One of the most expensive aspects of building or rebuilding an outside sales division is the time involved.
This leaves a big question in the minds of sales leaders: Is there a way to get an outbound team up and running faster? And if so, what are the steps?
On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with two outbound pros and successful entrepreneurs, Michael Bassin and Daniel Schwartz, to teach you how to build an outbound sales strategy that actually works in just a couple of weeks.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet Michael and Daniel:
Michael Bassin and Daniel Schwartz are the co-founders of the sales consulting firm ScaleUpSales which has an epic track record of helping businesses build outbound strategies that work fast.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
Jonathan Fischer 0:00
Hi. Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher. Whether building or rebuilding an outbound sales division, one of the most expensive aspects of doing so is the time involved. Well, today's guests are about to save you a lot of time, big time. In that project. Michael Bassett and Daniel Schwartz are two highly successful entrepreneurs who have a reputation for unifying people from highly diverse cultural backgrounds to achieve great things. Among other accomplishments, the two have built a consulting firm called scale up sales, which has an amazing track record of helping businesses build outbound sales strategies that work fast. We're talking from zero to full speed in just a couple of weeks, and our conversation today, you will learn exactly how you can do the very same thing for your company. And Michael and Dan, what a pleasure to have you on the show today. Welcome.
Daniel Schwartz 0:56
Thanks so much.
Michael Bassin 0:57
Thanks. It's great to be here.
Jonathan Fischer 0:59
So it's a great topic. Before we jump in, I wonder if I could ask you guys, how did you come by the insights you're going to be sharing with the listener today,
Michael Bassin 1:07
we came, we came through with all these different insights. By doing this ourselves a lot of different times, both Daniel and I were the first sales hires at a couple of different technology startups, we were basically expected to build out these processes fast in very much a sink or swim type of type of way. And since we started skill sales, we've helped over 50 companies build out their outbound sales processes in a way that's quick, efficient, and also where it's able to balance out the science and the art required to required for success.
Daniel Schwartz 1:38
Yeah, John, I can also tell you just kind of jumping in on that. You know, Mike, like Mike said, we've been sales leaders in a bunch of different tech companies. But I actually remember the moment Mike and I were, when we first met, we actually met at a, at a company working in the ad tech space. And we were basically building the entire company, the entire growth, the company based off of outbound processes. And we had a moment we were sitting there, like, why is this so hard? Why doesn't why can we just send emails, why doesn't this work? What can we just, you know, message as many people as we want. And that's when we sort of started digging into this black box and sort of discovering the process, it's actually involved in successfully managing outbound strategy at scale. So it really kind of the genesis of all really starts with just him and me banging their heads against a wall and not coming and understanding why we're not getting into people's inboxes. And so once we kind of realized that there was a necessity there for companies to grow that way. We started basically building into a service. And that's kind of how it all came to be.
Jonathan Fischer 2:43
Well, I love that, well, you know, the those those real world experiences are the very best ones for teaching us what works. And it seems like it's a moving target. I mean, it's not like you can do the same things today that you did even just a couple three years ago, in outbound. And still, before we kind of jump in, I'm wondering, why is it important in your mind, gentlemen, to move quickly on this where our promise to listener is we can do this in just couple of weeks? Why does that matter?
Daniel Schwartz 3:09
That's such a good question. Maybe I'll start with a mic, and then you'll follow up on this one, because you took the last one. You're absolutely right. For us, it was totally a moving target. I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges. So when you think about it, your What are your biggest, if you're trying to do an outbound lead generation campaign at at scale, what are your biggest challenges the actual email clients themselves. So that's like Google, and Microsoft, they basically are the two biggest ones. And all their algorithms around spam and delivering and all those things are completely concealed to black box. So they're always changing them. So you always to be on your toes, always sort of poking those boundaries and discovering what what you can do, what you can't do functioning within those guidelines will actually allow you to have good deliverability and get into people's inboxes The most challenging thing I think the biggest pitfall when it comes to running an outbound campaign at scale. And Mike, feel free to disagree with me is getting into someone's inbox in the first place. And then making sure the messaging that you're getting in front of them is fantastic. But But that first step is something that definitely requires you to be on your toes, and constantly paying attention to changes that are happening in those algorithms and making sure that you're able to hit people's inboxes. It's not just to end up in spam. The reason this is so
Jonathan Fischer 4:18
it's a bit of a cat and mouse, isn't it with all the different changes in technology to kind of stop you from doing your job as a as a business development leader, correct? Yeah, I think
Michael Bassin 4:27
the biggest reason to do this fast is because your competitors, first of all, are doing really fast. Outbound Sales outreach through cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calling, is by far the most cost effective b2b marketing channel. And also because when you're networking, when you know you can get people's attention through outbound messaging that forms the backbone of all the rest of the content marketing and messaging you're going to have for your entire growth as a company.
