(552) [Playbook] No, cold calling isn't dead (how to land a sh*t ton of meetings in 2025) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7J4E755tB4

Transcript: (00:02) today's Playbook is going to be focused on cold calling so and the kind of theme Here is if you've followed sales content for the longest time I mean for the last decade and a half that I've been selling and leading sales teams there's been this hey cold calling is dead it doesn't work anymore Etc uh we have two guests that we're going to introduce you to here shortly um and based on a lot of the client work that we do at outbound Squad with Brands like Shopify gong Zoom Etc uh cold is very much alive and we're (00:31) going to talk about how to maximize it today so we're going to stock uh talk three things one state of cold calling so what do we need to that we got a ton of data that we're going to share with you uh most importantly we're going to share tactical Frameworks so literally we're going to go through some of the same content that we deliver to sales teams when we're doing trainings and then we have a couple free resources that we're going to give you as well before we dig in I want to thank one of our partners and sponsors Orum (01:00) uh if you are making cold calls or have teams of people making calls there's two things that make that really hard right now one is do people pick up the phone and we're going to talk about things that you can do to increase your pickup rate but one of them uh orm has a way through their technology where they prioritize people that are more likely to pick up and it's also an auto dialer where you can get more dials out quickly and they also have a virtual sales floor that I just love so go check out Oram if (01:30) you're looking to increase productivity on your team from a cold calling standpoint so without further Ado we got Nick selski founder at 30 minutes to president's Club rocking the mustache today for us we had a whole in-depth conversation about that beforehand that we won't Bard you with today but liking it Nick uh we have Wasim kti I hope I'm pronouncing am I pronouncing your last name correctly yes it's close enough so uh Wasim is lead midmarket sales Acquisitions at Shopify so we worked together while we were training (02:05) the Shopify team and I was just super super impressed with seeing with you and all of the stuff that you were already doing with your team from an outbound standpoint before we even started so good to have you if you're coming across our stuff at outbound squad for the first time um we do sales streaming so primarily we focus on outbound and top of funnel so we work with SDR teams AE teams am like to help them get those conversations started all right so without further Ado there's a couple things that are going (02:34) to make our time together productive if you have a question we would like to answer as many of them as possible there is a Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen if you got a question drop it in there we have over 600 people on the call today and we want to get to as many questions as we can so drop your questions in there um second thing because a lot of people have asked yes it's going to be recorded and yes we will send it out to you afterwards Nick was see you you ready to rock we cool we good to go let's do it okay (03:06) let's do it so the first thing that I want to talk about is this idea of invisible scripts so an invisible script an example of that is I don't know about you two when I was in Middle School the invisible script I had around going to college was you better go so you don't have to get a blue collar job right it was ingrained in especially in the US that you go to school you get a good job and if Asian like me it was become a doctor lawyer Etc the reason why I bring this up is our prospects they have invisible scripts too and in particular (03:41) they have invisible scripts about people that do the types of things that we do cold call cold email Etc so first I want to prompt the audience let us know in the chat what invisible scripts do you feel like your buyers have about people that do cold calling that do this type of Outreach drop that into the chat for us and Nick was I just kind of open it up to the two of you what's your experience with this when you think about the buyer what they think of people that do the types of stuff that we do what comes to (04:11) mind for you Wasim I think like one of the biggest things is it's they kind of like to resemble it to like a car salesman um it's like more of a sleazy atmosphere it's somebody that's just trying to sell you something and it's less focused on like value oriented consultative approaches and more like oh you're just trying to push something on me um and that's typically a lot of people that receive cold calls like that's where their mind first goes to and I get it that's like through long-term experiences and has always been in the (04:39) past and I would translate like the future now um but I think it's part of our job to kind of like dispel that now um and and change these like previous false narratives so that's just one of scripts that I feel like has always put on people yeah the unfortunate thing in sales is that the buyer brings the baggage from the other hundreds of bad experiences they've had with people like us into that interaction right Nick what about you similar stuff to what I'm seeing in the chat I think a lot of people that have not worked in a sales (05:08) job think sellers are sketchy they're pushy they're scammers and when they hear the voice that they don't recognize on the phone they're like security risk alarm Bells go off they see us as rude they think we're interrupting their day and they think that we're pushing something that isn't actually designed to help them and we know that those things aren't true I think everybody here is probably the opposite of that but you're right Jason we are battling that baggage 100% so the reason why I want to sit the stage with this is it's really (05:38) important to sit in the seat of our bu it's really important for us to know from a psychology standpoint like what are they thinking and feeling when they decide to pick up the phone and say hello Because unless anyone else here disagrees with me no one picks up a cold call on purpose they thought that you were someone else someone else that's more important by the way than a rep calling so we have to meet people people in their place Nikki exactly so um there's a couple common problems around the approach with this that we need to (06:07) address first before we get into the tactics and the framework so you might be thinking hey is this even worthwhile to do because who even picks up the phone these days I don't know about you two I hardly ever pick up calls because I'm in meetings all day like I'm doing stuff like what we're doing here I don't have time to pick up a call during the work day and let us know in the chat if any of this resonates let us know um the other thing that we hear a lot is well hey I call really senior people um no executive is going to book a meeting (06:40) from a random call from a stranger for someone that they don't trust yeah Lauren says Millennials do not want to talk on the phone well