89: Jason Bay CoFounder and CRO Blissful Prospecting

Have you picked up your tickets for Rainmaker 2019? The premier sales engagement conference is back. March 11th through the 13th in Atlanta. Visit salesloft.com slash Rainmaker for all the details, including to purchase tickets. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. I'm excited to introduce my guest today, Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting. Jason, how are you doing today, man? Introduce yourself to the audience. I'm doing good. I appreciate you having me on the show, man. I'm super excited for this. Yeah, so this was funny because you actually prospected to me for this one, right? To get on the podcast? Yeah. We sort of talked about this before we hit the record button here, but I'm definitely one of those people.

What I love about running a prospecting company is that we do the same exact stuff to find our own clients, too. So we get to try things, and video is one of the hot things right now that we'll probably spend a little bit of time talking about, but that was something that we tested quite a bit ourselves to get on podcasts, to get the attention of our dream clients, and then we get to kind of roll that out with our clients. So yeah, I sent you a video, and something must have stuck out to you. I don't know what it was, but you sent it over to someone on your team, and now we're talking. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, it's hard to get attention these days, but I think, you know, it's all about relevance, so we're going to get into that.

But I think the, you know, and there's a million different ways to skin a cat, and this is why I look at, you know, people talk about, like, competition, right? I really don't think in the sales world, I look at competition in any way, shape, or form, right? Because we're all really good at certain areas, and there's all these nuggets and tips and ideas out there of how to approach things. And my hope is, is that between you and I, you know, we can give the audience here a nice collection of different approaches to use to go out and execute, right? Because one of the things I found, and tell me what you think, is, you know, selling sales training to sales professionals, like, that's, it's a little bit like selling crack to crack heads, right?

Because it's just like, it's like, it makes sense, right? Whereas when you pull out and you go from selling prospecting, or prospecting into accounts without that connective tissue, right? You're trying to sell a completely different service, it's a little bit harder. So I definitely understand the challenges of non-sales trainers prospecting into, right? Because I've done it for years before this. But let's talk about some of the stuff that you're seeing right now that's working for your customers. You mentioned video, right? But where are you seeing the highest return? Well, actually, I'm going to even take a step back. You talked about how you get to test out a lot of stuff. How do you test out?

Like, what's your, what's your approach to testing approaches? Because I think we'll talk about how we approach testing approaches, and what's the runway you give them, and then what approaches you're finding are working these days. Definitely. I think that I always like looking at data. I think that as salespeople, as business leaders, we tend to make decisions based on how we feel emotionally, and you're, not that your emotions are not important, but you do have to, if you have the data, you got to use the data, right? So, the way that I look at testing is, there are companies that do a lot of this type of outbound work, and they survey a lot of companies to see what's working. And one of the big trends that we found out about last year, because when we started doing this, we used to just do cold email.

And what started happening is, I'm sure you've noticed, you're probably getting a lot more cold emails these days than you got two or three years ago. And the reason for that is, guys like you and I are helping people with prospecting, and we're consuming a lot of content. We put it out on the internet, and guess what? People are so lazy that they'll copy and paste the templates and just start doing that, and stuff stops working. And one of the companies that I was checking out was a company called The Bridge Group, and they wrote the Sales Development Playbook. And one thing that they did that's really cool is they studied close to 500 B2B companies that do sales development and outbound over the course of four or five years.

And they noticed that the number of quality conversations per day is going down, and the number of attempts to get those conversations is going up. No surprise, right? But really, what they were making a case for is multi-channel. So what we needed to really adapt in our business model was, hey, if you're just sending email, if you're just sending LinkedIn, the likelihood that you're going to get a hold of that person because everyone else is doing that is very, very low compared to, hey, are you doing email? Are you combining that with LinkedIn? Are you combining that with other forms of social media if they have Twitter and that sort of stuff? And the big thing right now is video. So to answer your question about testing, it's really about statistical relevance or whatever the term is in terms of having a big enough sample size to actually make a decision, yes or no, if something's working.

And usually that number is 100. So typically what we're doing with the type of clients we serve, we're sending out about 100, we're emailing about 100 prospects per week for them. And that'll typically help them hit the appointment targets that we're trying to set for them. So after we send 100 or 200 emails, we might test that across three different ideal client profiles. And then we're going to get enough data right there right away. We're going to know if people are opening the email. We're going to know if people are responding to the email. And then we're also going to know if, hey, are they converting into an appointment? Those are the three metrics that we look at. Outbound can be kind of tough because sometimes it takes a month or two to get your pipeline sort of ramped up.

But right away in a couple weeks, usually after you've sent a couple hundred emails, you'll be able to tell like, hey, if the open rate's not over 50%, something's very wrong with the subject heading. If you're not getting a response rate of at least five or 10%, even if that's people saying not interested, something is just not right with your email copy and you need to do something different. And if you're not converting, usually we shoot for three to 8% of the total emails we send out to convert into an appointment. That number there is usually going to pencil from an ROI standpoint for most of our clients. So, but that can, you might not get that number for three or four weeks into a campaign.

So two weeks, a couple hundred emails, that should be enough data for you to know if something's working and what's working specifically that you might need to test. And so, and so what's your philosophy around like personalization versus scale, right? Cause there's the, you know, and I don't know what tools you use, you know, I use sales loft, but you know, there's this whole conversation around personalization and scale, right? And I used to train, or I still do train, you know, probably about, you know, when I took this training, it was Basho back in the day, you know, over, I think 12 years ago at this point, I've been training it now for 10. It used to be very focused on this one email.

