Increase Your Positive Outbound Replies by 236% with Collin Mitchell

Hey, y'all. I'm Tyler, and this is Outbound Sales Lift, where you can elevate your SDR team and transform your sales development efforts. Thanks so much for listening today. This is our first live broadcast of the show.

And if you're listening on a podcast player, please consider dropping us a rating really helps us get found. And so others can find this show just like you did today. So on today's episode, we're going to be covering how to increase your positive outbound replies by 236%. And I had the pleasure of being joined by Mr.

Colin Mitchell. Colin, how's it going? Man, I am glad to be here. I know we're going to have fun.

I love this topic. And yeah, to be the first live episode. I feel so privileged. We'll do it live.

We'll do it live, baby. So Colin is the chief evangelist at Humantic AI. And like I mentioned, we're going to be talking about how to really increase those positive outbound replies that you're getting. So Colin, 236%.

That seems, I mean, that's a crazy number. How do you increase by that percentage? And how do you get really these positive replies coming in with your outbound? Yeah.

I mean, outbound, as you know, Tyler is getting harder, right? For a lot of sales orgs, there's a lot of noise out there. You know, there's a lot of people that are having a hard time, even just getting in the inbox. Right.

And there's a few things that we've seen that can really make a big difference in a few different ways to, and 236 is average. We've seen even higher. Like we just ran a pilot where a team had almost a 300% lift in positive replies based on one simple thing, personalizing the message based on the person, right? So most people have sort of a baseline sequence that they're running, which is really typically based more on a persona, right?

This is our ICP, maybe here's their size, here's the problems that we think that they maybe have all that stuff is valuable but what isn't taken into consideration is the variations of different people that are recipients of that message and that's where you can really see a big lift is when you personalize to the person and so what i mean is like what does that particular person care about most what are their communication styles and preferences, and what things should you avoid mentioning that are sort of like hot buttons or landmines or traps to avoid.

So when you take all those things into consideration, you can personalize and you can do this at scale to the person rather than just sending your sort of baseline templated sequence. That's all written based on persona. Gotcha. Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like you think when we say personalization, when you're just personalizing to the persona, which I guess is a little bit more broad. That's not even really personalization. It sounds like you think.

Yeah. Well, people are viewing personalization as like, Hey, you went to this school. Hey, really enjoyed this LinkedIn post really enjoyed seeing you on, you know, the podcast with Tyler. Those are, you know, shows that you like did some work to research that person before sending them a message so that it doesn't necessarily feel like you just got jammed into a sequence and put on a list and clicked go.

So those help a little bit, but what isn't taken into consideration is like, is this a person that cares more about relationships? Is this a person that cares more about impact or ROI? So taking into consideration the things that matter most to these people and embedding that into the language and how you present, you know, your small value prop or your, you know, um, message there in the context to, to, you know, get some intrigue from, from the recipient. So let's talk a little bit then, like, let's get granular.

What do you see working then? Like if we're going to go specific, we're going to go to the person, we're not going to the persona. We're going hyper specific to the person, the things that you mentioned, Hey, you went to school here. Hey, I saw you on this.

Hey, I saw this online about your company. those are the things that come to mind, right? When a lot of people think personalization, it sounds like you think those and other things or like what are you seeing when you get granular as to like what type of personalization is working, what is not? How do you get 236% lift?

Because that seems astronomical, right? So what's the secret sauce there? Yeah, so the secret sauce is knowing your prospects and knowing what their personality type is, right? And knowing there's certain things like what your subject line should be based on their personality.

Should you say hi? Should you say hey? Should you put first name only? These are all small details that a lot of people think are meaningless.

But the problem is, is sellers are writing messages the way that they would respond to a message if they were receiving it. And the issue is that only works if you're sending a message to somebody that just maybe happens to have the same personality type as you. An example that I like to use a lot because I think it's one that makes a lot of people laugh is bullet points. A lot of times people love bullet points, but there's a good percentage of people that also hate them and it drives them nuts.

