My Work
My Prospecting Through Sequences course starts today! Join the 1,108 who have registered so far. This cohort is FREE for all Outreach customers. Click here to sign up!
On April 28 I will be presenting on How to Draw a Virtual Audience at the ChatFunnels Summit. It’s free to join: Click here to sign up!
Candid Thoughts:
I did a poll last week about how salespeople like to learn and the results were pretty interesting! This week I’m going to share some thoughts about making the most out of learning from colleagues and content creators.
Learning from Colleagues
The fact that colleagues was the most popular preferred resource doesn’t surprise me at all. Ideally a playbook would be the ultimate source of truth at a company, but that doesn’t always happen in real life. Often companies don’t have one at all, and if they do, they don’t always have the best information. [1]
Learning from other colleagues is a popular alternative. If you go that route, I highly recommend you focus on the top performers.
There were a couple different ways of doing this that worked well for me:
Talk to the top performers and figure out what they are doing.
Research what the top performers are doing yourself.
If you schedule time to chat with a top performer, have specific questions. My strategy was to make a note on a running list every time I was curious how a top performer would approach a situation. Then when I had an opportunity I would go through that list. Get specific. Vague questions will get you vague answers, specific questions will get you specific answers.
The second one, researching what the top performers are doing, has become much easier with sales technology. If you have Outreach and a call recording software, you can see exactly what a given person is doing to become successful.
There are a million different things you can learn/look for. But if you are new, start with these three:
Look at which sequences they are using.
Filter down to the prospects within each sequence to figure out with prospects are being reached out to in which way.
Isolate the calls that went from connect to meeting set and listen to those calls.
If the team is using sequences correctly, copying the workflows of the top SDR can be as simple as switching over to their sequences/email templates. Then use call recording software to get a first hand account of what actually works in someone’s cold calls. A lot of the most important takeaways can get lost when they are explained second-hand, check out what success looks like first hand if you can.
Learning from Content Creators
32% of people prefer to learn from content creators! The popularity of this method has increased a lot recently in the SDR world. When I started sharing content about outbound prospecting ~3 years ago I was one of the only ones doing it. The amount of content available has exploded and I expect that it will continue.
On one hand, it’s pretty amazing. It is so easy to create and share content, that a top performing sales person could produce and distribute content on the side. Of course, bad content can spread just as easily.
The abundance of content is a blessing or a curse depending on how good an SDR is at discerning between good and bad content. There is probably a content piece with a huge amount of social validation for pretty much any prospecting idea you can think of. But of course, not all ideas end up working in real life.
My advice:
Look for content creators who have done what you want to do. And then find their content about doing those things well. Be careful with content creators who become popular for their theories, but have not been successful as a practitioner.
You also need to get good at discerning what parts of a content creators process might be specific to their industry, or if success with a strategy requires a skill that is difficult for you to replicate. [2]
If you can master this though… There is a lot of wisdom out there. Finding effective strategies can be a huge competitive advantage.
Happy Hunting!!
-Sam Nelson
[1] The person with the bandwidth to make the playbook might not have been the person with the most accurate idea of what makes someone successful. And then even if they were, SaaS companies grow so fast that good advice can get outdated quickly.
[2] Many strategies that work for content creators work in part because of their brand. If they are talking about what is working for them now, consider how their brand is influences the success of a particular strategy.