It's called the why you, why you know, email it's Jeff Hoffman came up with it. And it's a very specific structure, which is, Hey, I was on your website and I noticed this thing happened, whatever that trigger is. The reason that prompted me to reach out to you is because many of our clients who have that happen, use our solution to drive these types of results. Who can I talk to about that? Right. And about, you know, I'd say about 10 years ago, it was totally worth spending 15, 20 minutes sitting down crafting this really, really well thought out, very personalized email and sending it off to an executive getting a referral down because you were getting a 15 to 20% response rate if you did it right.

But now it's been bastardized. It's been genericized. It's been blasted out to a million people, right? Because, you know, people are using the same format and just hammering it out in, you know, in these mass blast tools. So it's definitely not worth doing like 30 minutes of research on anybody, but I read a report recently on sales, uh, sales loss recent report that said the optimal personalization level is 20%. And they found that by like comparing a hundred percent personalized email to a 20% personalized email, the 20% was actually getting a better response rate. And so, you know, that's where, you know, if I look at the why you, why you know, email, that's like that first sentence needs to be the personalized part.

Right. So it's, it's, Hey, Jason, you know, I was on your website. I noticed this happened, whatever personalized. Now the next section, which is, Hey, the reason I wanted to reach out to you is because, well, that can be pretty standard based on whatever that trigger was. So I guess, how are you testing quality and quantity right now? And what are you seeing out there? Um, cause I wish that the purely personalized stuff was the answer because it would kind of force us all into the quality, but I'm starting to see that the volume being very retargeted is actually getting better results. Yeah. I I'm really glad you brought this up. The approach that we take that I always tell people is we take the murder by numbers approach and flip it on its head.

Everything right now is steering towards account-based. So account-based selling, account-based marketing. So really where you want to spend the research is on the account and where people make a big mistake is they say, Hey, I, uh, you know, I'm a software company and I serve the construction industry. Okay. Uh, what size of companies, what needs might they have? Are they doing commercial? Are they doing res? I mean, there's just so many layers that you can dig there. So instead of focusing and making the ideal client profile about the industry, make it about a niche, find a niche within that industry. Saying you serve software companies. That's, that's not niche. Is it SAS companies? Is it B2B SAS?

Is it B2C? So I think really nailing that niche down is going to help you personalize. So that's where you really want to spend most of the research. Personalization should only take a really just a couple minutes at most. And I agree a hundred percent. It's the sweet spot we found is the first couple of sentences in the email. And then you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. If you have a strong value prop, like that language obviously works. So just use what's worked in the past. And if you're working at a company that's been doing this for decades, obviously they've figured out what their value props are. Don't reinvent the wheel there. So the personalization, the first couple of sentences, and then what we've also been doing is, is video people have been using to personalize too, where people are getting really smart these days.

So just using merge tags, like first name and company name is, is, is not going to work and you can't fake a video. And honestly, if you've done your research, uh, a video might be actually easier for you to do than, um, writing the two sentences because you can be on their website as you're doing it, put a face to the name, all that good stuff. Um, so yeah, I, I don't like the murder by number stuff. I would rather reduce the volume, make sure it's a good account. And we hardly ever get emails back from people telling us to fuck off, you know, because we at least did our research and know that they're potentially a good fit for our client's product or service. So it's not like us sending an email to a company and it's not related at all.

They just say not interested or, Hey, I'm, I'm, I don't really want any more of these emails. We never hardly ever get emails that tell people why the hell you're reaching out to me. Yeah. And it's, and it's funny because you can start to see right now that marketing, you know, even a little nuanced things, um, marketing is picking up on those artificial intelligence is picking up on these things and they're trying to use them, but you can always sniff them out. I'll give you an example. You know, I used to the, the why you, why you now email, it used to start with, and this very specific word and I'm noticing certain things I I'm taking out, uh, just because I think it's triggering people in the wrong response because they're so overexposed to it.

So for instance, like I used to write, I was researching your account and I noticed this happened, right? Cause it showed personalization. Like I was researching you. I was researching your company type of thing. And so the word researching, I think caught on and what happened was marketing now, and I'm getting, I don't know if you get these, but I get marketing email. I get prospecting emails where it says, Hey, John, I was researching your company and it looks like you'd be a really good fit for our services. And then it goes into this throw up elevator pitch that literally has nothing to do with anything I would ever want. Even if like, if you, I got prospecting by a pro like, so it'd be like you reaching out to me, right.

Doing prospecting training and saying, Hey, John, I was on your website and I know you'd be a great fit for our services. I'd like to talk to you. Like I've literally got prospect to buy a company that sells prospecting training. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, come on. I'm like, this is obviously a templated email. Cut the shit. You know what I mean? And I think that's where I'm a little, I was a little bit nervous a while back about how artificial intelligence was genuinely going to take over pretty much any aspect of outbounds, especially email. Because I was seeing tools like Nova.ai and Shakespeare and a few other ones where I was like, holy shit. But what I'm noticing is it's like their personalization.

