Build Cadences That Convert: AI-Assisted Sequencing for Today's Buyer

Speaker A: Welcome to the daily sales show hosted by SellBetter. So, today we're talking about building cadences that convert sequences, cadences, whatever you want to call them. Um, I'm super excited to have Meg Houston here. Um, I just realized this, uh, not too long ago, but she's been with ZoomInfo for, like, eight years, maybe more. Meg, I just looked at your LinkedIn, but you've got a ton of experience on the sales development side of things. Uh, you obviously work for ZoomInfo, which is a leader in this space when it comes to list building and intent and all that sort of stuff that goes with sales development. So I'm really interested to hear your perspective, um, not only, like, what's working for SDRs now, but how that's changed and how you kind of see things evolving. So we're going to talk about all things, sequences, email list building, cold calling, LinkedIn, uh, outreach, etc. Uh, but, Meg, welcome to the show. If you want to just give a quick, quick about yourself before we jump in.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I have been with Zoom Info for, like Jen said, a long time. I've actually worked for ZoomInfo since I was 19. I am a college dropout. I, um, will say it proudly for the rest of my life. But, uh, I've had a couple of different roles at ZoomInfo. I started on the research end of things, so one of the people that was actually building out companies and contact information and making sure that, you know, all of our customers have the best data possible. So I was doing that for a while, and then I was an SDR for a while, moved into leadership, and I've managed multiple teams here and worked with just a bunch of people over time, helping them develop their, their careers here. So it's been a long, long ride. I have been at, uh, the company since we had, like, what, 200 employees? Up to thousands. And, um, um, it's just been. It's been awesome. So I, I live and breathe Zoom Info. I live and breathe topics like this, you know, talking about the best ways to be able to prospect how the times are changing, uh, what to do now that works versus what people did a couple years ago that doesn't work anymore. You know what I mean? So it's always super valuable to be able to have environments like this where we can just share with people who are trying to figure out what the best way is that they can use their time to find as much success in the sales world as possible. So, super happy to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah, good stuff. Um, I'm also a college drop, but if you guys are a college dropout, put it in the chat. I'm curious to see who else is here with us, but we're going to throw up a quick result, uh, to the poll here. Uh, we've got about 40% of you are SDRs, BDRs, so appreciate you being on the show. This will definitely be helpful to you. 27% AES. And then we've got a, uh, good almost 30% frontline managers and leadership. Always appreciate you guys joining us joining the show. If you filled out other, let us know in the chat what your role is. Are you in marketing, founder or something else? Let us know in the chat. Always curious. Um, if you guys don't know me, my name is Jed Marley, founder of Practical Prospecting and a host and partner here at Sell Better. Um, if you guys don't know Sell better, also put a 1 in the chat if this is your first time joining a Sell Better show. Uh, we run the Daily Show. We've been doing it for years. There's hundreds of show recordings on the website. I always tell people one of the best places to get free content. If you go to the Cell Better website, go to on Demand shows. You type in whatever topic you're looking for. You'll see at least probably dozens or more than a dozen of uh, in depth previous uh, shows we've done on that topic with experts. Also check out our YouTube channel because there's tons of good content there and just really good free resources on the site as well. Um, want to say thank you to our longtime partner ZoomInfo for making these shows possible. We're going to be sharing some stuff on Zoom info later but um, for now they have a free resource for everybody in the chat. We're going to drop it right now. Um, check out that link. It's completely free. It's basically a complete guide on all things email sequences. Um, they've got a couple guides in there but they've done a lot of research and packaged it together. So it's very easy for you to understand what sequences are working now, how to use AI in that process. Um, so definitely check that out in the chat and what we're talking about today. Like, like I said, there's a bunch of things we're going to be covering. Multichannel sequences, AI, email. Um, uh, Meg's going to be sharing a screen and walking us through kind of an end to end process of how she sort of builds lists and comes up with the campaigns in the first place. But the big thing I want to say to everyone on this chat is I know email's getting harder. Uh, LinkedIn outreach is getting harder. Connect rates on the phones are dropping. We're all aware of this. And, um, doesn't mean outbound doesn't work. But what I encourage everybody in the chat to do is ask the tough questions. Let us know the questions you want to know the answer to throughout the whole show. We want to make this interactive for you, so we are here to help answer your questions. We have things to go through, but I want to make sure that this is super, um, impactful for you guys. Uh, so with that said, Meg, uh, I'm gonna stop sharing. And I, I think, uh, the first place that I want to jump into is. I know this is kind of an open end question, but, like, obviously you've been leading the SDR team at Zoom Info for a while. Um, what, what are, like, some of the big shifts that you guys have made, um, throughout that process? I know in my experience, you know, you could set. You could kind of blast out emails and still get a lot of replies without much personalization or having to worry about deliverability. That doesn't necessarily work as much anymore. Connect rates were higher. What are like, kind of the. The key shifts or key differences that you're doing now versus maybe like five years ago?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. All of those are valid, I think. For, for me, I always talk a lot about cold calling. I am a huge cold call advocate. I do not feel like cold calling is dead. Um, I feel like if you are just spraying and praying and not using things like AI and insights to be able to go after the right companies and like, I can totally see why you think cold calling is dead, but, um, I feel like the way we talk to people on the phones too, is very, very different. Where I can think back to when I was an SDR at, ah, ZoomInfo pre Covid, and I would hear all the conversations on the sales floor. When we were cold calling. A lot of our conversations just used to be more, um, not necessarily combative, but it would be a lot more salesy, where we'd be really trying to convince people and push people and challenge their thoughts, and it would feel like we were on the battlefield, but that felt normal. You know what I mean? Like, people would give us objections, we'd fight back and forth and we'd see, you know, who the best man is. Right. Be able to handle those objections. And I feel like in today's day and age, it's less of really trying to prove that you have the best product or service and more being able to show people value, show that we actually took the time to figure out what this company does, who they are, what they value, and really building trust with people. I feel like building trust is so important. How you're coming off within those first 30 seconds on the phone is everything. Um, and really not beating around the bush. I feel like people in today's day and age need you to get straight to the point. So even if we are emailing, I bet everyone remembers who's been, you know, an SDR who has been in sales for a long time. I feel like we would send more like multi paragraph emails for our value ads and we'd be like, oh, this is money, this is so good. And then now I feel like I have a problem telling my reps to send an email that's longer than a couple sentences because one, people are losing their attention. Um, and two people are like, I don't want to read this because we're on our phones all day long, we're looking at information all day long. And we all have the mentality of just get to the point. So it's very, very different if people are frustrated and feeling like they're not finding success today with the stuff they did five years ago. Like, yeah, it's because the stuff we did five years ago is just completely different. Everyone changed throughout, you know, Covid and people just, they, they think differently, you know. So it's, it's been a lot of change. For sure.