And so I know we're talking about top of funnel, but let's just say, let's say you have already a prospect engaged, right? And you send them a message, recap after discovery, right? You send bullet points because that's how you love receiving information. And they're a type that you shouldn't do that to.

Well, that's enough to stall your deal. That's enough to even kill your deal because if it sits in their inbox for two weeks, what do you think is going to happen? Right? So that's an example that I like to use, but also just knowing, you know, are they a dominant person, right?

If they're a dominant person, that means that they're very goal oriented. And you need to show them you know how what it is that you do can align with the goals that you know that they have And also relationships don matter as much to them Not that they don matter It just not high on the list for them in priority when they making business decisions Now there's other people where it's the exact opposite. Small talk, rapport building, showing that you know what school they go to, small pleasantries go a long way because they value that stuff.

So knowing this information about the people that you're sending it to matters a lot. And that's how you can see these significant lifts in positive replies when you know this information before you hit go on that sequence. Gotcha. I want to go back and double click on the bullet points because I'm clearly a bullet point guy.

And now I want to know why. So you've connected bullet points in messaging to personality type. And you're saying some folks love that. Others don't like it at all.

I guess I want to know more. Who does like bullet points? What personality types like it? what don't.

And, you know, I'd love to just dig into that a bit deeper. There's a few, you know, different types of people, right? There's people where it's like bullet points are going to be a winning way to communicate. And then there's going to be people where you really should avoid them.

And so when we're talking about personality, right, it's, it's not so black and white, right? We, there's between the models that we use at Humantic, there's 36 different possible variations of personality, right? So some people are going to be a hard, yes, you should use them. Others are going to be like, avoid them at all costs.

Um, and then there's going to be some in between where it's like, Hey, you, you could use it, but it's not necessarily like a recommended winning way, uh, to communicate with those people. I see. Okay. So it's not necessarily a hard and fast rule because we have so many, 36 is a lot.

Um, and I'm assuming some people are just very pro some very against some in the middle. And is that, it sounds like when you're, you also mentioned like, hi or first name or Hey, also kind of with this, with that personality would type would indicate whether or not which one of those you should use as well. Yeah. And also, so like length of message, right.

Um, for example, C type people are very detail oriented, right? So your messaging should be much more proper, much more, you know, uh, buttoned up, you know, a lot, you see a lot of people writing messages without proper grammar, right? Which in a lot of cases work fine because people can process it that way. Uh, the same way that you see sort of like LinkedIn post formatting and stuff like that.

Right. But if you send a message like that to the wrong person, they're going to think what the heck is wrong with you and they're never going to reply. So knowing as simple as just the intro, like that could throw it off or the subject line, the wrong intro using bullets or not, like you decrease your reply rate substantially to the wrong person. Maybe, maybe you never get a reply because of those little minor details.

Or being too vague, right? Which is very common, right? Because, uh, specific specifically in top a funnel, people are just trying to create some intrigue or some interest, right? And so sometimes the language that they use is a little bit mysterious to motivate people to want to learn more or tell me more about that, right?

I mean, at least people that are doing outbound right are trying to create intrigue. They're not asking for time as their call to action. They're not sending a calendar link in the message. And again, this does happen.

I'm talking about people that are even just doing well without bound today, right? They're not doing these things. In a lot of cases, the way that that messaging comes across is very vague. And with the wrong type of person, that's going to turn them off completely.

Yep, exactly. Well, I like that you think about creating intrigue and you bring up a good point there. You talk about CTAs too. Like, are there different personality types lend themselves?

Like, should I use the meeting link with X personality type? Because that's the type of, I'm the type of person that just wants to be able to book through the meeting link. Other people, if you do a direct CTA like that, that's going to really turn me off. Does that, does it carry on to the CTA?

Is it really like every single piece of the email, the personality type would indicate yes, no, or maybe? Yeah. So, so there's a lot of different ways that we can, we can break it down. And you know, one thing is yes, there's some people where you really need to formally state your ask, like be very direct.

