18: Pros and Cons of Sales Cadence

happy monday everybody hopefully had a good week last week um the down week a lot of those snaps and tweets i was posting out last week were all about using last week to get ready um those are i actually really like those type of weeks when everybody else is kind of not doing anything there's not a lot of activities and not a lot of stuff coming into your inbox love those weeks to get prepped for the rest of the year the rest of the summer whatever and do some planning house cleaning uh get your list right get your contact strategy down everything else so with that um i did a lot of house cleaning myself got made sure that all my lists were right made sure that my strategy was set for the rest of the year and um one of the things i wanted to tap in today uh and by the way for those of you who are joining live here feel free to hit me up with questions i'll answer whatever you got but the topic today is the whole topic of cadence which has taken on a whole new meeting these days with all these sales automation tools and um i'm sorry sales efficiency tools but unfortunately they're being used as sales automation tools so as an example i'll use the the kind of likely known ones right the the sales block the outreach the tout apps the yeswares all these different tools out there i love them from the sales efficiency standpoint right because they help you send mass emails out at scale you help track everything you can track the response rates and split tests and do all sorts of stuff that i absolutely love the problem is when they're being used as sales automation tools and pretty much the same as uh any one of the marketing automation tools so marketo eliqua you know pardot you name it i don't understand why sales reps are using these sales efficiency tools the exact same way that marketing uses the marketing automation tools it's just doubling up on the noise out there and it's doing absolutely nothing to differentiate you and so i'm going to talk about the positives of uh of the cadence approach and and for those of you who aren't aware it's sending multiple emails out in a contact strategy right not just relying on that one email or that one voicemail to get that response but sending out a group of them you know five six seven eight touches whatever it is and mixing it up you know email phone whatever but you know really having that contact strategy because i've read study after study that talks about how many touches it takes to get in touch with somebody these days i've heard 10 touches five touches whatever i read a report the other day that said 35 touches it takes 35 touches to get in touch with somebody these days i'm saying if you reach out to me 35 times i'm going to call the police on you right but but the point is regardless of the study i've never seen one that says one all right one touch one email is the best or one voicemail is the best so it makes sense to have a contact strategy right why which is by the way it's also not worth spending a half an hour writing email right writing one email i've always been a huge fan of doing customized thoughtful contact strategies and doing research on somebody and i'd say probably three or four years ago you put 20 30 minutes into writing a really well crafted solid email and it got that much better of a response rate so probably 15 20 30 response rate if you did it right now because things have been so just content has been saturated out there marketing automation everything else the customized email still works but it's just not it's no longer 15 20 30 percent it's now more like five ten percent which is still way better than one to two percent average but it's no longer to me about the that one email it's about the contact strategy and telling the story and and having five six seven different things to say to somebody to get their attention and so the positives of cadence are just that right it gives you the ability to reach out to somebody two three four five six times and doing it in a way so you're not always scheduling those activities right so these cadence tools really help us with that and it allows us to measure it now unfortunately most reps don't but it allows us to measure the effectiveness of certain emails of certain contact strategies and everything else so i'm a huge fan of telling the story okay but what's driving me batshit crazy right now is that every single rep is just using them and putting template emails in there and and they all look exactly the same i probably get about five or six of them a day from reps and i can already tell okay this is the first touch this is the second this is the third this is their fourth here comes the breakup email you know the whole you know because all of them that's what they are right the first one is maybe something relevant to to me or my persona or something like that and then the next one is hey did you get my first email then my third one is hey bubbling this one up to the top and then fourth one is you know almost like a guilt factor of hey you know i guess you're not interested in this and then the fifth one is the inevitable breakup email which is there you know one two or three you know are you really interested in this or and you're just super busy you're not interested and you want me to take you off your list or you're stuck under a rock and you want me to call the police or something story the alligator you know which just drives me crazy right and it just came to mind recently because a kid did this to me uh recently and i actually feel bad but here's the email that was that just set me off and prompted this conversation because i've been seeing it too often and it's just getting worse and so i wanted to throw it out there of the issues with it