Why Salespeople Should STOP Prospecting - Outside Sales Talk with Aaron Ross

Aaron Ross is the author of the award-winning, bestselling bookPredictable Revenue. He has been teaching companies how to double or triple (and more) new sales since he helped Salesforceadd an extra $100M+. In this episode, Aaron shares his breakthrough selling methods, key takeaways from his book and why salespeople should stop prospecting!

Here are some of the topics covered in this episode:

• How to specialize your sales team and create predictable revenue
• Sales metrics you need to track
• How to effectively use the referral technique
• How to structure your lead generation and closing funnel
• Aaron's 3-step lead generation strategy
• The ‘Layer of the Onion’ principle

You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you get your favorite podcast!

About the Guest: 

Aaron Ross is the Co-CEO at Predictable Revenue Inc., the "Outbound Success Company”. He is helping businesses build an outbound prospecting program that creates sales growth and scalable revenue.

Before starting his company, he worked at Salesforce where he built a new tele-prospecting inside sales team and process (Cold Calling 2.0) from scratch that sourced $100m in recurring revenue for the company. Now he’s turned his attention to building the software platform that will power the next wave of Cold Calling 2.0 teams.

Aaron is the author of the bestselling books “From Impossible to Inevitable” and “Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com”.

As a highly ranked international speaker, Aaron speaks at conferences, Sales Kickoffs and Private Equity events, known for combining 'big picture' breakthrough and inspirational ideas with giving audiences hyper-tactical actions to take with them after. His speaking topics include scalable sales teams, creating predictable revenue, growth and innovation.

Website: https://predictablerevenue.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronross

Twitter: @motoceo

Listen to more episodes of the Outside Sales Talk here and watch the video here!

Transcript - Why Salespeople Should STOP Prospecting with Aaron Ross

Introducing Aaron Ross [00:00]

Steve: Welcome to Outside Sales Talk, where we meet with industry experts to learn the strategies and tactics that make them successful. I'm your host Steve Benson and I've helped thousands of salespeople all over the world crush their quota. Today, I'll help you crush yours.

Welcome to Outside Sales Talk. Today I'm really excited to bring you Aaron Ross, who is one of my favorite authors. He's going to be talking about why salespeople should stop prospecting. Aaron is the author of two bestselling books, the first one, From Impossible to Inevitable, and then Predictable Revenue, what he came out with two, three years ago with Jason Lemkin, and also a fantastic book and really worth reading.

Aaron's a highly ranked international speaker on topics like sales, business growth, innovation, how to create predictable, scalable revenue. And then he's got a company with easy to remember, same name as the book, Predictable Revenue, Inc. And what they do is they help businesses become more successful through outbound prospecting framework that creates incredible sales growth. Well, let's jump into it here.

The Case AGAINST Prospecting by Salespeople [01:15]

Steve: Most salespeople are responsible for generating their own leads, but you have very clearly stated that this is the wrong approach and that salespeople should not be prospecting. Could you tell us why?

Aaron: Yep. So, well, first of all, I'll be upfront and say that the idea that salespeople shouldn't prospect is a bit of an overstatement. It's a bit of a dramatic statement to get people's attention. The reality is salespeople shouldn't do most of their own prospecting, maybe a little bit. Let me talk about why. I also have nine kids. So the chances of someone breaking in here, like the, what was the CNN live, is a high probability, 18 months up to 19 years.

You never know, it’s just like a hoard here.

Steve: We're ready for the curveballs.

Aaron: Yeah. So I worked at salesforce.com years ago when it was a lot smaller today. You know what I saw through there and working with companies after is that when you rely on salespeople to do most of their own prospecting, you can't build a predictable sales machine or predictable sales result because a lot of times salespeople, they may not want to do it. They may not be any good at it. And even if they are good at it, then they have to juggle sales and closing and prospecting and that's just really, really hard to do. So what that means is, well, let’s jump to the solution. One thing that companies are doing now, and this is standard practice in Silicon Valley, the fastest growing companies in the world. But a lot of companies don’t do this practice of what we call sales role specialization. Sales role specialization means that you break things out like a sports team, right? In soccer or football or basketball, you don’t have everyone do everything. You don’t have people go out, all right, everyone defend and score. You’ve got specialists, you’ve got, in soccer, you’ve got a goalie, you’ve got defenders, you’ve got attackers, in basketball, point guard, center. So why don’t we do that in sales? Well, the answer is we should. So in sales, the equivalent is saying we have prospectors who prospect, they do most of the volume cold prospecting, assist in the prospecting process. There are closers who close new business. If you have inbound leads, you have a separate function of junior salespeople responding to them. And then for customers, you’ve got different roles around customer success, managing customers, account management, the services, and like all the post-sale customer services that need to happen. At least four core roles: outbound prospecting, inbound lead response, new customer signing, and post-customer services. When you do that, then you have a system that you can enable predictable results, like repeatable results because you’ve created a situation where people can do fewer things better. When one salesperson is trying to prospect and close and manage customers and maybe get some leads, it’s too much. It’s inhuman to feel they’ll do all that well. It’s very rare to find someone who can do it all well. It’s like the unicorn hire. You can’t build a team around that. You can’t build a repeatable sales system around that. So that’s the first step, that sales role specialization.