Jonathan Fischer 4:55
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to and I mean, obviously, a really well designed Business Development Strategy is going to have multiple channels, not just out bounds, but it's a super powerful one for sure. Well, we're about to jump in and get into the meat potatoes here listener, but we don't want to remind you, especially our LinkedIn audience, don't be bashful. We want to hear your questions, post those in chat right away, as soon as they occur to you, we're gonna bank those. And at the bottom of the half hour, we'll circle back into some live answers right here with our expert guests. All right, so guys, let's jump in. I'm, I'm your guy. Let's say I'm your founder, and I want to get this thing rocking. What are my basic steps someone laid off, get it started?
Michael Bassin 5:36
Sure, I'm happy to get started. Okay. When you think about what is required to get outbound working for two weeks or less, it's about consolidating a number of different totally separate processes. on an ongoing basis. There's creating really great content, particularly for email, LinkedIn, and cold calling. There's, there's getting a highly targeted, targeted list of targeted leads. There's managing all the technical aspects behind sending out your campaigns through email automation, LinkedIn, automation, and cold calling. And there's all the process management, the first thing I'm going to talk about has to do with how do you get your story straight? How do you make sure you have really great copy for email, LinkedIn and cold calling, that's actually going to convert, the first thing that you need to do if you're going to create really good short messages that are going to get people's attention is to write out your messaging and read out your entire story of what you're selling, in long form, and as long expository form as you can, in the form of a sales pitch. This is essentially we're coming up with your own business case, because writing long content is actually easier than writing short content. And if you don't totally know how, what you want to say, we're how you can get it in a really condensed way, running a long form is really great, because once you have it in one form, then you're able to then pepper it, pepper out that content in short form throughout your email campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns, in your cold calling messaging, I'm actually going to share my screen and show you kind of an example of what I'm talking about here. Okay. Let me see real quick, I'm going to share my screen, this is my first time doing it. Okay, can you see my screen? Okay, the first thing that I recommend if you want to create a really great email sequence, or have just a pitch for cold calling, is to create a pitch where you're basically thinking about how your messaging can impact the client and what information you need to assume about them in as expository form as possible. Because this includes basically thinking really thoroughly about what kinds of questions information you need, from a potential prospect, reading out your introduction about who you are, and what makes you very specific, what makes you very special. Talking about the problem, and in really great depth, you know, what is the problem you're solving? Why should someone care? How are you? How are you potentially helping them? What is your solution, having all of this content in long form, will make the entire creative process going forward, creating, being out some amazing concentrated campaigns, very, very, very easy and much less time consuming. Once you have this, you obviously want to create your campaigns. When you think about what your message should be, with a cold email, cold LinkedIn message or a cold call, you know, you have to consider what is your prospect going to understand, no matter how complex your solution is, from technologically, who you're talking to, you have to be as much as possible, make your language such that a small child or a very elderly person can understand you. And the best way to do that is also to consider what is the easiest way I can ensure that someone does what I want, which is usually booking meeting. So what I'm actually sharing right now is our top of our strat our structure for creating really high performing outbound content, whereby we create a messaging sequence, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for someone to book a meeting to actually note we want, which is why we build our we build our messaging out to think as if someone's reading it like they're looking at a CV, a resume of someone that might be willing to hire, just like when you look at a resume, and you take one second, three second, five seconds, 10 seconds to decide, if you're going to call that person in for an interview. It's the same as your outbound messaging. So when you're considering your messaging, the depth of your solution, the differentiation should always be at the bottom half the message and the top half of the message or the initial, your initial lead should always be a brief introduction, a very clear one or two sentences about your explanation and why you can help them with a quick call to action. Now when you when you send messaging out, you talk like this, you make it very clear what you want. It's a very clear snippet of what you're what valuable to offer, and then all the other remaining details that you might that might make unique. They might not read it word for word or hear it word for word, but they're going to be impressed You centered and are more likely to book immediate. And because I think the key when it comes to difference in your messaging is not trying to go super short, not trying to just, you know, hook someone on a call or common into getting on a meeting with you without really knowing what they're getting into. It's about balancing out their short attention span with getting the maximum amount of information.