you think Millennials I mean gen Z is is stepping into these buying positions too right and uh this is a generation that grew up on instant messaging um and you might be thinking if you're watching and listening to this hey does this even work is it worthwhile doing we're of course going to make a very strong reframe and argument that it is worth your while to do for a couple of reasons (07:08) one uh 5% of people might answer the phone uh but voicemails have a 90 plus% open rate so we're going to talk about voicemails here in a second um Nick do you what do you do with voicemails do you listen to all of them do you click on all of them do you delete them automatically from people that you don't know like what's how do you handle voicemail if I receive a naked dial meaning a dial that doesn't have a voicemail attached to it or an email that cites hey I just tried to call you from this number that dial was worthless (07:42) it didn't even register with me I use my voicemails as a way to redirect my prospect's attention to a channel they will actually respond on which is email no one has ever called but that's not true one person in my sales career has called me back from a voicemail and it was I was surprised by the call and I totally fumbled it use voicemail to direct to email is a freak accident Wasim what about you um I listen to the first five seconds so you have like five seconds of me pressing that play button and then that's about it and that's (08:15) typically where I tell reps like that's where you need to focus you have like that first five seconds that someone might answer and even if they send you kind of like directly to to voicemail sometimes it'll like pop up in like the new technology as like a written you'll like read the first kind of couple sentences but that's about it uh just exactly like Nick said you have to use it as a channel to push you to email yep you know what I was doing I was so by the way us three on this call we still make cold calls too so you're you're (08:42) hearing from people that do this uh yesterday I was making I had a call block um I was calling into a group because uh we're doing a sales exec dinner next week in Austin we have a couple more spots and I'm calling people that I've already gone through my first degree connections of people that I know so I'm looking through my LinkedIn and and I was leaving a voicemail and you know iPhones I don't know about Androids they have that feature now where you can see a transcription of the voicemail as they're leaving it and then pick up the (09:08) call in the middle of the voicemail and the person I called she picked up the call in the middle of the voicemail right so if you leave voicemails the idea here and we're going to talk about strategy and how to do this here in a little bit um just because people don't pick up the phone doesn't mean it's not worth your time to call them okay that's the first reframe second reframe is senior execs are they sitting around waiting to pick up random calls from strangers no they aren't but if you do your research and your (09:38) homework and show them that you reached out to them on purpose or that you talk to a lot of their peers they will typically respond pretty well to that a lot of senior Executives respect the grind in the hustle lastly I think definitions are super important we're going to say cold call a lot in the call today what we do not mean is doing what Wasim and I used to do back in the day calling through those rolodexes and just blindly calling people that you know nothing about what they do what business they're in ETC we (10:11) never want to pick up the phone without a strong reason to meet we call it an RTM so the idea here is warm calls but these are people again we have to acknowledge just because it's a warm call doesn't mean they asked you to call them so we're going to refer to those as cold calls okay but we're going to assume that no one here is BL blindly dialing through a list so couple cool important things here so there's data here so if you're wondering is cold calling dead and should you do it uh the answer is yes if you were unskilled at it if you were (10:45) unskilled you can this is no longer a profitable activity for you Nick do you want to talk a little bit more about this data this is from your book cold calling sucks uh gong did some of this data with you what are we looking at here on the screen before we dig in yes the book's called cold calling sucks and that's why it works and one of the first things that we did in writing the book was we said we had to figure out like is cold calling actually worth it nowadays and the way that we answered that question was we partnered with gong to (11:13) analyze over 300 million cold calls across their entire customer base and what we did was we had them pull data for the 50th percentile rep which is the data that looking on the screen is in the gray bars and then we had them pull data for the 75th percentile rep so not like the best rep in the world not the Wasim of the world not the Jason Bays maybe more like the Knicks the people that were like they were pretty good and there was a dramatic difference between the 50th percentile and the 75th percentile it's not on this screen but (11:47) basically what the data showed was that um if somebody makes an hour's worth of cold calls every single day for a month which is about 800 cold calls if you're not using a tool like Orum the average rep ends up booking two meetings the top quartile rep ends up booking 18 meetings because they are so much more skilled and then the data also showed that when you cold call it actually doubles your cold email reply rate because your calls draw attention to your emails and the reality is is like the bar is set pretty low the 50th (12:20) percentile these are people that are picking up the phone and saying hey Wasim did did I catch you at a bad time and their pitches sound like Billy May's commercials and they sound unsteady and unsure and promise everybody here in the next 40 minutes you will learn things that get you closer to that green bar yep so we're looking at three categories here it's the connect rate so that's the percentage of people that we call that pick up we have the set rate so that's the connected call Nick says hello the percentage of those that I book a (12:51) meeting with and then the show rate uh with SE are you able to comment on anything in terms of like your experience what does world class look like to you from like a meeting set rate and like a show rate I think like it it changes definitely like personto person and I think like Nick really hearkened on this is most individuals they focus is like to just get through the dials versus focusing on these like key indicators here like connect rate set rate and show rate I think what I'm seeing in terms of the data is is definitely in line with like (13:27) what a good performer can do at 13% 16% things of that nature and I think the more time they invest and focus on trying to improve these metrics versus trying to improve metrics around did I just book the meeting or not the more they're likely to to find success and I think that's what world class typically is is you're not just focus on this like one specific Centric kpi that is