#567 - How to Turn Cold Outreach Into Real Conversations | Adia Toll

Could you give me an example of what an ideal conversation might look like from one of your reps to a buyer? I like what's up. Hey, how are things going at 30 NPCs? Thanks for reaching out. It's awesome. Yeah, tell me more. What's awesome about it today? Oh, well, my boss Nick wasn't hounding me for my forecast like he normally is. So I'm actually having a pretty good day. Hey, I love that. If as I'm point you want me to show you something, I can help you with that. Anyway, and then I'm going to go into a different question. I'm going to ask you something completely separate from the pitch. Note that whenever I pitch, I immediately deflect myself to make it really easy for you to opt out of the pitch. So in this case, I'll ask something kind of silly like. Anyway, I hope the rest of your week continues going so well. I'm giving you the chance to end the conversation here. When I do it this way, I actually have like a 35-40% chance of getting a meeting booked. Because most people go, "Oh, hey, you can help me with that." Good morning, everybody! And welcome to another episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. I'm your host, Nick Sigeelski, joined with my co-host today, Alex Murphy. And today we've got Ada Toul, who is the head of sales development over at Ask Elephant. And dude, we got on with this one. And she's like, "Did you know that I booked 100 ICP meetings in six weeks, and I have a 72% reply rate?" And Alex, your eyes got the size of saucers. You are so excited. So I'm going to let you tell us. Why should people listen? I'm pretty sure I don't have a 72% reply rate for my own mother. So I was very curious how she was achieving that with her team. And we had a great conversation about the nitty gritty of how to get a conversation, started how to optimize processes to make sure you're getting a reply. And then I went and used literally right after we finished the recording. I went and used those tactics and booked two ICP meetings right away. So if nothing else, there's some stuff there that is. I can tell you from my own experience, it works really great. Alex, your mom does not count as an ICP booked meeting, but I'm glad she's responding to your messages now. Just. Okay, you know, give me a second to look at my pipeline. Hold on. And a free two one. Let's roll. All right, ADO, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. All right, let's start with goat. Goat stands for grind, optimize, automate, and thrive. Grind is go from sourcing your lead all the way through closed one, at least one time. Do it manually before you touch any automation for you to any AI. You have to do it right the first time. Once you've done that, you're going to break it down into every step there is, and you're going to optimize and maximize every step of the process one at a time. Then you can automate, you can begin building systems that are going to do parts of this for you. And because you've done the hard work yourself first, when you're done with that automation, you're not going to lose quality. You're going to continue seeing high rates of quality at cross your processes. And you're going to thrive. An example of this is the way that we find accounts. So we start by sourcing all of the accounts I go through and I choose a list of 50 accounts myself and I go, okay, I want to have the highest account conversion to meeting as I possibly can. So what needs to be true about these accounts where every single one of them is going to want to take a meeting, what exactly is RICP? Once I've done that, now I can go through and I can think about optimizing the click path for lack of a better term here of finding those best accounts and exactly what needs to be true for those accounts. Now that I've gone through this, I understand exactly what good looks like. I can automate the process of finding those accounts and now my STRs don't have to do the process of going in list building. Those accounts get sent to them every single day. Awesome. What's number two? Number two is frame, floor and focus. Frame is going to be picking one single metric and you're going to try to 10X it. Floor is to do the math on what has to happen and what needs to be true every single day to hit that goal and focus does not touch anything else until that goal is to hit. The way that we've done this is say with reply rates. So my team had a 7% reply rate. I wanted to get to 70%, which is a crazy number. It should feel impossible because when it's impossible, that forces us to break our existing systems and go and maximize the resource that we have induction and maximize yet. What we were doing at that point was never going to get us to 70%. We took three weeks where our goal was not based on how many dials can you make, how many meetings can we book. The only thing we worried about is what needs to be true for us to have a conversation. How do we get a 100% reply rate? How do we get a 70% reply rate? Do not send a message if you're not 100% confident someone's going to respond. When we figured out exactly what worked exactly what was getting replies and we hit a 72% reply rate. And