Speaker A: I agree. Yeah, I mean I saw a stat, it was like I can't remember how many billions, but some, a lot of billions more emails are being sent every year and year. And I think like nobody needs a stat to know that. But it's like everyone's inboxes are more flooded. Uh, there was a couple of quite. This is where I was going to go anyways. But there's two questions on it. I remember like when I first started cold calling as an SDR, I would get like 10 to 15 plus percent connect rates, uh, were not unheard of. Um, you could call, you know, five people get one pickup call Tempo, we'll get one pickup. But a lot of times I see it's like 5% or less pickup rates on the phones. And part of that's like the data quality that you have as well. But people ask like, um, one person has cold callers are more and more going to voicemails. Getting a callback is really poor how do we solve this? Another person asked, any luck getting around Apple's new call screening? I know you're a big proponent of voicemails, but just curious to hear your thoughts on that. Just acknowledging the reality the connect rates are lower. How do you still get those conversations and those callbacks?

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I would really challenge you guys. Like go, go look up some TikToks on the ways people are getting around the AI assistance. Like you'd be surprised what's out there. I've heard, not saying this is a best practice, but I've heard people on my teams, whenever they get to the AI call assistant they will like purposefully sound like their phone is going in and out. They'll be like, yeah, this is. And like it's crazy. It helps them get through or um, just being, being very, very straight to the point. I feel like a lot of people are reading a transcript, right? So they're not even listening to you on the phone when they're going through the AI assistant or whatever. And that's a, that's a great point with voicemail, right? When I am teaching my team to leave voicemails, I'm teaching them to leave it in the sense of thinking this person is probably going to read the transcript for your voicemail, they're not going to go and audibly listen to it. So if Your voicemail is 30 seconds long, giving your whole pitch and why you're calling and the value that you want to add, in my opinion that's probably the reason why people aren't calling you back as much. Right. Like a lot of the times we're pretty general. I'll be like, hey Jed, it's Megan with Zoom info. Um, give me a call back. I wanted to run something by you real quick, right? Like it's stuff like that that's very, very simple. Or for us, since we're selling, you know, sales related software would just be like, hey, had something that I think could potentially benefit your sales team. Give me a call back when you have the chance, right? Whatever, um, product or service that you're selling, just make it where we're like hey, we want to see if we can help you. I had something I wanted to run by you, get your opinion on real quick. If you're able to give call back when you have the chance, that'd be great. And people do give you a call back. Normally those conversations actually go pretty well for us just because if someone takes the time to give you a call back, they're probably open minded enough to hear what you have to say, and they're not going to hang up on you within the first 30 seconds. So. I advocate for voicemails a lot, to be honest with you. Um, I was told one time by one of our sales leaders, we were like, what do you wish that people would do more when they cold called you? And he was like, leave a voicemail and like, tell me who you are. Like, I want to know that it's an actual person that's calling me, not someone that's being like, I'm calling from debt collection, or I'm calling about the loan that you applied for. My mom talks about this all the time. Being like, why are there people calling me, talking about the loan? I never applied for a loan. This is so frustrating, you know, so they. They want to know that it's like an actual real person that wants to have a conversation with you. And I feel like a lot of the, you know, scam calls and whatever, they're. They're not necessarily leaving voicemails. Right? They don't want people to know who they are. Um, so I feel like that's great. You can also tell them, like, hey, I also shot you. I shot you. You know, a request on LinkedIn. Feel free to go, you know, look at a message there if you don't want to give me a call back. So, um, I think it's great. I think we should be using voicemails. It makes it more personal versus just continuing to give someone a call for a call cadence for a week and not leave a single voicemail. Like, I think that's weird, to be honest. You have some random number that starts calling you for a week and never keeps you a single piece of context. Like, think if that happened to you, I'd be like, who is. I don't think this person a callback. I don't even know who they are. If they, if they had something legitimate to say to me, like, they would let me know who they are. So that's my opinion on that.