kind of very nuanced in its nature you're focused on am I actually improving every single time I'm making a cold call and am I coming with a perspective um that's (13:59) the main thing that I see in terms of differences between the folks that are in that 50% perc on the 75 Jason you asked me to talk about what was on the screen and I can give you the short the short version is the top cortile reps when they make a 100 dials they talk to 13 and a half people the average reps talk to five and a half literally they talk to more people live and we'll get into some things that you can do to get more people to answer the phone if they talk to 100 people this is the percentage of meetings that they set (14:29) also keep more meetings so even if you get somebody to agree to meet with you you can see there's a pretty dramatic difference in the people that actually show up just based on how skilled you are so all of those things trickle down to a nonlinear increase in your results so let's start to get into the Tactical parts of the call let's give the uh let's give the people what they came for here so um the strategy that we're going to use here is what we call construction so we're going to actually break up the call into a couple of (15:03) components um intro hook and close we're going to focus on the intro first because the intro is where calls are won and lost so the average call lasts about 80 Seconds and only 10% of them are longer than two minutes and news spash you ain't booking a meeting in 80 Seconds okay so that first like 30 to 45 seconds is absolutely crucial so uh what I wanted to do here I have some stuff that we run across in the trainings that we do but I wanted to open it up to you to and we'll start with with seim what are the most common mistakes reps make like (15:43) literally like as soon as the prospect says hello what are the more common mistakes that they make that keep them from continuing the conversation I think like one of the biggest common mistakes that I see typically when I receive quote calls from reps is they try to over analyze the reason that they're calling and do things like Nick mentioned earlier where did I catch you at a bad time hey my name is and I'm calling from this and Etc and by the time they finished their sentence I've already checked out of the (16:10) call um and they're less focused on like what's best for the Prospect and more focused on like how am I going to come off on this call and I think that's goes all the way back to that like level of authenticity that Jason you and I always talk about it's like you're trying to put on a certain voice a certain show rather than just like call calling somebody being human to human so I think that's one of the biggest common mistakes that folks you know and a lot of stuff on LinkedIn from from influencers and things like that say (16:37) they should do these things so they typically just pick those up yeah so doing things that are very unnatural um doing things where they're very long-winded maybe pitching you know in the intro Nick what about you folks give me a one in the chat if you think your tonality matters on a cold call the biggest biggest biggest mistake that I see with cold callers is they do not know word for word exactly word for word what they are going to say when the other person answers the phone and they go hello this is Nick and the reason for that is I (17:19) don't know about all of you I've been cold calling for a long freaking time when I hear my Prospect answer the phone I still get that pit in my stomach I feel still feel the anxiety I still feel the nerves and my brain shuts off for a second and you better believe if I don't have a game plan for exactly what I'm going to say my voice starts to waver I start to go up a number of different octaves to the point when I was a new cold caller I frequently got mistaken as a woman because I would get so anxious my voice would go up really really high (17:52) um so the reality is is if you don't know exactly what you're going to say how on Earth are you going to be able to focus on mastering your tonality so I don't care if you open the cold call with did I catch you at a bad time if you sound like a freaking executive what matters more is your tone I don't think you should open a cold call with those words but the most important thing is you know exactly what you're going to say absolutely so that was number two here unnatural tonality I'll talk about mindset in a second um give me a yes in (18:20) the chat does anyone feel like sometimes you transform into a different human when you are selling you use customer service voice you use up talk corporate speak you you turn into like the most polite person it's like you're meeting your uh mother or father-in-law for the first time or you're talking to them like oh like how you talk to puppies and little kids right um so unnatural tonality is like one of my favorite sayings it's it's something that Navy SE say a lot it's it's slow is smooth and smooth is fast slow is smooth and smooth (18:52) is fast um second thing that you see their mindset this is not something we can help you with in a webinar this requires a lot of deep personal work but you have to separate your self-esteem from the outcome of the call yeah if you are personally hurt when a prospect rejects you it's G to make you sound super needy and that's just something you got to work on like the goal is to see if the person is willing to have a conversation that is really what it's all about and what we're going to talk about a lot is avoiding conversation Stoppers so (19:26) anytime you are selling your solution in the call you were doing the equivalent of being that person at a networking event that introduces yourself and says are you buying life insurance right now are you in the market for whatever thing and you're selling someone within 60 seconds of meeting them so what do we need to do instead the idea here is we're going to do two things so we have intro hook close and now is where we're going to get pretty tactical with how we can do these openers um what we all recommend (19:57) here is some variation what's called a PBO or a permission based opener and you may have seen a lot of these kind of classic openers we're going to give a few of you today a few of them to you today that you probably haven't seen before so the idea with a pbl the psychology here is they did not ask you to call them let's get an them let's get them to opt into participating in that call and what you're doing in this moment is you're giving them a way out now what you might be thinking at this point if you know if we did (20:30) something like you know hey Wasim it's Jason with outbound Squad I know I probably catch you in the middle of your day here do you have a minute for me to share the reason for my call you might be thinking hey if we did something like that the person could say no when we give them an out what's the psychology I'll kick this question your way with seam of hey when we give the person an option why is that actually a good thing I think like from a from a psychology standpoint people obviously love options and you're more likely to (20:59) get a yes on that when you ask for permission it's it's Point Blank period I think like