[Playbook] Account Executives: Steal this framework to self-source 30%+ of your pipeline (without making hundreds of cold calls)

The predictable revenue model that came out, Aaron Ross, I'm a very big fan of these guys by the way, but the model, when it came out, it was so awesome, right? It was this idea that, hey, we're going to have SDRs. Instead of having a rep that has to find the deal, close the deal, serve the customer, we're going to break that into three separate departments or rules, if you will. We're going to have people that do outbound. This is your SDRs and BDRs, we're even going to create some specialization where some of those people do inbound, some of them do outbound. We're going to have the account executives. They're just going to worry about closing the deals. That's what they do best. We're going to have account managers service the client. Where this started to fail is in the last three or four years, post 2022, essentially, the economy has taken a dip in the sense that things are more unpredictable right now for the buyer. There are so many, especially if you sell in SaaS, every category is extremely crowded. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of good competitors. It's just become really hard to buy stuff and people are less proactive about buying right now. So inbound is down all of that good stuff. What does that mean? The math equation. Every sales leader that we talk to right now is asking their account executives to do a little bit more. We don't have enough SDR support or the meetings that they're landing are not turning into qualified enough pipeline. You're going to have to go self-source and do the thing that we promised you that you wouldn't have to do. That's what today's episode is all about. We're going to talk about account executives and how you can self-source 30% plus of your pipeline without having to make hundreds of cold calls every week. Thanks for checking out Outbound Squad. We're all about helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers. If you're leading a team of account executives or BDRs and you're trying to make an outbound pivot within the org, you're trying to move up market, close more deals with enterprise logos. You're definitely in the right place. This week's topic we're talking about is AE self-sourcing. I have a really awesome group of guests. Erica Fuchs, she's a strategic AE, I'm almost at AI. She is a strategic AE at Elise AI. Robbie interested in a CRO at TitanX. Robbie and I first met each other when he was working at GONG. This several years ago, we did quite a bit of extensive work with GONG. Then Darren Alpert, who is a strategic account executive at Zoom info, we dig into a ton of good things. The really big thing that we start with first is the bottleneck. What is actually keeping account executives from being able to self-source more pipeline? We talk about everything from data to deliverability to how hard it is to get people to pick up the phone these days. The effort barrier is extremely high right now. When we talk about prioritization, that's the first part of a three part framework around how we think about prioritizing our time and where we point our efforts, commit. That's the time blocking, the tactical elements on the calendar of when we actually execute on this. That's our last piece is the execution. We talk about everything from phone, email, good approaches, bad approaches, plays that you can run, etc. So that further ado, let's get to the episode. So today's playbook episode, what we're going to talk about is self-sourcing. This has been a really hot topic. I feel like for the last two or three years, a lot of what's happening, especially in software sales right now, is that buyers aren't buying the way that they used to. People aren't as proactive about shopping. So in bounce down, we're realizing that, hey, SDRs, BDRs, quality of pipeline has become a much bigger focus. And AES are having to self-source anywhere between 30% or 60% of their pipeline in order to hit or exceed target. So what we're going to talk about today is the state of AES self-sourcing. So we have some data that we're going to share around what this is looking like across orgs based on deal sizes, all of that kind of stuff. We have a very diverse crew on the call today in terms of jobs that they are doing right now in perspectives that they have. And we're going to talk about common problems. And then we're going to give you really tactical framework that you can use as an AE or an AE leader to get your team self-sourcing at least a third or more of their pipeline. Before we dig in, I want to give Zoom info a shout out. I think the coolest thing about what Zoom info has going on right now is that it's just so much more than data. So if you haven't taken a look at their co-pilot, it's bananas, I guess I'll use the word to describe it. It's pretty cool. It'll tell you everything that's going on inside of an account. A lot of the research that you have to do manually to do enterprise account planning, all of that kind of stuff, it's built right into the solution. So I appreciate Zoom info for sponsoring the show today. Go check them out. Now for our guests, we have Erica. I should have asked you, I want to make sure I'm pronouncing your last name correctly. How do you pronounce your last name? Jackie Vaughan, FUX. FUX? Okay. FUX. FUX. Okay, I was going to say something else that was, you know, probably could be misconstrued as another word. Yeah. Erica. Erica's an enterprise AE, Adalese AI. You've been in enterprise sales. It looks like for the last six or seven years. So good to have you on the show. Darren Albert. Darren, you have like a really interesting background in that you've been like two time co-founder. You're working enterprise sales at Zoom info right now. Of course, working some of the largest accounts that Zoom info works. Good to have you on the show. Good to reconnect. Rob Anderson is CRO at TitanX. We first met when Rob was working at Gong. He since worked at Dechebo and now he's leading the sales and revenue team at TitanX. Rob, good to have you on the show as well. Thanks. Okay. Cool. So before we dig in everyone, because people are asking, yes, the call is going to be recorded. Yes, we'll send it out afterwards. If you have specific questions that you want us to answer, there's a Q&A button at the bottom of Zoom. If you can try to put as many questions in there as possible, that'll help us kind of sort through what's in the chat so that we can help you out. So first question. Let's direct this one to the audience first. Let us know in the chat what percentage of opportunities do you feel like top performing AES self-source? We've got 50%. We've got 60. We've got 575. 80 to 90. So sort of all over the place. I would love to hear from each of you as we dig into some of the stats because it does vary. I've seen everything from sales lofts data to essentially, hey, the larger the deals for the most part, the more that you're going to self-source. So top performers according to this data set from sales loft, you know, their self-source processing as much as a third to almost two thirds of their pipeline. Bridge group. This is data from, I believe, last year. You can see the larger the deal size for the most part, the more that that AES self-sourcing pipeline. So my first question, I want to just kick this your way first Rob. Like I feel like in software, it's gone through this dramatic change over time where there was like the old Aaron Ross model of like, oh, yeah, we're going to have SDRs and we're going to have AES. They are not going to do any outbound. They're just going to close and we're going to have AMs do the upselling and the cross-selling and manage the client account and all of that kind of stuff. You've been in the game for a while. How have you seen the demand for the AES self-source pipeline change just during your time and sales? Yeah. It's changed dramatically every time. It all comes