SDR BDR Level Up - Cold Calling

So we are going to kick today off. Just like every other time by sharing a win from the past week. And I am in my workspace today. Normally I'm in my home office, but someone at my twins' preschool Like one of the families, someone had COVID, and so they've closed the whole preschool. And my— it's kind of a weird situation here, but my gym has a workspace in it, and it also has like a little childcare place, and I get like 2 hours a day that I can use the childcare, so I'm using it to be here with you lovely people. So that's been a really fun curveball for my week that we found out on Friday evening. Like 7 PM, we got an email from the school. It was like, hey, by the way, school's closed all next week. And I was like, okay, we'll figure that out. But on the win side, I actually got a text message from a friend just now because On her LinkedIn, she got a notification that said that one of my posts had been featured in a LinkedIn article. And so I went and checked my LinkedIn, which I hadn't checked yet today. And I've got like 3— like 30 or 40 interactions on a post that I posted a couple of weeks ago about attaching a cover letter to your resume to explain if you have like a gap in employment. So that's really exciting for me. It's driving a lot of traffic to my LinkedIn. And let me pass it forward to Nathan. What's your win this week?

Win this week was, I guess, just had a lot of fun this weekend. Had some friends visit from school. I live in Humboldt County. They'd never been here before. I don't know if you're familiar with where that is. I think California, the northern part of California, but I got to take him on some cool hikes. It was a fun experience.

Well, that's awesome. Northern California is actually on my bucket list. I really want to see orca whales in the wild, and that's like one of the places you can see them.

I'll pass it on to Tyler.

Morning. Yeah, I guess wins from last week. After a really long time, we finally got ink on the Raiders deal. So that was really good to see. It's been a long time coming and it was good to see them finally move forward with it after they've been going back and forth for so long. Yeah, other than that, just a nice calm weekend with no plans. That's always my favorite kind of weekend. I think I'll pass it over to Mark here.

Yep, great.

Similar to Tyler there, I'm excited to try and rinse and repeat an opportunity that the Raiders had with another club in the NFL, making sure that we are solidifying a tighter relationship as competition continues to heighten and really come after our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So safe to assume you're gonna go after more NFL teams?

Yeah, and certain avenues of business, I think, in collaboration with awesome team members like Tyler Huggins.

Awesome. That's a great one. Um, I always love to hear, you know, success that you guys are closing deals and making money. Um, so today we're going to talk about cold calling. There's only the 3 of you here. So raise your hand if cold calling is relevant to you. And if it's not, we'll pick something else to talk about. All right.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Your emails was super helpful, Megan. I actually used the technique of being like gentle and inviting and asking if they had time, and I totally actually got a response back. So I'm in.

Sales is changing, and it has been for a while now, but I think COVID really ramped up something that was already happening, which is that I do not think I don't think of sales as pressuring people to buy from me, as harassing people, chasing people down. That is not how I think of myself at all. I think of myself as someone who solves your problem. And I think that if you don't have that attitude about what you're selling, you should switch it up and sell something else where you do feel like you're solving somebody's problem. And when you call somebody to solve their problem, you don't get pushy. You don't just start pitching. I call it being pitch slapped when somebody just like hits you up out of nowhere and hits you with a pitch and you're like, hi, excuse me, do I know you? Have we ever engaged about anything in my life? No. Okay, cool. Then don't try to pitch your product or solution to me because you don't even know if I have a problem. So more and more, I think cold calling is about genuine connection. And it is polite and professional and friendly. And if you can kind of capture that essence in how you call, you're going to have a lot more success than kind of the stereotypical burning the phone out dialing. A colleague of mine recently wrote a piece about how easy it was to be an SDR. 6, 7, 8 years ago. And I can attest that this is true because I was an SDR during this period, which was when like no one was on LinkedIn and they had basically just invented this front of pipeline sales position that was just outbound. Right. And all you really had to do was shotgun approach, hit everybody, and you'd get responses and you'd set basically as many meetings as your calendar could handle and you'd make a bunch of money. Those glory days are fading a little bit, which means that we just, we have to change our approach, right? So have you guys seen, what is the name of the movie? I'm like spacing on the name now, but it's about selling stocks years ago. And the guy hands him the pen and he's like, sell me this pen. Have you seen this movie?