They do that 20% personalization part right there. But it's like, it's like circa, it's like LinkedIn circa 2000 in the sense that it'll be like, it makes no connection to the value proposition. So for instance, if I would, so if I turned, you know, an artificial intelligence bot onto you to write you an email, it would say, Hey, Jason, I see you're based in Austin, Texas. Do you want to keep Austin weird? And then it would hard shift into a, like, like this, we're the leading provider of software. And it's like, okay, right. So I really do think that in order for artificial intelligence to really make the connections, we have to do so much work on the backend to craft messaging that aligns with traders, personas, and all those types of things.

So AI can actually connect the dots there. Because AI isn't going to be able to craft some really well thought out connective tissue between something that I saw about your business and our value proposition. So that's why I think we're still in a pretty good shape of, it's almost like the last mile. Like you want your sales rep, you need to be the last mile. You need to take a look at what marketing and artificial intelligence comes up with and put that little flavor on top that shows it's a human to be able to make it. And to your point, it should only take a couple of minutes to do that. Yeah. Have you seen the Terminator? Yeah, of course. Where he's like trying to teach him slang. He's like, you know, it's just like so bad.

That's really what I think AI is. Like, I think that's the max capacity in our lifetime of what, how AI is going to be able to personalize this stuff. And because we use Nova, I love the Nova tool, but we don't use the personalization feature. Really where you're going to get a lot of insights with AI and machine learning is it's going to be able to gather all the data in a really, really easy format. So you're going to make a really quick decision and be like, I can spend 30 seconds personalizing this because all of the data is just sitting right in front of me. Yeah. You still need to apply a human element because you're emailing and prospecting to humans. You still got to apply that element, whether you're doing it, you're have a sales assistant doing it.

Someone's got to spend that time to really, like what you said was so important there. You have to connect the personalization to the value prop. It can't be something completely unrelated to what it is that you're trying to help them with. The better it's connected, the more likely it's going to work. Yeah, absolutely. So let's, let's talk about video. Like, what do you see? Cause I see the same thing on video. I'm seeing people abuse video, like figured and those types of things where, look, like what you sent me, where it was, you know, Hey John, Hey John, what's going on, man? Blah, blah, blah. Love to be on that type of thing. But you're seeing the same thing that people do. They put the whiteboard up there that insert name here.

And then when you click on it, it's like, hi, thanks so much for opening up my email. I really appreciate, you know, you know, we work with companies and it's, and it, and it seems personalized, but they, it's, it's definitely something that they've sent out to 50 other people. So how are you currently using, how are you optimizing video in your cadences, if you will? Um, so that, so that it is personalized and you are seeing the success that you're seeing. So how are you leveraging video right now with your team? So what is really important with personalization and anything when you're prospecting is to not be fake. So don't pretend like you, because like a lot of people will say, Hey, I created this personalized video for you.

And then you click on it. And it's exactly the example that you gave. It's very disingenuine. And the thing that I think is just important just to step back a little bit with prospecting in general is to be very upfront about who you are and what you want. And don't try to fake anything, because if you do the people that respond to that, in my experience, they haven't been very good clients. The people that you really want to work with to have their shit together are going to respond really well if you do it the right way. So the bottom line with video is you can use it. We've been using it in two different ways. And I would suggest a third as well. You can use a templated video, but don't make it the first thing that you send to the person.

It could be a piece of content that you had, and it could be you using the video and then doing like quick screen share of like the content. Don't make that the first thing you send though. The primary way that we've been doing it is in two ways. So we either look at, so with prospecting, I think one of the most underrated things is taking like an 80-20 approach to it and saying, hey, I'm going to spend the most amount of effort, the extra effort on people that are actually most receptive to what I'm doing. And the way that you find that out is, hey, if I sent 100 emails last week, 50 people open them, like tools like Nova, Sales Loft, they all will tell you, like you can create an engagement score.

So what we do is we prioritize based on, we don't always use click tracking. It depends on if we're emailing a lot of companies that use Outlook, we try not to use click tracking because Outlook's, their filters are crazy. But you at least know how many times someone's opened an email. And a lot of times, I mean, because people are forwarding around, we'll see people open up emails 5, 10, 15 times in a week because they've been forwarding it around. I'm going to send a video to those people. It's worth me spending an extra minute or two. So the way the cadence might work is something where you're sending that introductory email. And it's got the personalization, that first three sentences in it.

It's got your value prop and why you're reaching out. And then a quick call to action, like, hey, I created this piece of content, or we have this white paper that's going to help you accomplish this. So they might get that on a Tuesday. And then a Thursday email, it'll be a quick follow-up call. Hey, what'd you think of the white paper? What'd you think of the case study, et cetera? So we're not really asking for a meeting necessarily really, really strong in those first couple emails. Email number three is going to be that video. Oh, go ahead. No, I was going to say, it's like, I'm sure you follow Gary Vaynerchuk, right? You know, he's got that book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, where you kind of lay the foundation.

It's like, hey, check this out, check this out, check this out. And then you come with your hard right hook of the ask, right? So what's that third one you were talking about? So the third one, that's where we'll throw in the video. And the big thing is that, just to comment on what you said about Jab, Jab, Right Hook, for some reason, people think this doesn't apply when you're doing outbound. You still have to lead with value before you ask for something. And the value can't be something that it's not like really sticky that's going to help this person. So one quick thing I want to interject before I talk about the video is everything is so context dependent and everything right now is steering towards very high personalization.