back to the interest rates and the money and the cost of the entire equation of everything. So we've gone through dramatic shifts. I mean, ultimately back when I was an SDR in 2016, I remember that sales lost an outreach for brand new and the emails still worked really well. It was a great time. And but there was the ratios, usually one to one or one to two. We went through, you know, Zerp and we had gigantic teams of SDRs where then we started to have less capacity means from the AES to self-source and now we're back in the economy right now where the math equation of having gigantic teams of SDRs is no longer really paying back the same way. Same time, companies have less money to spend, so less in-bounds are coming in. But however, no one's goals are going down. So the companies are looking for a way to get more pipeline from their existing headcount versus higher more right now. And most of these teams, they have more AES than SDRs. So the need is just blatantly from just a production and growing with the company perspective. It's a lot easier to say if I've got 60 AES, I just need one more opportunity from each one of those people per quarter. What would that do to cover the gap? So it's all just coming from that right now from what I'm seeing and all the conversations I'm having. Yeah, so high level, if you're a CRO or senior sales leader, you're looking at this as a math equation. Really? Yes. And it costs every dial, every email, every opportunity, and just trying to optimize that. 100%. Erica, from your perspective as a rep, having been in the game for the last six or seven years, what have you noticed during your time? And maybe give us a little bit more about what you're doing right now. at least and how much of your pipeline made yourself sourcing what that looks like for you. Yeah, for sure. I feel like it's definitely become more difficult and I think that's kind of overall consistently back that everybody says everybody kind of sends the same emails and does the same thing on the phone and so you really have to differentiate yourself. I think that from, you know, just a AE who does a lot of self sourcing, I think, and for forever will feel that cool calls definitely do the trick over emails. People probably get over, you know, 20 emails a day, I'm sure for reps and so especially if you're leveraging email, you know, you really have to stand out. And so to pick up the phone and actually dial that person and peak their interest in the first couple seconds, I think is really valuable and I think, you know, in the last couple of years I've been in this space. I think that has has become even more prevalent. So how do you find the time to actually do this because that's the number one complaint that let me know if this resonates in the chat with anyone like that's the number one thing I hear from account executives and we train, you know, companies as large as your, you know, zooms and shopifies of the world all the way down to your startups that are building out an SDR team for the first time. That senior account executive, hey, I'm working deals, dude. Like I don't have time, you know, to do this type of thing. Like how do you make time for that? Yeah, it's tough. I won't sit here and say that it's not. I think, you know, I am typically back to back quite a bit. So for the days that I do have time, I'm really just kind of like buckling down and, you know, ripping cold calls. And I would say I typically do some email prepping, email prepping at night and, you know, on the weekends sometimes, but I think there's always going to be time in the day to sprinkle it in here and there. I've tried the kind of blocking your calendar before and I think sometimes things just come up. And so whenever I get the chance, typically what I'm focused on is I know my target accounts that I'm going after. I know the folks that I want to go after. And so it makes it much easier to actually like just kind of sit there and get to what I need to get to. But yeah, it's, I think it's a priority for me. And so, you know, you find the time to do it. Absolutely. Like Zach says in the chat, Neil and email prepping some days. I'll never think about that. That'll always be that. Yeah, Tanner says filling in the white space on the calendar. Darren, you know, before we get into some of the content today, give give the folks some perspective. Like how do you look at self-sourcing? What role does that play in your success at Zoom info? And Darren, for for the audience, Darren, you're working some of the largest accounts that come through Zoom info. These are customer accounts. There are net new accounts, Fortune 1000s that you're working. It's some of the largest accounts at the company. So how do you think about self-sourcing and the impact for you and your success? Yeah, I mean, I like, this is so shameless, but I hit presence coming my first year at Zoom info and a good chunk of that with self-source deals like the biggest, one of the biggest deals I closed with self-source. So I think like, for example, that was a location, that was a business that has its location-based and I was driving by one of them and I saw that no one was working the account. And that was like, that's wild to me. So, shot off an email to, I put everybody on their exact team that fits our buying committee on one email. I think that's a strategy that can work when you're putting multiple people on an email, including a CEO, because if a CEO is on and a CMO is on and a head of sales is on, nobody wants to be the person that doesn't respond because the CEO is on there. So there's some psychology to that. But I think that kind of stuff works and we've got moved down the ladder, but like starting at the top, going after accounts and that maybe haven't been worked in a while tends to be one of the ways that I think about it. But I'm like, there's no way I'll hit my number if I don't do any of my own self-sourcing. Okay, we're going to come back to that. The group email is a very interesting tactic. I've seen it done very well and I've seen it done very distastefully as well. So we'll come back to that in a second. So I think that so far we've kind of set the stage that hey self-sourcing, it's gotten a lot harder over the years and it's become a very necessary thing for almost every account executive to do in order to hit target. And it's likely something you're being asked by your organization for your reps on here. How can you squeeze out another 20, 30 percent? So the first thing that I want to tackle is some of the common bottlenecks and challenges that we hear. I think there's a time component to hey I'm spending too much time working deals. How do I prioritize this? Maybe I've tried just about everything, but nothing's working for me. Or maybe you're in a position right now where you're like, I'm a little overwhelmed with how exactly to get started. So the first thing that I want to dig into prior to digging into this three part framework that we're going to give you guys today around prioritizing and knowing where to spend your time, committing and time blocking, and then we'll spend a ton of time talking about execution. I want to talk about all of the stuff that kind of gets in the way of making it easy for an account executive to self-source. The first angle I want to take is like really an org level angle, Rob with you. So you have I think a very unique perspective and feel free to give some context on on tight necks and kind of what you guys do. But you get to speak with these very senior sales leaders that have this problem, this efficiency problem, that they're helping to fix with greater better data, right? And better phone numbers, especially. But when we're asking the AE to make more calls and asking them to make more cold calls, it's et cetera, there's a lot of stuff from a tech and data standpoint that can make that incredibly difficult. Can you share some perspective on that? Absolutely. And just a little background really quickly. I do have