Speaker A: No, I like it. I like the, um, the simple voicemail script. So it shows up as, like a quick transcript. You're like, you're giving them just enough, but also, like, being vague enough to where that it's intriguing to call you back. Um, yeah, I've always. I think, well, even me personally, like, I'm also the type of person that looks at all the transcripts. So I definitely agree with that. I think, um, one of the other things we were talking about was, uh, like, parallel or power dialers I know those have become a lot more popular in the last few years. Um, it sounds like you, you guys are big fans of Those. Are your SDRs always using them? Are you directing them to, like, maybe go into call blocks with, you know, power dialing and then sometimes doing one off dials or how do you approach that?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We started parallel dialing back in October, so it's pretty recent for us. And in the beginning, when I was tell. When I was teaching my reps how to do it, like, I, I used to be an sdr, right? So I, I normally teach people. This is what I used to do. And then we started with parallel dialogue. I was like, I have never used this before. This seems so overwhelming. Like the system is dialing three to five numbers at once. And I'm like, yeah, how am I supposed to know what to say to these people? Like, they pick up. And I'm like, uh, you have no time. You got to be ready to go. Um, but I do think the call block that you talked about is very important, just because I am a firm believer in slowly, thoroughly working an account as well. Right. Like, you're going in, you're calling, you have your account pulled up, you know what they do, you know what your value add's going to be, and then you just call through everyone at that company because you're going to have pretty much a similar pitch and you can just work that company in bulk. Right. I think that's great. I think that's super valuable. But when it comes to, say, going back to your connect rate, um, your connect rate stance, like, our connect rates are definitely harder to obtain. Ah, Than they ever have been. So the easiest way that I've seen to be able to get as many connects as possible is through parallel dialing, is through having some kind of, um, smart rotation in your dialer where you have those different area codes that different people are more likely to pick up. I think it's called smart presence for the one that we use. Um, but I think, think it's a great way to be able to start your day, especially where you need to get out of your fog. You need to force yourself to wake up, and nothing forces you to turn your brain on like having to go call a bunch of people all at once and not giving yourself time to overthink. But when you do parallel dial, I definitely think you need to have whatever list you're dialing through be niche enough to where you're not having to pivot too much with your talk track. Like you're gonna have maybe a specific industry that you're calling where, you know, going to be able to have the same value add. Or maybe you have a specific Persona that you're calling where you're like, I know that these people are pretty much going to have the same pain points and that's something that I can stick to versus having five different titles in there for all these people that do different things. But I have some people who parallel out all day long and they love it. And I have some people where they're like, that would drive me crazy and I would feel like I, I just can't be strategic. So there's a time and a place for it all. But I think especially having two blocks a day where you're parallel dialing, if you have access to that, I think it pushes you out of your comfort zone and allows you to not have the analysis paralysis as well. Of like, do I call these people? Is it a good enough fit? I don't know. Like, the less you give yourself to think about that, the better. But huge advocate for it. We're still trying to figure out how it works and how we can best utilize it. It's a really cool thing to have access to though.