that's when we knew we were ready to move on to the next step. Some of the metrics we ignored were things like a meeting show rate. We didn't worry about that right now. We didn't worry about the meeting set rate. It didn't worry about account coverage. I picked one single metric, but all my attention on that for three weeks. Awesome. Round us out, ADO. What's number three? All right. Number three is know it versus do it. When you're talking about automation, when you're talking about AI, anytime that you are working on any of these projects, you have to get by and internally, whether that's from your team members or your rep for your manager or your CEO, you have to show them this is going to be a valuable use of their time. So the way that we talk about this is on a scale of do it and know it. The way that this works is the closer you are to the front lines and actually selling the more that do it matters to someone. This is going to be the actual hey, this sends an email for you, this finds a lead for you, this updates the CRM for you. And the higher you go up through seniority from manager to director to VP to C suite, the more that know it matters visibility. What does this person need to know to make the decisions that they need to make to do their jobs? So when you're selling match the attitude of the person that you're selling to, we do this for all sellers, but do it internally as well so that you can show them how it matters to them and how it's going to impact their role. So, ADO, I want to go back to what you said and take away number two. And when you were talking about this one, I was looking at Alex's face and I saw his eyes get really wide when you said your team has over a 70% reply rate. We do, yep. I want to get into the do it of that, which is you talked about some things that you did where it was like you don't send a message unless you're like, this is going to get a reply. But for folks that are listening, I'm sure a lot of folks are curious like, how do I get that to happen with my team? So could you walk us through the things that you did or didn't do to optimize that reply rate? Yeah, absolutely. So, we were going through a period where our reply rates were fairly low. We had about a 7% reply rate. It's not going to work for what we needed to do and what our company goals were. So we pulled the team together and we're like, all right, what needs to be true for us to have a 70% reply rate? Of course, my entire team is just like that. No, we can't do that. What do you mean a 70% percent reply rate? Like, okay, we gather our data, we research, okay, what is actually getting responses? What has never not gotten a response? Is there anything that we've sent out that every time we send it out, it works? Is there a joke that we tell? Is there anything that in our messaging that works really, really well? Let's start there. We focused on, hey, who do we talk to? Is it the context? Is it the companies? What is true of the companies and the people that we talk to that make them more likely to respond? When we put all of our attention into those different metrics, one at a time, and my entire team was testing and we all iterated together and we learned from each other and that's how we got to that 70%. It did take us a couple of weeks, but it was shocking seeing how quickly that metric converted. I am curious what were the things that never didn't work? What was the one, what were the stuff that was like 100% of the time it worked? Okay, so this is really dumb, but there's a specific joke that we tell and it works really well specifically on LinkedIn, not so much on email, but we'll say, hey, do you want to see under the hood and then in parentheses or trunk? I don't know about jokes. There is something about that specific joke. It has never not landed. It always gets a meeting. We're not sure why, but it gets a response. It gets a meeting every time. Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AIDL workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multi-threading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of Finance, who's viewed your champions recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's beakin' around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line and Align's AI surface is it before it's too late, so you can multi-thread to them. We built a full multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by 11X. You're all in one digital GTM team handling creating, qualifying, and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact linked in posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early, so pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has risk, and I have something I can coach too. Now we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again, and you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. So we started just taking these random puns and these things that we were doing that were kind of silly that were like, okay, every time we've said this, we've said this five times, it's worked every time. How do we replicate that and scale that because that's what we want? So what I'm hearing from you is telling this under the hood, under