a unique lens into some under the hood, I guess, of a lot of organizations out there. So much time and effort and content out there is based on email deliverability right now. I'm sure you see all the gurus talking around rotating inboxes and deliverability health and all those things. But there's a lot less on delivering phone calls at scale and like being able to actually get into efficient amount of conversation. So tight necks is purpose built to identify individuals that have the human behavior of picking up calls so you can get into a lot more conversations. So what we're doing is we're helping organizations and a lot of the companies I'm talking to right now are trying to increase AE self source. But what they're finding is that email is at all time low and AI is under overpromising but under delivering at times. It's helping with quick context is helping with quick research. But on true productivity, I think we're still quite a ways away from AISDR is really helping a lot. So the phone's the most effective channel, almost to everyone I talk to right now. But it's inefficient. The math is just not mathing for a lot of people where they look at their SDR who makes 100 dials in a day and that's all they do. And they talked to three people and maybe one of them's not the right person. So there's a lot of things here that we can help out with. But some of the first things that we look at is like spam risk. I don't know if y'all are ever doing spam tests on your own dialers, but you would be shocked at what I see out there. Every phone system on the planet right now. A lot of them are using the same exact graveyard of phone numbers that everyone has just been recycling over time. So if you're using outreach sales loft, etc. You haven't even thought to rotate a number or your company hasn't allowed you to buy multiple numbers. That is an issue. So in each carrier has a different level of spam risk. So you need to be checking really quickly after this call call from your numbers there and see all your different peers using AT&T Verizon, all these different things call them. See if you're showing up a spam because you are absolutely terminated before you even start if that's happening. And you need to demand that your org gives you another chance. If that's happening and they won't let you do anything else out, your cell phone is an incredible way to deliver calls at scale right now. Why? Because you have a ton of talk time. You have a very high fidelity number where you're doing normal calling behaviors on that. So as long as you stay under on 70 calls a day on your cell phone, you're not going to have any issues there. So that can help you like get ahead of that spam risk. And there's other things that you want to think through when you're calling into these things if you want to stay out of spam. One of these things is making sure you're not hanging out before the voice mail happens. This is like odd phone behavior. You want to stop that. You want to make sure that you are not going in quick succession of more than eight calls in an hour on a certain number as well. So like this spam risk, I see it all the time. And that is what's causing such bad connect rates for a lot of people there. And then if you look at like the data as well, I see a lot of people right now refusing to call mobiles. I don't know about you, Erica or Darin, but like I feel like that's probably one of the only ways right now. You can actually go across and get people on the phone right now, direct your mobiles, but like their company is not even providing that or they have these self limiting beliefs that they shouldn't be calling people in their mobile phone. But today that is the business phone. So those are two things that I'm just thinking through right away. You all should look into is your spam risk on your phone delivery. And your own personal cell phone usage. Was there anything else that we talked about yesterday that you want me to cover? So okay, dude, this is I think the reason why this is so important, what I would like you to talk about is like the math equation. Yeah. Like the math equation of if I have a 5% pick up rate. So I'd love to hear in the chat actually real quick. When you guys are making calls, what's your typical pick up rate? Drop that number into the chat for us. Two to five percent of people is a three to five. Where where we at? Let us know in the chat. Two to seven in the US. Anyone is calling enterprise or five thousand is going to be two to three percent all day long. And And if you get over seven or eight, you call into Europe or you have a very, very reachable market. So let's see if I, how right I am on that one. All right. Yeah, 3% is by far the average. I mean, so we look at hundreds of millions of records, 3% is what it is. This is, go ahead. - So let's do this equation real quick. So, Erica, Darren, if you guys were calling off of your cell phone, how many manual dials would you make over the course of an hour, typically? Go ahead, Erica. - We'll give it, we'll give it 20 max. I mean, off my cell phone, yeah, not too many. - Yeah, that sounds right. - So think about this. If you did a one hour call block every day, 20 calls, that's 100 calls a per week. Times a 3% pick-up rate, that's three conversations. If you are world class at Outbound, you might book one of those meetings. That's world class. Like, one out of three is, that's astronomically high. Most of us are going to be between 5% and 10%. And most teams, the best teams I've seen are between 10 and 15. That would be really, really good if you converted 10 to 15 of your conversations. So just look at the math. Like, you spend five hours a week making calls to not book a meeting as an account executive. That's going to feel really unproductive for you. So Rob, if you could comment real quick on like, this is why this stuff is so important. And if you could rattle off some of those things again, I'm going to jot down like, less than 8 to 10 calls per hour rotating phone numbers. Like if you could rattle off some of those, like the pick-up rate is the biggest bottleneck right now to self sourcing more pipeline. - Everyone I talk to leaders, they're actually like, it's this jealousy. A's don't hate prospecting. They hate wasting their time. They hate listening to rain tones all day. And I don't blame them. Like, I don't blame you at all. It's very frustrating. So yeah, the math equation, I mean, with the hour that you have, you talk to maybe one or two people, best in class is 10 to 15%. The show rate is then 70 to 80%. Conversion rate from those meetings is then 50% to accept it and then 10% to one. It's a hell of a lot of cold calls to make. So if that math is already working against us, then we have to make sure that we have the foundation that works with us, right? So just some quick tips and tactical things you can do. Every carrier has a different spam risk and threshold that can change on a daily basis. Just because the number you have today is not sure if it's spam doesn't mean it won't show up there tomorrow. So check those things out. Make sure that you have the ability to at least have three to five numbers you can rotate in your SEP, if possible. Those are things where you want to proactively manage this risk. If you're making more and firing off more than eight calls in an hour, right around the eighth call are data points to you want to rotate ahead of the time when it is going to hit you with that. If your company want to allow you to buy multiple numbers, at least use local dialer presence. That will fire a different number on every call that you make, which will keep you out of spam more often. Also, just think about what you do as a human with your cell phone. Anything that's odd behavior, a lot of calls and secession hanging up before someone picks up or even gets to the voicemail, not having a lot of talk time to your dial ratio. Like, these are all strange things and they pick up on that. So if you want to use your