and then how to fix it all right so this one the subject line is this goodbye and then it appears that you are not interested in the demo to learn more about the product and that that was actually the look like the customized part but then it went into a template which was dear john it appears you're not interested in a demo to learn more about our product um the number one rated sales tool on and i won't mention it i know you can streamline it it's going to help you do all this other stuff and effectively it's a guilt trip of why i'm not responding to this kid and my response back um was what's holding me back from the responding is bullshit templates like this that i know are being automated that you're putting absolutely no thought into it isn't customized to me in any way shape or form and the kid the kid actually got back to me like i said i feel a little bit bad because he's like rough day and i was like actually no i'm having a great day but i'm really getting annoyed with these type of emails because i just think it's putting sales reps in a position to get replaced i mean you've heard me talk about it before about how the you know the death of the average sales rep right about how i'm worried for sales professionals who are going through the motions and just pressing play and you know hitting that cadence and hitting up template emails or making generic cold calls you know asking bad questions and pressing play on demos all that stuff i'm worried for them because i'm watching them get replaced with technology again if you haven't seen it before look it up shakespeare.ai it's an artificial intelligence bot gmail plugin that helps you write fully customized targeted emails by just pointing that bot at an article and it writes them better than i can so if a computer is already doing that better than we can we just got to wake up and say okay well what's our value especially on the front end of the sales process right sales reps who are doing the sdr role and just cranking out template emails you know i'll be shocked if if that role is um is is considered sales moving forward and actually jamie shanks put together uh jamie shanks sales for life just check them out a really good um great company trains on social selling and he put out a blog post recently that says is is the sdr role killing sales and his point was is that sdr is the sdr used to be a breeding grounds where it was sdr with the intro role to sales and then it was ddr and then ae and then you'd get to the closer but now what happens is sdrs um as they go up through their promotion they when they get promoted it's either hey you can go in to be a sales rep or you can be an sdr manager you know and if you're 24 25 years old and you get the option to be a manager or a sales rep what are you more proud to call home and tell mom about right well i'm more proud to call and tell them hey mom look i'm a manager so a lot of reps are going down this sdr track or i'm seeing a lot of sdrs bounce from sdr role to sdr role it's sdr role and kind of almost be professional sdrs which is nothing wrong with that but what we're seeing here is that track move into you know just lead gen with all these tools out there and i'm sorry if you're not a fully rounded sales rep if you don't know how to manage a sales cycle and if you don't how to close you're not really in sales you're not a fully rounded sales rep so that's where jamie was talking about is it killing sales now i don't think it's killing sales but i do think it's reshaping sales i think that sdr role is actually going to become a much larger function in organizations and there's going to be sdr sdr manager sdr director sdr vp um but it's not going to be under sales it's all going to report to marketing or operations and it's going to be more about playing with the technologies and the tools than it is really about engaging with the client and selling so my my vision of sdrs in the future is um you ever seen those old switchboard operators where they're you know they're plugging like the kind of the old school ones where they just plug and stuff that's my vision of sdrs moving forward here because they're you know all these tools are going to facilitate that now my fear here and to jamie's point my fear is that used to be the feeding ground for edrs and then full-blown aes and and sales reps so where is that now new generation of true sales reps going to come from i don't know or maybe we'll go back to kind of the old school of of sales reps just getting in and having to handle everything and and evolving a lot faster that way but who knows anyways but back to my point of the cadence stuff here great usage but that kid that he reached out to me he actually after i ripped him ripped into him he's like actually done hopefully you can appreciate i didn't send out these emails you know my marketing department did i get the responses and i've actually been telling my my team or my manager and the marketing team look this isn't i don't want to do this i want to be more thoughtful around this but they're forcing me to do this and they're saying hey you know the negative feedback the positive feedback will way outweigh or the positive responses will way outweigh the negative um you know feedback that you're going to get and so i i kind of you know i felt bad i was like look i get this it's not you and i appreciate the fact that you're you know you're trying and at least you tried to fight that fight um so do me a favor send this over to your manager and here's more ammo of why i think those cadence things are actually doing way more harm than good to our brand um because again it's it ends up being spam um there's once you see one of these cadences you start to pick up on all the other ones and then once