all of us humans innately like when you ask someone for something like hey can I borrow this versus just taking it you're more likely to get a yes from him so it's like all that the the most favorite thing I like to do like when when I get a cot call or where I do it is I literally say do you have a second to chat I want to tell you why I'm calling you specifically and most often than not that pequs interest and it gives you the (21:29) way out but more often than not people will say yes and they're open to chatting um that's just an a human nature the more you give them chances and choices the more likely you're gonna you're gonna have it go your way especially an executive or someone that has any kind of leadership Authority um these are people with Egos and don't take away their autonomy is the kind of thing here um by the way the approach that we're teaching this is not the only way to do it okay so we're going to give you some options on this uh what we're (21:57) going to do next after this and again we're going to give you some examples here uh we call it a reverse pitch Nick you guys call it a value or a problem proposition versus a value proposition yep so again audience we're going to give you some specific examples here in a second and show you what those look like but Nick can you comment on okay I do this pbl what I'm gonna be really like tempted to do at that point is be like oh cool they said I have 30 seconds Let Me Pitch my product why shouldn't we do that and what should we do instead (22:31) uh you're right I advocate for what's called a problem proposition and I think a lot of salespeople have been taught that the key to being a great seller is to have a really really compelling pitch um or value proposition which might sound something like well Jason thanks look the reason that I called you is um you know we're the leading provider of billing workflow software for law firms and we can help you uh increase your bill speed by 87% we've done it for a bunch of other law firms when I lead with value one it again (23:02) triggers that telemarketer alarm for the prospect where it's like great let me shove in the door exactly what my product does and that can overwhelm a prospect and it doesn't seem as tailored to them there's been a lot of research out there that says that people are more motivated by pain than they are gain put a one in the chat if you've ever heard that before so what I want to do is before I get into my here's how my product works or what my value is I want to actually lead with the problem that RTM that you talked about Jason (23:35) that reason to meet and then and make sure that I'm right with that before I get into my pitch so instead of saying hey we've got the fastest billing workflow software out there I might say something like well look Jason the reason that I called you is I talked to a ton of different Insurance defense law firm CFOs every week and a lot of them have been telling me that it's been getting increasingly frustrating to have to deal with all of the deductions rejections and appeals from the insurance carriers that you Bill after (24:04) you win a big case for them we work with about 300 different Insurance defense law firms in the US to help them cut down on those appeals and I guess I'm wondering if that's something that you've been experiencing now that opens the door for me to get a little bit more context from them if they do indeed have that problem which helps me give a more nuanced and targeted pitch I'll pause Okay so so the idea here again and I'm going to share a a script uh template with you here this is going to be one of the things that we give away (24:36) to you today the idea here is again I'm getting an opt-in through my permission-based opener we're going to talk here in a second about ways that you could upgrade the PBO and then that reverse pitch or problem proposition is the way that I lower a prospect's guard and disarm them is not by talking in a language that only I understand my product it's a language that both of us understand their problem they live in their problems so the best visual I could give you is if this is your prospect's world and this is your world (25:05) I want to meet them in their world first the sales process is where you bring them over to your world the outbound call is not the place to do that so let's take a look at what those pbos look like we'll open it up for questions if you have them it looks like we got a couple good ones in the Q&A and um I'll let you guys know where you can get access to this document so this is what we're going to share with with you so this is a more templated version of a deliverable that we would actually give to a client so this is stuff that we (25:36) build out from a talk track standpoint um there's five different kinds of openers that we'll typically teach couple of these one of these is inspired by the one the only the great Arman Faro your uh your colleague and brother if you willc put that one in uh so so let me Demo a couple of these then I'll then I'll open it up to you too um for feedback and and if you have anything else to add um this is like the classic PBO that I feel like if you're calling into non-te personas um this one works pretty well just because (26:12) they're not getting called with a lot of these it's super simple hey Nick it's Jason I know I'm catching you in the middle of your day do you have a minute for me to share the reason for my call and one thing you'll know about my tone and my Pace when I was making a call block yesterday one of the reminders I always tell myself is slow down you got to slow down annunciate your words Etc here's where it starts to get a little more interesting so this one's called The Gong opener we did a lot of work with gong a few years back (26:44) and I was a bit skeptical of this opener until I heard them do it on a lot of recorded calls with uh buyers and if you have the personality for this one it can work pretty well uh Hey Wasim it's Jason without outbound Squad I don't suppose I got you at the worst possible time did I so if you can pull that off with a smile and a chuckle it's not personally my style but if you feel like you really want to lean in to your personality that can be a good one these next two are my personal favorites so what we're going (27:16) to do here and Nick I think you teach something similar to this you guys talked about where I'm gonna frontload the relevance in the call so what this is going to sound like is something like this let's say that I am selling the example I'm going to give you is a solution that helps with site development so this is a company that helps uh companies that have like solar farms and all of this kind of stuff select the right sites so what I might do here is I might say something like this um you know Hey Taylor I was (27:48) calling about the recent development in San Francisco on ABC 123 street it's Jason without bound Squad do you got a minute I promise to be brief so this one's really clutch because the first thing literally before you introduce yourself is something about them one other thing to point out that's super important is does everyone notice here how I'm not saying hey is this Nick I'm not opening up the call asking if it's the