Getting Attention & Building Pipe
- Dan Greenberg
- Jan 24, 2024
- 6 min read
There is no perfect cold email, or cold call script that will make everything magically fall into place. Sales takes routine and hard work, and a willingness to accept rejection. There are people out there who are incredibly disciplined and have trained themselves to live in a world of consistent optimism and hope, but that’s just not me, and I suspect it’s not most of you either. Frustration is okay, occasional sulking is even okay. What is important is routine, and the ability to recover and get back to your routine.
Getting attention is hard because, by definition, a person who does not know you, has no drive or incentive to spend resources like time and money listening to you or buying from you. Buyers are bombarded by outreach, and completely jaded, so outreach must be systematic, and intelligent. It must speak directly to the buyer and ask them for just a bit of their attention.
There are two types of outreach, ‘outreach for now’, and ‘outreach for later’. Both are vital, and without either one, you will struggle as a seller.
‘Outreach for now’ is a set of activities that drive conversations and relationships that can potentially convert in the short run. Since most marketing tactics, and cold outreach generally take a long time to come to fruition, your bag of tricks for this bucket is relatively limited, and scale will be very low. However, the relationships that you put in your pipeline form this activity are the most likely to convert and will have the shortest sales cycle. The tools you have in your toolkit for this type of outreach are generally your own network and referrals. We spent some time focusing on referrals in this blog at the end of last year, so we will focus more on the ‘outreach for later’ bucket in this article.
‘Outreach for later’ is a set of activities that are meant to build your pipeline 4 to 6 months from now. These activities include research, sales intelligence tools, marketing messaging, and cold outreach. With these methods, you have the ability to research in bulk and send campaign based, although targeted and relevant messages to scalable groups of prospects. This approach, for the most part, will benefit your book of business 4–6 months down the road. In other words, if you are reading this in mid-January, and you don’t start researching and targeting cold outreach now, you will likely have a bad May, June, and July.
Clients don’t often, respond to the first message, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. I could go on. This is because there are a few barriers that ‘outreach for later’ has to break through before any prospect can rise to the level of potential that is worth your time. Your goal with cold outreach is not to convince the prospect to buy. You can’t. It will never happen. Your goal is to convince the prospect to invest just a little bit of time in you. That is all. Let me be clear, picking up a list and dialing for volume is not the answer. Buyers are skeptical, and jaded, and therefore cold outreach in the absence of research, targeted material, and inbound signals is a tremendous waste of time and a resource suck.
The story of Chet Holmes is well known in the sales literature world. It is the story of how Holmes was hired by Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s business partner) to head up a large and struggling sales organization. A couple of years in he was asked by Munger, “Are we lying, cheating, or stealing? I’ve never seen sales numbers this good”. The answer is that he was doing none of the above; he attributed his success to one important strategic decision. He had taken a list of 2,000 prospects, trimmed it to the 167 best potential clients and focused 100% of his team’s energy on those 167 clients.
This story is well known, and not new, but it teaches us a very important lesson; 10 well informed, targeted, tailored outreaches are better than 100 ‘spray and pray’ outreaches. The time that you spend on cold outreach should not be spent on volume and tallying as many calls and messages as possible, it should be spent on research, tailoring of information, and crafting of messages that fit. The messages don’t have to be witty or perfect, they just need to speak directly to the person you are speaking to.
Many sellers are scared by this idea. They think to themselves; “what if I focus my list but accidentally leave off potential clients who really were interested and now will never buy from me?” Sure, this is a slight risk, but the real calculation is the value of all of the lost time that you will spend reaching out to clients that will be wasted because your messages are not targeted and don’t elicit a response. You are not a call center.
You are an executive, and your job is to solve problems for specific clients that you select, and that are worthy of the time you will spend on them.
Once you have wrapped your mind around that idea, it is time to set a routine. Resilience is not some magical phenomenon or idea that is fundamentally built into the personality of good sellers by nature. Resilience is simply the setting of routines and the discipline to adhere to those routines without succumbing to the desire to avoid them.
The world has changed, we have more technology, and we can use that technology to make our jobs more enjoyable and more fruitful. Information allows us to research, tools allow us to target, tailor, and gauge inbound interest, and platforms allow us to communicate in more effective ways than in the past. This means that instead of being a mindless drone and making the same phone call 100 times, you get to be an investigator for a while and figure out the best prospects. Then you get to be a researcher and learn about them and their companies. Then you get to be a marketer and tailor material that makes sense for each of them, and then you get to be a seller and send the messages and make the calls. Sure, you may not like every piece of the work, but it sure beats doing the same thing over and over again all day.
The key is to set time blocks and stick to them. Make sure that the time blocks make sense within the goals that you are trying to achieve, and that you are setting the right amount of time aside for the right activities. Treat your time blocks as commitments so that you are sure to do all of the activities in your control that lead to your success.
Choose your target accounts. It can be 5, or 10, or 15 depending on your goals and situation.
Choose your ideal buyers within each account, it can be 2, or 3, or 5 at each organization depending on your solution’s sales cycle.
Build a list of leads with research data attached to them (their focus, their likely problems, unique info about them).
Add them to the appropriate outreach cadence.
If you are in a more transactional role, you may pick 15 organizations with 2 people each, which will get you to 30 leads, or in a more strategic role, you may pick 5 organizations with 5 people each, which will get you to 25. Either way, you can do that research in about 90 minutes, and you can do the actual outreach in about an hour. Setting up time blocks accordingly will allow you to create a routine that is productive, and effective, but more importantly, doable. If you tell yourself you are going to research for 3 hours a day, and prospect for another 3, you may do it once or twice, but it is not sustainable. Build a routine that pushes you, but is sustainable. Something in the range of 2 hours a day is sustainable and something that you can hold yourself to task on without losing your mind.
Remember, the battle in outreach starts with visibility, moves to familiarity, and then to solution association. Your client needs to notice your outreach, then become familiar with you and your company, and then associate you and your company with the problem you solve. This can take months, and sometimes double-digit outreach attempts through multiple channels (phone, email, message). You can’t sell anything to anyone until they are receptive to listening, so all of the commercial teaching, discovery, presenting, social proof, and everything else that you have planned cannot start until you have overcome those three barriers.
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