you start to pick up on all these other ones you you start to tune them out it's just like any technique or or any approach like once that technique is used on you the first it might work the first time like that that's a breakup email of one two or three stuck under a rock you know the first time you get that okay fine i'm not stuck under a rock whatever but the very next time you get that email you're you're never going to respond to it again you're going to realize it's a sales technique and it's the same thing with these cadences okay now that's the negative side and i'm just going to beg you out there if you're going to use this case these cadence tools at least do it this way okay now my preference is a fully tailored one where you sit down and and you do research on an account like a tier one target account that you want to get into and you come up with four or five six different things to say to them all at the same time and that's actually what i recommend is instead of doing research on somebody and looking for one thing because what happens there is you tend to look for one thing and you ignore all the easy stuff so you're like all right that's not good enough that's not good enough oh there it is right you write this one mona lisa looking email and you fire it off and a half an hour later you've written one email which is a little ridiculous and then you schedule an activity three or four days later for touch two and now when that activity comes up you're probably already tend to you know probably actually 40 to 50 activities past due and now you got to go into research again and come up with another thoughtful email it's like yeah i don't have time to say did you get my first email and so that's how that works but if you sit down all the same time and say hey you know what let me come up with four five six different things to say to this client right and the persona as well so you know you go after the vp or the ceo or whatever look on their linkedin profile look at their website look at the news and events and try to tell a story and say okay now that you have five or six things you can put that together and say okay what's my first touch second touch third touch fourth touch and tie them together so they make sense um because that's the key to a contact strategy in my opinion is is the unique factor is saying something different every single time so you're coming at them with a different point of value each time for instance you know i do the two ways people tend to prospect are hey we do sales training you know broad elevator pitch right we do sales training consulting for fortune 500 companies that guarantees the results you're looking forward every single sales process that goes um nobody responds to that or they do hey this uh john barrows we do sales training consulting we do prospecting meeting execution negotiation objection anointing closing one of the five things i do and i can probably wrap a nice tight little message around that right email call whatever say i send you that email or you do that voicemail and you don't respond what's my next email what's my next voicemail right hey it's me again i'm not sure if you got my first email but we uh do sales training consulting we do prospecting meeting execution negotiates right uh third just uh touching base checking in uh i'm not sure if you got my right and so that's where that comes from but if i don't know anything about you my first email is you gonna it's gonna be about prospecting you don't like that one i don't care the next call you're gonna be about negotiation you know like that one whatever here comes meeting execution and i'm just gonna poke right if our job is to throw darts let marketing do the broad-based messaging our job is to throw darts and and try to pick up on things that make sense because you might miss and miss and miss and miss but then all of a sudden you might strike that nerve and and if every one of those messages has been value oriented been focused on me as a business or my my company or my persona you might like i said you might miss and miss but then like you might strike that nerve that gets me to pay attention and that's really where the cadence comes into play of of how you can do it as effectively as possible at scale right again going back to it my preferences do a bunch of research on somebody come up with six touches very tailored thoughtful and then schedule activity one two three four five and six and take the content that you've already researched and put it in those cadence tools so when they come up you already know what you're going to say now i understand that we all have volume numbers to hit here okay you know 50 dials or 100 activities or whatever so that's just not realistic i do think we should do a certain amount every single month i personally pick five accounts once a month that i go deep on it's a two-hour recurring meeting on my calendar once a month that i go and find i find pick five accounts go really deep on them come up with six touches for each of them and apply that contact strategy that's once a month but then to get the volume up there what you want to do is at least focus on some type of commonality uh within your database so for instance um go after a very specific persona you know cios in the health care industry or vp of sales in the sas industry and sit down and do a little bit of homework on what these people care about right and you know all you got to do is google search cios healthcare priorities 2017 see what's on their plate right now or vp of sales sas industries priorities 2017 there's a blog post there's something out there where somebody's talking or some vp of sales is talking about the challenges moving into this this year then come up with five