How to Detach from Quotas- Augusto Ferreira

What really changed the game was that get too attached with my quota and be like, yes, I have to reach that number. If I don't reach it, I'm nothing. I have to give like one tip would be to keep it like under 90 seconds.

Our guest today is Augusto Ferreira, a top performing SDR who consistently hits 200% of the quota month after month. Known for his innovative use of personalized videos and a content creation strategy that drives inbound demos, Augusto has kind of mastered the art of standing out in a crowded inbox. Today, he will share how he balances creativity, cold calls and crushing those targets. Without further ado, let's welcome Augusto. Good, Augusto, how are you?

I'm doing pretty good too. Thank you very much for the invite.

There are a couple of things I think we can talk about and I've made a note of it. Happy to run that through. Otherwise, if you have anything else where you feel that you bring more expertise, we can chat about that for sure. So one of my question I had was when I was going through your profile and obviously I want to understand, how did you become better at cold calling? What is your number one tip to be great at cold calling? You're a content creator advisor at various companies. What's the benefit you're seeing with creating content and if there's any advice you have. So I have these basic questions. If you're okay, we can discuss this or anything else. Perfect. Awesome.

They're perfect. Love them.

Great. Thank you so much, Augusto, for being here. Very excited to be, you know, talking to you about this because you have, have all. You have been all over my LinkedIn feed. So it was a no brainer to invite you here. I'm very, very curious to learn more is how did you become so good at what you do? You have been in SDR for a while, but I can see you have been hitting your code out of the park every month and month. What's the secret to that?

Thank you very much. Well, it's of course not easy at all. One year ago I was a bottom performer and what really changed the game was that, well, I changed industry, started selling a different product. So that helped a lot. But. And that is helping align with your product. It's fundamental, not only being a good product and being series A to E, but that the company and you combine together, that you feel that you join forces and with content creation, of course it helped me. I have a demo tomorrow that it came from LinkedIn and the guy just sent me on my DMs hey, you sent a video to my CEO. Are you guys working with payroll? I'm like, yeah, we can, you know, help your hiring international workers. I'm like, okay, I'm interested.

That's brilliant. Yeah.

Does it happen a lot or is.

It like one occurrence?

Actually, it happens at least once a month nowadays and with customers that I've prospected in the beginning of the year already and now they are coming to a point of expansion or anything related and they say, okay, yes, top of mind, that guy that sent me that video that, you know, made that cold call. So combining everything and, you know, getting more experience. But I think that most importantly is detaching yourself from the go. I can see that in the beginning of my career as a bdr, I used to get too attached with my quota and be like, yes, I have to reach that number. If I don't reach it, I'm nothing. You know, and nowadays I'm able to, for example, this past month of September, that I didn't reach quota the first month since last October, that I haven't reached quota. And I'm happy. Why would I be happy? Well, because I was able to take vacation, stay with my family and, you know, enjoy life. And remember that, you know, your happiness doesn't mean it's different. Completely different from your quota and, you know, from work API. Actually, you know, I made a post recently just about that. And after being able to detach myself, I'm able to make a cold call, you know, putting my feet on the table and being relaxed, that I'm going to have a great conversation. And if they don't want, it's okay because it's not personal product related, you know, it's something completely different from me. So when you are able to learn and apply that, the game completely changes.

I can, I can see how that might have come at the right time. Like you said, you were in an industry where you were not meeting CODA and how you kind of found the right company and that all of those forces joined together and made you where you are today. So great. I think that's, that's been a fantastic journey. I think I can totally see that you, I mean, I looked at your profile and I saw you have been consistently hitting 200% quota month on month. Not just 100% where people are struggling with 100%. What do you think? Besides choosing the right industry, what do you think you're doing different, which is making you do that?

Well, the first thing that I'm doing that is different, that is standing out is sending personalized videos. Because first if I open my inbox, all emails are going to look the same. There is nothing standing out. The same thing with the DMs. A month ago we went over our CEOs inbox and there was no video at all. And I asked him, hey, if you got a video like this, you know, a 10 maximum 30 second video, would you watch it? Would you respond? And he was like yes, of course. And I started applying it not only to my day to day, but also to my cadences. And I have a high reply rate because of that as well. They click the video, they watch it, they can understand way deeper when I'm speaking and they're seeing my face, my non verbal communication while when they're just reading through an email. So being able to personalize those videos and embed them both on LinkedIn, DMs and email, it's 100% a game changer. Wow.

I would love to see some of the videos and include that in our course somewhere, you know, just to show you know, how these things work. I mean, what do you include in the video since you talked about it.

So I'm sending SensePark videos. So they have some benefits. For example the thumbnail or, or the embedded gift. And what I say in the video is simply if I have the connection on LinkedIn, it's going to be something. Hey, thank you very much for being here in my community. I was checking your profile, got me super curious. How are you guys managing payroll in Venezuela today? If I see that they are related to it, if not, who is the best person to talk about this subject? Right? You try to don't ask hard questions from the get go. So if it's possible, that's the main reason why I say thank you for being here in my community, that it already starts to say, hey, we are a family. I like trying to help each other. Not about the monetary, it's about, you know, getting together. And that's why I say follow. I don't say followers, you know, I say members from the community. And also on the videos, I try to keep it as short as possible. So 10, 30 seconds max and stay still. You know, if you're gonna use the cell phone, don't be moving around, stay still, send a video and be concise to the point. If you send a two minute video, really to be honest, do you watch a two minute video or when somebody sends a WhatsApp audio of two minutes ago, like come on, if you want to send me that call Me?

Yeah. That's fantastic. And you're not using that sense for feature where you record it once and you send it to everybody. You're sending personalized video every single time.