the trunk joke, literally worked every single time. And so you decided to scale your dead jokes or puns that your team was spending or sending rather, what does that actually look like? Are they just sending a bunch of jokes now? In a conversation. We're still pitching, right? We're still in sales. It's not just conversations. For those three weeks, the only thing we worried about was conversations, right? So I was not worried about conversions. I just said, how many conversations can you happen? Have a day. Now I care a little bit more about meetings book. I care a little bit more about closed one. We still need to get to the product. But if you can combine those things, what we've always found is that if you can wait till for in a LinkedIn message, and we're talking about LinkedIn messaging right now, message five through seven is where we have our highest conversion rate on the pitch. So if I can get a conversation going back and forth and I can stop a report, it's much easier to go now and pitch. I mean, you're very, very data driven in the way that you're thinking about this. You're looking at like message by message. How are you all keeping track of that? I know there's like a million different ways to actually, sometimes it's the data tracking that makes these decisions for us because like we're only measuring what we can measure. It's ever wrapped just kind of like tracking around thing. I know in LinkedIn specifically, it's not like there's a native tool for that. There's not, but you can download your data from LinkedIn. And then you can throw that data into cloud and you can pull the stats that way. That's one way we also have a tool first touch that we use that helps us track our reply rates and our converter messages. But very honestly, just downloading the data is the easiest way to do it. You don't have to pay for anything. So you told me messages five through seven are the ones that resonate the most when you actually give the pitch. This is not like your normal sequence, I think, where you're sending four messages with zero reply whatsoever. And then the fifth, sixth or seven gets the best response. What I'm hearing from you is you are actually trying to just start a conversation and get some back and forth before you ask, could you give me an example of, and maybe Alex, you can play the role of the recipient on LinkedIn who might receive this message. What an ideal conversation might look like from one of your reps to a buyer. Yeah, for sure. Alex, let's do it. We've probably had this conversation on LinkedIn before. I've definitely message you on LinkedIn first. Alex, what's up? And then I like to do this thing called double tap. So I'll do an Alex, that's a single message. Second message will be something like, Hey, how are things going at? 30 NPC. It's awesome. Yeah, tell me more. Hey, I love that. So in this case, I'll ask something kind of silly like, anyway, I hope the rest of your week continues going so well. And I'm giving you the chance to end the conversation here. But whenever I do that and I don't make it a straight pitch, there's a place for a straight pitch. Don't get me wrong. Somebody's not responding to me. I normally end up going back and just giving them a straight pitch. When I do it this way, I actually have like a 35 40% chance of getting a meeting booked because most people go, Oh, hey, you can help me with that. In that case, or you didn't set me up, it might take me a couple more messages to get there. Yeah. So the, when you're saying that deflect, the pitch deflect is like, actually has something that can help with that, but you know, I can tell you about that later. That's what you're talking about with like a reflection. I'm almost burying the pitch and I'm moving to the next message that's really easy to respond to. So you don't feel awkward about this conversation. Are you calling out other things that might be more personal in nature or might be less directly related to what your product solves that you see on LinkedIn? And for context, you're selling to sales leaders generally. And so these are folks that are moderately active on LinkedIn, I believe. But I'm curious about like, what do you tell your team when you're coaching your reps? What to look for or what to talk about, especially if Alex isn't setting up saying my forecast, I'm not getting honed at. I wish every prospect was like, Hey, let me just set you up for a pitch here. But in most cases, I actually spend less than 30 or 30 seconds of time looking at their page before I decide what to ask them. I'm going to mostly ask them, Hey, how is how's today going? How is that at this company? I might ask them if it's in the quarter like, Hey, how's the quarter shaping up? Something like that. I'm acknowledging truths that are just general about being in sales. I'm not trying to dig for a ton of information about them. I'm not going, Hey, I saw you grew up in Salt Lake City. Tell me more about that. That feels awkward. I know I'm be about to be pitched. Something about generalizing it can actually be easier to respond to. And I'm not going in with a super deep question. I'm not giving them work to do. I'm making it very easy to