Steve: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, Aaron. You know, obviously you’ve been really influential here in the world of software as a service. You know, I heard this message years ago when you kind of pioneered it at Salesforce and now they’re obviously a hundred billion dollar company or something. When I talk to my customers who are much more, they’re not in SaaS, right? Because most SaaS gets sold over the phone. They’re outside salespeople, this message has not reached them, frankly. In general, I would say this message has not reached them. They’re much more likely to have, here’s the sales team. We have our sales manager and we have eight people on the team and they are responsible for sourcing and closing. I regularly get in conversations where I’m basically just repeating things that I learned from you and I’m like, hey, have you guys thought about splitting this out? Like you have the sales manager to, or the account manager to manage the deal and then, but after he sells it or she sells it, how about they pass it to someone who’s better at managing the account going forward? Because you can have someone managing the account, do a whole bunch more accounts and that’s...

Aaron: And do it well.

Applying Specialization Principles in Field Sales [05:59]

Steve: The specialization. Yeah, absolutely. They get good at fielding questions about the actual product as opposed to fielding questions about the sales process. Then on the other side, earlier in the funnel from your account managers, what if you had people assisting them in their lead generation, making phone calls, setting up meetings, building… Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah, and of course there’s gonna be a lot of salespeople who say, I would love for someone to help me with appointments and to set up appointments for me, but my management will never go for that. Or maybe like it just wouldn’t work because I have to go knock on physical doors or whatever the reasons are. Usually it might be my management’s never gonna do that. So we can talk about what to do if you’re a salesperson, you’re out there closing deals, you know, in your car, you’re walking, wherever you’re doing, how do you apply these principles to still get better even if your management’s not ready to specialize your sales team and your sales roles this way to give you more support on a lead generation front?

Steve: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I guess let’s talk about that. What do you recommend there?

Aaron: So, hey. Yeah. Well, first I’ll say that if you are a manager who’s listening, why this works, one more thing on why this works is that you cannot create predictable revenue unless you have predictable lead generation. In other words, if you have a predictable way to generate sales appointments, you will be able to create predictable sales. And this is, the Predictable Revenue book was the original one that sort of got into this. And I created the outbound sales process, the prospecting process at salesforce.com. And that helped add a hundred million in a few years and by now more than a billion dollars to their revenue. And I’ve helped companies build outbound prospecting teams and apply the principle. So that’s one thing I’m known for. It’s like a specialty is the outbound prospecting. And I will tell you right now, the only way that you get great results with outbound prospecting, the only way is when you have people dedicated to it, 100%. When you have people doing it part-time, you can get some results here and there. I mean, whatever results you’re getting, it will be better, far better when you have a team of people dedicated to doing it well. That includes you have them, they use your CRM system better. Your metrics are clear. They just get better trained because they’re doing it all the time, they can be experts in it. So what if you can’t do that yet? And maybe you’re a salesperson, maybe you’re a manager and you’re like, we just can’t do that yet. So the way salespeople apply this principle in the field would be, ultimately, it’s about focus, doing fewer things better. So the simplest way is to start by, so let’s say prospecting is a thing that you struggle with. Now they could be calling on current customers or whatever it is, but prospecting, so you could start by applying it with your calendar, which says certain times during the week, could be a day a week, it could be two hours at a time on certain days, you block out time to prospect. Because you’re really just creating space to do one thing really well. And it’s really hard to prospect or impossible a few minutes here and there. So what that looks like too, if you, for most people who struggle with accountability, if there are a few superhuman people like Elon Musk, who can just do whatever he needs to do, but a lot of us, and I’m not included, like I need to block out time. I probably need an accountability buddy. It’s like starting a new exercise routine. I need a time and place to show up. I need someone there who knows if I don’t show up, I might disappoint them or we can help each other. I need some kinds of goals. I need some structure to get me to start it. It’s easy to start doing this, but then you fall off track. How do you start it and keep on track? So I’ll just repeat those quickly, right? So you block out some time on your calendar, at least 90 minutes in a slot. Ideally, you have a buddy. You have some goals, like what do you want to get out of this? It could be weekly activity goals, it could be revenue goals. You start with weekly goals. And you get some feedback along the way. So, you know, whether it’s with yourself, your buddy, or manager every week, you’re sort of checking in like, what worked and what didn’t? Run this process to make it work for you. So that’s one thing. The ultimate thing is if you don’t create that time to prospect, the techniques aren’t really gonna matter. We can talk about the techniques as well. The first, you need to create the time and the space to do it. In blocks of time laid out.

Time Management and Maximizing Field Sales Efficiency [10:43]

Steve: Yeah, and I think that’s fantastic advice. I would add one layer to that for field salespeople. When I go out and meet with teams, what I recommend they do, and I usually meet with our customers and stuff, right? So they, what I recommend they do is they look at their day cause they can’t just brick. They can’t take a block of time like that because they’re out in the field and their leads have to be generated face-to-face a lot of times. For example, if you sell stuff to dentists, you have to get in front of that dentist. If you’re selling insurance to businesses, you need to get in front of that business.

Aaron: But actually, just to interrupt, like, I’ve had dental clients, you know, there’s a lot you can do at home on the phone to prepare before you show up. Cause if all you’re doing is showing up, it’s incredibly inefficient versus you can use, if you’re selling to like dentists, like smaller shops, the phone works best, right? Try to either of course schedule appointments or even call ahead to find out, would it be a waste of time to visit them or not? Like if you sell dental supplies, but you only can sell to chains where there’s at least three locations. If there’s only one location, that’s a waste of time. Can you do, when you go out in the field, which is very, when you’re actually out there in your car or walking, which is very expensive on your time, how do you make sure you get the most out of that? And that’s part of that is at home doing the preparation. What’s like the list review, whether it’s doing a call or emailing to make sure that when you do show up, when you do knock, you get the most out of that visit and you’re not going to places that are a waste of your time.