Right. And, and that's, what's going to win them over. Um, but we get into a lot of nitty gritty details all the way from subject line to saluation. So, you know, skip higher, Hey, with some people, um, you know, or, or skipping greetings, right.

Some people like greetings, like, Hey, you know, hope everything's going well, like, which, which is a line that a lot of people, you know, hate and say never use, but with some people it's actually, uh, recommended Now, also another big one is emojis and gifts, right? A lot of people are trying to bring creativity into their messaging. And some people that are a little bit more informal are going to appreciate that, right? but others we would say that you recommended or we would say you avoid it completely okay and then we talked about bullet points a little bit but then like that closing line that that cta which is kind of what you asked we'll even give you like specific things that we can recommend like should you formally state your ask yes okay so you might want to try something like hey if you're available tomorrow could we discuss this or you know would you be open to chat you know learning more about this sometime next week.

So really formally stating your ask with certain types of people is highly recommended. Also tone, right? What should the tone of your words, do you need to come across confident or not? What your overall messaging should be focused on, right?

With some people, it needs to be more on output driven. On other types of people, it needs to be more like relationship focused because that's something that really matters to them a lot. A lot of sellers are taught that like rapport building and relationships. And there's people that sit on different sides of the fence of like, you know, we've got the people who think relationships matter.

That's the most important thing. And then we've got people to sit on the side of the fence where it's like, no, relationships don't matter. If you solve a problem and there's value, like they don't need to be friends with you. Who cares?

Right. I'm sure I don't know what side of the fence you sit on Tyler But the answer is they both wrong because it matters on who the person is It depends on the personality type right It sounds like okay there all these personality types. Obviously, Humantic, the tool, has some way of figuring out I'm personality type 32 and you're personality type eight. But how does that even happen?

How do you know what personality type I am. Yeah. I mean, do you want me to tell you? I mean, yeah, I'd like to know like, what's the, what's the way in which you determine which one of these I am?

Is it just based on my LinkedIn profile or what does it look like? Yeah. Yeah. So we scan the digital footprint in like 30 seconds or less and identify personality.

And so for you specifically, Tyler, you're, you're a DS type, right? DS. Yeah. And so the reason, um, you know, and there's not a lot of people that do this type of, you know, have this sort of technology available.

There's one other company that does it and they follow disc only. We use disc and ocean, which are also referred to as the big five. Um, and so that's why ocean and ocean. Yeah.

Um, and so they're also commonly referred to as the big five, right? So that's how we can get really, really granular and accurate, um, by using both of those, uh, personality models. And so for you specifically, you're a DS, right? So that means you, and if you're following DISC, like there's four quadrants, D, I, S, and C.

And what are those four? Just so, just to let the audience know, what are the four stand for in DISC? Yeah. So D is like a dominant type.

I is influencer. S is steady. And then C is a calculative type. Okay.

And then there's all variations, right? You could be D, S, you could be, you know, D, I, and so on. Historically, I think when I've taken it, I've been like D, I kind of like stradding the line between D and I. Yeah.

Yeah. And the tests, people that have taken the tests, sometimes those can be a little bit tricky and the results can vary because you're bringing your own bias into answering those questions. You're answering the question like what you want to be perceived as, maybe not the actual truth. Exactly.

I've always thought that when you're taking those personality tests, is this really what I am? Or I don't know. They try to ask you things in different ways inside of like, hey, am I still getting the same answer with this question? And some of them can even feel a little bit tricky, right?

Oh, it does. I feel like you always get caught in the middle. Well, maybe I'm that, but maybe I'm that. I don't know.

Yeah. And then if you don't like the results, you take it again, right? Oh, yeah. I don't want to be a D.

I'm an I. I'll take this thing until I make it. I'm done. I'm an I.

Yeah. Yeah. And now if you like, let's say you sell into a particular title of people, right? Like, let's say you sell SaaS and you sell sales software into sales leaders.

You're going to see a lot of consistency around the types that you see. Lots of sales leaders are high D types. But then it gets more granular. They can be a DI, they can be a DS.