Wolf of Wall Street?

That's it. Thank you. I uncomfortably saw that with my mother in theaters, by the way. But that is how sales used to be, right? And I actually— I have genuinely— I've walked into sales interviews and been asked to sell the pen. And it's still— it's still a thing, right? And that's fine. But the way that we sell the pen has changed, right? So if I'm calling you and I want to sell you a pen, first of all, I'm going to find out if you even need a pen. Because if you're 100% digital and you don't write anything down, I'm wasting my time with you, aren't I? And so I think sales has become much smarter. And one of the things I look for is getting to know as quick— like, get to the no as fast as possible, if that's what you're uncovering. So when you're on a cold call, you can almost say to yourself that there's kind of like, there's 2 outcomes. And they're both okay. The only outcome that isn't okay is wasting your time because your time is valuable. So as you pick up to dial, the first thing you need to do is get in that mindset where you're like, either I make a connection, they answer the phone, we have a conversation, or they, or they don't answer the phone, right? That's like the first place where it branches. Either they answer or they don't. Either outcome's okay, right? It's fine if they don't answer. It's fine if they do answer. And then you come to another branch in the road, which is like, either you get somebody who is willing to like open to having a conversation, right? Or they essentially tell you to fuck off. They're both okay. In fact, like personally, as someone who spent a lot of time cold calling, I much more appreciate, like I would 10,000 times Rather get somebody who answers the phone and is like, no, screw off, stop calling me, than someone who jerks me around for months on end and tells me like, oh, well, maybe I'm interested, but I gotta get approval from my boss's second cousin's aunt. And, you know, I gotta bring 3 more people in and I don't, I don't, I don't even know, like, do I need your project? Like, that's a waste of my time. The guy that's gonna tell me to email him, and then when I email him, he's gonna tell me to set a meeting 3 months out. And then, you know, it's this whole cycle of time suck. So my goal when I call somebody is just to get them to either confirm that they have a need and I could solve it, or to confirm that they're the wrong person for me to be talking to. That's it. That's my only goal for the call. And obviously, like, we want to set meetings, we want to move things forward, we want to keep the ball rolling, but If you go into every call being like, either I set a meeting or I lost, you are going to get beaten down and dejected so much faster than if your only outcome— like, your only goal is just to find out whether or not there's an opportunity. Like, it's just, it's just discovery, essentially. Like, if you call and— I did. I did. I send you guys the qualification worksheet. I think I did, right?

I believe you did. Yes.

Okay. So I obviously, I use that for qualification calls, but I also use it when I cold call to take notes. Um, I use this fun handy-dandy notebook. It's the reMarkable tablet. Highly, highly recommend it. Um, cause it's a digital note-taker and you can load PDFs onto it and then take the notes on top. So like I import all of my templates. And take notes right on top. Alternatively, if you're like a paper and pen guy, you can totally print these things and keep them by your desk. But I don't— reduce, reuse, recycle. Um, so when I call somebody, I'm just trying to qualify them the same way I would if like it was an inbound lead I was qualifying. I'm just calling them and jumping right into those same questions, which are like, do you have a problem? Can I help you fix it? Um, What does it look like today? Are you talking to other vendors? Those— that's really the goal. And then obviously, like, it's a, it's a big win, ring the bell if you set a meeting, but it's also a win if you just find out that, like, no, they're not shopping right now, but ultimately the decision maker is a guy that sits in another department and you should talk to him. in 5 months, because they're going to be making their decision in 6 to 7. If that's what— like, that's a great call. You now know who the decision maker is. You now know when the timeline is for changing things about Python. You still won. And more and more, every SDR team I've coached in the last year and a half, I have said, stop focusing on meetings and start focusing on quality conversations and watch your pipeline change. Because what happens when we focus on meetings as a metric is we get a lot of junk because we just, we want to set the meeting and we're not thinking about whether or not it's a good meeting to set. When instead we focus on quality conversations, it takes the pressure off of us to like put a tally mark on a board that says that we set a meeting. Instead, it's like, did I have good conversations today? Okay, did I move the needle forward? What did I uncover? And did I log what I uncovered someplace where the whole team can see it? And that's how, like, over time we create a sales org. It's like super healthy. Okay, so moving forward. Mark, you said that you used some of the advice in my cold calling and that it worked for you. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about how, like, how that call Sure.