Steve: Yeah, that’s great advice. Qualify upfront and then make sure that it’s appropriate to go to this place. And that gets back to planning, right? And so then once you’ve got your general outline of what you’re going to be doing for a day, I recommend picking a number of leads that you’re going to go after. If you do have to, you’ve got your qualified list and now you do have to do drop-ins to get in front of people. I recommend choosing a goal every day and being like, well, I’ve got five meetings set for today and, you know, along that route I’m gonna drop in on five more cold drop-ins. Gonna drop off my card, drop off the written materials, say hi, try to set an appointment for next week. And for different businesses, it’s a different number, but pick your goal and go after it. And every day, just make sure before you’re going out in the field and you’re making your plan, plan those drop-in appointments and plan those meetings so you’re actually getting that. It’s very similar to an inside salesperson or someone who can do it all inside planning a brick of time to make those phone calls.

Aaron: Yep. Now, one more thing, sometimes you do need to get out there and you gotta go visit your appointments and do the drop-ins. That was interesting. Again, like a company that sold software to dentist offices, smaller chains, you know, one, two, three, four, five kinds of locations, ended up being able to do most of the appointment setting and demo scheduling over the phone. So by the, I can’t say how much they did end up having specialized prospectors. It’s like inside salespeople doing a lot of the work for salespeople. So you may not need to do as much in-person of the raw prospecting as you think. There might be a lot more over the phone or email you can do before you get into your car and go visit people, which is very time expensive.

Steve: Yeah, especially if you’ve got one inside person covering a team. Basically, well, if you do have a team of, let’s just say eight people, consider getting your next hire as being someone inside to support them with that kind of air cover because they, especially if you’re splitting that across, it may be very valuable. And then if it really works out, maybe you get a second one.

Aaron: Yep. So I will say, here’s a great fact, you know, I want to say it’s a fun fact, but a fact, is if you do, if you can get someone to, if you have them or you get someone to hire an inside prospector, I often call them a sales development rep or an outbound SDR, a lot of different names, somebody to do a lot of the prospecting or the pre-appointment preparation. You, they shouldn’t support more than about four salespeople. Cause otherwise they get too scattered, right? They get too unfocused. And the name of the game here is focus, doing fewer things better. I would say too, one more technique that worked amazingly well at salesforce.com that really was a breakthrough. And it still doesn’t get enough use today, is the idea of a referral technique. So it’s sort of a friendlier way, it’s a less salesy way to go into a place or call them or email them and start a conversation. If you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend it for two reasons. I’ll go through what the technique is. This technique, it not only is a little friendlier, it’s not salesy, right? So it’s easy to start conversations and it makes it more efficient for you to get to the right person. Or sometimes you’re not really sure who they are. So the technique is very simple again, whether it’s over email or in-person or the phone. It’s essentially, Hey Steve, I hate to bother you, but I’m a little bit lost. Do you mind telling me, I’m not sure who to talk to here. Can you point me to the right person who handles X or who here would handle Y? And what that does is even if it’s, like, the right person, let’s say you’re trying to talk to an office manager, like that’s your goal. And you’re asking them, they would say, Oh, it’s me. But if it’s not them, they’re like, well, okay, that would be our head of operations or our owner. And that’s John or Sarah. Okay. Well, what’s the best way to get in touch with them or there you can go into a little bit of your elevator pitch, a little bit of a spiel, but because again, it’s not threatening, it’s very friendly. It’s more research-based. It just works really well as a way to start conversations, whether it’s email, phone, or in-person. So if you haven’t tried that, try it.

“The Referral Technique” in Sales [16:52]

Steve: Okay. That’s fantastic advice. I think everyone could learn from that one. And if you can get that, I’ve found when you do that half the time, they’re just like, the best place is with email, I’ll introduce you or you can ask, Hey, well, would you be able to introduce me? And they just tap them right out on the thread or they start a new thread and make the introduction. That will get noticed, right? That doesn’t land in anyone’s spam box. That doesn’t get skipped. It’s like, people pay attention to that.

Aaron: Yep. So the other thing is too, I feel, after coaching lots of salespeople over the years, if you have done sales for a long time, you tend to be, you know, there’s this habit of like trying to get to the decision-maker, get to the decision-maker, get through the gatekeeper. So along with this referral process, so I call it the referral method, which is who’s the right person. And there’s the direct method, which is, you know, who’s the decision-maker, they both can be great. Right. So you want to have both at hand. The referral one tends to work more often, more easily. But I feel people who’ve done a lot of sales for a lot of years often struggle with it because they’re so used to trying to get through to the decision-maker. They get to the decision-maker, get through the gatekeeper to the decision-maker, that it comes off as very salesy and it makes the gatekeeper very defensive, whether it’s an office manager, a receptionist, or executive assistant. So I say your gatekeeper can be your best friend. If they like you, they feel like you’re not a, you know, you’re not a salesperson. It’s usually the tone, the way you talk, it’s how you carry yourself. Do they feel like you’re just trying to get something out of them? Or do they feel like, Hey, you’re just like a regular person. Then they will help you. They will give you the name. They’ll give you the introduction. They will tell you, give you any kind of simple qualifying information for you. Just tell me if this is a fit or not. So don’t try to just get through the gatekeeper. Try to make friends with the gatekeeper because they can be incredibly helpful to you for that next step of an introduction to the right person, to the decision-maker.’