respond. If they don't give me an opening, normally I'm going to ask them something like, Hey, tell me about 30 and PC. What do you guys do? And as you guys know, the polite thing to do after I ask that question is for you to go. So tell me about ask all of them. What do you guys do? No, I haven't opened the pitch. And if this doesn't actually go into a pitch, that's fine because that's when I call you. And now I know you're going to talk to me because you've been talking to me on LinkedIn. It's really easy to get you to talk to me on the phone. So let's say you've messaged Alex and he responded a little bit. He was like, I'm okay. And he told you what 30 and PC does, but he does not got very good manners. And so he didn't ask you back. And you decide you're going to cold call him. Maybe we can roleplay this one also. Alex loves getting to play the role of prospect. It really fills him with joy. Maybe we could give him a ring ring and see how I'm curious to see how you connect the conversation to the LinkedIn correspondence. Okay. Hey, Alex. Yeah, what's up? Alex, this is ADO. We were just talking on LinkedIn. Oh, yeah. You call. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, man, actually the reason I was calling you is because I do want to sell you. And I didn't want to do it over LinkedIn because I don't want to pitch slap you. You have 30 seconds. For you, ADO, yes, I have 30 seconds. All right. The reason I was calling is, and I'm going to give my big picture value problem. I'm going to give you a topic and we'll go back and forth. I do actually like PBOs in this specific situation. Most of the time when I'm straight, cold calling people, I don't use a PBO. I'll just use the, hey, the reason I'm calling you is just schedule a meeting. XYZ. But in this very specific scenario, I love to give the, hey, can I have 30 seconds because I'm pointing back to the LinkedIn conversation. I have a little bit more rapport. Yeah. And for those that don't know, PBO is permission based open or so. They're like, do you have 30 seconds? I can tell you what I'm calling kind of thing. I have not made a ton of big purchases as an individual. But there was one that I made where the person did this exact thing. They DM me on LinkedIn and then they called and they said, like, I am, hey, it's your buddy from LinkedIn was literally the message and they left a voicemail because it didn't answer. And I'm, you know, I'm sales. I'm like, I want to help people that are doing a good job. And so I called back and she was like, yeah, I'm your buddy from LinkedIn. And I was like, oh, my God. Yeah. And then I led to a purchase. So it, you know, from my own experience in the limited time of Benabair, it has worked effectively for me. Yeah. And just on our side, we have seen a ton of luck with this. Obviously not everybody we co-co we've had a LinkedIn rapport with. But building some social awareness means a lot easier to earn time. When we talk about optimizing conversion rates on conversation, how many conversations can I have a day? Well, if I am 10% more likely to stand on the phone with you because I recognize your name or I recognize the company name because there's some social awareness. That benefits how many conversations I can have a day. What does your timeline for CTA or for pitch look like in LinkedIn, engagement or conversation? Because context for folks listening, Aedia, one of the things that you measure your reps on differently than a lot of other sales teams is you are optimizing for number of conversations we have with prospects per day, not number of meetings booked. That's true. And so I guess in theory, if Alex were your prospect, you could have a conversation with him every single day for a month straight and go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I imagine there's a decline in efficiency if you're just having the labored conversations over months and quarters and never saying, Hey, I want to sell you something. So I'm wondering like, what is the timeline look like when you're your reps are engaging lots of Alex's lots of prospects on LinkedIn? Yeah, for sure. So whenever we're doing this, it is true. We are focused on conversations, not on meetings booked, not on KPIs, but on how many dies did you make today? The thing is we only count unique conversations. So if I am having conversations, the same guy I had yesterday in the day before, I'm not going to continue counting that. That's an ongoing conversation that I'm having, right? The other thing is that it has to include the product. So I never mentioned the word ask elephant. I don't name drop my company. I'm not giving you some sort of pitch. It doesn't count. So sure, I could get it. Like we want to talk about conversations. I get a lot of VDRs to talk to me on LinkedIn tomorrow. Yep. Right. But am I going to talk to them about my product? Is that going to go anywhere now? The other thing we're talking about is are the ICP? Is this the contact and is this a company that we should be talking to in the first place? Got it. So just a recap. What qualifies as a conversation for you is must include conversation about the product must be unique. I can't farm the same person