And then sometimes you even get, you know, an odd ball in there that's something that you're like, really? You know, don't see a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, it is. And these, you know, we're talking mostly about outbound messaging, but I've even seen this stuff work really well, even like cold calling and prospecting.

So, you know, we see teams, you know, basically bucket their leads based on personality. That's so cool. Yeah, we ran some tests ourself as well. Where you're not necessarily changing the call script as much because that can be a little bit overwhelming.

But the goal of a cold call is to get into a conversation. And so once you get into a conversation with somebody based on whatever your script is and stuff like that, how you frame that conversation, the tone in which you get into that conversation can be different based on the person's personality. 100%. So you mentioned DS, the S stands for something else, right?

We went through the disc scale. The S is that ocean scale. There's a second layer to this that gets it more granular almost. Yeah.

So it actually rates you, uh, you know, out of one out of 10 in each quadrant. Okay. Right. And then your, your personality is going to be a variation of the two quadrants that you score the highest on.

Right. So, um, but then there's other factors taken in there. Like, you know, you could score, you know, high on two and then the third one could be, you know, fairly high, but not as high. So there's there's a lot, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds about how this stuff works.

The recommendations are based on, you know, the entire score of the combination of both personality models. Got it. That makes sense. So I can hear some SDRs and SDR leaders out there saying, well, our prospects don't have a digital footprint.

So our typical buyer doesn't. So you could spit out a DS to me, but what did you base that off of? Because I've been to their website and their LinkedIn or whatever online, and there's not much there. So does there have to be data in order for this to be accurate?

or can it be accurate with limited amounts of data? Yeah, so a couple of things there, which is a great question, by the way. Yeah, some ICPs are gonna be a little trickier, right? However, we resolve from LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.

So even if we have email, we can resolve from there. Now, we resolve at a slightly lower resolution percentage than like say LinkedIn or Twitter with email, but we're also gonna give like a confidence score, right? Like, Hey, with you, Tyler, we are a hundred percent confident you're a DS, right? So it was a hundred percent with my score because you're very active.

My digital footprint is active, right? Yeah. Your digital footprint is big. It goes down based on the activity level almost online.

Based on the amount of data that we have to come to that conclusion. So, you know, if you see that, you know, it's a 60, 70% confidence level, you know, That's usually not enough to say definitively, I know this is the type, but it's probably close enough. Generally speaking, 8 to 9 times out of 10, we're going to be 90% plus confident in the score that we're giving based on that person. Now, there's going to be some particular ICPs that are a little bit trickier, but also it just depends.

because just because they not posting as much as Tyler doesn mean that they don have a digital footprint that you you know they could have a digital footprint that you not aware of Right right Yeah that makes a lot of sense So it sounds like obviously using a tool like Humantic would make this easy, but let's say you don't have a tool like Humantic or that's something that, you know, your team can't afford. How can you implement some of these principles without a tool that makes it really easy to implement these principles?

Yeah. So I would say a good place to start is like, there's a wealth of knowledge online podcast blogs, people posting on social, um, that talk about disc selling, uh, generally. Right. And, you know, disc selling is not some new novel, you know, concept.

Um, it's just that there's never really been great technology to enable sellers to be able to pull that off. So people have, you know, mostly relied on reading people, right? So, you know, based on your body language, your tone, the things that you say, I have to then process that and start to figure out what I think that you maybe might be. You know, if you're practicing it quite regularly, then you can get good at it.

A good place to start is really knowing yourself first. Like, what is my type? What are the things that I tend to care most about? What are the things that drive me nuts?

you know, how, what things come into play, um, that would drive me to reply to a email if somebody was prospecting to me. So, so knowing yourself first is a really good place to start. And then just, you know, we have a ton of resources. There's tons of resources out there about disc.

I would say the big place to start where a lot of people can just like start to really take a bite out of this is knowing what things to avoid with each type. Right. And so going back to a couple examples, you know, just those four. And when you say about each type con, you just mean you're just simplifying it down to this, not the 36 types, but yeah, or yeah, you don't need to know every, you know, all 36 types and variations.