So, from a standpoint of the— it was email more so than a cold call, but any which way, it was a cold email outreach. And basically, I asked about things like, do they have an issue? I referenced where I had heard of them or where I'd gotten their name from, explained a little bit about what we are, and then asked if they have time, i.e., like, you know, when you have— if this feels like— I said, kind of asked if They have interest, do they have time? Just an inviting thing rather than trying to like pitch a product, like just trying to throw fastball, fast heat down the pipe. I just, you know, so that I just got their response was, yeah, we're in the middle of a season. We are, you know, interested and, you know, so I'm hoping it's not a waste of time as much as I think that there really is a there there.

I think one of the reasons that I evangelize radical transparency, it's a two-way street. So like the more transparent you are with prospects, the more transparent they will be back. And you'll find that that just grows with time, especially like as StreamGuys as a brand gets this like identity of just being like really transparent, really honest. Customers are honest right back. So if you say, I'm reaching out to you because— and you explain, and you're like, here's a case, like a use case for us. Are you experiencing something similar? And then you say like, is now a good time, or do you have time, or whatever. You'll find people will often respond with like, you know, I am really busy right now, but it does sound interesting. Can we set something up in a couple of months? And depending on how probing your questions were in the initial email, sometimes you get a lot more. So the goal, whether we're on cold calls or emailing or whatever, is always to get them talking to us. Like, I don't— do you guys use Gong at StreamGuys? Highly recommend. But they also do a lot of just— they get the data from sales calls all over the world. And one thing that Gong has learned is that the more the customer talks, the more likely they are to buy. As salespeople, that's hard. It's hard for me. I love to talk. I don't know if you guys know this. I love to talk. So for me, it's hard on sales calls to be like, all right, Megan, shut up. Just listen, listen to them talk about their problem, their time. And It's harder when you cold call somebody because this expectation that's been built by sales for generations is that we're going to pitch them. That's what they're— that's what they're expecting. And when you call and that's not what you do, and instead you're like, hey, are you having this problem? And they're like, Okay, sure. Yeah, I am having that problem. And then you ask like deeper probing questions. That is where like you really throw people off their game. But also that's where you get like the deep knowledge you need to win a deal. Especially when you bring SEs in and they're very technical salespeople, bringing them in with something already kind of like a use case already built out really helps them to sell better. Because instead, And I actually, I've been on some calls with your SEs. You guys have really good SEs, but there's this thing SEs do a lot called feature dumping. Any of you witnessed this? Do you know what feature dumping is? Okay. You've seen it in person.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, technical people, they get really excited about technical features and it's not that you shouldn't be excited. You should. Stream guides can do a lot of stuff. Firsthand, I've sold it. There's a lot of stuff you guys can do, but if they don't need it, they don't care. So if I jump on a call and I think you guys have seen the like TV Startup contract at this point, right? It's made its way to you guys. Okay, so TV Startup was one of the companies that they actually came inbound through Cashfly's website and it was exclusively a StreamYard product that they were interested in. And I guess they had it like teeny tiny little need for CDN, but they are an OTT streaming platform that is building out their own app for live video. And they're doing live-to-VOD transcoding and then, you know, rewatch later. And when they came in, they had already gotten Steven. And he responded to them an email and he just like told them everything we can do, like vomit feature dumping. And they were, they ran away, but I guess they went out and they looked for solutions and they were talking to Vimeo, but they were like, Vimeo cannot scale up to what we need. We don't really want to build this 100% in-house. It's a lot of work. So they actually called the sales line and it was Easter weekend. And so like, you know, VP of Sales, I'm the only one answering the phones. I answer and I'm like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Tell me a little bit more. Like, tell me about yourself. Can you tell me in your own words what it is that you— what you do for your customers? And this— he talked for 25 minutes about what they're building, why they're excited about it, how it's different than anything else in the marketplace. FYI, it's not that different. It's okay. I pretended it was. And he got super, super excited to tell me about everything. And I was like, that sounds amazing. To be honest with you, we can definitely do all of that and more. But I think what makes the most sense is for us to schedule, you know, a deeper dive with one of my solutions engineers. Because if I'm completely transparent with you, I'm not that technical. And it sounds like you are. And I don't want to waste your time with a sales pitch that doesn't connect. Right, and so this all unravels and everything, and before we get on this call, I pull aside my solutions engineer digitally. You guys know Barry, right? You know Barry from my team? Okay. And I'm just like, listen, Barry, this guy, he thinks he's a technology genius. He's just smart enough to be dangerous, so we have to tread carefully here. But we need to let him tell us the problem and then explain the solution to him instead of the other way around, because if we do it the other way around, he's going to demand things we don't do but that we can solve for. And I'm sure you guys are experiencing this a lot in your calls because people already have a blueprint for what they're looking for here, right? Like, they have a map. They're comparing you to your competitors. And if you let the call run that way, they're