again and again and again. And they have to be ICP from a company and persona perspective. What is the benchmark that you set for your reps for number of conversations per day or per week? What we're aiming for every day is at least 10 conversations. But you're going to do the master's self to know how many conversations do I have to have to get a set of day. So some of my reps have been able to have very high conversation to meeting rates. I had somebody with over a 50% conversation to meeting, right? How many conversations can you need? It was different than the guy who needs 10 conversations to get two meetings. But right? So they're going to work backwards when they're quote are their goals start there. And whenever we had a large goal. to go and hit. There was a point where we needed to get a hundred meetings booked in about six weeks. Very early on at the company level whenever I was here it was right before we raised our seed. So I had six weeks to get a hundred meetings with just me and I did the math and was like, all right, I have 20 conversations a day. I can get there, but I have to get 20 ICP prospects to talk to me every single day for the next six weeks. And we did hit. But that's intense, right? Alex is like, yeah, that's a lot. But you did it. Yeah. I did. I'm not going to pretend I didn't work a lot those weeks. But 10 is a lot more manageable. It's still a goal and still something we stretch for. But every single wrap is going, okay, this is the number I need to hit the goals that I have. So I guess I'm curious. You talked about the goat framework, which I love the goat framework. Grind, optimize, automate, thrive. I'm assuming you did that framework specifically to get this reply rate to where it is. It's like, can you talk through like, how did you do that? Like, what what did that process look like specifically for like the replies to messages? Yeah. Okay. So with the conversation, apply rate, you start with grind. So okay, we've already gone through this. We've already gone from finding the account, finding the person knowing what to say, having the conversation. Right? Those are the steps. Right? So that's already happened. We've done it manually. We know it works vaguely. We know it doesn't work. Let's go through and optimize each of these steps. So who are the perfect accounts to go target? Who are the absolute most likely to reply accounts? One needs to be true about that account and funding and hiring and all of these different variables of things that might be true about an account makes them likely to talk to us. Right? Next about the people. What needs to be true of this person to be likely to reply? I know that if somebody is active on LinkedIn, they're more likely to answer me on LinkedIn. That's going to be something I think about. What about email? Well, there's variables around them responding to email that I can go and look for. Their title is a sales manager more likely to respond than a director. The director more likely to respond than a VP or vice versa. Who is the most likely to reply person on each of my target industry? So now I'm thinking about the like the industry segments that we target and how those different industries convert. And I'm breaking that down. So that's all account. That's person. Next we have the what to say. All right. When I talk to people, what am I saying that has the highest rate of conversion? And I'm optimizing that step. Next is the channel. When I talk to them in these different places, what is the highest conversion? Each of those are metrics that I can go and measure for each of these steps. I'm going to maximize all of these. Now I can go through and automate it. So I can automate finding the account. I can automate finding the people. I can even build automations that draft the messages for me so that I can go and send them and I can go and edit them. I can automate the process of going and figuring out where I should reach out to people based on where they are online. All of those steps can happen. And now my reps are 100% focused on having conversations. They're not thinking about the rest of it, but we haven't seen a drop in quality or a conversion rate even though we've automated. Today shows brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this. Stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts before you open your Slack, your email before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. We built a guide with Unify on how to get 100% of BDR's to quota in 2026. Go check it out in the show notes. Today shows brought to you by consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems and number three, what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30-MPC demo deck template powered by consensus. Today's show is brought to you by responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal security and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes. Yeah, this is the Faustian bargain that we make oftentimes in sales. I mean, we've had this conversation internally. We're like, my gut reaction all the time was like, I can automate all this stuff. Awesome. And I'm going and automating stuff that I haven't fully like