Right. Cause that's just a ton of things to keep up with. Oh no. What, which one is he, you know, versus four is a little bit more manageable.

Yeah. We, we have a ton of resources on this stuff where we have like, Hey, reasons that these particular prospects might be tough, you know, what the winning strategy and magic lever traps to avoid landmines, things like that. So I would say the first thing to do is like really know yourself, um, you know, get familiar with some of the resources that are available out there, whether it's from, from Humantic or any, any other, you know, um, places, Google like disc disc selling.

Yeah. Disc selling. Yeah. Is that the name that it's put on or personality type selling or something like that?

Yeah. Disc selling is, is a, you know, sales methodology that a lot of sales organizations, you know, use. Um, but typically, you know, they're, they're having, you know, disc trainers coming in and enable the team and it's just, it's part of their culture. So, you know, after you kind of get a good sense of your own personal type, whether it's, whether you run your profile profile in Humantic, whether you, um, you know, take one of those tests, you know, maybe once or twice or a couple of times to feel, feel happy with your results.

Whatever the case is, knowing yourself first is a really good place to start. And then just starting to understand what things you should avoid, what things you should avoid is a really, really good place to start. Because you'll start to see certain people and, you know, language that they use. And, and, and another great example that I like is like, you hop on a zoom call and, you know, if you're with a D person, you know, skip the pleasantries, like, just get right into it.

Um, okay. And now the opposite there is, is if you're with an eye type, you know, small talk relationship building. And the funny thing is, is those things are really important to them. So sellers tend to default to whatever they are because they, they just, that's what they think is a winning strategy.

And so the funny thing is you get on with an eye type and you ask them how they've been, how their weekend was and whatever the case is. And you just see them like light up like a Christmas tree. And you're like, wow, this stuff is actually really powerful. And, and if you're not, you know, a high I or, you know, score high in that particular quadrant as a seller, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable for you because from your perspective with your bias, you're going to think, man, if I was on the other side of the table, that would drive me nuts.

Like, let's just get to the conversation. Let's get into it. But you could almost listen for that, right? I mean, you could prompt with a question initially And then based off of that answer, that's probably a signal.

Oh, this person's leaning D, this person's leaning I. And then I guess with an S and a C, I mean, I don't know, you might hear it. You might hear different things, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So like with S types, you know, you, you, you really don't want to be pushy. They're just typically slower paced people. So with them, if you're, you know, really aggressive or pushy or try to create some false fake urgency, you know, discounts to close it, like that stuff's just going to drive them away, you know?

And so, and like what I, with a C type, you know, I said, they're very detail oriented, right? So like really get, you know, telling them a little bit more about how the sausage is made, um, is, is recommended. And if you're the type that doesn't care how the sausage is made, just care how it tastes, that's going to feel weird for you. But, uh, with them, it's, you know, going to be the way to win them over.

A hundred percent. Colin, any parting words of advice for someone just trying to implement some of these, this dis-selling methodology? Yeah, I think, you know, if you're curious about this sort of stuff and you're wondering, how do I get started? Knowing yourself first, like I said, is a good place to start.

Knowing some of these things to avoid, really just starting to put it into practice. because like we said, we've ran tons of pilots. We have teams that have had tons of success and we've seen anywhere from range from two to 300% increase in positive reply for cold outbound, which everybody knows is extremely hard right now. And so think about whatever that means for you.

How many more meetings would you book if that was the case? How much more pipeline would you generate? And so on. Well, Colin, thanks so much for the great conversation today.

You can find Colin on LinkedIn and we'll link to his LinkedIn profile and the Humantic website in our show notes. Those are gonna be at our website at thesaleslift.com. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Outbound Sales Lift.

Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to check out next week's episode filled with more great ideas on transforming your sales development efforts. For those listening in live, thanks so much for joining. And remember, no sales starts until you book that meeting.