going to be like, do you have insert like feature or service that they get someplace else that isn't exactly like— you don't have the exact same thing, but you're still solving the same problem. So if you sell to the problem instead of selling to the feature, you're way more likely to win deals because the features themselves, like, while they're super cool and they're great for marketing, like put out a blast about a new feature or whatever. When you do that as a salesperson, I hate to say buyers are dumb because they're not dumb. They're just busy. Buyers are busy. And so they are not going to do the work to map their project to your feature. You have, you have to do that for them, right? And you can't do that if you don't ask them about the project first. And the majority of people who are building something are excited about building it. Every once in a while, we run across somebody who's just really burnt out on their career and they hate it and they're just going through the motions every day. But I'd say probably 90% of the time when you reach somebody, they're excited about what they do, right? Like, at least some piece of it. And, you know, maybe they're busy putting out fires that day and that's their frustration. But if they're building something, whether it's like infrastructure or video platform or like redundancy, whatever it is that they build out, they're excited about it, they're passionate about it. If they weren't, they'd probably be doing something else with their lives. So we just have to kind of like keep poking around and pushing until we stumble on that thing that like they are excited about, and then they'll talk. Even the most introverted, weird, maybe still lives in their mom's basement weirdo decision makers I've ever come across. will talk if you just kind of keep being like, come on, give it to me. Come on. I know, I know there's something in there that you're passionate about. The question of the day is kind of like, well, how do you do that on a cold call? Because it's different. You know, you're interrupting somebody. And so the key piece for me, and everybody's a little bit different about how they like, how they work and what works for them. For me, I love psychology. It's kind of, it's kind of what got me into sales in the first place. There's a method I liked, like psych tricks that you could pull on people. So I like to really map somebody before I call them and really understand like what I'm interrupting, you know, like what does their day look like? What are they excited about? What projects are they working on? And especially for big companies, they put a lot of information out there. A lot. I was Prospecting Yahoo the other day. Don't ask me why. Sometimes I just like to challenge myself. And I was just like reading about what they're up to, and I hadn't really looked into them since the Verizon acquisition. So I was like, what's Yahoo up to these days? And I was blown away with how much information I would personally keep private that Yahoo has just like publicly out there. Anybody can read it. So if I were calling into like literally anyone who works at Yahoo, I could know exactly what projects they're working on. It's incredible data for like a salesperson. So you can call in and be like, hey, so I was reading an article about literally the project you're working on right now. And it occurred to me that maybe you're having, you know, this problem that we've actually solved for this other company. And like, this is how. Does that sound like something that would be interesting to you right now? Or is there someone else I should talk to? And, and really like making it conversational so that it's a 2-way conversation from the very, very beginning. Now with cold calls, there's a piece where you have to introduce yourself. Like, it's 100% necessary. I have seen some extremely good senior callers who do it without introducing themselves, and it's some kind of like crazy Jedi mind trick they do where they have a whole conversation and they never tell a guy their name. Um, I don't recommend that. That's for like When you're a Jedi master level cold caller. In the interim, you have to find like a way to introduce yourself that's kind of fun. And it's different for everybody. Right now I'm not calling for any external orgs. So my last month of cold calling has been exclusively for myself. Right. So I usually, I make it kind of funny and I'll be like, hey, this is Megan. I'm calling from my own consulting company, and you're probably asking yourself, why is the CEO dialing? And it's because hiring people is a pain in the butt right now. You know, like, I've been really struggling to hire solid staff, and I just opened up an SDR pipeline type project where, like, I'm training SDRs and then pushing them out. And getting them jobs, right? And so trying to sell them on the fact that like I can find their talent for them so that my intro, which is about like how it's hard for me to hire, converts right into like why I'm calling you because hiring is a pain in the butt and you have to list the job and you have to do background check and then you have to do interviews. And we all know right now that like the time to hire, it has to be instant or you lose talent. But how do you do that when you don't even know how to interview salespeople? And like, I've been interviewing salespeople for the last 6 years and I still struggle with it because like, what, as salespeople, what's our number one skill is sales. So of course we can sell ourselves, right? Like, of course I can go into an interview and, and sell you on me. If you give me, you know, and the thing is like interviews, what is that like a guaranteed hour slot of somebody's time? Okay, if you give me an hour of your time, I can definitely sell you on me. I'm amazing. Let me tell you all the ways. Or tell me about all the problems that you have at your company that I can solve for you. Neither here nor there. You have to find the thing that like one is interesting about you. Or about StreamGuys. I recommend it being about you. People buy from people. And if StreamGuys had such an impressive brand presence that people weren't buying from people, they would just turn on online signups. You guys wouldn't have so much work to do, right? So make it about you. Be like, hey, my name is Tyler and Um, I don't know, what's a fun fact about you, Tyler? What do you got, man?