right person that's a dead giveaway that I'm a stranger assume it is the right person and let them correct you if it isn't I'm (28:26) going to Dem with these other two and then I'll open it up for you um Arman foro have you heard our name tossed around opener I love because you can adapt it in so many different ways the one that we teach this quite a bit if anyone here reaches out and does like sled or federal government or does something that's a little more regionalized or localized this can work pretty well so you could say something like um hey Nick we actually work with a few of the other top contractors in Texas Like A and B it's Jason with (28:57) outbound Squad you by chance heard or name tossed around so I'm going to drop in Social proof or let them know what kind of companies we work with and where or I could name drop companies there and that one's pretty good too and last but not least we have the make it quick hey Dave it's Jason I know you weren't expecting my call do you mind if I take a quick moment to share why I called you specifically so Wasim this one seems really kind of in line with what you do but I want to open it up uh with see we'll start with you first here um is (29:28) there any particular opener either that you see here on the screen that you like or something else that you do a little bit different that we could demo for the audience I think like number five people always are intrigued that are very egocentric they want to know why you're calling them specifically like I love that one I don't think I've ever listened to a call that a rep has done and had someone say no I don't want to know why you're trying to call me specifically most often people love that um I personally I'm all about trying to (29:57) show your personality and like be authentically yourself on the phone uh it's also not too hard to do a little bit of improv so number two like hey I caught you at the worst time did I and like just smile um you know circuit 10 years ago my manager at the time had brought us all mirrors and he would put a mirror in front of us and while I was calling he was like smile smile and I was like smile and people can hear you smiling over the phone I know that sounds crazy but that's completely true and like when I smile my tonality (30:27) immediately changes and it becomes way more natural I'm just being myself so I love number two I know number five works um it's just about how you deliver it yeah delivery is so important I I grew up in part of my upbringing in sales so to speak was in call centers so this is something that we did too we had little mirrors inside of the cubicle you have to see your teeth when you're talking uh Katrina Bray in the uh Q&A asked something along the lines of hey if I'm starting with cold calling and am I anxious about it do you suggest having a (30:56) script uh absolutely I don't know why people are so against scripts I don't say this stuff word for word but I like to have it so I know like what's coming up next and I don't have to be thinking about what to say next I can be like really really in the moment um Nick thoughts on pbos stuff here that you see on the screen that you like that you want to you know kind of double tap on or plus one or is there something that you do differently advice Etc I'll speak to the third one which I'm going to go back again to I really (31:26) like your language around having an art TM a reason to meet Jason um give me a one in the chat folks if when you call your prospect you know something about them anything about them oh good great that's makes me happy to hear what I do is I frontload my call opener with the trigger for the reason to meet so I'll give you an example I sold to law firms for a very very long time and Brian uh I saw you in the chat saying does this work when you sell to it decision makers we often called like cios of law firms or CFOs of law firms (32:02) and one of the impetuses the reason that someone would need to buy new billing software would be if they were expanding as a firm particularly into different states because that often meant more tax complexity uh that would mean they would need to upgrade their billing software so I would pull a list of law firms that had opened new offices I could find that fairly easily when I been doing when i' be doing my call prep and I'd be able to find 50 law firms that had opened a new office in the last six months and that would be my trigger (32:31) for calling them in the first place so when I would call Jason Bay the CFO of a six office 80 Attorney Law Firm my opener would be he would answer and he would go hello and I would say Jason I just finished reading the press release about the big office opening in Tacoma and I'm going to be honest this is a cold call but it is a fairly well researched one and I'm wondering if I can get half a minute to share why that office opening prompted me to call you and then you can totally hang up on me if it doesn't make sense from there so (33:01) what I'm doing is I'm leading with something about them that's related semi- related to my pitch that will come later on that problem prop that will come later on but this is intimately tailored to them because they just had an office opening in Tacoma and what seem to your point earlier when I go back to do you mind if I take half a minute to share why that new office opening prompted me to call you and then you can totally hang up from there the Curiosity element no one's going to be like no I don't care like it feels so well researched (33:34) and tailored and you can do this in Mass it's not like you have to come up with a different trigger for every single Prospect you call because a lot of us have volume goals that we need to meet um so that's my that's my number one way that I open calls now love it and for some reason Nick that opener especially hits with the mustache so it's it's just I love I appreciate it yeah if only they could see you know I need to start FaceTiming my ects that will increase my call conversion rate so more data for you so that we're (34:05) not just sharing anecdotally what works for us but you can see same study G in 30 minutes to president Club analyzing hundreds of thousands of outbound calls Ben asked in the Q&A I use this Chris Foss technique where I asked did I catch you at a bad time and you say that that works well for you the Golden Rule here is if something works well for you please please do not change it keep doing that thing but let's talk about what working well means working well is that opener 8 out of 10 times or more you should get to the next part of the (34:39) call if you're getting shut down more than 10 or 20% of the time you need to change your opener so the did I catch you at a bad time the how it going openers for the most part across a large data set don't work as well as the permission based openers in the have you heard or name tossed room so super important there so we've talked about pbos I think on LinkedIn people like to focus a lot on fancy openers and unfortunately I wish it was that easy to just do a great opener and book a meeting um you got to nail this next part so the reverse pitch (35:12) the reason for your call super important and guess what yes we have some data for you on this too