Sales Managers: Structuring Sales Teams for Success [19:03]

Steve: Very great advice, just awesome. I guess next question, could you talk about what else sales managers can do to develop and structure their sales teams successfully? And I guess from a framework perspective, could you walk us through this process from inbound lead generation through to customer success management?

Aaron: Well, when we do, I often do assessments and growth plans for companies. So I go in, a lot of them are like five to $10 million companies trying to grow, but sometimes it’s bigger companies like Red Hat, which is a $3 billion. But the thing I see time and again is if you’re a sales manager or a company executive, that your dashboards and metrics are not set up the right way. And what that means is a common problem is you have, certainly, there’s like maybe one dashboard, if you even use dashboards. So, because if you don’t have dashboards or clear metrics, then you really don’t know what’s going on in your business or in the team. That’s the first step is if you’re trying to improve what you’re doing, you need some kinds of metrics to help you gauge what’s working and what’s not. They’re not the answer.

Steve: Choosing which metrics to use in the first place. Is it a number of leads? Is it number of signups? Is it number of meetings? What are the key things to measure? Everyone’s great at measuring dollars of revenue closed, but there’s all these things that happen before that that are measurable, and if you can kind of focus in on those and get people thinking about them.

Aaron: And improve it. And so this is the way, if you step back and again, whether you’re a sales manager or a CEO, you need to be able to measure everything like a funnel, right? There’s your lead generation funnel and then there’s your closing funnel. The lead generation funnel though needs to be broken out into two, at least two sections, right? There’s outbound lead generation, which is cold calling, cold email, you’re prospecting, and that funnel and the metrics in that funnel are different than the marketing funnel, which is if you have marketing, hopefully you have marketing, where they’re generating leads through advertising, website, webinars, they’re being trickled down, hopefully being processed by the market response rep or an inbound SDR, filtered, routed, ideally then setting appointments, passing appointments to the field. But that funnel, the inbound funnel and the outbound funnel are different, different metrics, different steps, different rates and expectations. That’s the first step. You have to separate those. And then the sales funnel is its own different funnel. So at the point that there’s an accepted opportunity, so whether the salesperson is creating it or whether marketing is or a prospector, then, you know, a qualified opportunity, what does that look like through to close? So again, people don’t break out their funnels enough into separate inbound, outbound, and sales. And then on the metric side, I’ll give you some sample key metrics that people get wrong or miss. So really the one that matters is the, there’s different terms for this, right? So they say sales qualified leads or qualified opportunities or sales accepted leads, all that means is at the point a salesperson, the closer, the salesperson has a meeting, whether they’ve got it themselves, whether marketing generated it, whether a prospector generated it, that’s where it doesn’t matter. They’ve accepted it there to say, Hey, there’s something here. I’m taking it into my sales pipeline, my sales funnel. Like that’s the key metric. And I think where people go wrong is if you have a prospecting team or salespeople prospecting, you can measure things like meetings booked, meeting set, calls, dials, but none of those really are as important as how many meetings happened that were then accepted by the salesperson, sales accepted leads. So again, if you’re paying people, like if you have prospectors and you pay them on booking meetings, don’t. That’s only on meetings that happen. And of those, which ones are accepted? On the marketing side, same thing. If you have a head of marketing, don’t measure them on number of leads generated. You should measure that. But the metric that matters is how many sales accepted leads are they generating? If they created a thousand leads this month, but only a hundred ended up in the sales pipeline of salespeople, that’s the one that matters. The number of those opportunities being created and the dollar value of the qualified pipeline being created. Right, that’s where everything meets is how much qualified pipeline, the number of those qualified accepted meetings are being created every month. And people end up measuring prospectors on meetings booked, marketing on number of leads, and sales on revenue, and they’re missing that key point in the middle where everything hinges. Because if you can measure the amount of qualified pipeline being created every month, if that’s going up or down, that is your leading indicator of future revenue, period.

Steve: Such a great insight. And so many people I know don’t do that. They count leads. I’d say almost everyone seems to count leads, you know, by number of marketing qualified leads, but not sales qualified. And then they count sales. And this is, if you took one thing away from this, this might be the thing, is also start counting opportunities created by what gets added to people’s pipeline. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah. And you do need, it’s a little extra challenge because there’s some subjectivity. Like it’s easy to count the number of leads created because it’s like a system thing. Humans don’t touch that. But when you have this qualified or that, you know, it is a little more challenging cause there’s need, an agreed-upon qualification criteria. Sometimes what if a salesperson wants to do a favor for their prospector and accepts it too soon? What if, I mean, there’s just, it’s a little trickier for some people, but it’s the most important thing. And again, if you can get everyone to be measured on the same thing, it’s so much more aligning, because then you don’t go away from the whole marketing generated a bunch of leads, but they’re all crap. And marketing says, well, sales isn’t following up. Just to review, when you have that marketing-sales divide, the two solutions that really make the biggest difference are when you have the SDRs, the internal sales development reps, and there’s the inbound ones and market response reps that respond to marketing leads and make sure they get attention and only pass over the good ones to sales. That’s like 80% of the battle to bridge the marketing-sales gap. But the other part is having that aligned goal where sales and marketing care about the same thing: the sales qualified leads, the qualified opportunities being created. That, you know, as long as sales and marketing are talking, pretty much fixes the whole sales and marketing divide.