cell phone, it has very high performance. Just stay under 70 dials a day. Most of us can on a self source. That'll get you a strong place. Trying to think if there's anything else I miss there, Jason. No, this is great. Oh, come back. Do you hear an Erica? Is there anything like how strategic are you with the phone around like when you decide to call people? Are there little things around like, hey, wait till they open up an email through three times and maybe focus on them? Are you looking for other activity? Are you pulling multiple phone numbers or either reviews and dial out of any other stuff like that you have around getting, setting yourself up for success by just even getting an abat with the prospect? Yeah, I think for me, I can go. I think for me, this is the hot take. But sometimes I do call after six and I, and I get up that way. Typically, morning or kind of like after the work day, I'm typically doing my dials for like, key T as well, like a little bit later. And so I've found success with that in terms of time wise. But I would say for the most part, I think I'm lucky that in the space, man, I think it's easier to find mobile numbers. So I don't have to go through a lot of like key papers from that perspective. But time wise, yeah, I would say after six and so I was like, Rob, Rob, I love it. Hell yeah, I do Friday afternoon after four is dominant. So don't hang it up early. Yeah, I would be interested to test like Sunday night. There's a lot of execs that work Sunday night. Yeah, I'm in the NFL team is winning or not at that point. You're a bold man. I don't know if I haven't done it. So I mean, I feel a lot of emails on the minute. I actually think emails on Sunday night works pretty well because a lot of times it's execs working on the business, not necessarily in the business. So they have time to, you know, they're not getting flooded with emails from people, but now they will. I'll try to just have that. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I also wonder if like the world of cold texting is going to start because it's like, it's kind of the world we live in. I don't know. It's like this unknown. I think cold emails were a thing, worn a thing until they were a thing. And like, I think cold texting could become a lot more popular over the next five years. There's going to be a lot more regulations that hit cold texting before cold calling though. So TCPAA is out there. Anything where they're protecting people on B2C. It always trickles down to B2B. So there's a fraud. There's links and stuff. So it's, I would be surprised if that comes, goes big. But maybe the cold FaceTime will make a return who knows. FaceTime. That's cool. So I've noticed too, because I've been making quite a few calls this week for a Chicago exec dinner that we're hosting next week. And I have like a 16% pick-up rate between 5 and 6 PM local time in Chicago. So it's like, I definitely noticed that. I don't know what the legalities are around what I'm about to recommend. But I also noticed five minutes prior to 8 AM, 755 to 8 AM. I get a lot of pickups right before 8 AM too. So if I'm having trouble getting a hold of someone, I try to call them before the beginning of their work day. You can do that on every hour or five minutes before. Usually people are expecting a call to come in for their next call. So if I have really high tier 1a people, I would set up those blocks who are minors for those like really core times. And if you think about it too, like you can set up your day for success really well. It's a little bit of extra planning, which, but it's worth it, is to like tag all of your prospects by their city time zone from LinkedIn. So then you're calling, you can make effective calling blocks all throughout the day. So if we want to call from 8 AM to 930, 12 to 1 and 4 to 6, you can stack that all the way out from East Coast, Central Mountain, West Coast, where you're calling from 9 to 12, but you're hitting everyone at the perfect time the whole time. So if you just make some smart views and filters and tagging systems, that'll set you up because IBM ran millions of studies of billions of records. It looks like a W. People are in meetings all throughout the middle pockets of the day. You want to hit them at the lunch, the early hour, and when they're going home. That'll give you the by far the highest success rates. Love it. Okay, let's keep moving. I want to talk about something else that is kind of a hot take before we get to some of the techniques, which we'll get there to you. So we'll spend a bunch of time talking about more techniques and stuff. I want to talk about list building. Erica and Darren, how much time are you spending each week like, hey, let me pull the account up. Let me pull the contacts. Let me see if they have phone numbers. Let me check for cells. Let me like essentially populate the stakeholder group that I want to reach out to. How much of your week is spent doing that type of work typically? I'm biased because I work at Zoom in for a very, very little. A lot of what I am doing is just kind of targeting accounts based off our co-pilot tool that will allow me to say this account is researching a number of different topics. And then co-pilot is giving me a buying committee of people that I've already pre-populated based on job titles. And what they're doing that it my time building with is next to nothing. Love it. Yeah, I'd say plus one to that of my in two. I think I'm sure same as Darren, like have a very targeted listed accounts that I'm working. And so I probably know the folks that I need to go after. And so I don't really need to continue to do research. Obviously, every now and then I look for a new hire because typically they'll evaluate when they come into the role. Other than that, I typically know my like target folks at each target account. So Rob, you have kind of a hot take on this. Yeah, I mean, I'll add full of them, I guess. But I don't think a sales rep should ever touch building a list outside of like very one off, like account based multi threading after like the first meeting is going down. And there's a lot of ways of things through that. I mean, personally, at our company, we've got a list building team. We enrich everything. We score it all. I only hand stuff to my team that is perfectly ready and teared out. I just want them focus on being sales people. So like there's there's better ways to handle that. Now, I know that's not how a live organizations are. Most of y'all have sales navigator plus a tool exhumant foe and you go and map your own accounts, takes a lot of. of time as well. But for those of you all that are working with SDRs, one thing you can do is you can meet with them, plan out your accounts above the line, below the line. Who's going after what? They can build the list for you. You just give feedback onto, yes, this looks good. No, this doesn't. And they refine it over time. They'd love you just to spend that time with them. I promise you, because the more you spend with them, the better. So that's a one thing. If you have SDR support, they can be building the list. And then you guys can be both heading them up at the same time or different based on levels. A really big fan of that. There's also some really power stuff that you can do a clay out there right now. But I don't really recommend it at an individual AE level. It can be an expensive mistake to learn how to use clay with credits. Ask me how I know. So I really do think list building takes a significant amount of time. It's one of the things AEI is really good at. It's just really critical, though, to like these big databases are awesome, because they have such a large amount of information. It's hard to keep them up to date. LinkedIn is just moving so much faster. So there are some ways to verify. Are they still at the company? Are they still in that same title using clay and stuff like that, too? So if there's any sales leaders on the call, you can hit me up. I'll help you