A fun fact about myself, I have a ton of pets. How about that? I have a tank right behind me.

Okay, all right, lots of pets. Okay, um, hey, my name is Tyler. Hold on just one second, I gotta get my turtle back in their tank. Sorry about that. Do you ever just feel like your day is totally getting away from you working from home? Good. Let them talk. Does it feel like a cold call? We actually, uh, we had Bruce.

Yeah, that makes sense. Leading it more into a conversational tone.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you were calling your friend, right? How do you talk to your friend? And like keeping that tone in your mouth the whole call. And it takes a while. I'm a big advocate for cold calling, like within the team, just call each other, practice, but do it outside of a set time. I've seen people set aside time to practice calling with each other. It can work, but like you're, you're setting this parameter for it, which is not the parameter that you'd ever cold call in. So instead, just like pair up and Tyler be like, Mason, I'm just going to randomly call you and pitch you and you let me know how I did. Random time, like dinner time, you know, pick up the phone and dial. So you're interrupting something. Be like, hey, did that interruption feel like an interruption or did it feel like a call from a friend? And do it with the people in the org that maybe you're not as comfortable with. Oh, that works great. And I always look at it as like a level up, right? So when I'm practicing cold calling for a new organization, I just walked in. I'm going to start with the salespeople. They're probably kind of extroverted, probably kind of friendly. They've sat in my seat, they know. So I'm going to dial them first. Then I'm going to like level it up into my sales manager. And then find the people in the org that are the most similar to your buyers. So like, if you guys have a CTO, Okay. That's who would be like my final level challenge. Like, would you Would you book a meeting with me if I called you and we have this conversation? Right. And it's like twofold, a great idea. One, you're practicing and honing your skillset. Two, you are making it very clear to absolutely everyone in your organization that you are working your ass off. And that is never bad.

Right.

For everybody to just know that you guys, you guys are practicing every day. Right. So what's, what is your like big push right now? What's the product you're trying to sell? Like when you're cold calling, what are you trying to get people in the door for?

Say, it depends certainly on like the organization, but SG Recast is usually our flagship product that's most applicable to everyone.

What? Recap? Sorry. Say the first part again.

SG Recast.

Okay. Recast. That's basically DVRing for playback later?

Yeah. Podcasting, any of those, those kind of—

And both for podcasts and video, right? Audio and video?

Yep. That's correct.

Cool. And do you guys, do you guys already have your list built? Do you know who you're calling?

No, we keep an active running list that grows week by week and Some get taken off and some get added on.