The Role of SDRs in Sales Organizations [26:15]

Steve: Such important advice here. Well, I’ve got a question that follows that. The business development team, your SDRs, the people making these outbound calls to generate leads and sales qualified leads, do you believe they should report to the VP of sales or the VP of marketing or something else?

Aaron: Great question. So the simple answer is that when you’re creating it, it’s whoever is going to be the most passionate about investing in the team to make it work. Sometimes you have a VP of sales who doesn’t really care, or it’s not a priority. Or sometimes you have a VP of marketing that really cares. So usually as it gets built, this junior sales team, the typical term is sales development rep, SDR. Again, you can have outbound SDRs prospecting, inbound SDRs responding to leads. Usually ends up in sales at some point, because it’s part of the sales career path. But really it’s about which executive is going to make it work and invest the time, the focus, the money, whatever it takes to get it off the ground. Cause it can take, you know, three to six months easily. If you’re starting from scratch to build the team, get it working and have it, you know, say, all right, I don’t need to watch it every day. Like it’s working. There’s things we’ll need to fix, that never changes, but it’s working. Sometimes it’s six to 12 months for the outbound side if you’re in a tough niche. There’s all kinds of reasons why it could take, should it be more like three or six months or more like 12 months, but that’s the typical range. It’s not 30 days.

Defining Your Ideal Customer [28:31]

Steve: Okay, so that makes a ton of sense. Next question, in your book, Predictable Revenue, you talk about Cold Calling 2.0 and I know you’ve continued to develop your thoughts here. Could you walk us through what you believe the best practices are to approaching lead generation today, not from how the team is structured, but actually how... How would you go about generating leads? Is it best to use the phone? Is it best to show up in person? Is it best to use emails? And what does that look like? What does that email, you mentioned one email strategy, but talk about phone versus email and how you do it.

Aaron: I’ll start with, so again, in the Predictable Revenue book, there’s a section in here. You can’t really see it, but you know, sort of the five steps and really the prospecting begins with defining your ideal outbound customer. And I think this is where most companies and even individual reps go wrong in not doing this to the extent they should. So they end up wasting a lot of time calling on the wrong companies. So step one, who’s your ideal outbound customer that you want to go after? And those look like, hey, which customers, again, whether you’re a rep or a team or company, have been the easiest for you to close for the most money. You want to avoid the small ones that are hard to close or the small ones that are, you know, we all learn, the smallest companies tend to actually be the most difficult. Just because they’re scraping by and they need to get the most support for their dollars. And so for you, like which ones are the easiest to win, most money. Step one. Step two, build a list of them. And step three in the technique you refer to is, it depends on the market. Email in general works the best. Well, really the best is email and phone together. But if you are going to smaller businesses like dentists, it’s really more like solo shops, then email doesn’t work as well. Either the phone or of course in-person can work well. So phone and sort of researching and preparing at home and using the phone to pre-qualify. And email sometimes works, but phone would be number one before you go in-person. So as you get to bigger companies, email tends to work better and better and better. The phone is always important to balance it. The ultimate, you have to experiment a bit for your kind of market to determine between phone, email, and maybe social and in-person, which could include handwritten cards or there’s really a million ways that you can do things, which works best for your market. If, again, you’re talking to like car repair shops and they’re just not on email, right? They’re on their phone, maybe texts. It could even be the best where you go, you might go there in-person. Maybe you call ahead, are they there? You go there in-person, they might give you a cell phone number to text them with. So sometimes cell phones can work well. So the experimentation is important, but it’s like know your market, know your customer. Stop and really, if I think about it, rather than just being so busy going out there to get all the appointments you can, I gotta hit my 10 appointments, that you’re just wasting a lot of time going to the wrong people just to hit an arbitrary number. And sometimes those numbers are pushed down by management. So hopefully you wanna have an agreement with your manager or executives on, hey, what’s the right way to do this? The system. If you can create the system, and everyone knows the system, then it’s a lot easier, because they understand how certain activities, you’re not just doing appointments for the sake of getting numbers up, exactly how many appointments you need to take, what type to get to a certain revenue number. That’s the goal, predictable revenue. Understand the system behind it so that if you can know how you get it, then you know how to grow it.

Steve: And talk about that cold phone call. What’s your strategy there? You’re trying to generate a lead from over the phone to a, let’s just say a doctor or a dentist or whoever, what is your strategy if you’re selling to a small business of this nature as an outside salesperson?

