Find A Way to Get to the Right Person and Say the Right Things - Tom Slocum - Revenue Today - Episode # 019

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by RevGenius, and we're on a mission to bring in Inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

I'm really excited to come to you today and talk about your go-to-market strategy in regards to your messaging and what you're doing with what I like to call your frontline reps and how they are approaching the funnel. And so how we can start taking a methodology around stop selling and start helping. I'm gonna pull up my deck here for us. All right. Can everybody see that? Let me know in the session if everything is good to go. You guys can hear me? Perfect. All righty. So now how do I— there we go. All right. So what I wanna talk about first and foremost in your go-to-market strategy when you're developing your messaging and how you're going to organically call or email your prospective buyers is through research, relevancy, and relatability. Over the 14 years that I've been in sales, this has been my pillars and my mindset and everything that I have created for my team when they are doing sequences, when they are building out those cold call scripts. You wanna find a way to hit on these 3 pillars. The days of cold calling I'm gonna say it live here, cold calling is dead. It is dying, uh, because you no longer need to do that. If you know, there are some markets where you might find that you don't have a live active audience on LinkedIn, but they're on other social platforms. In the last few weeks, I've talked a lot about, uh, Twitter for certain industries. There are engineers, there are people over there that are living and breathing for you to be able to connect with them, build a community Within your prospective buyers, and so that leads into research. Doing your research, digging in to find something that is you know letting you know you're calling the right person, you're reaching out the right time, and you're saying the right things, right? What can you use triggers like what go around normally are hey I saw your post on LinkedIn around XYZ, right? You can go in with that. Something I started doing that was a little bit different than most in the market is, hey, I saw your comment on someone's post, right? Maybe they're not posters. Maybe they're not out there doing a lot on the social platforms, but they are engaging in others. So you can find enriched comments that they might have dropped on somebody else's post. Maybe they liked a post that you can bring into the conversation. That makes sense. And that leads into the 2nd part, which is relevancy. Where a lot of reps miss when you're building your sequences is you're putting in relevancy and missing it because, okay, you're gonna talk about surfing, you're gonna talk about the school they went to. That's great for personalization, but it has to be relevant. Don't mention something because you're stretching for the stars to make this connection with your prospect, right? You wanna read with real relevancy, again, reaching out at the right time, saying the right things. Hey, I see you're a surfer. You know, have you thought about how your revenue engine is like a wave and you gotta, you know, ride that wave and there's bumps and bruises along the way? That's relevancy and tying it into that message. And then you wanna look at relatability. Make a connection. These people are humans in the messaging and you need to build those relationships. And so these 3 pillars are what you wanna focus on as you're building out your messaging. And start going to market on a larger scale. A lot of companies are growing right now, they're bringing in a ton of reps. Remember, there are people, they buy from people they connect with, and when you lead with these 3 Rs, you're able to get the meeting. So if you have questions, I'm always, always down to help in showing you how you can position these 3 Rs within your messaging. Do some research. I like to do the 3x3 method. So you can encourage your reps to find 3 key pieces of information in under 3 minutes, start practicing that muscle so they can start learning how to actually research their prospects and what they might be really looking for, and then notate it, put it in a CRM because again, that's gonna help your revenue engine as a whole. I cannot stress the importance of documentation because that's gonna help your entire engine. That's gonna help your marketing so they can get better in their marketing material. They can understand what you're finding out there and seeing, as well as your operations team, your customer success team, all of that being in your system will help and help your reps because each time they make outreach, they're able to build on those notes and tell a beautiful story with their prospects. Next slide here that I wanna jump on is hero's journey. Okay, and the next step when you're crafting your messaging and you are reaching out with that relevancy, relatability, and research, focus on the hero's journey. What can you do to help your prospective buyers and their hero's journey? Because for your reps, your frontline reps, yeah, it's just a meeting booked. It's a closed deal. It's getting to eat this month, right? It's bringing in revenue for your company. But what many forget to think about is You're helping somebody on the other side of that transaction, right? When I got reached out to by many companies trying to enable my team with various tech, that helped my team, right? That changed our lives to help us drive more goals, do things. And so remember that when you're pitching your product to help this person, it's because at the end of the day, you're trying to help them be their own hero. And how do you do that? You show them you know them. Show me you know me. Very, very key here. Demonstrate that you've done your research by showing the prospect what you've learned about them that would be difficult, if not impossible, to automate. That's the trick here. Not that they went to school, not pulling in merge fields within your messaging, but allow your reps to find 1 to 2 sentences that can actually show them that they know the prospect and did a little bit of digging in the research. They actually went on their LinkedIn profile Maybe saw a beautiful recommendation that they got from a fellow coworker, throw that in the email, right? If it's relevant to what you're trying to reach out, share with them insight on what they're facing. Prove your domain expertise by illuminating a common roadblock you've discovered by working with people similar to your prospect. I tell this to SDRs all the time and AEs is that you are in the best position Because on the day-to-day, you are interacting with these roles, these people within these roles, right? A VP of marketing is just in his or her own little world, in her company, his company, doing what they do, but you on the front lines are talking to 50 marketers a week, 20 to 30 a week, learning from them objections, you're learning from them what their pains and their challenges are, and you're using that to be able to provide your domain expertise and your messaging in your cold calls to show them that, hey, I know what you're facing. I get to go out there and do all this research and bring it to your doorstep to help you solve your problems, right? That's valuable. So remember, you know, share those insights with them, be ahead of them, ask those leading questions. Hey, have you seen challenges like this as well? You know, is it A, B, or C? Which one aligns most with what you've got going on today? And if those 3 are relevant because of the people you're speaking to, they're gonna say, oh, you know, it's actually number 2 for me. We're struggling on call connections right now. Awesome. What have you done up until this point to do that? And you start building this conversation. Then you wanna give them something they can use today. Again, I'm a big preacher. You know, RevGenius is about this, is give, give, and give some more. End of the day, we gotta stop taking and putting the burden on the prospects and our go-to-market strategy that it's up to them to come to us. We gotta go to them. We gotta give them something they can use today to impact their life and earn a relationship with you because you gave them something that can give them a quick win today. So find a document, a PDF that actually makes sense for them, not some big drawn-out thing, but maybe 5 steps to help them get better at XYZ that doesn't cost a dime to interact with you. They don't need to go through a gated portal. They don't need to come and be a customer for you yet. But you can give them a small win that they go and be a hero today, that they're gonna come back to you for more. So offer that practical tip that they can implement whether they work with you or not. Again, we've gotta stop being salespeople and start being help people. Last one, ask what I can do for you. Request agreement to a low-risk ask, like agreeing that what you've written them about is a priority or permission to send them a piece of content The biggest question I always get from reps when they're going to market and trying to build out their territories and their companies is, how do I not ask for the meeting in every single email? How is it constantly, can I get 15, 30 minutes, or can I schedule this with you, or all these crazy CTAs that are just too much of a burden for the prospects? Do a little bit more risk, get invited. Now you can say your whole email, you can write it up and at the end say, May I send this over to you? Would you be interested in seeing this? That is a soft ask that now that prospect could either say yes or no. Most often they'll say, I would love that, please send that over, right? And now you're invited to share that collateral with them versus just dropping it on in your first email and saying, hey, check out this great PDF, which you don't even know if they're interested, if it even makes sense. So remember, it's okay to let them guide you through the process and ask their permission to proceed with them in the buyer's journey. Rather than forcing it and trying to handle them and sell them and, you know, pull the donkey across the finish line. It's a partnership and you're helping them in their hero's journey and helping them solve their problems in their day-to-day.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.