laser it in on each of those data points. So what it sounds like is you have found a way through through that by like getting a ton of data by you and the team grinding through. And your amp, your, this is not like a gut feeling of what's working, what's not working. You're like looking at the numbers in a really specific way as you optimize. No, I live in this space. Whenever I first started here, I was a founding sales hire, was the seventh hire of the company. First thing I did because I was really excited. I was like, okay, I know my sequences. I've been a BDR at a big company before. So I had all of these automated email sequences and things. I'll go and build a big automation. So I go and I get 2000 contacts. And I build a sequence and I throw them in and I think I got 0% reply rate on emails. Like I got nothing back across 2000 companies, 2000 contacts. And then I had maybe a 5% pickup rate. And a 5% conversation to booking rate across the calls that I made. That means that it took 500 dials for everyone meeting booked. So that's my base. That's what I'm going to go and try to automate, right? Then one, the cost of contacts, the cost of phone numbers, cost of emails, that's not an effective system. Two, I can't hire my way out of that problem. If I try to scale it, I am scaling a failure. I have to fundamentally break what I was doing and go and optimize each of those steps before I have any right to automate anything. But it's so easy to be like, okay, let me just go and do an outbound system. Let me just go and automate things because we're excited. You do have to earn the right to automate. What channels are working best for you? What are working worst? So the phones are always going to be awesome. We love the phones. It's the best way to have a back and forth that like you would definitely have a back and forth if you can get somebody on the phone, right? Outside of that, LinkedIn is going to have our highest conversion rate. LinkedIn is where we have the 72% conversion rate. On the phones, we only have about a 15% pickup rate, which is actually very decent for industry standard, and our meeting to conversion or a conversation to conversion rate on the phones is about 35 to 40%, depending on the rat. Which means that if we have a 15% pickup rate, we're going to get five meetings out of 100 dials. Just fantastic. It's awesome. For emails, it's going to be a little bit lower. We're closer to three or four percent. Again, very close to industry standard. And outside of that, you've got events. You've got Facebook message. You've got Reddit. There's a lot of other places you can go and get in front of people. I've gotten sets on Instagram and I've gotten sets on Twitter. Going and being in person in other places, depending on where your people are and organically reaching out to them where they're most like to respond is the secret. We talk about social selling. That's like usually code word for LinkedIn. You're saying you've booked meetings on Instagram and Reddit. Can you talk us through like what happened there? Yeah, I think Reddit's the weirder one because you don't know who you're talking to on Reddit. It's anonymous. So I'm talking to I rate banana about his CRM. I have no idea if this person's ICP. I just know that they were talking about a problem we can solve. Okay. So in that case, you are throwing a dart and being like, "Hey, can you send me your LinkedIn? Can you communicate who you are to be before I book this meeting?" Right? And I think the trick there is just show up in places where your ICP is. For us, it's like the HubSpot subreddit that is the sales force subreddit. I'm going to go and be in places for people who need our product, we go and complain about their problems. I got to ask about how did you start that conversation on Reddit? Did you just like go and start answering people's questions? Were you DMing people? Were you on Reddit sales? Were you somewhere else? Yeah. So the subreddit time on where actually primarily subreddits of things like sales force or HubSpot, they're actually for the CRM that we work with. The next thing that I'm doing is I'm commenting and I'm not talking about the product and building some of those social reform before I DM. And once I get it back and forth going, then I'm DMing someone. What do you say in the DM? Like, "Hey, instead of spamming that tag, let me talk here." Yeah. Or, "Hey, where do you work?" Like, let me fill it out this a little bit, figure out if you're worth my time here. I again don't put a ton of time for its Reddit. It's a lot more work per meeting, but there's a depending on your ICP, that might be a very valuable place to be. When it sounds like you were in threads where people were actively talking about problems, which as I have found with my own prospecting, people are very understandably reluctant to talk about problems because they kind of know Alex is a sales guy. He's reaching out to me. If I tell him a product, it's like catnip and he's going to be all over it. And I don't really want to do that. And so it sounds like you've found some places where people are being a little more regarded Reddit being one of those. So you've basically gotten to