this next part which is super important there's a couple things when you use problem-based language statistically I mean you're going to book three times more meetings than if you use buzzwordy product pitches so if you talk about what your product does and say words like platforms and dashboards and single source of Truth or single paint of glass or whatever one uh says that sells software um you're booking a third of (35:48) the meetings that you should be relying on social proof alone is not enough either we need to leverage social proof and problem-based language so this reverse pitch it's going to feel like 20 30 plus seconds is of stuff that you're going to say and you're going to be really tempted to be like that feels like I'm talking too much but the idea again gong found that hey and the successful cold calls when people booked meetings there was up to a 37 second monologue but you know what the kicker is the kicker is that (36:20) monologue is not a product pitch that monologue is here is what we are seeing from other folks like you I'm going to give a demonstration of that and then I'm going to ask you to for examples so let's say that I do my permission based opener I say hey was calling about the recent property you acquired or the one that you're looking into on abc23 Street in San Francisco do you got a minute promise to be brief Prospect says yes okay so this is a variation of what this could sound like what's really important is that this is not super scripted in a (36:52) way that feels uncomfortable and I want to also make sure that the language is very simple so sound like this um great appreciate it Nick uh the reason I'm reaching out again is that recent site development there on ABC Street in San Francisco a lot of the developers that we're working with in the renewable space like companies A and B are sharing these two challenges one is around growth they want more projects this year but it just takes their team a ton of time to research and validate those sites and the second is really around (37:24) risk reduction they want to get to these sites before their competitors do but if they move too quick they could pick a bad site how does this compare to what you're thinking about at ABC company so some version of that where it's like hey thanks for the time again I'm reaching out because of this here's what we hear from people like you challenge One Challenge two how does that resonate how does that compare the other thing that I want to note here too is you might be thinking well Jason it feels kind of assumptive (37:56) like you're talking about their problem what if they don't have the problem that's the point you're not going to assume that they have the problem don't make it personal say I talk to all of your peers here's what they share you're asking for resonance does it resonate with you you're not saying I know you have this problem I find that that mentality coming in of not being assumptive is super super important um and yes Katie and for the rest of us of you in the chat we're going to share this document here in a few minutes nick uh we'll (38:26) start with you how does this compare to the problem prop is there anything that you would do differently here anything that you would add on anything like that I like this approach because if they bite on either this one or this one the growth or risk that gives you an opportunity to transition into a far more nuanced pitch because if they're really focused on the risk piece I know to tailor my pitch not to be around growth I need to tailor it around risk for me I want them I want to paint a picture in their mind of a really really crappy (39:06) scenario that they had to deal with in their work that our product can make go away so I gave the talk track earlier but when I was selling billing software to law firms it was great thanks you could even start a timer if you would like would be how I would respond to do you mind if I take half a minute and then i' go well look the the reason that I call you is typically when I'm talking with a CFO of an insurance defense firm that is expanding they tell me it can get really really frustrating to have to deal with all of (39:37) the deductions rejections and appeals that they get from their insurance carrier clients after they send them a bill we work with about 300 different law firms helping them reduce those deductions by scrubbing attorney time entries right when they're submitted but I don't even know if that's something you're dealing with and I guess I'm wondering if you might be open to learning more when I'm when I'm not totally cold calling you out of the blue nobody is saying yes let's book a meeting to that question just to be (40:05) clear like we got permission to pitch I gave maybe a 20 second Pitch there but I'm asking for the meeting because I want to orient them around I'm not trying to have an extended sales conversation here and when I ask for that meeting really early are you open to learning more when I'm when I'm not pull calling you out of the blue now they'll start to say well wait a minute how does it do that or wait they they'll start to asking me a couple questions which gives me again reasons to meet reasons to meet reasons to meet and (40:31) they'll usually have one or two back and forths before I'm able to secure a meeting so that's the approach that I take and how it might differ a tad Jason love it and then if you can get really granular like you're talking about and do this in a little more story form for you more advanced people it could be hey I was reaching out like I said saw the recent site development at ABC Street in uh there in SF I was just talking to another developer in the renewable space yesterday and she shared and then I just elaborate on like what (40:59) that person shared that's another really great way to like take a conversation or a sales conversation in to the prospecting conversation um with see I know this is very similar to what you teach and preach um but what does this look like for for you guys at Shopify um it's like it's it's very similar and I think like one of the biggest things when we're like having this type of conversation that I say a lot to reps whether um at this or previous orgs is you want to kind of deliver it through internally and externally I think giving that Nuance (41:35) problem would really just open the conversation and allow you to go down like different routes so let's say an example if if I'm selling also uh to law firms I would say internally we're spending a lot of money on uh you know law law administrators that are doing a lot of the admin tasks on the day to-day basis and then externally we're not able to satisfy our customer base uh within en time and in time facilitating because of XYZ problems you've given them an understanding of this is an issue that not only are we facing internally but (42:06) also what our customers are facing externally with their relationship with us and most often than not it is going to be one of one of the two issues sometimes it's both but most often than not it's going to be one of the two issues and it will guide your conversation to go into a more nuanced uh pitch like exact like Nick said so don't be afraid to go down that route to be like