Speaker A: It is, yeah. And it's also just part of the math of it. Now if connect rates are low and it's going to help you make more calls, it's, you know, I know a lot of times they're more, they're, they're pretty expensive. But if you can make it work, it's definitely, um, definitely a good option. Um, I want to move on to what you had to share with us in, in Claude. Um, I think guys keep, keep the questions coming because I see some questions in there. Um, I do want to answer. There's, there's two questions that are kind of similar as we kind of transition off of the topic of cold calling into Claude. Uh, Mike had asked like best techniques to get past the initial defensive resistance to, to, to earn their attention. And then Stacy had asked, you know, what actually compels them to respond, especially when they're receiving so many types of these outreaches per day. Um, I know like when you're parallel dialing it can be hard to like really deep research that one specific person. But do you have any like, tips and tricks for how your reps are able to say something compelling even with maybe limited research?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the soon, like when people focus the first 30 seconds of their call with giving this big long pitch and explanation of what it is that we do, I feel like that loses people super fast. People's brains turn off. But I have found that if you can ask a couple really simple questions, maybe it's just like the yes, yes method, like Dale Carnegie talks about and how to win friends and influence people. Like, like age old book.

Speaker A: And it.

Speaker B: It's still works, right? But forcing people to be engaged, I think is the biggest thing. Just saying, like, for. For us, we always say like, hey, Jed, Megan with Zoom Info. Um, just curious. I'm calling you because I know you're the VP of sales over there. You probably oversee, you know, new business efforts. Are you guys bringing on new customers right now, or are you guys maxed out for the foreseeable future? And then they're like, no, we're bringing on new customers. Okay, great. Like just in the St. Pete area or like nationwide? No, we do nationwide. Okay, perfect. So it causes them to think, right? So whatever that question is, whatever industry you're in, I feel like if you do that versus the stereotypical. Hi, Jed, this is Megan with ZoomInfo. Does that ring a bell? Are you familiar with Zoom Info? Everyone just goes, no, I'm not familiar. And then they are expecting to get. Okay, well, Jed, the reason for my call is because we do yada, yada, yada, right? And they're just like, I don't want to listen to this. So a couple questions, even if it's one question where you can almost stop them in their tracks and be like, yes, yes, that's accurate. I feel like it keeps people a lot longer. So that's. That's something that I teach my reps to do a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. I think everybody should practice having, uh, those, um. I've heard it called a lot of different things, but like a poke to bear type of question or a light bulb question where it's like you're getting them to sort of break out of the. It's almost like a pattern interrupt. Something that gets m. Them to lean forward and actually listen in a little bit more. Um, but cool. With that said, let's, um, if you want to share your screen and let's talk through, uh, and I believe this is something that you're doing or been testing with. But just how you approach coming up a new, uh, you know, target list to go after and pushing us into a campaign, how you build a list, I think that'll be a huge thing for the audience to see, so they can kind of see end to end how you're approaching things.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Can you see my screen? Okay.

Speaker A: Yes, I got it.