Aaron: Yeah. So obviously a situation, it’s easier when they have some kind of receptionist or office manager. Alright. If it’s a practice where it’s really just the doctor and maybe like a medical assistant, those are tough because they’re just, you know, they’re busy. So let’s just talk about a practice where they’ve got at least a receptionist or office manager of some kind. So generally, again, we’ve already sort of decided, alright, we only want to target practices in a certain area or maybe they’ve got a certain size, like there’s at least three practices in this group. We’ve done that work and we call them. So call it, you know, dial a number, someone picks up. Hey, it’s Jane. Hey Jane, did I catch you at a bad time? You need some kind of like bridge so don’t just leap into your pitch and all. I’d say, Yeah, but what can I do for you? Well, hey, my name is Aaron. And so I’m a little bit lost. I’m not really sure who to talk to there. Can you help me out please? And they’ll say, Yeah, like what, who are you looking for? Okay. Well, I’m, this is where, so in this case, I’ll just use my own. Well, we work with companies to help them grow sales. You know, typically we would talk to the owner or head of sales. Who would that, who would manage sales there? And again, if you sound like, if your tone sounds like a salesperson, they’re already going to be defensive. So if you sound like, Hey, I’m just a lost lamb, something like that, lost. Yeah. If you’re on the corner out on the street and you’re like, Hey, is there a gas station around here? That’s the kind of tone. They’ll pick up who’s in charge of sales or like who makes, whoa, that would be, yeah, our owner’s Tim, you know, he looks at all those things. Okay. Great. Is Tim, does he work out of the office there or where is he based? Yeah. He’s here, but he’s not here right now. I’m sorry to ask this, but what would be the best way to get in touch with Tim to see if this would be something that would be of interest to him or not? Email’s the best. Do you mind sharing his email? Sure, it’s tim@blahblah. By the way, just so in case that doesn’t work, do you have a phone number for him? What’s the best way to call him? Yeah, here’s the phone number. So that, you can keep, and then one more step. Is there anyone else there in sales who would care about this? Yeah, we actually have a sales director. So you can, by the way, you can keep going with this. Now, if it’s a busy office and they’re like, I got customers here, you know, so, but the point is with those calls, and I’m not saying the direct cold calls, the, Hey, I’m gonna pitch my service, are bad. I’m saying this technique of, like, a referral call. We also sometimes call it a mapping call. Cause you’re mapping out, you know, who’s there, who does what, we’re not trying to sell yet. We’re just trying to research who’s the right person, is this a fit, how many locations, do you already have X software, can work really well because it doesn’t trigger their defenses. It’s not a sales call. It doesn’t trigger them to try hanging up on you. And you can, again, if you make friends, not friends, but if they like you, they’re going to give you a lot of information as long as they’re not, you know, have someone breathing down their neck at the desk in front of them.

The “Layers of the Onion” in Sales [35:27]

Steve: Right, exactly. One thing that kind of triggers with me here, you’ve talked about the layers of the onion concept. Can you talk about that really quick?

Aaron: And one clarification, that mapping call I just did, you could do that over the phone or in-person. Same thing. Layers of the onion. Layers of the onion was in the Predictable Revenue book. And really it’s the idea that a lot of times when people don’t know us, we often try to move too fast. It’s like going on a date. You’re just saying hi and going for the kiss rather than giving them smaller steps to get to know you a little bit. So...

Steve: Yeah, great point.

Aaron: That might be, okay, they don’t know anything about you or your company. What’s a small bite? The first layer that you can give them so they can get to know you a little bit. That could be like an elevator pitch. So, and then once they’re like, oh, okay, that makes sense. What’s the second layer? It could be showing them like a little brochure. You know, so if you give them an elevator pitch and that took them 30 seconds to digest, and then you might give them a brochure, which might be a couple of minutes. And then the next layer would be something a little more. That makes sense for sure. Then how about a demonstration, which might be 15 minutes. So you’re taking baby steps, you know, step-by-step rather than going in, Hey, you want a demo? Like step one, small, step two, a little bigger, step three, a little bigger. And then finally sort of like the big ask you want. Another metaphor, this is squirrel bites, which is a lot of times salespeople in sales go too fast in for the kill. It’s like there’s a squirrel out there on the grass or in the forest and you’ve got a pizza. And you’re like, hey squirrel, here’s a pizza. Boom. And just throw the whole pizza at them. Versus you take one little bite and put it out there and let them take a step towards you. Then you put another bite and another bite, maybe a little bigger bite. And soon, theoretically, they’re then eating out of your hand at some point and more open and willing to go through and receive the information that you’ve got for them. Squirrel feeding, call it.

Sales in 60 Seconds - Quickfire Sales Tips [37:39]

Steve: Layers of an onion, squirrel feeding, I love it. The next section is what I call Sales in 60 Seconds. So I’ll ask a series of questions and the goal is to answer them in 60...

Aaron: Great, one of those rapid-fire things. Okay, I’m ready. On the clock.

Steve: So number one, what are three fatal mistakes that sales executives often make?

Aaron: Okay, number one, two, and three. Basically, number one by far is not specializing the sales team. If there’s one thing, that’s the number one, number one, number one, because if you don’t do that, everything else is far harder. That’s number one. Number two, I think is, again, expecting your salespeople to do all their prospecting without any kind of support. Doesn’t work. And number three is not getting your metrics, not using the right metrics, the right systems to measure the business and watch the business, gauge the business. The dashboards and metrics that we talked about a little bit, the inbound, outbound funnels being separate, really that intense focus on the amount of sales qualified opportunities being created every month. Those are the three.

Steve: All right. What are the most important skills or characteristics an outside salesperson should have?

Aaron: Well, I think anyone in sales or anyone in business really has to be open to be coachable. It’s, they have to be coachable, which is related to being adaptable and open to new ideas. And HubSpot did a study and HubSpot was, you know, it’s a billion-dollar marketing company. Yeah. I’ve heard of them and their number one sales hiring trait is coachability because if someone’s not coachable, they’re not going to be able to adapt and change. Because at some point something’s going to change and if you can’t adapt, it’s just not going to work. So basically being coachable. And I know today being organized is incredibly important, especially for inside sales might even be the number one skill they need, but even for field sales and the outside, you have to be organized. If you’re not organized, you just not going to be able to make the most of your time and not gonna be able to know what’s working and what’s not. And that’s just something you have to be able to do well to really succeed in sales today.