Okay, cool. Well, that is a yes. Then you do know who you're calling. It's just sometimes it's a little bit of a dynamic list. All right, cool. So let's say we're calling into like an NFL team. Would that make sense for Recast?

Yes, they use it today, but I would love to get them to use more features. So that would be like an AM type upsell/cold call.

Okay, cool. So if you're calling into like the NFL and you're trying to grow the account, how would you start?

If I had not booked out a call with the team and I was speaking with someone in a cold call?

Yeah, you're just calling them.

I would think my initial would be to introduce myself since I do not work with them primarily. Most of them work with Mark or Tim. So introduce myself, you know, hello, my name is Tyler Huggins. You know, I don't do a ton of cold calling. I typically mention what part of the business I work in. So, you know, hey, I work in the sales department, primarily in the ad section of the business. Then, you know, if I were to be calling one of the teams, I would probably be mentioning someone or one of the other teams that was relevant that did something. So, you know, We recently were working with the Raiders to do some direct sales and, you know, I wanted to speak to you directly about it to see what are your ad initiatives and then kind of hand it over to them to see if I can hear more about what they're doing today.

I love that. I love that you're gonna like share something upfront. So that's great sharing. The only thing I would add to that kind of flow is that when you introduce yourself, Come up with a compelling reason that you're calling. Like, I'm not your usual account manager, but I'm calling in because I wanted to touch base with some of our key accounts to get feedback about how things are going right now.

Mm-hmm.

And then like, let them, let them tell you if they're happy or not. When I call into existing accounts, first and foremost, I want to get their first-person account of whether or not they're happy. Because You know, not that anybody at StreamGuys would do this, but sometimes salespeople lie a little bit and they make the relationship seem stronger and better than it is. You want to find out from a fresh perspective, like, are you happy? And get a feel like, am I interrupting your day? Are you excited to be hearing from me because you want to tell me about how things are going? And then I would transition to exactly what you're saying, which is like, we're doing this for somebody else. This is the problem that we solve. Are you experiencing that? Would you be interested in— and here's where I, you know, if I were your sales leader, I would say we'd give it to them for free for, you know, whatever period of time. Because from my perspective, when you are— when you're confident in your product, just always give it away for free. It's like, what's the worst thing that happens? They churn. Would you rather have them churn from like having tried it for free and still liking your company because you didn't try to like get them into something?

Mm-hmm.

Or would you rather have them churn out of a contract, which they're still going to find a way out of because absolutely no one's contracts are written in stone. They're going to find a way out of it and then they're going to be pissed and it's going to be bad for the brand. So my, like, I personally give everything away for free for at least like a month or whatever. Try it on, see if you like it. Take attitude, and then always kind of just have like a goal for the end, right? Which is like, do you just want to get a commitment from them that they will give it a try by a certain date, and then set that follow-up? So when I'm selling upward into an account, that's usually my my goal right out of it is. I'm going to turn this on for you for free because we saw a lot of success with it for the Raiders and they're really loving it. You've been a good customer. We want to give you the opportunity to try it. Is now a good time for that? Could you, you know, could you actually try it between now and September 15th? Okay, awesome. Let's set up a call to talk about it. On the, on like the 15th or the 16th, but by then you'll have tried it. You can let me know if you like it, give me any feedback. And people love being beta testers. So if you reach out to accounts and you say like, we'd love to have you test this to give us feedback because you're, you know, one of our key accounts and we really care about what you think about our product. Who's gonna say no? Who's gonna be like, no, we hate To test your new product for free and give you feedback. Okay. Actual, like, let's say we're cold calling into a brand new account. Who does the most like actual cold calling out into not existing accounts?

We don't do a whole lot of cold calling.

That's why you guys should just start. Okay.

Yeah. We, we're luckily pretty busy with what we have, but it's something that we definitely could afford to do more of. So I would say primarily all of us dabble, but none of us are primarily the outbound cold calling person.

Yeah. I mean, busy is good for sure. You got to keep the pipeline moving. So I would say to just set aside a block of time each. That you say, you know, Tuesdays from— And it's extra great if you can all set aside the same time, because then you can really like support each other and have like a decompression at the end and like a pump-up session at the beginning. So ideal world, you'd be like, okay, at 2:30 on Tuesdays every week, we're going to meet for a team huddle, spend 15 minutes together, just like Pumping each other up, talking about our wins from the week. Then we're gonna go dial for 2 hours.