Both. So I have both strategies in my cadence. I have. And well, when I send those personalized once in a time video, I use the regular recording option. But for when you're gonna do it in masses and wanna do a recording, for example, this speech I just said, so you can say, hey, watermelon, thank you very much for being here in my community. I was checking your profile. I saw you have international workers. Are you the best person to handle this or would you recommend me to somebody else? So I know, for example, now I'm gonna be a little bit more generic on my request of the person. And when I say, oh, you have international workers, not, for example, Venezuelan workers. That would be for someone that I only know that have Venezuelan workers. So gotta understand when and where to play both possibilities.

That's quite interesting. I mean, you're the first person I'm talking to with explaining me how SensePark works. I've only seen some of that probably floating around from either the CEO of SensePark or some people using it. But yeah, thank you for that context, I think really helps. Are you doing like an A B testing within cadence? Is that what you're saying? Is that like an automated sequence versus one being super personalized?

Well, I do some A B testing, but not in that case of the automation. It's more in the sense of what I say in those videos and what I like to use most. I have an HR and a finance cadence. So on both I have. I also have the text. So for example, what we had on the template that we had before, plus the video. Not only the video, so they can read. And if they want a deeper understanding, they can open the video.

Okay. Would you mind if I ask you to maybe send me a screenshot of how that email looks like and feel free to, you know, Mark, hide any of the information. Do you think you can do that?

Yes, of course.

That'll be awesome. And if you can maybe see one of the videos, I think our audience and our students will be super helpful. You know, super happy to see that because we do teach video prospecting. But I feel, you know, there is. There's obviously something which is changing every day and I would obviously love to connect with people like you who are obviously using this on a daily basis. My next set of questions I have for you are around cold calling. Do you have cold calling in your cadence?

Yes. At least five if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I've been cold calling for a while. I've passed the 70,000 mark a while ago. And it's crazy because been four years, let's say like that, that I've been in this world of cold calling. And in the beginning we thought that we didn't have enough connections, right? That every number was bad, data was bad and we couldn't get a hold of someone. Nowadays it's even worse. It's crazy. Unbelievable that how data is. It's hard to get and having those nice conversations. So I 100% recommend using a dialer, for example. That saves me a lot of time. So for example, Yesterday I made 100 calls in what, 30, 40 minutes. And you know, you gotta say that a life changer, a game changer, you know, because you are not wasting time with the ringtones and then the gatekeeper. So it's 100% recommended. And I would say if I have to give like one tip would be to keep it like under 90 seconds, not counting the tip I gave you before about like detaching yourself from the go. But you know, try to keep it under 90 seconds so you don't mess it up.

What's your number one tip? Let's say to be good at cold calling and maybe you can maybe talk to us about like how did you actually learn cold calling in the first place? Because I'm sure there's a lot of SEOs out there who are obviously in the same shoes as you are and I'm sure they can benefit from it.

Perfect. So I learned cold calling by doing it and I was pretty horrible. When I was working at Santa Commerce, my manager Samantha Garcia, she one of the best managers I've ever had. We would have done role plays every week in my ramp up every day. I did like 60 role plays in the first three months and at a moment I was overwhelmed. But it gave me the basis to understand how to make a good cold call. And that product was very complicated as well. So the cold calls would be very different because you'd good, you know, it'd be good to have a five minute cold call. But nowadays like 90 seconds for me is the best.

Wow.

Apart from last week that I had a 30 minute one, we had a demo today. At least they did show up. But to get good at cold call you first have to have something is growth mindset, growth mentality. So learn from mistake. Gotta hear a lot of cold calls. You're gonna get used to Your voice to your voice. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, we all hate our own voices, but get used to it. And you're gonna learn, for example, how to stop using or, you know, for example, in my case, I'm always saying, you know, and you gotta practice. So if you want to get better, practice, make cold calls. Call your mom, call your dad, call anybody that you can practice cold calling. Because if you stay in this, oh, my God, I'm so scared to do it. They're gonna yell at me, they're gonna forget about it.

I'm glad that, you know, you're definitely lucky that, you know, you had a manager who would do 60 role plays you said in three months. And it could be overwhelming. You're absolutely right about it. I would jump back to the content creation again. You are pretty consistent While meeting your 200% quota, you know, half time are able to carve out time to create content. Can you walk us through your strategy? How do you do that?

Yes, of course. No, thank you very much for asking that question. And what I do is my content is what happens in my life, my professional and personal life. Right. In the sense of, for example, this week I. Or better say, last week, I booked this meeting I just told you about. I was in a cold call, 30 minutes. It was. It was the. It's the longest cold call of my career so far. And so I could make a post about it. You know, it's just look back, take it easy, and say, okay, let's say three things I was grateful for, three things that I learned, three things that I could have done different. And from there you can start thinking, okay, I could share this. Maybe this could be available for somebody, inspire, educate, or entertain somebody so I can share it. What I do is I take the notes on my phone and I start writing. For example, today I had five options of posts to create, but I was like, I'm not feeling any of them. You know what? Let's do something different. If I was a BDR starting right now, what would I like to learn, understand, you know, work on. And I had the paper right here, but basically it's. It is my post today, you know, is being yourself, detaching yourself from the quota, you know, practicing and everything that we have covered here today. So to be able to create content and stay on top of your quota, mix both. So talk about the demos, talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Very interesting way to go about doing it. I have never been able to, you know, think about the content in that fashion where I would talk about good, bad. I'm probably, you know, I probably treat all the days as equal. It doesn't happen to me like good or bad, but I know. I think that's. That's a good strategy. Thank you so much for making up the time.

Thank you very much, bro.

Thank you. Have a good one. Take care.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.