And that's more than just those two sentences. It's also, not only am I reaching out to the right company, but we separate the personas in the company based on above the line versus below the line. So essentially what we're doing is we're segmenting VPs and C-level people because they're really revenue and profit and risk focused, reducing risk. And they think in terms of quarters, usually. The below the line people, the directors and managers, those are typically people that are more focused on the day-to-day. What they could have is they might not have the ultimate decision-making power, but they could have just as much impact on the decision. So if you're selling sales training, the sales manager is probably feeling the most pain and you'd be able to help them.

And I'm sure you found this in your business. Getting that person to champion what you're doing is really key. Those emails though, the verbiage is going to be not a lot different, but it's going to be, you're going to be more features and more helpful. And the content is going to be more how to that you share with below the line versus above the line, people are going to want to know like, dude, how is this going to help me hit my revenue targets? How is this going to help make our investors happy, et cetera? So when you're sending emails, just, just keep that in mind. So that email though, with video, that's where we'll insert into the cadence that video, it'll be very similar to the one type of email that I sent to you where this is like very personal.

It's like, like, Hey John, uh, was want to do something a little different here. Put a face to the email. The reason why I was reaching out is that I run a company called blissful prospecting. We do a lot of really cool stuff with prospecting. We're testing things out like video. I thought it'd be really valuable for your audience. I listened to your last episode on this. I thought this was really cool. Uh, want to know if you're accepting new guests, if not totally cool, but I'd reach out if nothing else, keep up the good work. Hope to talk to you soon. Something very short like that. So for me, it was podcast outreach. So I'm going to be very specific, like, and show you that, dude, I listened to your podcast, right?

I listened to an episode. Here's what I got from it. Um, and it could be completely different for if you're reaching out to a VP of sales somewhere. Hey, I checked out your LinkedIn profile. Oh, Hey, I really liked this blog post that you guys wrote on this, whatever that might be. So that's one way of doing video is waiting until you see who is most engaged and then prioritizing your extra effort on those people. Yeah. Uh, number two is I, I really believe that you should separate your prospecting based on like, who are the dream clients? Like these are the companies, like if you're, if you're running a company, like you might want to work with like the Googles of the world or the fortune 1000 companies, you might lead with video with those people, because you know, that especially a VP at a company like that is getting hit up a ton and to get their attention, you're going to have to do some extra stuff.

So again, everything's about prioritization. Don't treat every prospect the exact same way, because there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are not receptive at all to any, any sort of outbound cold outreach. And a quick pro tip too, is whenever someone says they're not interested or take me off your list, always say, Hey, cool. Um, share a resource with them that you think would be helpful, but ask them, is there anything I could have done to make this email more helpful? Do you have any feedback and people will actually respond to that? And they'll let you know, and you're going to get people, like I said, that say, I just am not responsive to this type of thing. Don't waste any extra time.

You know, if you're an SDR, especially, and it's such hard work to get these appointments, don't spend any extra time on people that are not even opening up your emails. Yeah, I think that's, that's key is, is I think the prioritization is key. Unfortunately, too many reps, they get their territory and they get whatever a thousand names in their territory based on very basic demographic information, industry size, number of employees, whatever. And then they just started one and they start hammering through and, you know, and then they recycle back through. And I think the, you know, one of the most important things that you can do as a rep, it's kind of like that old saying, and I forget who said it, but whatever, if I had, you know, four hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend three hours sharpening my ax type of scenario.

Abraham Lincoln, I think it was, or George Washington, one of the two. I've stopped actually quoting what it was, because I've been called out too many times, like, John, that's not who said that, like, whatever. So whoever said it, right. But the idea there is you front load, you know, everything with, you know, that ICP figuring out your, even your research. Like, so for me, as an example, when I'm putting together a cadence for a client and like, especially one of those logos, it's not, uh, I don't do research, find one thing, send one email and then schedule another activity three or four days later, and then try to figure out what else to say. I sit down and I go do all my research at the same time.

So I'll pick, I'll say, I want to go after blissful prospecting. I'm going to go on your, like, I'm going to spend 30 minutes, but instead of 30 minutes looking for and writing one email, I'm going to spend 30 minutes finding five, six, seven, eight things that I can reach out to you about, and then taking a step back and figuring out how am I going to tell my story? Like, what's my first touch, second touch, third touch, fourth touch, what content am I going to share? And then putting that all together into a system to then let it run as opposed to template emails crammed in press play or personalization, every single one, you know, one at a time. But yep, I love that. Let me ask you, one of the things I'm struggling with how to do at scale, I know how to do it when that scenario, when I do that scenario I painted, which was, I want to go after you specifically, you're a logo I want to go after, I'm sitting down, like for me, I spend the first, I have a two hour recurring on my meeting on my calendar, the first business day of every month, where I pick five accounts, and I go deep on them.

And I come up with a six, seven, eight touch campaign to each one of them. And I just let that roll. So I got, you know, five accounts once a month. And that's, for me personally, what I do for my prospecting. And then, and that makes it a little, that makes it easy for me to share content, to know how to retweet and what, you know, and go on your LinkedIn and make a comment. So there's impressions there. So you see me all over the place, right? One of the things though, that I find that sales reps don't do a great job at is the whole going back to Gary V's jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? The jabs, the adding value, right? I've seen a lot of fake value, fake value attempts, where it's, hey, John, here's a case study.