Jonathan Fischer 10:21
So when you're talking about having a message that can get a quick call to action like that, how are we implementing this? Are we using old school cold calling? Is this email marketing? Is it a combination of different channels omni channel approach? How do you how do you deploy tech tactically? Dan,
Michael Bassin 10:37
do you want to refer to and
Daniel Schwartz 10:38
I? And I think, Jonathan that the short answer is yes. Saying I always love it when Mike talks about how to construct a proper sales pitch or messaging. He's one of the strongest people I know in it. And it's brilliant. And so yeah, Jonathan, when you look at like, what Michaels talking about building this whole script, who are we as a business and what is our angle, what is our what is our pitch sort of having unified language across all different channels are going to be approaching is is is key to creating your brand identity. And it's also key to sort of driving interest in your business and making sure that you have a clear and concise message. So we're starting with that full who you know, the whole sales pitch, everything we do, and why it matters. As your sort of core source, you're going to be able to leverage that for creating messaging for your cold calling, for your LinkedIn, and for your email. So it kind of goes across the entire board, which is why it's great to sort of brainstorm the whole thing to start with, then I'm going to add here is, when you're considering the way you're writing the messaging, I think it's really important to think about it from the perspective of the person you're writing to, you should always be writing value to your prospective your respective clients. I use this example. So many times, I know my Pete, if you want to, you know asleep for the next two minutes, Mike feel free to. But I think one of the best sales pitches of all time was 2007, when Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone, he's got a new device that people don't know about. And it's pretty cool. And he goes on stage. And so I think I think the presentation is 30 minutes long. For the first five minutes, I remember correctly, he doesn't tell you that it's one device, he tells you what it does, to internet communicator, it's a phone, it's your iPod, I think your music, everything that the iPhone does. And then for the first next eight minutes, right, the total eight minutes, he doesn't even show you what the device looks like. So even by the time you've discovered what device isn't that it's a single device, you still don't know what it looks like, because he's harping on the core value of what the device is for the user. And by the time you actually present the device, you already understand why you should care about it. And the same is really true when you're creating messaging, especially when it's short messaging, like you're gonna have on a call call or an email or LinkedIn. Think about why the person on the other end who's reading it cares, what's the value that's coming to them, it's really easy. When we create a service or product or a SaaS company, we put a lot of work and energy into the thing. We want to talk about ourselves because we're proud of what we've done. But nobody cares about us. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about your product, nobody, right, what they care about is what it will do for them. And so when you're writing that messaging, and when you're writing a sort of who we are as a company out, and then starting to create those more specific messages for email, LinkedIn, etc. Always be thinking that for the lens of what is the value I'm providing to the person who's reading this, and we can talk about my product along the way, but like, what's the core value I'm bringing you Jonathan can
Jonathan Fischer 13:51
add something? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Go ahead. The other
Michael Bassin 13:54
thing that needs to be done when it comes to creating this differentiated messaging and leading with value is almost doing a psychological breakdown. And via writing to, there's not a one size fits all way of reading all emails necessarily, okay, because how I might approach a technical buyer, a CTO of a company, a software developer is totally different from someone who's a salesperson or a CEO, you know, technical people don't like being called out reached as much, you know, whereas if you're a revenue generating, you're in a revenue generating position, like a CEO or a salesperson, you might be much more open because if a solution can help you, you know, develop, you know, generate more revenue, you want to hear more about that. So whether you're going to take a an informative approach, a conversational approach, and I feel your pain approach, getting a feedback approach. These are all things that need to be happen in advance of even putting pen to paper with reading one email, the writing the email process, or writing the cold call pitch or LinkedIn messaging templates. That should be very fast. Once you have your outline and your pitch and all these different points and your psychological profile, everything else To be smooth sailing,
Daniel Schwartz 15:01
this is such a solid point. People usually think about I'm just gonna write one email and spam my entire ISP, my entire ideal customer profile, everyone I'm reaching out to right. But Mike, you're 100%, right, man, it's all about who am I writing to and making sure that if I'm writing to, you know, CEOs, CEO VPs of sales and heads of marketing, each one of those might need a whole different email campaign for them. And so I'm not just writing one email campaign for everybody. I'm writing a campaign to fit every single profile person I'm looking to touch huge.
Jonathan Fischer 15:37
Well, no, that is huge. It sounds like it's a unique task that requires devoted attention, right? I mean, how do you do that? Can you still kind of segment out your audience like a marketer? Or do you need to go one by one by one? Like, what do you recommend on that front?
Michael Bassin 15:52
I think that it's not scalable, or practical or time effective, to really do things one by one by one, unless you're trying to, you know, arrange a bunch of meetings for a business trip or a conference where you're reaching out to a very small list. You know, we're talking about trying to build an outbound sales operation at scale. So I think what you need to do is you need to go among a list of assumptions. And one of the challenges with cold outreach in general with cold calling cold email and cold LinkedIn is that you don't totally know exactly what's going on on their side. There are some indicators, you can look at people's LinkedIn profiles, what kind of constantly promoting, does the company have a blog, or they're issuing press releases, but most of the time, if you're if you're an expert in what you do, and whatever solution you're providing, you've got to you, it's your job to know as quickly as possible, what you think their pain point is. And the way that you are able to test that whether you're right about that pain point is by having messaging that's super easy to respond to, if you don't have messaging that's easy to respond to, you're going to be driving in the wrong direction for a long time, because you don't know if people are not responding to you, because you're wrong about your assumptions. Or if your messaging just sucks. So you have to make some assumptions. I don't recommend testing out too many different kinds of messaging, because you have to have enough data. In order to make assumptions. Generally speaking, I would, I would always advise that you've got to test out your messaging on at least a couple of 100 individual prospects to be able to make any conclusions. 20 is not enough, it could work for 20, it could not work for 20. And, you know, it's up to you to come up with an initial hypothesis, and then test that out by having really great language, it's really best not to skimp that out and to send it to friends, family colleagues to say, do you understand this? If you really are in a crunch, and you really have no idea what you're saying is being understood, honestly, have your child read it, or your grandma or someone else's grandma, because if they get it, you're sitting on a goldmine.