okay I understand what's happening inside of your company and I understand how your customers feels about your company externally and I love (42:34) that like answer at the end is like does this resonate with you is this something that you're currently experiencing versus just trying to Pivot to IM meeting immediately so love it so the internal versus external is big one last piece of advice on this part before we move on is there's a very specific formula behind this reverse pitch it's headline so what's like the one to three-word thing that we hear that is like top of mind for them right for an HR person that might be hiring as one bucket and then retention as the other (43:09) bucket for cyber security that might be like um visibility remediation prioritization right so the next part is they want to do this it's aspirational statement but theyve run into this problem it's the age old copyrighting formula in marketing we want to do this thing but we run into this problem we want our AES to self Source more pipeline but they rely too much on sdrs and marketing right so Human Resources Anna I have no idea what you sell but it's probably going to be uh retention and hiring are probably going to be the two (43:47) big buckets for you right they want to hire more of the right types of folks but working with third-party uh recruiters takes way too long and it's super expensive you know I'm just totally winging it there so let's uh let's keep moving because we got 12 minutes left and we haven't talked about the middle part of the call um this is I feel like the most overlooked part of the call honestly is we've talked about PBO and reverse pitch but what do we do next the idea of the hook is to focus the call around where (44:16) they have a problem Taylor Duncan I used to work with Taylor what's up Taylor he's like third party recruiters are great yes they are great if you're a good third party recruiter they're they're good um so here's what you want to do is uh what what we call Money questions um so the money questions are questions that you ask that show that you really understand the buyer's world so an example of a bad question would be well what are your biggest challenges with your law team right now uh what are your biggest challenges with recruiting um (44:53) what that question doesn't demonstrate is that you know their world a little bit so in sales I know that we've been taught uh there's no such thing as a stupid question in sales there is such thing as a stupid question there are questions you can ask that do not show that you understand the buyer's world so we'll talk about those money questions in a second what those money questions and let me skip ahead one more what those money questions allow us to do is summarize the conversation and then transition into the close where we're (45:24) going to schedule and do what we call a triple confirmation so I'm going to run you through what that looks like real quick get your feedback and then what we'll do is share this document and we'll probably have a little bit of time for Q Anda so one of the things okay there's a couple people as I'm sharing my screen here that are asking how do I sound less scripted practice is a really big one if you do not have chat GPT on your phone you need to install it and pay for the premium version right now you can literally roleplay with GPT that's how (45:58) good it is with the advanced version you can tell it how hard you want it to be you can tell it who you want it to be you can have it grade you you can have it give you 10 objections in a row I mean like you have to practice like don't rely on a partner to practice so the way that this talk track works again we have permission based opener we have reverse pitch and let's say hey we're game now we need to find the hook so there's two parts to to this I find that giving the teaser on what your company does is optional sometimes people will (46:34) just ask in which case I like to make the other person ask I feel like I'm more in the driver's seat when they ask me but you need like a one- sentence teaser statement on like what you do so if you haven't given that at this point you might say yeah an ABC company you know we help land developers avoid project delays and roadblocks without having to add headcount or rely on super expensive third party external consult I'm curious and that's where we go straight to a money question so this part of your talk track you're just (47:03) going to have as reference with the questions what I like to use this is probably my favorite style of question is you ask the question from the point of view of someone that would be at their company using your product or service so what I might ask here is I might say hey I'm kind of curious with see you know if I was one of the developers on your team and I needed to get insights today on a site before a competitor could grabbit how would I quickly run that analysis without having to work through a third party and what I what I know because I (47:35) know this client well what they're going to say is well yeah we we can't do that we we have to work it takes about one to two weeks to turn that around oh interesting yeah I'm glad I asked because a lot of our clients they're able to literally log into a dashboard and get this information instantly for a fraction of the cost right so I can ask these good problem based questions so I need like three to five of these questions knowing that I might ask one or two and they're gonna either give me something that their users are dealing (48:08) with it's going to Spotlight problems uh I might get them to tell me a story Etc once I've done a good job here I'm going to cut the call short so I'm going to suggest next steps typically I find the best way to do this is to just quickly repeat back what you heard so I might say um so Nick basically what I heard today is that you don't really have a way to get some of this data quickly and you mentioned that some of the sites that you're getting to you don't get to in time before a competitor snags it um do you mind if I (48:44) can make a quick suggestion and usually when you ask this question they respond kind of funny and like yeah what's what's going on how about we continue the conversation when I'm not calling you randomly in the middle of your day do you have your calendar handy we schedule time there's two things that are super important here I want to get the prospect to accept the calendar invite live on the call reason for that is if you have not had very much email communication when you send a Google Calendar or uh Outlook invite it only (49:17) lands in their inbox it doesn't hit their calendar until they accept in the email and I'm going to give them the reason hey Wasim I want to make sure that email got through through because it might be in your spam folder and I and I want to make sure that we have the time blocked off would you mind real quick looking for that email I just sent it to you and just hit and confirm when you get a chance and I just wait while we're waiting I might have some small talk like I was calling people in Austin yesterday so I said uh (49:45) hey you know I I used to live in Austin from 2018 to 2021 have you been to sell and so barbecue spot you know