a conversation on this Reddit thread and you're talking about CRM and you're talking about frustrations with that. And then you're jumping straight into the DMs and you're like, "Hey, which I hear. I'm assuming you did the pitch and push away if I could call it that," or it's like, "Hey, I actually could help you with that, but we don't have to talk about that." It's Reddit, LOL, whatever. Yeah, exactly. I'm diffusing the situation while I'm asking something from them, which makes it easier for them to be like, "Yeah, okay, tell me about it." And there are definitely tools that you can go and use to go and figure out who a Redditer is in real life. And so you can go and use that too. Oh, so I got a start using those when I see hate mail about 30 NPCs. The other way is just to get them to tell you what company they were at, normally you can do some math and be like, "Hey, are you this person?" Like, "Yeah, how about Instagram? You briefly mentioned Instagram, or you're doing anything special there to book meetings?" Not really. It's just reaching out to people that you're like, "Hey, this is a prospect. I see that they're very active on Instagram. I'm going to go look at their Instagram page, see if there's information. Okay, let me shift the message here, 'cause I know they're here. - And are you just saying the same thing? Hey, how's it going? - Hey. - Hey, what's up? Man, then slowly moving into a pitch. Hell yeah. Conversation first. - There's a debate that I see sometimes on this of like, you should start with some small talk and sweeten them up, and then, you know, pitch later, it's rude to pitch slap people. That's one school of thought, the other school of thought, is it's a waste of everyone's time for you to not pitch slap people. And what I like about this is you're sort of finding a middle ground of like, I mean, in order for your reps to count the conversation, it has to be about your product, and it has to be with a unique ICP person. So there is some like institutional rigor around making sure it's a valuable conversation for you all. But if your reps are doing this, they're also not coming straight out with a pitch slap that ends with a CTA of like, hey, can I get 30 minutes next Tuesday afternoon? Sounds like it's a lot more conversational. So you're kind of getting the best of both worlds, which I would assume is a big part of why your response rate is so high on these conversations. It's easier to respond to us if you're engaged, with us already on LinkedIn. So we talk about Sphere of Influence and building some rapport first. And the other thing I tell my reps is, if somebody is not active on LinkedIn, they're not engaging, there's zero interest there. It's okay to just directly pitch. But the reason that people don't like pitch slap is because you can tell it's completely automated. It wasn't written for you. It's very generalized. And so if you can make it sound a little bit more human, and it's going to be much easier. Another thing to do is if they're not on LinkedIn, use it to empower a different channel. So if they're not on LinkedIn calls are probably going to be a better option. So use LinkedIn to just be like, hey, is this your phone number? Okay, can I call you on four? Now that's a way easier to respond to. And I'm just using it to empower a channel that I have a higher rate of getting your reply on. They're more likely to convert. - Really good. Adia, you've got so much good stuff, but the clock is tick, tick, tick, tick, and so we got to move to the Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, and his final question, which is, never said that before. - It talks about a lot of best practices for sales people to follow. Now I got to flip it on its head and ask you the final question, which is about a worse practice. So last question is, what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sales reps exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps? - I think there are a lot of companies that are implementing AI with no intention of trying to get a high, they're expecting bad quality from the AI and automation, and they're okay with it. They are moving to a spray and spray system. And so when we talk about bad practices, it's just going, hey, how do we send as many messages as possible? Not, hey, how do we have as many conversations as possible? Not, hey, how do we get as many quality conversations that we map our tab? So make sure that we're focusing on the right thing. Don't scale activities, don't scale posts or comments or dials or emails just for the sake of the activity itself if it's not bringing you the outcome. - Love it. Adia, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap. Coming up soon. All right, folks, it's time for your two by two recap. Alex, what do you got for your two takeaways? - I think the two that jumped out for me, one is the goat framework of grind, optimize, automate, thrive, and specifically thinking about what works in the grind phase 100% of the time. Like what is the move that we've made that has literally never failed? And taking that as like the kind of the keystone for what are you gonna then continue to optimize an automate? That was a