Hey, John, here's a white paper. And there's no, and you said the word earlier that I've stole from Gary V too, which is context, right? There's no context around that content that says, hey, this is why, John, I think you specifically should read this, right? And the easy way is, hey, John, like you said, I listened to your podcast recently, and I noticed where you were talking about something about this. I wanted to share this piece of content with you that is directly relevant to what you just said there, because I thought it might add some value based on what you were talking about there, right? That to me is, holy shit, game changer. I look at that rep a different way, especially if that piece of content is directly relevant, right?

But that's hard to find at scale. So how are you sharing content and doing the jabs out there to add value to a certain degree, any type of scale that isn't like the eye rolling, yeah, this kid is trying to send me some quote unquote value so I pay attention to him. Because I'm starting to see that. People who do that to me, I've gotten to the point where I'm rolling my eyes. It's like, look, I appreciate what you're trying to do there, but that piece of content was so off base as far as what I give a shit about. And by the way, I'm not going to read a 39 page ebook that you send me, you know, or like a book, like I'm going to tell everybody out there who's listening to my podcast, stop fucking sending me books.

I don't fucking read books, okay? Like the best fucking book on the planet, I'm not going to read it. I'm a blog post guy. I'm a snippet guy. I can't stand books. But yet I get books all the fucking time from reps saying, hey, and I'm like, God, so what are your thoughts on how to share content that's relevant, that will add value as opposed to eye roll value? This is such a great topic. I'm glad you brought this up. I think you have to step back and think about like one of the big mistakes that we can make with prospecting is to not put ourselves in the prospect's shoe. So when you look at the email cadence, don't look at it, I'm a salesperson, your only goal is to set up a meeting with this person.

The prospect has a bunch of other shit they're dealing with that day and your email needs to grab their attention right away. So when you look at it through that lens, it's kind of obvious when you think about if I'm sending a 40 page ebook to this person, are they going to fucking drop everything that they're doing right now to read that ebook? Like, it's just not going to happen. So the way that you can do this, again, I think you have to separate out the, like the type of prospecting you're doing. You want to work with companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn, who you already have, but like companies like that. So it's worth it doing the way you're doing it is awesome. Like that is very hard to scale.

Like if you have a team of talented people to do that, you know, to kind of help you with that, that's the way to do it. For the rest of the companies that are maybe a little bit more mid-market, one of the things that you can do that we started implementing that, you know, cause my background is primarily selling business to consumer at the beginning of my career in the last half of my career, the last five or six years has been selling B2B. Yeah. You did the whole thing in college, didn't you? Like painting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they had excellent sales training actually there. Um, but what, what we didn't learn because it doesn't apply in B2C is the buyer's journey with a B2B company. The person you're talking to is not going to be the only one that has decision-making power or that is going to collaborate on this.

So what we've been really implementing with our clients is just basic buyer's journey stuff and understanding, you know, awareness and consideration and interest. Like what, what does it take to create that awareness and where you can really tie this stuff in with a prospect is through empathy. And this is something that I think is actually really hard for harder for men than it is for women. And I put myself into that because when I, I grew up, I had a very, yeah, I grew up in a 5,000 person town in Brookings, Oregon, very blue collar. My dad, uh, mill worker, you know, it was very much, you don't talk about your feelings and, and, and what that made me do is kind of suppress that stuff and not put myself in the shoes of someone else and let them empathize with me.

So where that comes out in an email though, is I'll give you an example. We work with a client that sells these really high end cloud security services for tech companies, primarily SAS. So in SAS, what you have, if you do something in healthcare, for example, you have to deal with HIPAA. So the data that you collect, there's a lot of regulatory requirements and these SAS companies, a lot of them don't do that in house. And a lot of times if they want to work with a big fortune 1000 company, they have to get third party verification from someone outside their company that says, Hey, your stuff's secure. So when we reach out to people at their company for our client, we're reaching out to chief technology officers and VPs of, uh, engineering and that sort of thing.

So a way that this could come out is, Hey, I know that you're super busy, like meeting deadlines. You probably want to spend the most amount of time that you can like working on your product. So security might be one of those things that you just push off to the side and don't really want to deal with. That's why we help companies with this. And we've worked with this company and this company. And what we can help you do is that next time, you know, a third party verification is required from when your clients or one of your partners is asking for a compliance review. That's where we might be able to help you. And this is not a good fit for everyone, but want to reach out because you're very similar to the type of clients you work with.

Are you interested in chatting? That's the type of context that you would need, um, for content. It could be, Hey, I know that, you know, for the reasons that I just talked about that, that empathy, that this is a challenge for you. Like, here's some things that you might be able to implement with your team really quickly. I wrote up a really short blog post on it that you can read in a minute. You know, um, that's where the empathy needs to come in and really give context. You can do that at scale. Now that's not going to be as effective. If you're reaching out to a C level at Salesforce, you're going to be need to be much more personalized than that. But if you're reaching out to a company that's, you know, a couple thousand employees, like those people are not quite as busy and getting pestered as much as a fortune 1000 company.

Yeah, no, I think the empathy piece is, is, is so critical. I mean, you, you think about when, you know, it's funny, Morgan, so my, I hired this kid. I don't know if you know Morgan Ingram, but, um, hired him about a year and a half ago and, you know, SDR, SDR manager, now he's doing full cycle sales and all that stuff. And when we first started, you know, we, we worked on messaging for cadences and those types of things. And he was, and he's very like, you know, sales loft driven, like he lives and breathes in sales loft, lives and breathes in cadences. Right. Which is great from an efficiency standpoint, but, you know, but, but the, and the results were okay. When he was, when he first started, you know, first couple of months, whatever we were doing okay.