Speaker B: Okay, great. So this, um, is really great on the management side of things. Um, I know the, the bigger percentage of people that we have on here are, you know, SDRs, BDRs and AES. This is great for you too. But when I'm thinking every day, like, how can I go and equip my team with things to be able to call, um, this is a great way to be able to do it. Or if you're wanting to plan your week. The. When I got to the end of chatting back and forth with Claude on this, I had probably 15 to 20 different searches I could do and campaigns I could run, which is definitely going to last me for a whole week, which is great. So what I would do is I would start with giving Claude a prompt just. And this, you can do it with any AI. But I've, I started recently diving into Claude. I really like it, um, I really like the graphics. It gives you two and just makes everything super organized. So give it some context of who you are and what you do. Right. So you can say, I'm an SDR at, uh, XYZ company. Here is my target market in broad terms, here's what I'm really trying to be strategic about. Right? So really wanting to be able to go after companies with higher deal sizes. That's just for us, just because, you know, zoom info, we're a little bit of a higher tier software for companies to be able to utilize. We want to make sure that if they can close one deal using our software, it pays for itself, right? Versus having a bunch of tiny deals where they have to justify the cost. So thinking about that with, you know, your potential customers too. So higher, um, dollar deals. And we want to be able to play around with some industries where the time of year that we're in right now is going to be a good time for them to be more receptive to what we have to say. Say, for example, I always think of, you know, right around tax season, we're probably not going to want to be calling, you know, financial companies just because they're like, I can barely finish, you know, everything I have on my plate. I don't want to have a sales call right now, right? So thinking about those kind of companies, depending on the time of the year, if you find that a lot of, um, industries are seasonal for what you go after or, you know, whatever the case may be, um, and then playing around with some signals if you have access to something like a zoom info where you can see company signals, whether it's companies getting funding, going through hiring cycles, um, intent topics, being able to see what they're researching online, like all of that is super, super helpful. If you don't have access to something like that, figure out what you can do with what you have. There's still plenty that you can do. And then I always ask at the end of my prompts, feel free to ask me any questions to better understand what I'm looking for. I find that Claude does this really well. It's itself where sometimes I don't have to tell it to ask me a question and sometimes it'll literally say, let me ask you these few things before I give you your results. If you're using chat gbt, I find that it rarely asks you questions. You have to tell it to ask you questions. Um, so that's one of the reasons why I'm liking cloud a little bit more. Right? So gave me a couple industries to be able to go after and then some signals to be able to use. But then it asked me some questions, right? So what are some of your current best close rates? What intent data are you using? Um, are you call heavy email heavy? What does that look like? Asked me a couple more, gave um, it my answers and then it gave me a, you know, refined industry target for the motion that we use now. This is great, like all in the paragraphs. I like mine to look a little prettier. So I said, you know, give me a one pager and then it starts popping out, stuff like this, which is really cool right now you can get this in a downloadable PDF if you have the free version. It might cut you off or it might take some time, but I literally sent screenshots of this to my team this morning and I was like, all right guys, if you need some ideas on what to go after this morning, here are some ideas. We got all of our industries right here. The reason why they're good to go after. And then I really like this section right here. So we have calls, email sequences, bulk email. Because that's what I told Claude. I said we do a mixture of these things, right? Um, gave us some intent topics, some different scoops, companies, um, using certain technologies, which is great. Companies, um, that are going through growth, um, companies that recently got funding. All of these are great. And then it gives me why it matters and how to use it. So cool. And it's all color coordinated, which is great too. Um, even gives you a talk track. And it's funny because this talk Track is actually pretty dang similar to what we use, which is great. Then you could even tell it, you know, hey, for the, the call framework, I want to have a couple variations of this. Give me a couple variations or help me write an email.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I feel like most people use AI to help them write emails. I um, feel like that's what we did in the very beginning, but I feel like we're not using it enough to actually figure out the kinds of companies to go after and how to prospect. Right. So yes, it is good to write you stuff, but all of this other stuff is super beneficial too. Um, then it gives me some titles to be able to go after. Right. So what I did with this is I started to move this all into zoom info and I'll show what I did and it was super quick. You can do this with, you know, however you're going to be going and building your lists. Right. Um, but I chose business services. I was like, let's just do this for now and then I'm going to use these intent topics and that was it.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But think about it. Just to show how far this search can take you is I can do business services and this intent search, then I can do in a separate search, logistics and freight and this intent search, that's five different searches already I can do with just this first section. Then if I want to go back and do business services researching us or our competitors, that's five whole other searches to be able to do the scoops, the new titles, that's five more other searches. So this whole search right here can last you an entire week, which is great. Um, going back to that, you know, analysis paralysis of what do I call and like what's the best people to be able to call having something like this? I would recommend making something like this on a Friday afternoon. When you're about to go into your weekend, your week is done, you're cleaning up all of your stuff, go into your AI, go make something like this on a Friday afternoon. That way when Monday morning comes, you are prepped and ready to go. You have everything good, you've already built out your search and then you can just go dial. So I'll go ahead and show really quickly what I did in the zoom info platform. Um, just how easy it is to be able to go and plug and play these into whatever search you're doing.