out with that type of thing. But whatever you can do, remove every row block or resistance from an AE wine to put in the calls. Make it easy for them to do it. And you'll see a lot more success. It's also like an elemental thing. Why are you calling them? How are you defining what your list is? And what is it based off of? Like, are you picking up that they're on your website, not filling out a lead form? Is the company researching topics related to what you guys sell? Is there a job change of somebody that came from one, like your current customer to a prospective customer at your account, or an account that you're trying to go after? Like all of that, to me, is reasons to reach out to somebody versus like, here's a smile and dial list. Go at it. It's just not very targeted, in my opinion. At least some my wrote, because I sell into big accounts. But-- Well, that's how it should be for A's, though, is like, I don't want your data mere of the SDRs day in how you go about prospecting. Prospecting doesn't have to be smile and dial and just bang out everything. They used to be looking at different strategic angles to go after their accounts, whether it's partnerships and affiliates, whether it's people that have a similar market, but you can partner with. Past users, past evaluators, people who have been closed before, but are now in new organization, people who are new to roles, spending a lot of money. You should have this whole acronym or prioritization system where I start here. If nothing there, then I move here. Finally, ending up with just cold prospect in account that I own, that's a good title. So we can talk about that a lot, too, on prioritization. But Jason, I want to cover one other thing, too, just the SDR thing. One thing that a lot of y'all can implement right now is a lot of y'all have SDRs calling. There are dispositions that people will log out there where it wasn't a no, it wasn't a yes. There is interest, there is intrigue, but they just couldn't quite get it. Maybe they said send an email or something. What I've learned over here at TitanX that we do is, we create a pool of activated leads that then the AEF follows up on. So we know these people answer the phone. We know these people are who they say they are, the numbers right, and then we have the recording we can listen to. You have the subject matter expertise as the AE that can convert that better. Don't send them an email, call them, and do a good job. And you'll convert those. We convert those almost like 5x higher than a cold call. So that could be something you just do every day. Get 10 to 15 new activated leads from your SDR. Go hit those up. That should be a priority one. Yeah, it's a constant game of 80, 20 rules and account executive. This is the same type of outbound I do. I get maybe two or three blocks where I can send emails and make phone calls. I only want to spend that on stuff where I know that the return is going to be really high. Let's get into the framework, you guys. So Rob, you already kind of started to allude to this. I want to break this down into three parts. Prioritize, commit, and execute. So for this prioritize bucket, Darren, I want to start with you on this one. The prioritization-- again, the reason why I think this is so important is that the analogy I always like to use in the lesson I was shared in sales, one of the best things I've ever learned was you want your pipeline to look less like a funnel and more like a martini glass. So in other words, I want to shrink down that top of funnel out on a go super deep where I know the return is going to be really high. Darren, how do you think about this with your work at Zoom Info and what you're doing? How do you think about where to spend your time? Because that choice-- that's the first big choice that we need to make. Yeah, no, it's a really good one. I mean, well, so I came from G2, Prior to Zoom Info. And I think when going back to Rob's point about all these different things that you could think about signal-wise, when it comes to the martini glass, I look at my prospect accounts. I look at where we have really good customer stories that look alike accounts. And I start building out the buying committee based off of that. I'd like, these are the people I want to go target at this account. That's when the martini glass starts to get skinny. And when it does start to get skinny, you're like, all right, these are the five or six people at that account that I know at this look alike account where heavily involved in actually getting a deal done. I'm going to go reach out to them. With literally-- I think salespeople's job is to be the shepherd of your customer stories. And what I mean by that is you need to take the stories of what you're really successful at with customers you already have, with social proof and all that, and go after their competitors because they all want to know what other companies in their space are doing. Like I think if you can get that targeted with it, I'd see my outbound rates go up by simply just saying, hey, we're really working with so-and-so account. This is how they're working with us. And we'd love to chat and see if that's a fit for you guys. It's that simple. So how are you thinking about-- you mentioned the look like account. Are you digging a layer deeper into what are all of the other triggers that you might be looking for in terms of newly hired executives, previous users? Like is there a hit list of things that if someone's maybe not using co-pilot that kind of spoon feeds this information to them, what are some of the other things? Yeah. Yeah, did some-- [INAUDIBLE] at their last company that now works at the prospect you're going after. Are they using a similar type tool? Are you finding people post-- like for example, there's a deal on about to close-- the one of the main champions had a post on LinkedIn about the K-L-O and other tool that she brought in for her sales team that's complimentary to what we sell. I'm like, OK, she was super involved in this deal. That I know because she's posting this case study. And that means she likely helped champion it in. If I have something that's complimentary that can help her, I'm wondering if she's somebody that's to change the agent within the organization that would potentially bring us into. So I'm looking for these people that are actively talking about change and making the org for them. This is a really big thing, I think, for enterprise reps that's highly underrated is you look for case studies that other companies have created with that account in complimentary products. Some of these case studies were like, they get really deep around the problem that they had. And most importantly, you know the person that was involved. So that's-- it's such a great hack that I think is very, very underrated. This is something you can use co-pilot or whatever other LLM that you guys are using. This is stuff that you can scrape online. It's pretty powerful. Erica, what about you? Prioritization, where you're going to spend your time, all of that good stuff. How do you think about this? And what are some of the specific tactable things that you would recommend others watching this deal? Yeah, I think I'm all for going after specific contacts like timing-wise, is it in a new hire? Is it someone who's previously used us? But I think something that works really well for me is like from a company level as well. So in the real estate space, there's a lot of acquisitions that happen. Typically, when someone acquires a new property, there's a new hire that needs to be made. There's a new tool that might be put in place. And so leveraging things that are happening from a company level, are they expanding into a new state? Things like that from a news perspective is something that I'm always looking at. In terms of prioritization, I typically-- we have a pretty targeted book here, and we go by units because we're in the apartment space. And so I typically go by white space. So an