Steve: Yeah, it reminds me of a great quote from Charles Darwin. Well, I think it was him. I can’t do this off the top of my head, but it was something along the lines of, the species that survive are not the strongest or the fastest. They’re the most adaptable.

Aaron: Basically, yeah.

Steve: Definitely some wisdom there. Well, what is one thing that you think all salespeople should do to be more successful? A habit, a routine, et cetera.

Aaron: Let’s see here. Habit or routine to be more successful? You know, time to really sit back and review what’s working and what’s not. Like that reflection, whether it’s in work or in your life, rather than just doing the same thing over and over and then trying to meet management’s activity goals or trying to, you’re just doing the same. Who said it? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So it’s like, try it. You got to shake things up, try different things and sit back and, Hey, did this work or not?

Steve: What is your best piece of advice that you want the outside salespeople listening today to remember?

Aaron: So. If you can’t get management to specialize your sales teams, take control of your calendar, block out some time for whatever you need to do. So there’s, I think there’s a metaphor, you’ve got your rocks. There’s like the big things you need to do with the rocks and there’s the sand. So rocks, you got to block that on the calendar. So for me, that could be even exercise. Like nine kids, if I don’t block it on the calendar, it just doesn’t happen. In sales, if you don’t block the prospecting, whether it’s the in-person or like the preparation, it’s probably not gonna happen. So I live and die by the calendar because that shows me my priorities. So I think that’s, you have to step back and be aware and mindful of your time and how you use it. And if these things, you’re just like, I can’t get to this, that, or the other, block it out, block it out.

Steve: Great advice. What’s the most important sales metric that managers should be tracking?

Aaron: So sales managers should be tracking, my favorite is, again, that best indicator of future revenue is the amount of qualified opportunities or pipeline being generated by your team or by individuals. So of course if you’re having problems, you’re getting plenty of that and you’re having problems closing, that’s separate, but I think what doesn’t get tracked enough, it’s not just the number of meetings. It’s not just like the number of demos. It’s what actually gets qualified out of that. What’s entering the real pipeline. And it takes some diligence and pipeline review calls, which is, how do we know what’s qualified? How do we define that? How do we keep people consistent in doing it as a team the same way so that we can trust the metric, that we know what we’re getting and what we’re not getting. That’s another big problem is when people are logging things in different ways or not even logging things. And then we don’t know what we got. Like if you can’t trust your metrics, you got nothing.

Steve: So Impossible to Inevitable is one of my favorite business books of all time. You did a great job. Looking back, what are the most important takeaways from that book to you?

Aaron: I was really happy. I’ve had a lot of people say it’s their favorite business book. So the takeaways from the book, I would say is, I always tell people really to read it. It’s like worth its weight in gold. And when Jason Lemkin, who founded this company called SaaStr, which is the number one SaaS software community in the world, and I, the idea was, there’s a thousand things that you should do, could do to grow your business or to make more money. We’re in this age of overwhelm. There’s so much stuff. And how do you filter all that to see what’s useful? So the goal of that book was to say, here are the few things that affect your growth the most. Now it’s really written for the C-level, for managers and executives, but the principles in there could be used by anyone starting any business, taking control of their own destiny. So what I learned was, for example, there’s a lot of sales and marketing practices in there on how do you nail a market and how do you grow sales and build a team and so on. But in writing the book, Jason and I were talking, there’s a section called “Do the Time.” And it’s really like how long things take and things take a lot longer than people realize or really appreciate. So for example, we call it “Do the Time” because those big goals you have are probably gonna take years longer than you want. And how important it is to be able to stay the course and go through the ups and downs of any great thing that you’re creating. So in other words, if you want to personally increase your, like, double your income, right? You think, maybe if I do these things by next year, I’ll do it. Maybe, maybe it’ll take three years, but along the way, you’re gonna, something will go great and then something will fail and great and fail. There’s that, the ups and downs of the journey. And if you quit too soon, then you never get to the breakthroughs. So it’s like how important it is to have people, different people call it grit or perseverance. I just appreciate that you’re not, when things are failing for you, you know, it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means maybe some things need to be fixed or adjusted and you need to get through it, but everyone goes through these ups and downs. Every entrepreneur, like Mark Zuckerberg, you just don’t see it. Marc Benioff, Elon Musk, you just don’t see it. Everybody has that and everybody has problems. You just don’t see it. So you think, okay, why is everyone else killing it and I’m struggling? Well, because people on social media, people post all the good stuff, but they don’t post all the struggles. And for you, most people in sales, 90% of your day is dealing with problems. You focus on the problems. How do I get customers, how do I close customers, how do I manage customers? So there’s this natural mental disconnect between seeing everyone else succeed, I’m struggling with problems, why am I failing? Well, you’re not, you’re not. So it’s okay. It doesn’t make it feel better. Just like, you’re not doing anything wrong when things are going wrong. Just keep going and learn, adjust, and keep in, stick, go back to where you’re trying to get to. You fall off the wagon, get back on and it just can take, it will take a lot longer than you think it will or should.

Steve: Great advice. As a final takeaway, what should our listeners do as a first step to optimize their sales process and generate predictable revenue?

Aaron: I would say go to predictablerevenue.com because there’s links to this book and to the Impossible book. So for most salespeople, the Predictable Revenue book is like a simpler way to start. And that’s just predictablerevenue.com. It’s on Amazon. The newer book is the Impossible book, but I think if you’re in sales, it’s a really easy read. I’d say the first few chapters, you’ll get it if you buy it for your manager too because really it’s written for executives as well. Start there with the Predictable Revenue book and I’d love to hear back from people on what you think, so on the site or on LinkedIn, I’m pretty easy to find. You can email me at aaron, A-R-O-N, at predictablerevenue.com. Tell me what you think.