like you can make small talk if you want I'm going to restate the agenda and the purpose of the call and then I'm going to ask the they take a keep an eye out for the confirmation email so I will pause here anything Nick or Wasim that you would add before we open it up for a question or two around like the hook making sure that we have a couple good questions and then anything that you advise around how do we make (50:16) sure that we at least get 70 80% plus of people to show up at the end of the call go ahead Bim I think like one of the biggest things when you're going for that meeting at the end and you're repeating what they say don't repeat what your perspective is on what their problem is repeat what they specifically set to you so what I hear you're saying is you're currently facing XYZ Z issue and that's exactly what other individuals that I speak with are also facing versus going in and saying something along the lines (50:49) of like what I heard is your facing this problem this is how we can help you've kind of shifted that Focus back to your organization and away from the problem and most folks would kind of have that like alarm Bell start to ring again exactly like how Nick said so that's one of the biggest things is like maintain that pace the entire time is that this should be around the problem they're facing and not trying to reframe it back to what your solution can solve for so um and then I really like that uh hey watch out for my confirmation email uh (51:20) not typically one we use so definitely taking that back love it Nick and for everyone I dropped in the document you have like five minutes there's hundreds of people trying to access this document so you may not be able to get to it all at once so keep trying but I dropped the document in there for you to make a copy of so that you have it uh Nick any feedback that you have or anything that you would add let's answer some questions let's do some Q&A I love the money questions that's so smart so Raphael Nick let's point this question (51:50) your way essentially Rafael's question is I'm an AE that does self sourcing um I want to keep the conversation at a high level but when at like should I transition straight into a demo maybe off of the cold call which my guess is Rafael maybe sell something a little bit more SMB or transactional but how do you know when to like pivot and just like book the meeting versus if the prospect has time there maybe doing the sales call on the spot like how would you advise someone like rafhael think of that so without knowing exactly what (52:23) Rafael is selling it's tougher for me to um give the answer cuz because if it's something where it's like a $80 purchase where they give you your credit card over the phone maybe you end up having a mini sales conversation and closing on the cold call for 95% of other scenarios I would recommend against that and the reason for that is this is an unscheduled interaction and you have no idea if your meeting is going to get interrupted someone might come into their office for a scheduled meeting and you get cut short the other reason that (52:53) I would always prefer a scheduled meeting is you want time to prepare and you want them to have time to prepare what I mean by that is I asked earlier does everybody know something about their prospects when they're calling and I saw a lot of ones in the chat but my guess is like you didn't do a super super deep dive on the prospect because you wouldn't have time to be making enough calls if you did a mega Deep dive to prep for for every single person you were going to cold call so I want a scheduled meeting so I have more time to (53:20) prep and I'd also like to serve them an appetizer before the big meal of the demo meaning before we meet I actually want to send over some resources to my Prospect about my company about my perspective on their problem maybe even like a 90 second highlevel pre-recorded demo so that when we meet live they've already started to digest what we do and so for those reasons I prefer a scheduled meeting rather than trying to sell on the spot love it next questions for you from David is it appropriate to call cell phones if we have them and also their (53:57) office phone there's still like a lot of debate on like calling cell phones and stuff like that so uh I personally I mean I personally think it's it's it's appropriate we're in an age where you're everybody's calling your cell phone number you call random numbers all the time as well so I do think it is however if a person has shared with you in the past not to call their cell phone number that is where like the the kind of the boundary starts to and needs to be respected but most often than not individuals know their numbers are are (54:29) over the Internet so that's at least my feedback around it it's just give it a whirl and see how the person might take that on again uh the worst thing is they'll reject you the worst thing you lose and I think my new favorite term is losing is the new winning and at least you'll know that hey maybe this is not the correct person to call again love it love it all right let's do one more question um Victoria asked if you have relevant intent data on the prospect account do you leverage that in the call so how should intent data (54:59) because this is just all the rage right now be worked into the outbound call if at all my opinion is that intent data is the trigger for you to find a trigger to reach out meaning intent data gives you a sense of like are they looking up stuff relevant to your solution are they on your site are they searching for competitors Etc you likely get a list of people that are showing intent my recommendation is not to call and say Jason I just saw you were on our website I know this is a cold call but it's well research like that's sort of weird what (55:31) I do is when I see people are showing intent that is my trigger to go look up did they open a new office did they win a big case recently did they just hire a new partner at the law firm and I use that as my opener so the intent is my trigger to do a tiny bit of research to then personalize the Outreach what your effort in the right direction yeah go exactly yeah it's like Direct um so typically like if you know hey this person has been on this specific website going through this specific resource that is how you can leverage (56:05) that in the in the actual call when you call them it's like hey I went on outle out colle and I noticed that throughout it what ended up happening is they stopped on all these specific Pages you can use that in the call to kind of like directionally move the call forward but you shouldn't be calling them up exactly said to say hey I noticed you're on my website uh want to book a demo it's uh you know if they wanted to they would submit the the inbound contact as for regardless awesome thank you YouTube we'll email this stuff out afterwards in (56:37) the chat grab cold calling sucks the book it's linked up there uh connect with Wasim on LinkedIn and then if you want custom Training for your team so if you want your sdrs AES AMS to be doing more of the stuff that we talked about today um set up a time to uh chat with us there as well and that's all I got for you team no [Music]