Speaker A: And by the way, just, just, I think you've already touched on, but just everyone's clear because we get a lot of these questions. Um, what you did there was just on the cloud free plan too. So you don't even necessarily have to have a paid and you can do the same with. I agree on Claude by the way, where it is good at like making sure it's asking follow up questions to get to what you actually want. But of course you can do it on Gemini ChatGPT, that sort of stuff. And I think the, what I really like about this is a lot of times it's not always just about what are you saying on the phones in your emails, but it's like making sure your list is actually targeted and correct and then you don't even have to be the best str cold caller email in the world if your list is already tight. Um, that's such a huge part of it. So I think yeah, using AI to come up with your campaign ideas and getting strategic around how you're building those lists is a huge piece that a lot of people sometimes miss.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. And this is super easy, right? So you just plug in your titles, make sure they have contact information. This is where I just put the industry. So I put business services. My team goes after companies with 10 to 99 employees. And then here's why I did the signals, right? So I did all these signals in here. This is just off of that first block, right. So super easy. Um, and then I added all of my Salesforce filters to make sure that we didn't have any, you know, current customers, open opportunities, stuff like that. Right Now I got 514 people to be able to call just from this one search. And I don't know how many people are making 500 calls a day. Maybe not the majority of people. I feel like a lot of people are making maybe like 100 to 200 calls a day, depending on who you are. If you're an account executive and you're on demos all day long and stuff like that too, you're probably not even getting to make, you know, 100 dials a day. So this right here, this one search could last you a good amount of time, right? You can go in and filter this even more if you want to make it better. Um, but whatever, whatever search platform you're, you're using, you can do something that's very similar to this. So just wanted to show this as an example of being able to use AI where you don't feel like you need to be the smartest person in the room of finding all these creative avenues to be able to go down. Like a lot of I can do a lot of this for us.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, really good stuff. I. A bunch of questions came in. As you're going through that. I want to come back to the, uh, the account sheet too, and share that with people in a little bit. Um, but let me, let me pull up some of these questions because there were some good ones in here. Uh, Marco had asked, how many steps on average are you working? Uh, in a, in a cadence or sequence? Like how many call steps, email steps, LinkedIn steps? How do you guys typically approach that?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So I feel like that kind of ties into the, the account sheet that I normally make for, for my newer reps. But, um, this is also something that I feel like has changed since, you know, pre Covid when I was first starting to now. And this is just specifically, you know, SMB wise, because I feel like if you're going after mid market companies, enterprise companies, your cadence can be longer and that's, that's okay. I feel like for small business, we're not spending more than a week going and prospecting into a company that's just us. I know people have their opinions on how long that that should last. Um, for us, if we're giving calls Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we're adding a LinkedIn message, a second LinkedIn message, an email, a second email, two voicemails, then that's normal. It's pretty thorough. Like the, what I would ask or what I would have you ask yourself is how much outreach will it take before I go recycle this company for me to really feel like they know who I am and they're gonna be like, oh, this is zoom info calling. But I know they're just ignoring me at this point. Like, how many would. What do you think it would take? 2 weeks, 2 full weeks for someone to be able to understand who's been trying to reach out to them and the value they're trying to add? For me, I don't think it takes two full weeks, especially if you're leaving voicemails, if you're adding on LinkedIn and email. Right. I want to be able to have the confidence before we move on to the next company for me to be like, no, Jed seen my name. Like, he understands I've been reaching out. He just doesn't find the value. That's fine. You know, I can go bake a batch of cookies and I think my cookies are great. And then I could go offer Jed like, hey, do you want a cookie? And he'll be like, no, I'm good. And I'M not gonna think, oh, it's like my cookies that are bad. Like it's not anything I did. It's just like he just doesn't want it. Okay, well now I'm gonna go offer him to the next person that you know would like something like that. Right. So it's, it's the same thing. It's not like your outreach is wrong, it's just we're gonna have people that are open minded enough to want to go take a look and then people that are like, I don't have time for this or I don't think this is valuable. So for us I would say it's about a week. You can cram them out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and get a bunch of your content in front of someone in that period of time. For me, I like to spread them out and do like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, kind of spread it out throughout the week.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, I'm in the same boat when it comes to SMB. Like especially because your, your TAM is obviously going to be so much wider. There's so many more accounts you can reach out to and I think, I don't know, four, five, six, seven, eight step email sequences. Like at a certain point you're just going to get blocked and then you're like, you kind of, you get to a point where like the, the you it sort of shifts to where now you're just annoying and you're leaving a negative uh, uh, perception of yourself versus if it's just a few emails, they're ne, they're not, I mean they're probably just forget about you and then you can reach back out in a few months and just rerun the cycle because a lot of it is just timing. Like you can't always predict exactly when they're ready. But if you just stay in touch over time, um, without blowing them up, I, I think that's definitely the right approach. Um, let's a ah, couple more questions actually. Um, how are you approaching LinkedIn and that side of things? Are your reps, are they seeing much success with LinkedIn? Is it just um, it's like within a sequence or are you guys actually uh, you know, spending a lot of time there? Because I know some people are doing like going as far as doing LinkedIn automation and spending a ton of time there. I even see people creating like fake LinkedIn profiles which I wouldn't necessarily recommend. But uh, what's, what's your approach when it comes to LinkedIn?