But he came to me and he goes, uh, you know, well, six months in, he goes, Hey John, uh, I'm not getting the results that I, that I would expect to get, you know, based on what we put together here, you know, what we got, you know, what's going on here, you know, that type of thing. And I said to him, I said, Morgan, you know, your, your results aren't really going to change all that much until something, until one thing happens. And he's like, what? And I said, until you start giving a shit. And he was like, and he was like, excuse me. I go, look, I know you give a shit about your job. I see the hours you put in. I know you're working your ass off. I know you genuinely care and are passionate about what we do.

But until you start really genuinely giving a shit about the client, the results aren't going to change, you know, in the sense that like that. And I think that was the, the, the, I want to say aha moment for me, but when I first started, uh, when I was doing before, you know, I was doing this started a company 25 years old and it was a pure numbers game for me. It was, I'm up with an elevator pitch, make $400 a week, send out a thousand emails, go to as many events as possible, tell my story as many times as I possibly can. And basically just trip over opportunities. You know what I mean? It was, it was really a timing thing. Like my pitch almost didn't matter. We did. We sold outsourced it services.

And if I was calling enough times, I would eventually trip over somebody whose network was on fire or who just had a, you know, server crash or something like that. I'd come in, you know, yay. Then all of a sudden I took this training. It was Basham and it was a, Hey, do your research. Right? So what I started doing was I started just connecting the dots. Oh, you open up a new office. Here's my value proposition for opening up new offices. Oh, you went through a merger and acquisition. Here's my, and look, my results went from here to here. No question about it. They, they definitely improved with, with just literally connecting the dots there. But then when they, then when they went from here to here is when I stopped and I had enough experience doing this to know really where we made a difference.

You know what I mean? Like looking at like, because I had sold enough accounts, I had seen enough of the results that we drove for our customers, like genuinely saw them. And that's when I started looking at clients with a whole new lens to say, holy shit. Like, I know we can help there. Well, I don't know if we can help them, but I know we've helped other companies that that thing has happened to, or are at that stage of their business. And then I would write a really, truly genuine, empathetic email to them saying, Hey, look, you know, and I, and I caution people on using the word help, right? Don't ever tell somebody you can help them. Right. You don't know that yet now middle of the sales process.

You can help me. You know, that's why I want to figure that out. But, but what you can say to get around that, because it's like you come after me, Jason, you say, John, I can help you do this. I'm automatically on defense. Like who the fuck are you? Like, you don't know me yet. Right. So what you can say to get around that is we've helped other people like you. Yep. Right. And that's, and let me share with you some examples there. So I think that's, and that's where it kind of, it was, I think to a certain degree, it takes a certain amount of just general business experience, especially in what you sell, because now Morgan's results are great because he's done enough of these trainings and he's seen the results, like he's gotten the feedback from the clients that have said, Oh my God, Morgan, that was game changing.

Like, look at, like, check out this email. I got a response back. Oh my God, I got into this company. And so he's seen the genuine impact that the training has had. And so now it's easy for him to transfer that enthusiasm over to somebody based on their situation. Right. Yep. I think so to your point of empathy and just one more point, you know, as I think about this, cause I, there's a cautionary tale out there for everybody on when somebody isn't responding to your email, don't be a dick because my, because most people like we get mad. So this goes to your point of empathy. Like we send these emails out to people and if they don't respond to us, all of a sudden we're starting to get an order, right?

Like what the hell? Those types of things, especially if somebody is engaged with us in some way, shape or form and said, yeah, send me information or whatever. And then they ghost us. All I got to say is before you send that, what the fuck email put on top of it. Hey, I hope everything's okay. I haven't heard back from you in a little while. I hope everything's okay because I don't know about you, man. Have you ever gotten like been pissed off at somebody sent that basically FU email and found out they were in the hospital for the past two weeks or the kid was sick or something like that. Is that happening yet? Uh, not quite that extreme, but like major shit was going on in their business. It was way more important than talking to me.

Absolutely. And that's the point, right? So have some empathy be like, look, I hope everything's okay, but you had said earlier of these things, so can we reconnect here or whatever it is? So, um, cause without that empathy, then, then we get replaced, right? Then technology and AI, to your point earlier, empathy is what we will still have as the power over the machines to continue to make connections with humans. And until robots start buying, you know what I mean? Robots buy from robots. Okay. People still buy from people. And I believe that to this day. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I love everything that you shared in, in one thing that you could do if you're an SDR or training SDRs is have them go through those buyer persona exercises together and share those things.

Like the three areas that we focus on getting from our clients, cause we don't know their industries as well as they do. Right. So that's the most challenging part of running a prospecting business, by the way, is we have to learn about new businesses and industries, but goals, fears, and obstacles. So what are those prospects that they talk to you? Like, what are they trying to accomplish that's related to your service? So if you're selling, you know, outsourced software development, which some of our clients sell, like, what are they trying to accomplish? What are their fears? What are their challenges? And you work that into the email copy. And another thing is if you're working in a big company and you're the SDR and you just hand it off to an account executive, and then you don't see what happens after that.