Okay.

And then we're gonna reconvene at the end for another 15 minutes and just decompress, talk about, you know, if we learned anything, if we made any progress. And it doesn't have to be a ton, especially if you're just implementing it as a team, like you haven't been doing it a whole lot. 2 hours a week is better than 0 hours a week, right? And it also, from my perspective, like cold calling, depending on the salesperson, but it can be one of the most psychologically terrible things for salespeople because there's nothing quite like being told to screw off like over and over and over and over again. And the more we don't do it, like the more weeks go by that we're not calling, The more we convince ourselves that it's not part of our job and we don't need to do it and that we can be successful without it. And I'm not saying that there are no salespeople who are successful without calling, but there is a trend happening right now in sales where the industry's changed. I think we all know that things are like, they're different now than they were 6 months ago. They're way different than they were 2 years ago. Email is becoming just a way less effective method. Have you guys seen that? Have you seen your email open rates go down?

I would say outbound, yes, certainly. But like for current clients or like, you know, even if it's an inbound lead, the response rate has been good, but outbound, strictly outbound.

Yeah.

There's, there's not a great response.

Yeah. Cold email, cold emailing. And I mean, in an ideal world, you're working at like the dream job, it's like marketing is doing a ton of demand gen, all your leads come inbound, all you got to do is alley-oop and close them. That's amazing. That's incredible. That's everybody's dream sales job. But it doesn't always work that way. We can't all pay for our salaries with inbound leads. So email is less effective than ever, because it's become so popular, like, and sequencing tools are more popular than ever. So like everybody's got some type of tool, they're just sending out generic Back-to-back sequenced emails, and so decision makers are sick of it. They're like, oh my God! This is the eight millionth email with the same template I've gotten this week. Awesome. So the cold calling kind of mixes things up, especially if we're able to get people's cell phone numbers. And so there's like a psychological aspect, which is overcoming your own desire not to do it. Right? And I still. Like I have been cold calling for 15 years and I still kind of, every time I set aside time for it, I look at it on the calendar and I'm like, oh cool, it's calling time. All right, that's fine. So I, I have like my own habits around it. Just like I put on my pump-up music for 15 minutes. And for that 15 minutes, I don't do any prep work. I just like, I listen to music. dance around my office embarrassingly. Um, I, you know, drink my coffee and then I sit down and I get out my list and I start going through the list. And I have a template already set up that is like my account research template for each deal that I'm going to call that day. So I did— I send you guys the account research template?

I think you did. Um, I would need to double-check back, but I'm fairly certain you did.

So I build my list for the week, um, Sunday night, and Monday morning I open it up and the list— I have an account research template open for each company on my list. And so I go in and I fill out all of my research and look back on whatever research I've done before because I run on a, um, on a rotation. So I do 50 accounts. And I rotate 10 in and 10 out each week. So it's like I do 10, and the next week I do 10, and the next week I do 10. So I'll go back and look like— because that means essentially every 5 weeks I'm calling the same accounts again. And so I'll go back and look at my notes from last time, and I spend 5 minutes ramping up for each call, and I set a timer on my phone. It's like it goes off after 5 minutes so that I don't get in the rabbit hole. And then I pick up and I start dialing. Um, and when I get through an account, then I give myself another 5 minutes to do my research and listen to music or whatever, but I set the timer and then I call again. Um, and I usually have 5 to 15 contacts per account. Um, so it's like, you know, 5 breaks, then go. 5 breaks and go. Your rhythm does not have to be the same as my rhythm, but you want to build a rhythm that gives you mental breaks too. So like, you have that, you know, 5-minute rebound period to either research your next account or cry in the bathroom, you know, whatever, whatever you need to do.

Yeah.