Speaker B: Yeah, we're definitely not doing the whole extent of like LinkedIn automation and stuff like that. Um, I feel like we treat it more as social selling where we're trying to be people talking to people, especially in a LinkedIn setting. Like, I feel like the more corporate you come off over LinkedIn where you're writing, like we said, like a long message and providing, you know, all this stuff about what we do and how we do it and wanting to connect, I feel like people's attention span on LinkedIn is shorter. Right? Like it's like the same thing on, if you go on TikTok or Instagram and you're scrolling through reels or whatever, like you skip pretty quickly just because you are entering your brain into a very quick dopamine hit environment. And LinkedIn is not necessarily as quick of a dopamine hit environment. But we're not looking to go read like extensive paragraphs about everything. Like, even when I go look at LinkedIn posts, I'm more likely to go watch a quick video than I am to read someone's six paragraph whatever about a topic. So for us we're leaving those like uh, sentence long messages of just like, hey, wanted to show you this, see if we could help your team. Give me a call back at this number or like shoot me a call at this number. It's very, very simple. Um, and then we'll send a second message where we're just like, hey, let me know if this has any merit. If not, you know, I'll, I'll go ahead and move on. Basically that's the, the messaging that we're using. Um, but we're not doing the super tailored LinkedIn messages. And again that could be totally different with mid market and enterprise where you're talking about like, hey, I saw you had this post in regards to this topic and saw you went to this college. Like stuff like that is so great too. Like don't get me wrong, I know I do, um, I do a couple webinars with Sarah, uh, from Selling Sarah and she always talks about being able to do the customized stuff with LinkedIn and get people to be like, oh, that's cool, we have something in common. It's so great for us in SMB. We're just ripping through as quickly as we possibly can so it's a little bit less customized. But I do think LinkedIn is great because there will be people that will never answer their phone from an unknown number, never respond to your email, but they are on LinkedIn all the time. Versus I'm the opposite. I suck at reading through my LinkedIn messages like I'm terrible, I'm awful, but I will go pick up a call from an unknown number just because that's just how my brain works. Right. So people, vice versa, you want to be able to hit all of those channels just so that way you're not missing out on the people that potentially you spent two weeks calling. They are never going to answer your call. But if you would have just sent them one message on LinkedIn, maybe they would have responded to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm the same boat. I think it gets an important thing to remember too that when you're, when you're um, if you're on like webinars or like uh, reading content or whatever it might be like understand the context of who they're selling to. Right. So like you, you sell into SMB. For the people in this audience who sell into mid market or enterprise, maybe your approach is slightly different. The fundamentals are all there but it's, it's obviously like um, there's no like right or wrong answer to anything. Um, but yeah, that's, that's, that's really good stuff. I'm on the same page when it comes to LinkedIn. My, my feedback has always been like, try to write LinkedIn messages like it's a text. Like you're shooting a conversational text over um, and just really try to start a conversation over trying to directly book a meeting there. Um, let's get into the account sheet. I think that's like an immediately helpful thing. Um, for just to like. I know everybody has sequencing tools. Sometimes they, they get crazy. It's a great way to just like make sure that you're just consistently doing the stuff that actually matters. Um, but we can share that with the audience as well.

Speaker B: Perfect. Awesome. Let me know. Do you want me to drop the link or do you. Got it?

Speaker A: Uh, I'll drop the link. Do you want to just screen share real quick and quickly talk about.

Speaker B: I'll screen share. Uh, awesome. Right, let's see.

