Founders, Sales Leaders and Recruitment professionals get insights from 1000s of SDR interviews, 25+ outbound sales projects delivered over 5+ years.
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Why your cold outreach fails (and how to fix it!)
Published about 1 year ago • 3 min read
SDR Hire Insights
SDR Hire Insights is a weekly newsletter that serves SDRs and those striving to become ones with actionable tips and top notch content.
tl;dr:
Proven Framework: Product vs Pain focused outreach
Top 5 LI posts by Top Performers to make you a killer SDR
What 20,000 rejections can do for your Sales career
Read time: 3 minutes and 18 seconds
Sellers are too generic!
After successfully completing 10+ outbound sales projects as a consultant + being an SDR manager and an Account Executive in my 9-5 few years back:
Being too generic is why people fail at outbound sales.
I was that way too!
We (naturally) start with what our product can do.
"Oh you increase your revenue by using our service" "You can send X more emails with our platform" "You get X hours back per week"
This will fail 99,9% of the time.
Every service and product out there either saves or makes more time and money.
So your pitch (even though well intended) sounds like everybody else's.
The way to switch is to focus on the problem/pain.
Here's a waterfall framework how to do it:
4 step framework to craft your messaging
Product understanding You're here right now. You know what your product does fundamentally. Now we go a level deeper. SDR Hire example: SDR Training & Recruitment for B2B startups. Companies hire vetted and trained SDRs significantly faster then they would by themselves.
Persona understanding Who can benefit from our product? Persona, title, department, company size, jobs-to-be-done, hierarchy (managing or contributing), goals, KPIs. SDR Hire example: Sales leaders at B2B startups. CRO, VP of Sales, Head of Sales (Development). Seed stage to Series B. JTBD: Hire & ramp SDRs, maximize pipeline and revenue, coach and train sales reps. KPIs: Revenue, pipeline, # of SDRs, quota attainment, time to ramp, SDR tenure (churn), etc.
Pain understanding What is stoping this leader from achieving their goals and KPIs?! What is their boss measuring them by? What might get them fired or put in the spotlight? What's on their mind as they drive back from work? SDR Hire example: If they don't hire SDRs quickly enough, they don't have enough pipeline to hit revenue targets. If SDRs churn they don't hit pipeline targets. If they don't ramp up fast enough, they miss targets. If they don't hit quota, they miss targets. All of these can get them fired (worst case scenario).
Value proposition Now I can craft my outreach to match that potential pain - without focusing on my product. Probing questions (learned this from Belal Batrawy and Josh Braun): Saw you're hiring SDRs. Considering that the average hire+ramp time in the US is 120-150 days, how do you minimize the revenue and pipeline not generated during the hiring process? I'm addressing a pain I think they have. This will start a conversation. At some point I'll do my "pitch" or my value proposition statement: We find talented non-US salespeople, up-skill them on SDR skills and recruit them remotely for companies like yours. This allows you to hire vetted and pre-trained SDRs in days instead of months, while keeping your ramp time the lowest possible, leading to 100s of thousands in realized pipeline. I make sure I address their pain first. It sets the stage for the value prop. Then I explain my product/service through the lens of their pain with a positive outcome as a contrast to the negative outcome from the probing question. Try this framework and let me know how it worked for you!
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