account that's going to bring in the most rare avenue for me is typically what I'm most focused on. And so the large accounts pretty much top down. But we also have different integration partners that we work with. And so accounts that can be integrated were easily our accounts that I'm focusing on. And so it's a little bit about the people, but also like the company. Of course, I think many people can agree, budgets happen at a certain time of year. And so also prioritizing by budget seasons for us student housing, they've got a specific season that they work in. And so targeting those accounts at different timing. And so I think a lot of it is right account at the right time. And I think a lot of people maybe don't realize that sometimes. And I think there's a big thing to do with nurturing and account properly and making sure that you are kept top of mind. And when you're talking with someone just because now is not the right time and you get a no, doesn't mean they're saying no because they're not interested. And maybe this is something that they're going to pick up in three months. And so one thing that I've found that works really well with especially that the larger accounts that are most important is really just giving them value here and there. Here's a new case study we just launched. They're an owner operator that has a similar unit count as you. Are using us for delinquency. [BLANK_AUDIO] everybody is interested in increasing their net operating costs. So I think it's just about keeping yourself top of mind. So when the time comes, you're someone that they are now reaching out to instead. Love it. Rob, how do you think about prioritization? And I think one of the things if you could comment on you guys talk a lot about the list being the strategy and segmentation and where reps spend time, how do you guys think about setting your AES up for success? Yeah, for sure. I've run a lot of large SDR teams as well. And this topic has been one I just obsessed about every day is how do you prioritize accounts and how do you prioritize people within them? What do I do today versus a month from now versus last week and all the opportunity costs and associate with that? Most of us have more accounts than we even need. At least at the SDR level, AES should have a smaller patch within there to be focused, but you still should be tearing out your accounts based on fit. But then how do you go beyond that in a more dynamic place of the signals that are going out there? So I'll hit on the list as a strategy here in a second, but just like some tactical things, I find that obviously when we get these territories, trying to inherit and understand what's happened in the past within my book is really critical. And there's obvious stuff like closed-loss deals. I think there's like some of like by far the best at one point time someone thought it was good enough to be a qualified opportunity and conversational intelligence can give us all of the stuff that happened in the past. I mean, Gomp can even allow you to ask anything about the past of like what happened there. Like talk about incredible context to call with. So I'm always looking at Pat like closed-loss, but I want to take it a step lower even past users, right? That's awesome, Rob, but those things exhaust. I have like maybe 16 of those in my book and then what? So I was always on this quest of like how could I build a bigger stack of signals of my best signals? And one thing you can do is on closed-loss deals, most of us are only reaching out to the primary contact on that opportunity. But if you think about a whole cycle, there's some of us are seven to five people. There's group demos of 10 people. There's always different people involved throughout the deal cycle. You can look into all these, I call them past evaluators, but like there's now you just amplified your stack of people that know your brand that have evaluated your solution the past by about 10x instantly. And then you can stack those with other signals, right? If those people have now moved somewhere else, they're not a new company, they're new to their role and they've evaluated before. That is like absolute money that you're not thinking about behind the scenes. Lots of different ways to track those people, it's LinkedIn sales navigator, manually. There's like user gems out there. There's a ton of tools, but like tracking people wherever they go and never missing new to role people in your top accounts is really critical in my opinion. So never miss on your closed-loss, never missing your past evaluators or past champions. I think is really key as an AE. Next would be again, those activated leads are follow-up follow-ups. We have a saying where we say the fat stacks are in the follow-backs here. So basically, call calls converted like a double rate or 3x rate on follow-up calls. It's just a not now. Don't forget about all those people that you have talked to. Why again? They're verified the right person and you know they pick up the phone. So you can focus on these people. The timing is not always right and outbound. We can't cheat that. So how do we just make sure we're showing up at the right time? At least calling people like every 90 days. So I'm looking at that type of stuff. I mean, obviously we can have the shameless plug here for a second. At TideNacks, we just identify people who pick up the phone at a very high rate at 25% connect rate. So that's a lot of what I do with my team is just we find the right people. We build the list. We identify those with the human behavior that pick up the phone and that's all I have my A's call and it makes 30 dials and talk to eight people in 30 minutes. So it's a little bit easier with that, of course. And one last thing, it be multi-threading. I don't think prospecting has to be a net new opportunity you create each time. If my mid market plus AEs or enterprise AEs, this is a great strategy here as well. Just because you get one meeting in FedEx, you don't have to stop and just keep that one contact, right? You learned a lot in that first meeting. Sometimes your managers or directors, where do we go? So your prospecting should be focused on getting a second and third plus meeting with new stakeholders. That's where I've lost my A's to a lot of prospecting is SDR breaking into an account. A E now take that leverage and go wide into that account. So that's where I really like to use the prospect as well is to get momentum. Love it. Ashley Blake in the chat asks, "I have so many contacts that don't have emails, so it's hard to make calls." I can't say she didn't say this, but essentially what she's saying it looks like is I can't say I'm following up on the email. What do we think of that? I have a very strong opinion on this, but let me know what you three think. As you call people, if you don't have an email and you don't have anything to follow up on, and if so, what's the strategy? Do they have a LinkedIn? If they don't have an email, they probably don't have a LinkedIn, right? I never know. Yeah. Well, is it different from not having an email? That's a lot of individual I guess. Let's say that you don't have the data. You don't have the data. They probably have an email address. We don't have the data. I'm hidden LinkedIn in the phone personally, but LinkedIn is actually pretty untapped. If you do it right, LinkedIn doesn't have the spam filters as these great companies do. LinkedIn is pretty powerful right now, as long as you don't treat it as a connect and pitch slap ultimately, but I'll be hitting that up as another channel, and I'd be finding their phone number, and I would be calling the HQ number if I have to. So that's a different way. I think the thing I think, go ahead, Aaron. I was going to say that Mike smells too. Yeah. You can start testing email formats too. There's only so many email formats at most companies. First, the natural last ad, first.last. There's only so many. That was my first SDR job. I was just guessing emails and