Speaker A: And then uh, we got some more questions we can get to before we wrap things up.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So uh, for some of you guys, you might be looking at this and being like this is so old school. Like I have all this automation and you know, all of these different cool softwares that can make um, my account organization look so much better. Good for you. That's great. I am kind of an old fashioned person when it comes to keeping track of my notes on accounts and especially for your brand newest person who's starting, who's already Trying to get the lay of the land on all your softwares and how you do everything and it can kind of be overwhelming. Um, this is a good, tried and true way to be able to get people ramped especially, which is what I've seen. Normally at Zoom Info, we have people that start on inbound and then they move to outbound. And of course that's the team that I oversee, is that outbound team. So this also allows people to really actually have to physically check boxes of steps that they did, which I kind of like. So for this we have a couple sections down here, so we have your account for us. We move all of our accounts to a, uh, protected status in Salesforce, so that way no one else is going after it. So that should be our first step. Are we going and protecting the account? Like yes, we need to, um, adding something to our target accounts on Zoom Info as well. If you have Zoom Info, this is a great resource to be able to do. If you add companies to your target accounts, it'll basically show you all the cool signals that are going on with those companies. Right? So definitely being able to do that and then just putting the services that this company provides right in front of you. You can either go to the company description page on Zoom Info, you can go to the company's LinkedIn, go to the about section, go to specialties, and then you have all of their services just written right there. I love that section. Because if you're normally going on a company's website, sometimes you're trying to figure out exactly what this company does and they just have a big paragraph about how we're the, we're the leading provider and revolutionizing the way that companies do whatever, and you're like, like what? Like, okay, what do you actually do? What are your services? So on LinkedIn in that about section specialties, it normally lists them off in just quick bullet points. Um, all your prospects, the time zone that your prospects are in, um, title notes, your pipe stage, whether these are, um, people that are early on or people that you've been working for almost your week long, you know, time period. Here's all your boxes, right? So did you send them a message on LinkedIn? Did you leave a voicemail? Your second voicemail, your first email, your second email. Right. So I normally don't have people live in this sheet forever for sure. But it's good to start out with. Same thing. Any of your cancels or no shows, people that you booked who did not show up, keep track of those people right there are so many people that I meet where they have someone no show them. And I'm like have you called them since? And they're like no. I'm like why not? You know, literally why not? So um, being able to keep track of those people as well as actions needed this one. I feel like everyone needs a spreadsheet on. These are for the people that went send me an email. And then you go and send them an email and then you forget to follow up or hey give me a call back in two weeks. Those people like all of those random stuff where you need to do some follow up action. Put them on a sheet, put them in a doc, put them somewhere. These are the people that are the easiest to have slip through the cracks just because you're not actively working them in the next step of your call sequence anymore. They're kind of put to the side and given whatever that next step is. So it's super simple. Um, but I love being able to have a resource like this just so that way you can keep everything organized.

Speaker A: I think it's really good too if you're in kind of a right like just going back to the basics and, and having something to just go off of it simple instead of trying to go through all these complex different tools. Um, so yeah, I like it a lot. We've got, we got three minutes left. A couple things here. I want to go through some rapid fire questions. Um and then we will uh, yeah we dropped the account sheet there so make sure you guys grab that. For everybody who asked about the recording as well. You will be getting that in a follow up email. Um, but last chance for questions. There's a quick one from Timothy Scott. He says what is your opinion on leaving a voicemail without stating your company name? I know some people do without. Some people do it. Are you guys mentioning Zoom Info or, or.

Speaker B: No, I have people that do both. Like I really want people to go test it. Be like what gives you more of a response? Like I'm not gonna say oh you need to go say what company you're calling from every single time if it's not producing for you. That's just my opinion. Test out both. Love.

Speaker A: Um, it um, Jonathan asked. I think this is a good question for leadership management of the team and also like just given how, how big Zoom Info is, it's a, it's an interesting question to hear how you guys handle this. Uh, he asks how do you keep your team from duplicating the efforts others are doing if they're searching for their own leads, for example, like, how do you just systematically make sure they're not, you know, overlapping on accounts and things of that nature?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. We have some engagement filters that we can use where we're excluding, you know, companies that have been called within the last several days, or that's why we use the protection status a lot. So a lot of the times we're making sure that the same companies aren't being called by the same people. Sometimes we will have lists that are made for us by our marketing team that, uh, they drop for everyone and everyone kind of goes through at the same time. So there will be multiple people calling. But. But as long as you can have some kind of organization, whether it's engagement filters or protection statuses, normally it's not too big of a problem that we run into.

Speaker A: Yeah, good stuff. Um, well, I think we'll wrap it up there. We're gonna, uh, we just dropped Meg's, uh, LinkedIn. Go follow her there. Grab the Akan. She, you'll get the recording. Um, thanks again for joining the show. I think it was super helpful to kind of hear all your perspectives across every channel of outbound, especially given for how long you've been doing it. Um, go give Mag, uh, a follow on LinkedIn. And yeah, thanks again. I appreciate it. And thanks for everybody who joined.