Jonathan Fischer 17:51
I like that, I do think that we can be just a little bit too smart by half as the saying goes right in our marketing and end up losing the impact. So yeah, grab grab your nearest eighth grader, I guess, right? It's a good rule.
Michael Bassin 18:04
Seven like that a lot. Or what? Seven year old?
Jonathan Fischer 18:07
Seven year old even better? Well, yeah, just because we're in tech, I mean, we have to make it approachable. I'm interested, Michael. And when you say easy to respond to tell me more about that. What do you mean specifically?
Michael Bassin 18:19
But minced is this? A lot of people have want to believe that short emails are always going to be the bat better or short messaging in general is going to be better. Not necessarily depends what you're selling. If you're writing too long emails can be incredibly effective. You know, we always test out short, medium long emails. When I say long emails, I'm typically referring to messaging on an email that's longer than 160 words, I've seen 300 word emails do fantastically. And 100 word emails do terribly. But it mean when I when I refer to make it easy to respond to, if you have a really long email with a lot of information just about you, and it's all about, you know, what you can do in your product in all these features, you've got like a very incoherent call to action, the very bottom of it, it's not very easy to respond to because, you know, saying like, Please book some time with me here is not the same thing as asking a question, having a call to action early on the email, assuming someone might not read your 300 word email or 150 word email word for word is super valuable, because you want to make it easy for them to respond. You can send the information after that, but that's actually why with not every email, we do have emails that are short within a sequence and some that are longer to develop different propositions. But I think it's always good especially in the earlier messaging to have two calls to action within an email. Okay, because that way you know, you're striking them twice and it's absolutely crystal clear what you want from them.
Jonathan Fischer 19:41
Are there certain types of call to action that work better than others?
Daniel Schwartz 19:45
I just want a follow up work or don't like so yeah. Two calls to action you mean to the same calls action? Not too difficult.
Michael Bassin 19:50
Yeah. Yeah. If you want to meet and then you say Are you available to connect about this next week or in the next call to action can be you know, when available next week, are you available on Thursdays Something like that. And, you know, I think that should generally be the same call to action. Because you don't want to confuse users, you don't want to have a call to action, you're asking for meeting in one place, and then different Call to Action saying, read this white paper or go to this link to like our blog, well, they're only going to do one because people don't have the intention span. Oftentimes people are reading from their phones, they don't know who you are. And especially if you you're already a stranger, already a foreigner, you're already like foreign to them, you're really trying to come off like a human being on their level not come off as overly overly anxious to get in front of their faces. You know, you don't want to send out messaging that says, I've stopped your LinkedIn and all your social media for the past six months, just anticipation of reading this message, you don't want to come off as too aloof, and too overbearing, or too much of an expert. You want to be a human, you want to be personable, and you want to make it easy for them to know what you want.
Daniel Schwartz 20:52
Yeah, and just kind of a last thought on that. Cuz I know we're getting a little bit tight on time, we want to talk about other things in the process as well, I'm sure. But if you think about an email, like its core objectives, there are three things you really want to get across the line, right? You want to get who you are, the value you're going to bring to your reader, and what you want them to do. So when talking about like, I want to make an email easy to respond to, it's just like you would do if you were on a sales call, right? The last thing you really want is to make your reader have to think, Okay, well, what does this person want from me, what kind of forbid have to choose two different things that you want from them? Right, so making it really clear and concise, hey, let's get on a call and talk about how I can bring you value. Or if you want them to read something, or whatever your specific goal is making sure that that's immediately understandable. And that No thought is actually required, in order to understand what's wanted of the reader. That's, that's critical in terms of making it easy to to get your reader to understand what they need to do.
Michael Bassin 21:53
Another thing that's really important, Jonathan, when it comes to making really good outbound campaign content, is also identifying a super niche profile. I don't mean niche, like 10 people, it can be 1000 people, 2000 5000 individuals, but the more niche your audiences, the more niche your content is going to be. And that kind of goes into the next aspect, which has to do with lead research.
Jonathan Fischer 22:15
Right, I will talk to us about lead research, what does that mean? And how you go about it?