thoughts, right? Well, I think the other thing too, underneath the question is if the reason you're calling someone is to follow up on an email, you need a stronger reason to call that person. That's not a great reason. Yep. That's the thing I would be thinking about, Ashley, is you're not calling to follow up on an email. You might say that. I sent you an email by XYZ topic, but you should be calling because you're working with a peer. You see that they might have a problem with something, and you have a point of your hypothesis on that. That's what you should be doing. You don't need to follow up on an email. To that point, I've always viewed sales when you're selling into new customers as free consulting. You're consulting by giving them a perspective they could not get. If you work with Pepsi and they work at code, tell them what Pepsi's doing. That is the only way to really differentiate yourself at this point. I come back to these customer stories because our job as salespeople is to shepherd customer stories to prospective customers and teach them something that they couldn't get anywhere else. Absolutely. I agree. I think the FOMO effect is truly real in the space. If your competitor is using something, if someone that another tool that they might be exploring, what are you missing out on that other people are using and benefiting from? Your $1.5% down ex percent over the last year and there's four competitors in your space that are using us and they've grown. Do you want to see how? That's pretty powerful. You're hitting on the offer. That's one thing that most people just forget about a lot. Do you have something valuable enough for your VP+ to actually take 25 to 30 minutes? Just asking for time is, sorry, you're not special enough. Your company, you should demand from them. Are there offers that we can create round tables, benchmarking reports, like, connecting you with our, if they start a product marketing? I'd like to connect you with our VP of product marketing to talk about things. You need a reason for them to take the meeting. Getting them on the phone is one part. Getting them to agree with the time is another and a demo or Starbucks gift card ain't caught in these days. You sound like everyone else. You're me something I can't find anywhere else. The stats back this up too. We just did a study of 85 million cold emails with GONG. It's like two months fresh. A compelling offer outperforms asking for time or asking for interest by 40%. You're 40% more likely to book a meeting by having a compelling offer. Love that. That's everything in enterprise too. We get to keep going. We've got about 12 minutes left. We've talked about prioritization. I think we should talk about the commit piece of the equation. Really quickly, Darren, I'll start with you. Dude, how do you make time for this between all of the other shit that you're doing? Maybe a not-so-obvious thing or it could be a really obvious thing that people just need a reminder of. If I need to prioritize this and make this happen, how do I actually make space for it and commit to it, follow through, etc? Yeah. I have a two-year-old son. I try to get off line from 530 to 8 every night and just not look at anything and just be with him and my wife. After that, I'm like, "Okay. Do I want to go sit there and watch some stupid sporting event or some Netflix movie I'm going to zone out in or would I rather go build pipeline?" The reason I do it at that hour is because there's no noise. You're not getting internal slack messages. You don't have just random updating you have to do in Salesforce, blah, blah, blah. That is the time that you can really just hone in on that kind of stuff. You have to make the time. You have to block it out. I just, like, the reality of our business or salespeople in general is like, you're going to get hit up with all this internal stuff that you've got. you have to do. So if you want to go actually deep dive into accounts, like that's the only time I find time to do it. - Honest the answer. You do it outside of business hours. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, through reality. - Erica? - Probably the same. Obviously, cold calling for the most part is during business hours. But again, I, you know, I'm really sort of gently accounts and looking into what I can potentially leverage and bring value to them, they pick up the phone so they don't hang up, right? And so I think that work is probably done, you know, outside of work hours, right? But that makes during the day, even when I can pick up the phone and, you know, call these, you know, 50 accounts that I know. Oh, these are the C-S-P people that I want to go after. I was like, I know that, you know, this contact is probably the right person, but wanted to call you and let you know that we're hosting an event or we're, you know, having a live one that you can join. And just rather than just consistently pitching, just bringing value other ways and kind of sharing that, like I just want them to, you know, attend and join the thing that it's gonna be valuable to them, rather than like initially going in and saying, hey, meet with me, we can help. - Rob? Yeah, just, you gotta get out of the mentality. It is your job. A lot of people have given condition that they don't prospect in that role anymore. I think that's ridiculous. So you have to prioritize it 'cause you wanna look at your future pipeline coverage. At the end of the day, you need to de-risk that. The more you need to deal, the less that you are gonna have a good time getting that deal. When I close the most, it's when I have, by far, I can just walk away from a deal. And the only way to get that, and the logos you want, and the President's Club, you can't rely on inbound or your SDR. The end of the day, you own your territory, so you have to figure out time to make for it. And I look at a lot of A's calendars, unless you're in like an AI startup and is going absolutely nuclear, you have the white space. So now we have to be honest with how you spend your time. So if you commit to it, great, now I would just batch your task. I would plan ahead to win. So do all your list building if you need to, and enrichment, and prep on one hour block. Send your emails on another. Do your calls on another. Don't try to do all the whole flow in one. You're going to go so slow through everything. So just batch your task out. And if you're going to make calls, might as well leave an avoid smell, because you already did all the work, and you don't exist if you don't leave one. So no one leaves voice from us, by the way. I don't know why. The only other thing that I would add, we have an SDR at outbound squad. Like we did a power hour earlier today. Like create accountability. Like don't do it alone. A lot of us work in a virtual environment, pair up with another AE and say, hey, we're going to commit to these three call blocks. Each week are these three prospecting blocks, or whatever it is that you want to do. Create that accountability. Let's talk about the execution piece. So we've talked about committing to this. We've talked about how to prioritize. Let's just rattle off some best practices in some non-obvious ways that we can actually execute on some of this stuff. We've already shared a ton, just on calling, increasing pickup rates. We've talked about voice mills. That's where to stuff. Rob, you mentioned voice mill. So let's just talk about that real quick. Why should we leave a voice mill when people are probably not going to call us back? And what's best practice around like a good voice mill? I'm like, I don't know why. I just like the biggest voice mill fan ever, because-- I love it too. I'm on the receiving end of calls all the time, and I still call them and stuff. So if you make all these calls and you don't leave a voice mill, there is literally no existence of your effort at all. So I always want to leave a voice mill, but I'm not going to ask for a call back. There's a couple of things I always