If your company is not already doing this, you've got to spend some time talking to account managers and people actually fulfilling the product or delivering or fulfilling the service, excuse me, or delivering the product and ask them those things that you figured out, right? It's like, what are the results that we create? And most importantly, what is the language that the prospects and the customers actually use when they talk about those things? Because you have to use their language. One of the worst things that I get, I get so much of them in LinkedIn is people that are like, their emails are filled with a ton of jargon. And I'm a marketing sales guy. I know what the jargon is. It still turns me off.

Even when I know what the jargon and the abbreviations and all this other stuff mean, it's just be a human and empathize with the person. Yeah, I think it's funny because I wish every company was able to do this. But the few companies that I've started, anytime a new hire has come on board, I give them a blank org chart. So here's something that people can do out there, especially smaller businesses or small divisions of bigger companies. I gave them a blank org chart with titles. And I said, I want you to go find these people and I want you to interview them. I want you to basically treat it like a prospecting call. You have to basically find out who these people are. You have to do some homework on them.

You have to earn the right to get time on their calendar. And then you have to run a quote unquote meeting to understand why they work here, what's so special, what do they do, those type of things. And then write a book report for me of basically a one pager that says, this is what I learned about why people work at this company and why they love working at this company. So that's side one. The other side is now here's a list of customers that I want you to go grab lunch with, get a call with or whatever it is and ask them, hey, why do you still work with this company? What were you doing before our solution? What are you doing after our solution? What are the main pain points it addresses for somebody like you specifically?

So now with the internal, I understand why people work here. I'm passionate for what I do and why customers buy from us. That sharpening the ax before, right, that month that I give those kids to do that, all of a sudden, as soon as they hit the phones, they got stories to tell, they got passion, they got, you know what I mean? They're fired up to actually make those calls and it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, it's allowing you to actually put yourself in the shoes of someone else. It's no different than how you feel when you watch a really great TV show or a really great movie and you're like, they just have this down. I felt that emotion before. You have to show the prospect that you understand what they're going through.

And honestly, it doesn't take a lot, but this stuff is, it's not simple. It does take a lot of work to actually do this, but it's a pretty straightforward, it's pretty straightforward if you put in the work. I think that most people aren't thinking about the fact that, you know, beyond your quota, what you got to do and reaching out to this person, like actually think about, I am sending this to another person. Who is that person? And doing that exercise and, and it could be as simple sometimes as before you send an email to someone like, look at their LinkedIn profile, look at their picture, this guy, Jeffrey, who's Jeffrey, what's he going through right now? You know, I do that with sales calls too.

Every time I make, I mean, right now I have your profile up against, I mean, thankfully we're, we're, you know, video wise, we're seeing each other here, but every single call that I make to somebody, I always have their LinkedIn profile up there. So I'm looking at them as a person, I'm talking to them, even if it's static, I'm talking to them and it helps, it really helps me make the connection and then make the connection with me too. Yep. Love it. One more piece of advice that I'm looking for, for the audience here. What do you tell the kid who's out there who listens to this podcast is like, I get it. I think, you know, I really want to be empathetic. I want to spend the time, but my boss is telling me I got to make a hundred dials a day.

Like outside of quitting that job and going, finding another one, what do you tell the kid that understands that, that wants to move in the quality of the empathetic world, but is being beaten over the head saying, you have to make a hundred dials. You have to send out 150 emails a day. How do you find, you know, what do you do? This is a tough one. So what your boss cares about is you hitting your quota. So at the end of the day, it's whatever's going to hit the quota. So what I've always told people and what I've done in the past in scenarios like this is it's no different than starting a side hustle. When you have a full-time job, it's going to be a little bit of extra work for you at first, and it's going to look like this.

And then you can get the workload down as soon as you start showing results. So what I would suggest is, you know, if you're working eight hours a day at your job Monday through Friday, spend an hour or two outside of that, doing some of this research and actually put together a test that you could show your boss and say, Hey, actually what I did. So all the new work that, and that I've been closing here, the 20% of my effort that I spent actually segmenting this, doing the messaging, showing the empathy, those clients that I got from this, or those new users for our software, like they came from me doing this and you might be the person that actually gets to teach other people that leads to promotions and all that other stuff.

But bottom line is it's going to suck at first and you're going to have to make the calls. But if you could spend a little bit of extra time doing the other stuff and most importantly document it and show it, it's like an, it's like a personal case study essentially at that point. I've had to do this a lot actually in my career, um, both from a sales standpoint and just a marketing standpoint where the company I was working for in college, college works painting, didn't have a marketing department before I came there, became their marketing directors. It's like $35 million company with no marketing department. I had a really good feeling that, Hey, I don't want to go about the way that you're telling me to, cause I, my boss was one of the partners at the company, but I had to actually do that without telling him and show him a little test and be like, Hey, here's the data.

And all they care about is, Hey, are you hitting your numbers? That's, that's all your boss cares about it ethically, obviously, but that's really all they care about at the end of the day. Yeah. I, and I can't, again, for everybody out there listening, the most successful reps I've ever come across are the ones who do the extra stuff that they're not being asked of in addition to what they're being asked to, right? It's the same thing, like the side hustle, make your side hustle, your existing job, but a component of your existing job to get better. It, it really, I will say, you know, there's a lot of shit that millennials take these days about, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's a lot, a lot of jealousy from, you know, my generation and above, because it's a lot easier than it was type of scenario in some cases.