Daniel Schwartz 22:20
Yeah, I can I can start on that one. So first of all, when you think about messaging at scale, you have a bit of a challenge, right? So we already talked a little bit about this, you're going to need to create sort of the right message for each person you're talking to, and it needs to feel personal. But you can't write to everybody, especially if you're doing it at scale. If you're writing 2000, you know, new contacts, month over month, you can't actually write to every single one of those people not consistently. So one of the first things you're going to need to do is consider your ideal customer profile. Who is it that you want to get in front of right? That's important, because you want to make sure that when you're getting on calls, you're getting on the right calls, because you're never going to close a deal with the wrong the wrong lead, right. So that's the first thing Who's your ideal customer, your ideal customer profile ICP? Once you have that in mind, you're going to want to consider what geographies you want to approach. So do you want to be in the US market? Latin American market? Right, European? Why? Are you language specific? Can you know what can your product actually support for your service actually support and who's relevant for your target? Once you've considered that, right now, we're building a lead profile, it's now in the process of building a lead profile. And that's going to allow us to do research on that profile. So now we're going to sit and consider what type of businesses we're going to be reaching out to, like what industry they might be in, we're going to be thinking about the size of the company, which can be significant, right? Smaller companies tend to close up more quickly, but might be a higher risk of churn or might be a lower at a lower annual contract value, right, lower ACB. So now we're thinking about, about that process, right? Who are my low hanging fruit as well, you know, what are we most likely to close soonest that will bring you the greatest amount of revenue or for that balance point. So you're gonna want to go through a process of deciding who those who those profiles are and what you're going to be reaching out to. Now once you have that profile, you have something to work with. And then there are a bunch of different tools you can use. To achieve your research. At the end, what you're going to need is a leads list, right, you just want to have a set list of 2000 leads, 3000 leads, however many might be that you're going to be reaching out to and touching. There are a lot of different platforms that can achieve this. I think the most cost effective one is going to be like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it can be actually enormous ly effective. But you know, Zoom info, Apollo, Lucia, there are a bunch of different tools that you can use to do that research. You can also get people on Upwork or whatever to help you with that. But any of those tools, if you just use those leads list, you're gonna run into a big problem. And that big problem is a lot of the emails on those leads just aren't accurate. And so you're going to end up basically sending a lot of emails to a lot of bad email addresses. And we haven't talked about domain health yet. But what that's basically going to do is, the more you send an email verses that aren't real or are outdated, the algorithms that Google and Microsoft have are going to flag your account or your domain, specifically as a spammer. And every single message you send from then on will go to people's spam boxes, you won't get a single inbox, and basically everything you've done, no matter what you no matter how great your content is, no matter how great your product is, no matter how brilliant you are, is worthless, because no one's gonna see it. So you're going to need to use tools to clean those email addresses that you get those leads lists, there are a bunch of different ones that you can find, but you're gonna need to clean them, get rid of all the bad ones. And then during the sending process, you actually have to monitor your sending performance for bounce rates, to make sure that those are within a reasonable, reasonable amount. Once you're passing boundaries of seven to 10%. Once you're getting beyond that, you're getting into dangerous territory. And the higher that number goes, the faster you're burning your domains credibility, you're gonna find yourself in trouble. So there are multiple stages to creating a targeted list. Again, just in short, creating that profile. You're doing the research itself, and then cleaning that research list. And then making sure you're monitoring the outreach to to see how your bounce rates looks like it look like and make sure you're running clean.
Jonathan Fischer 26:33
Are there ways you can ensure the safety of your domain, for example, have some other domains to use for testing campaigns? That might be something close hyphenate, your name or something along that line? Does that work? Do you recommend that?
Daniel Schwartz 26:46
Yeah, so here's the kind of the inevitable the inevitable truth, any domain that you use to send at scale, will burn out at some point. So the workaround there is you need multiple domains. In fact, every single email address you're going to be using is going to need its own domain that's actually touching base on sort of like our next point in the process of micro product, which is, which is email addresses, you're going to need multiple email addresses to send at scale. And each of those email addresses needs to be tied to a domain or a subdomain. And you'll need tools to warm those emails up. So they have sort of natural human behavior, and they don't get flagged as spam out the gate. So So yeah, you're going to need multiple email addresses, you're gonna need multiple domains. And you're going to want to make sure that you're not actually using your own company's domain for any of your sending, because you obviously don't want to enter your own company's domain.
Jonathan Fischer 27:39
That makes a lot of sense. But we have burned through our time together already. And we've just I think everyone listening is like, Okay, what else? But maybe the best way to get Yeah, maybe the best way to give the listener what else is to tell them where they can find you guys, because I think you've, you've impressed us that you know, what you're talking about? What are the best ways for people to proceed from here,
Michael Bassin 28:04
the best way they can do it is we've got actually a Learn section on our website, we have a section where you can basically, we have articles in depth articles about all these different topics, at scale, sales.com/learn. So you can see that we also have a very, very active blog, where we have dozens, I think it's probably hundreds of articles now about each of these different topics. But the shorter, more condensed version is definitely the blog. Next week, we're actually going to be coming out with a very index, in depth white paper, which is basically the complete guide to cold email. So when that's ready next week, if people want to send messages through our website, or contact us on LinkedIn, and we can add them to the distribution list, we're going to send them the complete guide. It's not the complete guide to cold calling yet, but we'll have that out soon. You can't win them on every single document. And, you know, I think the biggest thing to notice that, you know, doing this type of doing sales outreach is not the skill set of any one person, you need a lot of different types of skills, you've got a lot of different types of teams, it can be very, very time consuming, but there is a way forward. Unfortunately, it's not something you just set up once and let it run. It's kind of like driving and navigating traffic, it needs to constantly be monitored and constantly be be looked after. So if anybody's interested in in a complimentary consultation on whatever they're dealing with and wants some help, we're happy to also jump on a call with them to help them guide them through the process.
Jonathan Fischer 29:31
All right, well, that's fantastic. And of course, we'll put the those URLs in the show notes. Also. Well, what a great conversation it's been now let's get into sort of the afterglow, we we definitely have some nice questions from our live audience here. Let's dig into some of these. And let's see I had one from Rashida Bay. I thought I liked this question because it's kind of it's kind of turns the tables a little bit receded. Rashida is asking as an outbound expert What's a pet peeve that you have about outbound messages that you personally receive? Who wants to take that one?
Michael Bassin 30:05
Oh, I'm dying to jump out first. Did I gotta
Daniel Schwartz 30:08
go first one? Come on man. Find you. I don't care. Yeah. So that's a great question. I think Michael and I could probably have come up with a whole list of pet peeves that we deal with. But I think one of the one of the ones that gets me the most is when, when I open an email, I have no clue what what someone's product is going to bring for me, you get these emails, where somebody's just really pushing to hop on a call, or wants you to do something for them, but they haven't even told you what they're gonna do for you. I actually, that is like the fastest archive message that there is for me, like if I if I don't understand what you what value you're gonna bring me in the first, you know, three sentences. This, this conversation is over. That's when the noisy the other one is, sometimes you get people who, who really just start going technical and talking about their product. And again, if I don't know the value you're bringing me I don't know why I'm supposed to care. I think those are my two my two biggest pet peeves, but definitely the one where I have no clue what value bringing me like that. That first one. That's just the worst.
Jonathan Fischer 31:04
Yeah, you just resonate with that, for sure.
Michael Bassin 31:07
I have totally different pet peeves.
Jonathan Fischer 31:11
Yeah, go ahead. My,
Michael Bassin 31:12
my pet peeves are as follows. When you start off your cold email saying, I know your time is precious, and this is only going to take a minute automatically. As a loser, you're a loser, you put yourself in Neath me, You made my time more valuable than you, you're groveling to me to get my attention. And now I just don't respect you. The second thing is, when you've stalked me and made your email way too customized. People have people talk about not wanting to write generic emails, I totally get that the customization, your your outbound messaging should have to do with your profile, not necessarily too much about the individual. If you've registered an email to me saying, I read your blog from six months ago, and I've seen your LinkedIn profile. And do you know this person were connected with on LinkedIn who maybe I do or got connect with them, somehow, it comes up as creepy and trying too hard. You don't want my focus to be on some silly detail. Like, oh, you liked some silly blog I wrote a while ago, you want the focus to be on Hi, I'm so and so I'm going to change your life, you should be begging to get on call with me. We need to see your self respect. I need to see the fact that you're a worthy person that's reached out to me. And I should be thanking you every single person who reached out to him. If you've gotten your message, right? You've gotten your profile right should be thanking you for reaching out because you're generally there to help them when you gravel. When you focus too much on the wrong things. It tells me you're swindling me.
Daniel Schwartz 32:32
Yeah, I gotta follow up on Michael because that's actually you test that I totally forgot about, you know, 100%. Right. The choice of language that people use, you'd be so Kevin would be being apologetic. The second you say you might like Michael saying second you ask because you like you apologize for messaging someone. Hey, and I messaged you last week. But I'll tell you there was there. Yeah, it sounds it's just sounds so worthless. It sounds like why are we even having this conversation? If you're not bringing value to the table that goes back to? And, you know, it's so important to make sure that, that you're conveying that confidence. If I think I don't know who said this. But if you thought about the fact that what if your product is bringing true value to someone, right? If your products bring it to value to someone, and let's say you had a million dollars in your hand, and you could give that million dollars out to anybody, right? You would not have any issues, emailing someone saying, Hey, can you give me a million dollars colleagues, when Hey, can you give me give me a million dollars, people will be thanking you to have that conversation, right? Oh, of course, I'm gonna have a conversation with you about giving me a million dollars. The same is true for your product or service. If you've got something in quality, and you're bringing people true value, they'll be thanking you for reaching out to them. So make sure that you're confident in what you're doing. And people will be a lot more receptive to it.
Jonathan Fischer 33:50
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes so much sense. Well, we've got some more questions to jump into. I wanted to pile on as well, though, just just super quick. I had a guy walk up to me right here in our neighborhood. He's like, hello, my friend. And he said, It's in such a friendly way. And it should have worked, but it kind of pissed me off because I'm like, I don't know you dude. Like, we're not friends. Not yet. Anyway, I don't know really rubbed me the wrong way. If you were to use the same tone and said something like, Hey, I don't want to bother you. But I got something really cool. Can I hit you with it really fast. You can tell me if it's interesting. Like he would approach me like really calm, but the confidence was great, but it was still kind of creepy that he was trying to be too much my friend. So maybe that's maybe that kind of balances a whole thing. Right. You could overdo the confidence thing too. With with creep. So there is a sweet spot for sure. Here's a question from a LinkedIn user on. I think this is a Pamela I don't know. But the question is, which way are you finding you're getting the best and fastest engagement in terms of these different outreach channels, email, LinkedIn phone calls. Do you guys have preferences on that?
Michael Bassin 34:54
Yes, I definitely have preferences. They're all important but your success with them are going to vary based In the industry, and how available the data is, the most readily available data and responses are going to come from email. The reason for that is because people are living in their email inboxes, they directly feel pain when the email boxes get to fill it up. And so people are living and dying based on that. When it comes to LinkedIn, LinkedIn has done everything it can to prevent it from being a quality sales channel anymore. It is still a great sales channel. But LinkedIn is much more of a content engine, a social network, there are restrictions on how many connection requests you can send and how many emails you can send. LinkedIn is a really good backup for email, it's great to run the to run campaigns in parallel, because if somebody if you're doing that, you're probably more likely to get more responses, specifically over email. Cold calling is by far the most hit or miss, it's hardest to get the best data on, we normally find that it's common to get data on about 30% of the contacts are running email and LinkedIn campaigns on. And it's also not always clear based on industry, whether people are going to answer the phone, there are different types of databases and tools you can use to cross reference it to know who's a much was much more likely to answer the phone. But when you get it's kind of like this, when you get a lead from cold calling, it's the most high quality lead, it's the best lead there is. But you're not doing that for volume. Email is usually for volume. LinkedIn is for branding. Okay, yeah.
Daniel Schwartz 36:23
I think there's a difference between when you say best and fastest. So if you want to talk about like best for lead generation scale, that's email, usually. Well, to be fair, you have inbound as well, like PPC, paid advertising, that can be really good, that can be the best for scale, depending on your budget, if you want to talk about fastest. I don't think there's anything really faster than getting someone on a phone call, might have to call a lot of people. But once you actually have someone there, if you're a good cold caller, that's the fastest. You might have to call a lot of people before able to get that person on the line, though. And I think Lincoln is actually really valuable when it comes to Account Based Marketing, like what is your what is your go to market strategy? Do you have a huge total addressable market like your tam is a huge, and let's do email, let's do let's do cold calling let's that but do have a really clever, really tight, total addressable market. It's not that broad, but it's high value, and that I've got like 200 300 companies I can work with. LinkedIn actually might be your best bet, right? Trying to develop those real relationships with people sort of a longer social route, building a brand and sort of taking that much more nurtured process. That could be your best channel. So I think it really depends on what your goals are, what your go to market strategy is, and what that looks like for you. Which channel is going to work best?
Jonathan Fischer 37:47
Do you guys? Do you guys have feelings about some of the companies that focus on getting you cell phones? Are there? Is there promise and peril there? What are your thoughts?
Michael Bassin 37:56
What's the question exactly?
Jonathan Fischer 37:58
Well, there, you can get data lists where they're focusing on getting the mobile phone numbers. So they are going to be and I know that's changed to even just very recently with some of the scam detecting software now even on my own phone, like scam likely pops up, suddenly, what are your thoughts on that most mobile focused data when it comes to the phone piece,
Michael Bassin 38:20
I think the first thing we need is to make sure you also have do not call this need to cross reference your phone data with really not calling people who are on those lists, okay, it's gonna be kind of a waste of time. It is they have specifically, the whole point is, we're not trying to bug people we're not trying to spam, we're trying to form good relationships. So some people, we phone, you can send one person 10 emails, 10 cold emails, and they're gonna thank you on the 10 in one person on the first email is gonna mark you as spam or, you know, hate your guts. I definitely think that all of this requires a lot of data cross checking. For all the lead research you do. There's lots of great databases. And there's a lot but those databases are not where you stop, you got to take these databases, and then manually go through all the prospects to make sure that the data is verified, they meet your highly customized profile. And that's why the lead research aspect is really probably the most time consuming, it's the most time consuming the most labor intensive. So it's good to get those phone numbers from those data sources, but you have to cross reference them and, and really, really do your due diligence otherwise you can get in trouble.
Jonathan Fischer 39:26
Quality, quality, quality takes time but worth the effort. Well, let's circle back then to more of a content content based question from Alfonso Gomez here who is asking once you have your long form pitch written down. What do you consider to start kind of eliminating sentences paragraphs and get this thing kind of pared down? This is you I have and I'm copywriting. I always start with William Moore. Right. And then it's about trying to pare it down. Can you give us some recommendations on best practices in that vein?
Daniel Schwartz 39:52
Sure. That I apologize for writing. So long, I didn't have enough time to write a sore letter. I don't remember Yeah. Oh, I think that's a huge challenge. Alfonso like actually creating concise and tight messaging is super challenging. I think one of the first things to do is look over everything you've written and start killing anything that sounds like Buzz. Any buzzwords that don't actually mean anything. People love them. They're garbage, they just fill up space, kill them. Now, the next thing to consider is what things am I saying here that are intrinsically understandable that I can just say one word, and everybody gets it? And what things here are actually like, niche language, or brand specific language that I need to define? And then how much do I actually want to? How much time or space? How many words you actually want to spend dealing with those topics? And is it better to just skirt around them? Or give them full attention? Like, are they core to my value? A lot of people get caught in the bus thing. And a lot of people will get caught saying things that they think are understandable and they're not. So So first consider those two aspects. And then look for anything that you've said, you know, with four or 567 words that could be said with to. Also, I would say make sure that you're using language that is you know what, like eighth grade level, you want to avoid any sort of large words. Even if you're verbose and loquacious and you have this enormous vocabulary, forget about it, right? If you have a big word that can be you know, if you have a word of seven letters that can be replaced with a word with three go with the word that three letters long, like simplify everything. And again, on you might also write down what is your core value? Like? What is the core value, the core thing that you want somebody to understand? And that anything and all that messaging that's not related to that? kill it dead? And try to boil it down to that core value? And then just start whittling away?
Jonathan Fischer 41:54
Yeah, yeah, like that. My, my daughters are both studying, taking the film studies in university at this time, and they talk in editing of movies about killing your baby, which sounds a little harsh, but you'll you know, if it's your if it's your creation, you can fall in love with certain scenes or certain portions. But when you realize that the whole is better served without that part, you just gotta cut it off kind of mercilessly with Michael, would you agree with that, which I'd say more on this process?
Michael Bassin 42:24
I would say that, you know, Alfonso brings up a great point of funds, if you want, you can always contact us directly. And we'll send you our, our whole framework for recruiting email copy, we have with a kind of a document we have we recommend, it's kind of a guideline of best practices to follow, I always recommend starting that long. So you want to say and then taking like a few hours or days to kind of go back and review it, because how it's going to look in a couple of hours is different than how it looks. Now, I recommend having a colleague, maybe someone at the company, read it for you help you edit it, and probably the most important person I'd recommend. Helping you explain you're trying to you're trying to sell in really simple language is actually a technical member of your team. Developers, software developers, or product specialists are really underrated salespeople. They're not salespeople by nature, because usually not maybe not as outgoing, or they don't want to be in front of people. But they're used to trying to explain the details of what's going on in really simple language. And so having a developer really can help align your language with them can be really useful. I'd be very careful about short sentences, and also not having long paragraphs, each paragraph should be no more than two sentences before another space, okay, the calls to action should be in a separate line by itself. Okay, because you're, you're you're writing something that's going to get a quick glance, you don't want to have bulky paragraphs, okay. And the biggest thing I would say is the following. If you really look yourself in the mirror, and you have no idea what your CEO, your CTO said, you don't really know all the intricacies because a lot of times when people write these messages, especially salespeople and marketers, they're parroting what they think they heard from their boss, because they want to make a good impression. And they think it kind of makes sense. And they assume that using this buzzword, the language is going to get the job done. The problem is that even if someone on their side is super technical, and really understand your niche, the way you write it at 3am, or 7am, or when on the train, ever everyone's capacity to understand, good, it goes down goes down the toilet. And so that's why you need you're reading for an eighth grade level, hoping that that 35 year old man or woman will will be able to spare some attention to try and understand it. So definitely get other people's feedback. I would have short paragraphs, a lot of whitespace and a messaging. And most importantly, and unfortunately, have very few links because those links are going to send you to spam.
Jonathan Fischer 44:48
Well, for sure. Well, gentlemen, it's been a great conversation today. I want to thank you for giving such great actionable high value content to the listener today and for being such fantastic guests in the show.
Daniel Schwartz 44:59
Jonathan With great pleasure being here, so real fun. Thank you so much for having us.
Jonathan Fischer 45:04
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and we'll plan to have you guys back in the future I trust. Well, I want to thank our live audience as well for being here on LinkedIn. And for all of our wonderful many listeners that are making the show such a success. We give you our thanks for continuing to continuing to help us grow at a very rapid pace. If you're enjoying the content each week, you can check out all of our past guests by going to the evolved sales leader wherever you'd like to go and find your favorite podcast download listen to while you're working out, spend a little time behind the windshield or what have you. The old sales leader has a growing library of thought leaders across a whole range of business building insights that are cutting edge and up to date in this post COVID era. Well, and we also want to give a shout out to our sponsor overpassed, the leading platform for getting talent to grow your your company fast. It's a global workforce, but it's cutting edge talent from anywhere in the world. You can hire quickly a team of STRS AES fullcycle sales reps, people to work your telephones and help you grow your business in any capacity. It's free to set up your account, go to overpass.com and check them out today. Well, that's gonna do it. Once again. I'm Jonathan Fisher, thanking you for being here. We'll see you next time. Take care everybody