And I think the more you do it, the better you get at it. And also the more you talk to people about their problems and your solutions, the more confident you get that you are the answer. And I think if I had to say there's one secret to success with cold calling, 100%, it's being confident. And you fake it till you make it. Like, just pretend that you know what you're doing until you do, and you'll be fine. I think all of you know what you're doing for the most part, but if you're not calling every day, the first couple, it's going to be awkward. Like, there's just no way. I mean, if one of you has your first cold call and it's like amazing and you like book a meeting and you're stoked, send me an email because that never— the first couple, you're just like, hi, my name's, uh, I know my name. Uh, yeah, my name's Megan and I'm calling you from my company named after myself. So that's easy. The other thing that I found is like surprisingly successful that I've had happen a couple of times is that if you do make a mistake, you mess up or whatever, just be like, hey, sorry, man, I haven't called in a while. Do you mind? Can we just start over? People are human. And the more like human you are with people, the more responsive they become. When you call like a robot and you're calling off a script, which doesn't— I Not disparaging building scripts because I think they're great, especially for junior resources, but when you're calling off of like a script that's just clearly been written for you and isn't even in your voice, people can tell. Hi, my name is Tyler. I am calling from StreamGuys. We have a new product called SG Recast that I want to talk to you about today. They're like, hang up, right? That's when you can't even get that first sentence out and people are hanging up on you over and over again. 9 times out of 10, you're not sounding confident and you're not sounding human. When you call somebody and you're like yourself, which some days I call and I'm like very, very chipper and I'm like, hey, this is Megan from Megan Killion Consulting. I just branched back out on my own. I'm super, super excited to be reaching back out to customers and talking to them about For whatever I'm pitching. Other days I call and I'm like, hey, this is Megan. And it's— they're both okay. They both get responses. What doesn't get a response is when I like am forcing something that's just not, not real. All right, we're coming up on the end of time. Do you guys have specific questions? Anything in particular I can help with? I don't.

I don't have any initial questions now, but I mean, that all makes sense and I think it's helpful advice. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Um, so yeah, my kind of like homework would be to try and spend an hour calling this week. Um, even if it's not normally part of your role. What'd you say?

I said it'll be a fun hour.

Yeah, that's right. Obviously a fun hour. Not at all torture. And hey, welcome, uh, Ralph and Tim. Do you guys want to share your win from the week? You didn't get a chance at the beginning. Yeah, um, Tim's racking his head for a win.

I am.

Um, new, new project coming on through TuneIn, so, uh, exciting to onboard a new, new broadcaster. Even if it's not Mike Lowe's directly. That's an account management win.

Awesome. How about you, Ralph? Do you have a win from this week?

Well, I have an account that I set up a while back. They came in and we've been growing them for a while and now This account is actually going out and bringing in business as well. And so I'm talking to them pretty much almost on a daily basis, trying to keep them doing kind of what you're doing, trying to keep them pumped up, which is really unusual because I don't normally— I'm not normally like that, but I'm trying to push this guy into into bringing in more stuff. And, and I'm trying to pull in accounts that maybe we can't, we can't service because they're just a little too small, but they might work for him. So we're pushing— I'm pushing stuff his way, which he was able to close.

And I love channel.

Yeah, so it worked out, it worked out pretty well. And he's getting pretty enthused about it. We've got another one coming up also, which is has to do with podcasting. So, which is pretty cool that we're trying to figure out a good strategy to get these guys in. So we'll, we'll see what happens. So yeah, good.

I love channel sales. One of my personal favorite things to do, because there's nothing quite like getting somebody else to sell for you.

Right? Exactly.

Yes. That's cool. All I gotta do is keep talking to you and like, you know, send you lunch every once in a while and you keep bringing the deals in. Amazing. And it's especially great when you get people who like can service a different vertical than you can, whether that's, you know, they're going after smaller accounts or they just have a really good brand presence in an industry that you don't have a presence in. Like, that's incredible. So that's awesome. Good win, Ralph. Um, so next week we're going to talk about qualification, which is one of the things that I am the most passionate about. Because I truly believe bad qualification ruins entire sales orgs because from top to bottom, everybody's time is being wasted. So that's my, like, my big one. And yeah, let me know if you guys have any questions. If there's resources you're looking for that you can't find, you know, let me know. I have folders upon folders upon folders of sales resources. Yeah, let me know if you have questions, uh, feedback. Yeah, that's what's up.

Awesome. Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan.

Awesome. Talk to you next week.

Talk to you next week.

Bye, Megan.