But the one thing I am a little bit concerned of these days is the work ethic component of what's going on right now, because I used to, you know, so I do, usually I'll do an 8.30 to 4.30, right? That's my training. I'll do 8.30 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon. And then 4.30 to 5 is usually, you know, reps asking questions, wrapping up. And then usually from 5 to 6 or 5 to 5.30, I kind of light up my laptop. I check my emails right before I head off to the airport to the next one, right? And when I leave offices at 5.30 in the afternoon these days, they're fucking ghost towns, like ghost towns. And it's like, and it really disheartens me to walk around a sales org that isn't crushing it.

You know what I mean? Like, it isn't just making it rain or whatever. And by 5.30 in the afternoon, everybody's out at happy hour doing their thing. Like, this is where I do, you know, I think Gary's a little bit extreme with his, you know, fuck your 20s, like, you know, work 20 hours a day. I mean, I did it, but, but I, I, I do think you do have to have a little bit of fun. You know what I mean? Work hard, play hard type of stuff. But, you know, the side hustle stuff and applying it to your business and spending your weekend doing some research on some accounts, spending, you know, you know, Thursday night, instead of watching the lineup or whatever it is, actually jumping on and kind of poking around some websites and being, you know, connecting with people and those types of things.

Like that stuff, the most successful sales reps I've ever come across in my life are the ones that do that. The lead, the average or not successful ones are the ones that just kind of show up and do their job. Yeah. And what I don't fucking understand is like why you're not so like lit up about what you're doing. Right. Because I, I, I used to do that. I would work the 80, 90, a hundred hour weeks at times. And I don't, I think that's a bit extreme. Like you're saying, you don't need to put in that much, but a 50, 60 hour work week in your twenties, what the fuck else are you doing? You know, like right now, what people don't like, I'm married now, I don't have kids yet, but dude, when you get married and you have a family, you have actual real responsibility, it's going to be much harder to actually put in that time.

And for me, I don't, I don't want to be, I'm 29. I don't want to be in my thirties having to grind out 60 hour work weeks. Um, and the reason why I don't have to do that right now is that from 18 to like 24, 25, I was hustling, you know, like I wasn't just going to college and saying, Oh, you know, I'll work 10 hours a week at Starbucks. No, I'm working 30, 40 hours a week. I worked every weekend in college. That's what we did. We had to drive home to where we're running our house painting business. And then I knocked on doors and did estimates with homeowners. So if you don't have that fire under your ass, you got to think about why am I doing this? And it's in, find out it's very, pretty simple.

I don't want to get like motivational, like preachy, but find out your, why, why are you doing this? If it's money, that's cool. If it's just, you need to make a shit ton of money to get to your next job or to start a side hustle or whatever, find something to get jacked up about and like find a way to connect what you're doing right now to something in the future. And if you're doing sales and you're passionate about sales, what you're doing right now as a salesperson, developing those skills, that's going to help you later on. The stuff that I did at 18 years old going door to door, although I don't go door to door technically right now, that stuff laid such a great foundation for what we do now.

I'm not afraid of rejection. I know how to start a relationship in 30 seconds with someone at their door and get them to pay me five or $6,000 to paint their house. You know what I mean? Like those are all stuff that are going to be really helpful for you in the future. And if you can't see that right now, cause it doesn't exist, just know that these skills are going to transfer. And do you want to be grinding it out in your thirties and forties, or do you want to get that out of the way and like get your 10,000 hours into your twenties? Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I will tell you as a 43 year old though, the grind never stops. Depending, like I'm still grinding. I mean, I put in that work that makes this grind easier and makes me put, puts me in a position to do what I want to do.

But man, it stops even, even, good luck, good luck, stop slowing down, but awesome, man. Well, we gotta, we gotta roll things up here, but, um, appreciate the conversation here, Jason. And what, um, any, any last thoughts or any last thoughts and also tell the audience where they can find out a little bit more information about you and what you're doing over there at Blissful Prospecting. Definitely. Um, the best place to check us out is just on our website, blissfulprospecting.com. I highly recommend, uh, recommend, excuse me, checking out our newsletter. We don't do one of those like bullshit company updates, newsletters. Um, every other week or so, what I send out is I consume a lot of content.

So I listened to podcasts like yours, blog articles, et cetera. And I pack all of that down into like an email you can consume in like five or 10 minutes. And it's really like, here's a book review with the three things that I think you should take away from this book and start doing right now. Um, not just here's a link to the article, but here's the one thing I think that's going to be really important to tweak in your call to actions in the email. That's the type of newsletter it is. So I definitely, that's going to be the best taste of what we do. And then I love connecting with people on LinkedIn too. So just Jason Bay, blissful prospect. If you'll find me on LinkedIn, I try to do, I don't do them every week, but every other week or so I'll do a cold email breakdown.

So I'll take a screenshot of a cold email that I get, blur out the person's name and company, and just give feedback on the email. And that's where you can get like a really good, you know, sense of what you might be doing. That's not working and sort of how we might tweak it and make it better. Love it. Awesome, man. Well, great conversation. I appreciate it. Um, thanks for coming on and everybody go check out blissful prospecting, Jason, what he's doing over there and, uh, go make somebody smile today. Cause, uh, there's too much negativity out there. Uh, try to make somebody happy these days. All right. Thank you very much, Jason, everybody make it a great day. Cheers. Thanks so much for tuning in.

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