Summary and Conclusion [47:48]

Steve: Awesome, well, I’m gonna try to summarize kind of what we’ve talked about here, because a lot of people are in the car, et cetera, so people remember things they hear twice. So in summary, what we’ve talked about today, salespeople shouldn’t do most of their prospecting themselves, because it’s just not efficient to juggle prospecting, closing, and customer management all at once. It’s crucial to specialize your sales team, have people who prospect, have closers who close, have people who respond to inbound leads and outbound leads, or who make the outbound leads, and have another group who’s in charge of the customer assistance and managing that customer once you’ve made a sale to them. So that comes down to four specializations on most sales teams. Structuring your team in this way allows you to get repeatable results since people can do fewer things better and with higher success. The only way to get truly great results with outbound prospecting is to have a team dedicated just to that. That’ll, dedicating a team to that will get you more leads going into the top of the funnel. If your sales rep and your management is not ready yet for this type of specialization to give you more support in your role, start by truly focusing on the most important activities that you’re doing. And so if it’s in the field, it’s all about focusing on doing fewer things better and block out time to prospect and focus on just that for a certain amount of time, whether you have to lay it out throughout your day or because you have to do it all in the field or if you can just do a brick of time on the phone and with research and a lot of reps will be able to get more done if they’re able to focus on the phone and take that research time sitting down and just block it out. The first step is to make the time for these things that are important to you and that’ll let you close more deals later down the funnel. Also, make sure you always make the most out of your time. Even if you have a little time in the car or in between meetings, make sure you use that time effectively. Before you go visit prospects, have tried to do some outreach already over the phone and get those scheduled demos to use your time in the most effective way. We talked about the referral technique, which is a great way to start a conversation with prospects. Get the account mapped out and find out who’s real, get your message in front of the right people. It’s a more friendly, less salesy thing to do and it’s also more efficient for you to get in touch with a qualified prospect than just cold calling or dropping in. The success rate therefore becomes much higher if you do this referral technique that we talked about and you should get more referrals that you can get and therefore get in touch with more prospects. Don’t just focus on trying to get through the gatekeeper. Kind of re-gear your thinking there and try to make friends with that gatekeeper. Have them be an asset to you to get your message in front of the right people. Next, when it comes to restructuring your sales team, first of all, you need to establish some metrics that you want to measure and improve on. It’s important to break your sales funnel into different steps. The lead generation funnel should be broken up into outbound and inbound on the marketing side. One important metric, for example, is how many meetings were created that were actually accepted by the salesperson into the salesperson’s pipeline. That’s a great thing to judge both the marketing team on and the sales team on and that’s a great predictor of future revenue. So focus on sales qualified meetings to get better performance and insights about the future. Outbound SDRs should be in charge of outbound prospecting and then pass on those qualified leads to the appropriate salesperson to close. When it comes to prospecting, start by clearly defining your ideal outbound customer first. Ask, how do you do this? You ask yourself, which of my prospects, who in the world is going to be the easiest to close and make the most money per sale? Then find these prospects, make a list, and reach out to them with a combination of phone and email. Another way to look at this is the go-after-the-low-hanging-fruit strategy. It might depend on the customer and the market what works best for you, but just do your research and that’ll lead you in the right direction. Usually the phone is the best way to pre-qualify. It gives you the opportunity to find out who the right person to talk to is and ends up saving you a lot of time if you can qualify people out of the funnel over the phone or with a little bit of research. In these first cold calls, channel the lost lamb, is how Aaron described it. So the tone in your voice should sound like you’re asking for directions on a street corner. You need help to find the right person. It shouldn’t be salesy early on because that puts up people’s defenses. After you know who to go after and who’s the right, you’re directionally going in the right place within an account, then you can follow up with email, in-person, to get an appointment, et cetera. Remember the layers of the onion principle, where you give the prospect more information and value, step-by-step, in each interaction. So don’t start with a big ask right away, like asking for a demo. But start by giving them a brochure, and then a little more, and a little more. Don’t throw a pizza at a squirrel. So being organized and coachable, meaning more adaptable and open to new ideas, is absolutely crucial to your success in sales. Aaron’s number one piece of advice for salespeople is to take control of your calendar, block out time for whatever you need to do, especially the big important things. Finally, I would personally recommend to everyone listening to get Aaron’s book, Predictable Revenue, and as well as Impossible to Inevitable. Both are fantastic books and really worth reading. And it’ll really help you improve your sales processes and understand how sales teams should be structured and be more successful. Definitely very influential on my thinking over the years. So Aaron, we talked about where our listeners can read more about you and reach out to you. I guess via LinkedIn and email. Do you want to restate that just for, we’ll put it in the notes too.

Aaron: Well, the best site, predictablerevenue.com, and then email Aaron, A-A-R-O-N, at predictablerevenue.com, and you can use that to find me on LinkedIn as well.

Steve: Alright, aaron@predictablerevenue.com. So, well, I hope everyone’s enjoyed this episode of the Outside Sales Talk. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us at feedback@outsidesalestalk.com. If you like the podcast, please subscribe to it, leave us a review. It really helps us spread the word. Again, Aaron, thanks for coming and talk to you soon.

Aaron: Alright, thanks Steve.