or six different messages about the different aspects of your solution that support somebody in that persona so you know again prospecting meeting execution negotiation objection and closing most of you listening to this i promise you you could carve up your value proposition in at least four five six different ways the recommendation is to carve it up and to give yourself multiple reasons to reach out to people so you're not saying the same damn thing over and over and over again now if you put these these persona based messaging together now you can start to poke away and you don't have to say the same thing over and over and over again and you can run a list of 50 or 60 people in your territory that fit that persona and let that cadence run and then measure it against another cadence you know to a similar persona you know you don't like you don't have to do personas either you could do other stuff like um you know any type like i said any type of commonality where they're all using a certain technology or they're all using one of your competitors or whatever just something that you can run a list where everybody fits a similar profile if you will and you know 50 or 60 of these so once a month is what i do i pick you know vp of sales staff industry that use salesforce and i run a list of five or six different template of emails and i put them into a sales loft and i let them run and i see what happens now another recommendation here is by doing that you can actually make one of those touches or two of them a call so say you have six touches and um you know you come up with six different reasons to reach out to a vp of sales in the sas industry that uses salesforce okay well you're going to send email one email two and then make a phone call right and that phone call can be now a call blitz because if every one of those fits a similar persona then you can say the same thing on on the calls and gain some momentum and learn something for those of you been paying attention i've talked about call blitzes before and how the best way to run a call blitz i personally think that that um scheduling phone calls throughout the day is a drastic or making phone calls throughout the day and sprinkling them it's a drastic waste of time you know you make two or three phone calls send an email write a proposal that's everything i think that's a i think phone in that scenario drastic waste of time where i know phone can be effective is when you hyper focus for an hour i call them power hours and not only do you just make phone calls for an hour but you make phone calls into one very specific persona with one very specific message for an hour and because that way you can prepare so now because you're going after a persona not only can you come up with a message that you can repeat and get better at but then you can also come up with two or three questions that are relevant to that persona so instead of something saying something like dude tell me about your priorities you can say stuff like hey you know thanks for taking my call the reason for my call today is vps of sales in the sas industry are talking to us and they're showing us we're showing them how to drive these type of results i'd love to have a conversation uh when can we schedule that oh i got time now all right well i'd rather schedule it later so you're prepared for it but here's a few questions i have typically vps of sales in the sas industry are telling us that their top priorities in 2017 are x y and z are those yours even if they're not the fact that you showed you kind of know what their um world is all about tends to open up the conversation and then ideally you have like a case study or a story to tell them there to help qualify so now you run everybody you know a list of everybody that fits that profile you call them all up and say the same thing again you can gain momentum you can learn something and you can have some flow to it you can you can you know what the objections are going to be so you can prepare for those so now if you have that cadence that's more of a targeted not fully tailored but targeted based on a persona or something like that you can now start to make some you know email email call call blitz 20 to 30 dials in an hour no problem email email call another call blitz right there and you can start to run these on a consistent basis you can do one of these once a week for crying out loud and that is how you use cadence tools effectively is to be targeted with your approach not templated with your approach so for those of you out there who are still cranking out template emails and using these cadence tools without putting any thought into them at all please i'm begging you at least target them at least target them because you're no different than marketing if you're just going to send out templates and by the way marketing is going to do it better than we can because they're going to analyze the results and they're going to make the adjustments where sales you know probably the biggest weakness of all these cadence tools first from a sales reps perspective is sales really don't look at the data they just use it to to use it from an automation function but they don't look back at those templates and those cadences and say okay which one yielded the highest response rate and why and now let me dig into that and tweak it and tweak it right marketing knows how to do that they've known how to do that for the past 10 to 15 years at this point and they're way better at it than we are and so i'm just begging you all to stop sending these these bullshit template cadences out there and put at least some thought to it all right structure it focus on a persona sit down come up with five or six different messages and let it roll okay so with