do. The more specific, the better. But hey, Jason, I sent you an email yesterday titled Outbound Squad. I sent it 12.52 PM. I don't need a call back here. Ask them to reply to your outreach. You're going to lift your reply rates in email. You're going to lift your reply rates in LinkedIn, point towards the other channels. And also, you can just add a little thing at the end of it is if I don't hear back from you, I'll make sure to give you a call back in a couple of days. That creates some action as well. I found that from the cable sales people. So ultimately, there's a couple different pointed voice mills you can leave, mix it up each time. And if I just look at it, I get 100 calls, I get two voice mills, two. So just stand out. Yeah, it's being transcribed. There's also this thing on the iPhone's to where people can see the transcription live is relieving the voice mill. I've had plenty of people pick up the phone in the middle of a voice mill too. Just put it there. You all three work from home. Yeah. Yeah. You, Eric, you don't? I feel like half and half. Yeah. Like, do you find yourself going to check the mail every day? Like outside? I do it to get out of the house. It's like a reason to get off my desk. Like outside. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the analogy. I actually think-- You have to walk to do something else. Yeah. I think people are actually checking the stuff in their voice mill because you don't really get that many of them because no one's leaving them anymore. To Rob's point, I actually think that's a reason to do it. Exactly. Do what other people don't want to do. Yeah. And to Rob's point, it's not necessarily an ask to call back. I don't think I've ever asked someone to call me back. I'm like, hey, send you this email. Or like, hey, we've got a conference coming up or something that can provide value rather than just saying, look at this. And I think that is going to get them to do what you ask compared to some some long voice mill that they're probably pitching your product that they're probably going to hang on midway. Yeah. Yeah. Dear, and tell us about this group email thing, dude, you brought it up at the beginning. Other group email thing? Yeah. Tell us about this. I don't know. Maybe this is the founder and me that my previous life, where I literally would check every email and read everything, and need to get it in or out of my inbox. That same mentality, if you look at the people that have made the C-suite at these big companies or even smaller ones, they're pretty neurotic. They're pretty driven people. They want inbox zero for the most part. They want to make sure that there's close loops with things. That's one piece of it. The second piece of it is, if you're a CMO or a CRO that reports into a CEO and you're all in an email, somebody needs to take accountability for that. Otherwise, the CEO is going to be like, what happened to this? I'm not saying every time, but it's led to some very big deals for me. There's psychology around putting everybody on one email. What's the focus of the email when you send it out and you include a bunch of people on it? I want to make sure that everyone here understands that this is not a spam tactic where you just drop a shit ton of people on the account side into an email. What's the purpose of the email generally? Hey, your competitors are using us. Do you want to hear how? The C-suite is the most competitive group at any company. Always thinking about how to capture more market share. In fact, they're probably the only ones that a company thinking about it. If you're going after some mid-tier director or even VPs, they work at the direction of the C-suite. So if the C-suite is rowing about it, and they're the ones setting the whole motion of the company and all the strategic core things that they're working on, and you hit on something like that, granted, it's not always perfect. But if you do hit on it, they're going to go push it down to somebody on their team. And if somebody on their team gets handed something from their C-suite, they're going to follow up on it. Yeah. Do you address someone specifically? Jamie is asking. And they go-- I'll put their names. Like, I don't put more than four or five people on it. Like, we sell the sales leaders, and we sell the marketing leaders. So I'll put a CMO and a CRO or a SVP of sales or whatever. Yeah. And a C. C-O is the number one salesperson in any company. That's their job. Grow the business. So if you've got ways that you can help them do that, and you're showing how you're helping competitors do it, the competitive juice has started to come out. It's funny. No one-- a lot of people have neglect C-O's, because they just think that they're harder or whatever. We actually have a lot of data points towards C levels are converted to higher level on outreach, because they're actively always trying to find things to do. And people avoid them, because-- Yeah, they're just people. So-- They didn't call the C. They didn't call them. Yeah. Yeah. What do you-- They're people. Yeah. We found also-- Yeah, we did a-- No, we didn't use. Sorry. No, I'll get-- it was cut now a little bit. We did a pickup rate study with Orem recently. And what they found also is the VP is the hardest person to get a hold of on the phone. Like, the C suite is actually easier to get a hold of than the VP's. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting. A lot of data on that. It's pretty-- from top to bottom, from STHIRS to CEOs, it's pretty flatish around just how many people do answer. It's crazy. So don't have self-limiting beliefs that they don't pick up. They will. Yeah, love it. We've talked about calling, cell phones, all of that type of stuff. Anyone here leverage partnerships or partner intros or anything like that, any best practices you guys have on that, then we get a hop. You asking the panel here, yes? Yeah. Yeah, I do a lot of affiliate stuff. And I feel like the best time to ask for either partnerships referrals, affiliates is right after you've delivered value. So someone who just finished a sales cycle, someone who just renewed, someone who just got that got a, they actually had value realization, get them when you have delivered. Now you can deposit and then you ask. Like, hey, and make it easy for them. I've identified these 10 people that you're connected to as well. Do you actually know any of these people? We'd love to talk to them versus, hey, do you know any of your network? You're putting work on their plate. Make it easy for them to do it and you can even ghost right for them. But I get a ton of pipeline just from referrals, just 'cause I ask. Like a lot of people just don't ask. So I think it's a really untapped leverage for a lot of A's out there. Yeah, I tend to ask too, especially if someone is open to like creating a case study with us. And I'm like, oh great, you're open to creating a case study with us. Do you also have people that you're interested in introducing us to that could also benefit from this solution? So that tends to work. Love it. Yeah. You've got to, in your orbit, anybody in your orbit that you can help solve things. Like we've talked to, you know, like we have a great partnership with G2 because they sell this similar type buyer and they're always looking like G2 helps. With customer stories, we help crack doors open. Customer stories help crack doors open. There's a great symbiotic relationship there. Anybody that's like selling to the same type of persona with a different type of solve can definitely be a great partner. Cool. We got a run team, Rob, Erica, Darren, appreciate the time today. Everyone else, appreciate you coming to the webinar. Hopefully you got some really good tips and tactics around how to self-source more pipeline. We'll send out the recording via email and all of that good stuff so you have it. And that's the, that's all we got, team. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Mr. Dave. See you. Yeah. [Music]