instead of apologizing and saying, hey, I was late because of traffic, really thinking about what does it feel like when you sit in that room and you're waiting on an important person that needs to be at that meeting, you're waiting on them. What does that feel like? Well, it might feel a little bit of frustrating. It might feel like this person doesn't really care about you and like what you need, you know, and like really sitting in the seat of the other person. If you just did that, if you made a practice of that in your personal life, like really thinking about everything that you do, and my wife, your husband, your spouse, your friends, whoever, how does what I'm doing make them feel? And what would it be like if I was in their position right now? I noticed that that's really not a thing that most people do very well. And I was one of those people a couple years ago. And if you just made a really big focus at that, your personal life, that becomes habit. And it's the number one tool in your sales arsenal is you have the ability now to, hey, when I do that stupid 27 second thing and it sounds robotic, how does that make the other person feel? You can start connecting those dots a little bit. So that would be the number one thing I'd recommend, is you have to level up true, like true empathy chops and know how to tactically use it to understand people better and disarm them and figure out where they're coming from so that they're just open to listening to you. Because that's. That's half the battle. Maybe three quarters of the battle with Outbound really is just getting the other person disarmed so that they're just listening to what you have to say.

I love that because it's other people Focused, Right. Like, Zig Ziglar said this a while back, right? You can get anything you want in life as long as you help other people get what they want first.

Right.

And by thinking of the other person and what their world is like and what they're thinking, how they're feeling can make you better at what you're doing as well. So I love that, man. That's a phenomenal party advice here. So where can people get more of you, man? Like, where can they get more of your content, more of your insight sites? You got a course, a book? Like, where can people get a little bit more blissful prospecting in their lives? Yeah.

So blissful prospecting.com is the best place. So if you're like, hey, Jason, I just want free stuff, we got a ton of that. So there's podcasts, there's guides on video, there's a reply method guide. All that kind of stuff's there. And if you're looking for help as an individual, we have something called Outbound Squad. And the whole kind of premise behind that is I don't believe that top reps need to consume more webinars and podcasts and content. I really believe you need to focus on, like, what do you need to take action on that's going to move the needle the most? You need to be surrounded by a community of people that are, like, want to level their shit up, you know, as a salesperson. So that's what we do in Outbound Squad. And we also work with companies, too, so if you're looking to implement some of the stuff we talked about today with your company, we can help with that as well.

Oh, yeah. So website's the best place to go get this information.

Directing.com. yep.

I love it, man. Man. Well, this was amazing. You know how I feel about Outbound, man. And it's just fun to sit down and talk to someone where I resonate with so much of what they're saying on it. Because there's a lot of junk out there on Outbound that I'm like, no, I don't agree, and I won't pretend that I do agree with it. So I love what you put out there, man. Appreciate your time, your energy, your insights today, man. Thank you so much.

Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me on, man.

Hell yeah, dude.