that i'm actually going to be writing that blog post i'm going to uh um i'm actually going to put these emails the ones that i ripped on uh into a blog post coming up on thursday with something similar here that that we're talking about so take a look at that you'll see the actual email in there and if you want to see a good version of a cadence in my opinion take a look at my blog it's um i wrote one a little while ago called finally a contact strategy i can appreciate and this was one of the first times that somebody uh sent me a targeted email uh cadence that was not it was obvious that they did not go on my website and do a ton of research on me or linkedin profile but they profiled me really really well and so if you want to see what i mean when it comes to a thoughtful cadence that leverages things um go ahead and take a look at that all right so i'm going to take a question here do you recommend uh so camille how you doing um thanks for coming in do you recommend a different contact strategy for the government market or would you suggest uh or would your strategy be the same for every industry you know it would it'd be the same now my reasons might be different for the government right and and the information might not be the same so for instance i'm going to sit there you know if i go back to fully tailored targeted templated i'm doing a tailored one you know for the typical public sector uh or private sector it you know you open up a new office you want some new products you know you look for those triggers right uh merger and acquisition something like that now for for the government for the public sector it's different right there's not those triggers aren't as valid but you want you have stuff like you know maybe broader picture stuff like regulations um shifts in in or budget timing you know those type of things i always say the budget objection is crap uh except for in public sector um i sold to the government when i was selling xerox and uh you know there was definitely times a year where you had to you had to get in there so you could get in the budget for next year so you can do that as far as a timing standpoint but you want to look at all these agencies you want to look at all these you still want to do the same research you still want to go and look at them and say okay what are some of the things that are working on what are the the strategies the good news is is that they're public so their strategies are public it's just you got to find them in different areas so with that you know that's the fully tailored one the targeted one again sit down and think of what is a cio in the in the public sector what are their challenges right now in dealing with all the malware stuff that's out there the security of documents like all those type of things and figure out ways that your solution can tie to some of those challenges i would absolutely can be able to do a google search on whatever their title is you know government cio uh you know treasury priorities 2017 and see what comes up right there's publications there's stuff talking about it and so go find that stuff and it might be a little bit more broad as far as okay they didn't have a merger and acquisition but hey here's some challenges that they're faced with so now let me come up with five or six different messages related to that persona specifically and put together a cadence and go after it that way so great question um i would still use the cadence it's just different information and maybe uh more more public oriented information as far as trends uh regulations uh those type of things laws that get input you know are putting in place or things that are coming down the pipeline that you know are going to start at a certain date um so you can help them prepare for those type of things so thanks for the question um so if you have any other questions feel free to chime in here um but i'm going to bounce out maybe a little bit early if there's no other questions because i got a four webinars i got to do this afternoon for some clients and then i got to take off for new york atlanta and houston this week so follow me on snapchat to find all the wonderful uh snaps i'll be doing along the way just chronicle in the journey as usual and um oh and also for those of you who didn't uh see it i've launched uh the j barrow store a little while ago a couple weeks ago it was um it was just in response a lot of clients so i got my make it happen tagline and a lot of my clients and reps are like man do you have any like gear around that because make it happen is one of my favorite um you know little taglines there and so i'd like no but why not have one so i've put up a story you can go to i think it's store.jbarrow.com i'll put it in the uh i'll put it in the post here that you can go click on that and take a look at some of the gear that's out there so i got some posters and t-shirts and all that type of cool shit so anyway uh any help spread the love would be greatly appreciated hopefully you got some value out of this one hit me up anytime instagram snapchat twitter it's all john m barrows so m is michael all one word uh and i respond to every snap you hit me with every question you email me about uh and every you know instagram post or whatever it is i'll respond to all of it and by the way it's all me so it's not somebody uh you know autobot doing this response it's all me um i really do genuinely appreciate everything that you guys uh share of mine and and all the questions that you have here so let's try to make this week a great week i know it's a down month uh july is usually kind of a slow month for sales don't accept that go out there and make it happen everybody all right have a great week later oh so you you you you you you you you you