huge one. And then I think there's just a really important framing shift. I get into my own prospecting and I get way locked into I got a book meetings, I got a book meetings, and it drives people away. And so like reef orienting around my goal is to start a conversation and get some kind of response. That's what I care about. And once we have a conversation going on and have a way better chance of actually booking a meeting, that changes huge for me. - Yeah, well that rolls into my two, which was Ada talked about, touches five through seven on LinkedIn, actually have the highest conversion rate for her team. Now she's not talking about, you hit someone once, you hit him twice, you hit him three times, you hit him four times, and then you bump the message again and you get a response. What she's actually referring to with the data shows is when you start a dialogue and she starts it really simple. Hey, how's it going? How did your corner end? Which seems basic and simple, but she shared that it's converting better than if she's like Alex, I saw you grew up outside of Binghamton. What was that like? People kind of smell that when you come in with this like weird force personalization to start a conversation. So touches five through seven have the highest conversion rate for Ada's team. And then she shared that she is optimizing, their team is not optimizing for meetings booked. They are optimizing for 10 conversations today. That's a benchmark that she holds her SDRs accountable to. However, a conversation needs to meet the following criteria in order to count for that metric. One, it has to include some mention of the product. It cannot just be shaming it up about the Buffalo Bills for 42 messages back and forth. You've got to mention the product at some point. Two, this has to be a unique person. I cannot have a conversation with Alex where I talk about my product every single day and say great, I had 365 conversations with this one person. It has to be unique. And then three, this has to be an ICP account in contact. This has to be someone that we would actually want to sell to you. So those are the criteria to use for the 10 conversation today benchmark. The meeting I booked right after this interview, it was touch six. Oh, we started a little back and forth. Touch six is where we booked the meeting. So it perfectly validates. Your mom is really not wanting to get dinner with you. It's crazy, man. This is where I got good at prospecting. It was both the tactics and the need for validation. I'm just, my mother is a wonderful woman and very responsive, especially if my daughter's involved. So great, great stuff, Nick. How can folks help us out? So if you'd like to what Adia talked about in this episode, she got into a lot of her LinkedIn social selling. We talked about Reddit at one point. We talked about Instagram even briefly. We recently did another social selling prospecting episode where we interviewed Kate Hinkle, who is the SDR of the year over at Common Roon. And I really like Kate because he's very forward thinking like first principles sort of thinker, like he didn't just show up and start copying what everyone else was doing. He kind of did what his gut told him was going to work and it's actually working pretty well for him. So if you liked what this episode was about, I would give the one with Kate a listen. It was a very, very good one. Thanks for listening folks and we will see you next week on the show. Today's show is brought to you by Mu and E, the AI agent that helps you personalize your buyer's experience and beat the competition. The best sellers connect the dots between what they learn and discovery and everything else they share with their prospect. Every demo you show and every piece of content you share, you need to explicitly tie back to. I'm presenting this to you because you said X. Now this applies to business cases, proposals, and more. And we partnered with Mu and E on the three magic sales templates to help you move your deals without needing your marketing team's help. Today's show is brought to you by ambition, the coaching and performance platform, helping sales leaders turn metrics into action. To understand any metric, you need two things. Context and trend. If your team booked 40 meetings this week, there's no way to tell if that number is good or bad. Because if the goal was 80, you're in trouble. If it's 20, you're crushing. That's why you need context. But trend can change things. If you averaged 80 meetings a week for the last quarter, and then you only hit 40 this week, something went wrong. Now we built a guide with ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team without becoming a dashboard manager. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales busy work like CRM updates, and flag hit and deal risk. So if you wanna avoid ghosted deals, end every discovery call with these three questions. Number one, do you wanna buy? AKA, validate if the deal is real. Number two, when do you wanna buy? Validate if it will close this year. And then number three, how do you buy? Validate that they will get you in front of power. We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes.