Month: September 2023

Categories
Tactical Selling

Why the SDR model as we know it is dead

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Thanks to our sponsor who keeps this newsletter free for the reader:

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by my 7-day email course, Escape The Hamster Wheel. If your end goal is to stop having a boss, work on your own terms, and choose what to do with your time, then this course is your first step. Pre-order it now and find out how to land your first side gig (without leaving your job yet).

Why the SDR model as we know it is dead

In today’s newsletter, I will share why I think the traditional SDR model is no longer effective and suggest ways to future-proof your sales development career. By adapting to the changing sales landscape in 2023 and beyond and making well-informed choices, you can save time, earn more money, and have the freedom to live life on your own terms.

Let’s dive in:

Observation #1: SDRs are being fired in droves

2023 was a challenging year for salespeople. According to Layoffs.fyi, 236,835 employees were laid off in the tech sector alone. That’s an average of over 794 people fired per day, and new layoffs continue to occur daily.

These layoffs typically occur when businesses are seeking to achieve profitability or extend their runway. As a result, they let go of employees who are considered non-essential for the operation of the business. When SDR teams underperform, they are among the first to be laid off.

Observation #2: Throwing bodies at growth goals does not work anymore

A few years ago, increasing the number of salespeople in a territory was an effective strategy to acquire new customers and create the impression of growth for investors. It was simple to schedule meetings, generate opportunities, and close deals that ultimately resulted in churn after 12 months.

However, in 2023, CFOs carefully examine every expense, and hiring costly full-time employees is no longer their preferred choice.

Observation #3: Tools and AI make SDRs more efficient = less SDRs needed

Since the beginning of 2023, the sales industry has been greatly impacted by AI and ChatGPT. Initially, there was a belief that AI would replace all salespeople. However, after a few months, it became clear that AI would instead empower salespeople who were able to quickly learn how to use it.

As a result, we are seeing a significant increase in productivity among SDRs, and there is a rapid growth of SDRs as a service agencies and individuals. For businesses aiming to minimize risks, collaborating with an agency is less risky compared to hiring, onboarding, and training a full-time SDR.

These three observations indicate that the traditional model of hiring in-house, full-time SDRs and promoting them to AE within six months is no longer valid.

However, it’s a great opportunity for those who can adapt and find solutions:

Solution #1: Learn the basics of human psychology

If you ask ChatGPT to write a cold email for you, this is what you get:

Image #1
Image #2
Image #3

No single human would respond to an email like this one, and I had to regenerate the response three times to make it remotely readable.

An AI can generate incredible cold outreach messages, but it needs to be trained by a human who understands psychology and knows how to get responses from other humans. If you can identify:

  • your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
  • the problem they are trying to solve
  • how to incorporate these problems into your outreach

Then you will be able to schedule a lot more meetings.

Solution #2: Learn how to use AI tools to become more efficient

One option is to learn how to use AI tools to increase efficiency. For instance, you can utilize AI to identify and address problems with your ICP, extract key details from a 10-K report, or train ChatGPT to use an email framework tailored to your needs.

Many sales tools incorporate AI into their roadmap, but knowing how to effectively interact with AI is crucial for improving as an SDR. If you’re interested in doing this, go check my AI Outreach System.

Solution #3: Prepare to lose your job, and become independent

The future looks bleak for those who believe they can secure a job and remain employed at a single company until retirement. This is particularly true for salespeople, who typically have an average tenure of 18 to 20 months.

You have the option to continue switching sales jobs every two years or so, or you can escape the hamster wheel and become independent. If you have the skills to book meetings for someone else, you can do it for yourself as well. You’ll discover that many businesses are willing to pay you to book meetings for them or teach them how to do it.

This is a topic I will explore into with more detail in a 7-day email course. I am still in the process of creating it, but you can already pre-order it now.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

P.S. When you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you:

 
→ Join my AI Masterclass on the 11th of October (80+ students & waitlisters)
 
→ Build your outbound prospecting system from scratch here (250+ students)


→ Write cold messages that get a 38% reply rate and 27% meeting rate here (75+ students)

→ Sponsor my newsletter & get 40K+ eyeballs on your ad!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

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Categories
Tactical Selling

This is how you should use AI for sales

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Thanks to our sponsor who keeps this newsletter free for the reader:

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Reply.io’s Sales AI Marathon, where I’ll be giving a free AI messaging masterclass. Grab your free seat here.

And by my AI Prospecting Masterclass. It’s a 90-min live workshop to discover advanced AI tactics to book meetings. Join the waitlist today.

This is how you should use AI for sales

In today’s issue, I’ll share three concrete ways you can use AI for sales. AI has been a trending topic in sales for a few months. With more experience, we can now understand what AI can do for us and what its limitations are.

But first, let me share a quick story to demonstrate how AI is more of a productivity tool than a superior intelligence that will take your job.

Below is a sticker I created using AI on my iPhone (yes, it’s my son):

Image #1

Here’s the initial picture:

Image #2

I kept my finger on the element and the AI extracted it:

Image #3

As you can see, the AI highlighted and automatically extracted the element. This process took me 1 second compared to 3 minutes without AI.

This is an example of a task that AI can perform better and faster than a human.

And here are 3 ways it can help salespeople:

Idea #1: Prospect research

AI, specifically ChatGPT, is extremely useful for prospect research. For instance, you can utilize AI to brainstorm challenges faced by prospects using the following prompt:

Prompt: “Act like {nameOfProspect}, the {jobTitle} at {company}. {company} is {companyDescription}. Here’s more details about {nameOfProspect}:

{LinkedInAboutSection}.

Now list your top 3 challenges for 2023. Bullet point answers only, no jargon, clear and concise sentences.”

Example: “Act like Jeff Weiss, Chief Revenue Officer at CMiC. CMiC is a construction software for accounting and project management, built on a Single Database Platform. List your top 3 challenges for 2023. Bullet point and concise answer only.”

Image #4

When you’re done, you can ask the AI to find symptoms of challenges with the following prompt:

Prompt: Now list 3 symptoms for each challenge above. Bullet point and short answers only.

Example:

Idea #2: Outreach Personalization

Personalizing outreach is crucial for receiving replies when prospecting through email or LinkedIn. However, the challenge lies in the time it takes to personalize each message. Here are some ways you can significantly reduce that time:

Step 1: Export the resume of your prospect in pdf

  • Go to the LinkedIn profile of your prospect and locate the “More” button.
  • Click on “More” to reveal a dropdown menu.
  • In the dropdown menu, select “Save to PDF” to export the profile as a PDF. This works for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections.

Step 2: Ask the AI to skim the resume for personalization elements

Prompt: Here’s the LinkedIn profile of a prospect. I’m trying to get this prospect to reply to my LinkedIn messages and I need to mention an element of their profile that is relevant to problems I help solve:

  • {problem 1}
  • {problem 2}
  • {problem 3}

Now find me 5 elements from this resume that I could mention to catch their attention. Here’s the resume:

{PDFcontent}”

Example:

Image #6

Step 3: Write your message

Now that you have learned more about your prospect, you can select a personalized element that is relevant and use it to compose your outbound message.

In the given example, I chose point number 4, which mentions the prospect’s experience with private tutoring.

Here is the message I wrote:

Image#7

Idea #3: Writing Cold Emails

AI is similar to a super virtual assistant. It operates continuously, learns rapidly, and continually expands its knowledge through training. You can train AI to compose a cold email, and it will utilize that training to generate new email ideas. Here is a prompt you can use:

Prompt: Now I’d like to build a [x] touchpoint outbound sequence in order to get [prospect] to reply to my prospecting. I use the following framework for each message:

  • Question: A question based on one of the 9 symptoms above
  • Teaser: A potential resource to help alleviate the symptom mentioned in the question
  • CTA: A simple question to get a reply

Here’s an example for the first symptom you listed:

  • Question: How do you avoid and inconsistent of undefined sales process?
  • Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a 3-step checklist to help you audit your sales process.
  • CTA: Worth checking it?

Now based on the framework I shared, build a cold outreach message for each symptom listed above. For the teaser, don’t mention a case study or webinar. Instead make it more appealing by calling it a resource, checklist, playbook, framework. Always introduce the teaser with a variation of “If you’re interested, I can share a [teaser]” or “If you’re into it, I can share a [teaser]”.

Example:

Image #8
Image #10

And these are 3 ways you can use AI to become more efficient. As you can see, the AI helped brainstorm, find relevant triggers faster, and turn a template into a message quickly. It didn’t replace what makes a salesperson successful: their experience and knowledge.

And if you’re interested in learning how I use AI for prospecting, you can join my free workshop at the Sales AI Marathon.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

P.S. When you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you:

→ (NEW) Fill in this quick survey to improve this newsletter
 
→ Learn how to use AI to book meetings here (150+ students)
 
→ Build your outbound prospecting system from scratch here (250+ students)


→ Write cold messages that get a 38% reply rate and 27% meeting rate here (75+ students)

→ Sponsor my newsletter & get 5.500+ eyeballs on your ad!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Categories
Tactical Selling

3 tactics you can’t ignore to keep a deal moving

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Thanks to our sponsor who keeps this newsletter free for the reader:

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Topo, a buyer engagement platform. They just released the “Sales Playbook for 2023: Navigating 8 Key Sales Challenges in an Economic Downturn”. Get access to it for free here.

And by Reply.io’s Sales AI Marathon, where I’ll be giving a free AI messaging masterclass. Grab your free seat here.

3 tactics you can’t ignore to keep a deal moving

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 tactics you can’t afford to ignore if you want to keep your deals moving in 2023. So many salespeople I’m speaking with are getting ignored by prospects, ghosted by customers, and they keep losing momentum in their deals.

Here are 3 tactics that will help you solve that:

Tactic #1: Ask the right questions

When running a discovery call, a majority of salespeople try to get their prospects to go through a qualification framework. But in most cases, buyers feel interrogated, and they end up ghosting sellers. That’s where you can use Skip Miller’s tool:

  • Cause – What’s causing your to have a conversation with me?
  • Outcomes – What are the outcomes you’re expecting?
  • Decision – When can you make a decision?

If you can answer these 3 questions, your deals will gain momentum, and you’ll get ghosted a lot less. However, you may find that a lot less deals are going through in your pipeline, as these questions help you find out who’s serious and who’s not.

Tactic #2: Follow-up with a value-based email

When buyers ghost you, it can be challenging to come up with an email that’s going to get you a reply. If you’re “just checking in” or “bumping this at the top of your inbox”, you will lose momentum.

That’s where I love using the Jobs to be done framework:

I used a variation of this framework (always tweak your messaging) and got this reply:

Image #2

Tactic #3: Align and follow-up all in one place

When you’re working on a deal with your buyers, you end up using multiple channels (email, Slack, text, etc.) and this creates friction in your deal. Between quotes, redlining from legal, and other back and forth, it’s easy to lose track and delay your closing time.

That’s why I recommend using a tool like Topo, where you can create a digital sales room. This allows you to share and execute mutual action plans, involve and get commitment from all your stakeholders, and share all types of valuable content with your prospects.

These are 3 tactics you can use to keep a deal moving. I detailed them on LinkedIn, so give it a quick comment and reaction to make sure as many people as possible can see it.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

P.S. When you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you:

→ (NEW) Fill in this quick survey to improve this newsletter
 
→ Learn how to use AI to book meetings here (150+ students)
 
→ Build your outbound prospecting system from scratch here (250+ students)


→ Write cold messages that get a 38% reply rate and 27% meeting rate here (75+ students)

→ Sponsor my newsletter & get 5.500+ eyeballs on your ad!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Categories
Tactical Selling

How this sales rep used negative-psychology to book a meeting with me

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Today’s newsletter is a bit special.

Today’s newsletter is the last one in this format. As of next week, I’ll share the newsletter with an upgraded visual, and some additional content to help you book more meetings. I’d love for you to take 20 seconds to tell me about what you’d like to see in Tactical Selling.

How this sales rep used negative-psychology to book a meeting with me

In today’s newsletter, I will share how a sales rep used two psychological biases to book a meeting with me. I receive a ton of messages from people trying to book a meeting with me, and in most cases, I ignore them. Here is what this sales rep did differently:

Step 1: The trigger

Here’s a screen capture of the first message the rep sent out.

Image #1

Omid used a clever approach to reach out to me by replying to my weekly newsletter and complimenting my work instead of directly asking for a meeting. Omid knew that, as a creator, I would appreciate feedback on my newsletter. This short email earned him a reply.

Image #2

Step 2: The ask

With the conversation open, Omid accepted to write a testimonial, but he asked for something in exchange:

Image #3

Note that Omid did not immediately pitch his idea. Instead, he asked for a “selfish favor”. This approach is brilliant because I am not in a position to say no, especially since he agreed to write a quick testimonial about my newsletter.

Step 3: The pitch

After receiving the authorization, Omid pitched his product and requested a meeting.

Image #4

I like this message for a few reasons:

  • Short description of what Omid is building (even if it’s not really clear in this email)
  • Asking for 25 minutes is a good pattern interrupt (in general people ask for 30 min)
  • The PS gives credibility by mentioning other creators
  • No link

Despite the great message, I didn’t feel like responding because I wasn’t sure if it would be a waste of 25 minutes of my time. So, I ignored the email.

Step 4: The negative psychology + reciprocity trick

This is where Omid demonstrated his outbound prospecting skills. He waited for two days, giving me enough space but not waiting too long. On August 24th, he submitted the testimonial and sent the following message:

Image #5
Image #5

The message and its timing are brilliant for a few reasons:

  • Omid employs reciprocity by writing a nice testimonial about Tactical Selling
  • He labels the situation by assuming my silence was a polite way of saying no
  • He doesn’t push for a meeting or try to convince me of anything, instead telling me it’s fine (negative psychology)

As a result, I accepted the risk of wasting 25 minutes of my time because Omid gave me something (the testimonial) and played along instead of trying to persuade me.

This is how Omid booked a meeting with me. He understood that the goal of an outbound message is to start a conversation and navigate it until a meeting is set.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

Preview image

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P.S. When you’re ready, here are 5 ways I can help you.

→ (NEW) Fill in this quick survey to improve this newsletter
 
→ Learn how to use AI to book meetings here (150+ students)
 
→ Build your outbound prospecting system from scratch here (250+ students)


→ Write cold messages that get a 38% reply rate and 27% meeting rate here (55+)

→ Sponsor my newsletter & get 5.500+ eyeballs on your ad!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get my free, 4 min weekly newsletter. Used by 5.900+ salespeople to book more meetings.