In today’s newsletter, I’ll share a simple system you can use to book meetings when you’re too busy to prospect. If you can follow these steps, you’ll become less dependent on inbound leads and SDR-sourced opportunities, and you’ll set yourself for success in 2024 and beyond.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: If you’re too busy to prospect, you’re doing something wrong

When I became a manager (I was also carrying my own quota), I thought I was done prospecting for good. It was a mistake. I ended up without pipeline and missed my personal targets 2 quarters in a row.

As prospects have more and more tools to protect them from spammy salespeople, it’s getting harder than ever to start conversations with them. You need more skills, more experience, and better systems to book meetings. And relying on SDRs who often have limited sales experience is a good way to loose control over your pipeline.

If you’re in sales and you don’t prospect, you’re doing something wrong.

Step 2: Block some time in your calendar, every day

Knowing that you need to prospect isn’t enough. You need a system.

The first step to building a prospecting system is to protect your time with a recurring prospecting block. It can be as short as 30 minutes per day, or as long as needed to reach your targets.

For example, I prospect from 08:30 AM to 09:00 AM every morning. No one can book me during this time, it’s my sacred prospecting ritual. Doing it daily helps me stay in touch with my market and keep conversations flowing without delay.

Step 3: Start with follow-ups

Let’s be honest. Prospecting is no fun. It’s the one thing I dread the most when waking up, yet it’s the best thing I can do for the health of my business.

A good way to get over the initial reluctance to prospect is to start with follow-ups. For example, I start my prospecting block by opening my prospecting tracker, finding prospects I need to follow-up with, and getting rid of the list of follow-up tasks I have for the day.

This helps create momentum, because it’s so much easier than looking for prospects, finding a good trigger, and crafting a solid outbound message.

Step 4: Find 5 prospects

With your follow-ups done, you are now warmed up to work on the most time-intensive part of the prospecting process. I personally go after 5 prospects, because I found that it is enough for me to book 2-3 outbound meetings a week, but you can calculate that number with my Sales Process Calculator.

There are countless ways of finding prospects. My favorite is using prospect’s LinkedIn activity as a trigger.

Step 5: Contact them

This part of the process is like filling up the tank of your car. By adding new prospects to your sequence daily, you make sure you have enough fuel to keep your prospecting engine running.

You need to make sure your first outbound message is creative, contextual, and personalized. Here’s a resource to help you do just that.

And these are 5 steps to booking meetings when you’re too busy to prospect. I’m currently working on a whole new prospecting course for 2024, and I’m going to build it in public. If you’re intrigued, go check it out and join the waitlist here.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same, and what you can do about it. If you can accept these changes, forget scale, and focus on starting quality conversations, then you’ll book more meetings, and create more opportunities as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Reason #1: Email Service Providers are cracking down on mass emails

If you opened LinkedIn in the last few days, you may have seen an email sent from Outreach to their customers. In short, it shared new limitations from Outreach to protect the deliverability of emails, imposed by restrictions from Google and Yahoo.

These new limitations mean that if more than 0.3% of your emails are marked as spam, then all emails sent from your domain will be blocked by Google and Yahoo.

This is excellent news. It will translate into less spam for prospects, and leave more space to good emails from salespeople who take the time to do their research, and focus on starting conversations.

What you can do about it:

• Rebuild your Outreach System with a focus on getting replies
• Focus on prospects’ problems and use them in your messages
• Double down on LinkedIn prospecting and cold calling (but stay focused on quality)

You can use my New Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #2: AI is making salespeople exponentially efficient

AI (and specifically ChatGPT) have brought massive changes to the world of sales. Instead of replacing salespeople, AI allows them to become more efficient. For example, you can use AI to:

• Search for a specific trigger in a 10-K report
• Find personalization elements in a LinkedIn profile
• Build cold outreach messages from top-performing templates

These tasks are common for salespeople, and they often take hours to perform. With AI, salespeople are able to do this in a few minutes, so they can focus on tasks that require them to be creative, or interact with customers.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with common AI use-cases for prospecting
• Work AI into your daily prospecting system
• Find out what not to do with AI

You can use my AI Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #3: Data is (almost always) freely available

This last point is the main reason outbound prospecting has changed forever. In the past, salespeople didn’t have access to much information about their prospects. They typically knew about their names, phones numbers, and emails.

Nowadays, you can find a ton of “digital footprint” online. You can go on LinkedIn, see what posts prospects reacted to, gather data on their companies, find out their company headcount, and countless other data points. You can then use this data as a triggers in your cold outreach.

Yet, most salespeople ignore these triggers and put prospects into cookie-cutter sequences. And this brought us to the situation we are in right now; prospects don’t reply anymore, and SDRs are being laid-off in droves.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with triggers you should use in your outreach
• Stop sending automated sequences
• Focus on starting conversations

I’m currently working on a course to help you book more meetings, and create opportunities from outbound in 2024. Join the waitlist if you want to learn more about it.

These are 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same. You can choose to ignore this and keep using the same old playbook, or you can adapt to the seismic shift we’re going through.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share why I built a Prospecting Template Assistant, and I’ll show you how I use it to make any top-performing email, connection request, or cold call script my own. If you can replicate this process, you’ll be able to turn any cold message example into a message you can use to book your meetings.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Download my Swipe File

If your LinkedIn feed looks like mine, you should see a ton of brilliant examples of cold emails, cold call scripts, and connection requests you can use for outbound prospecting, on a daily basis. However, applying these examples to what you sell can be challenging.

That’s why I have created a Prospecting Template Swipe File. It’s a collection of top-performing emails, messages, and cold call script templates. I update it every week with the examples I find on LinkedIn.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact 3 steps I follow to turn ChatGPT into my personal sales assistant. If you follow this system, you’ll stop using ChatGPT for futile use-cases, gain efficiency, and focus on standing out in the mailbox of your prospects (which is hard in 2023).

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Give ChatGPT custom instructions

A few months ago, ChatGPT introduced custom instructions. This feature is extremely useful for providing context to ChatGPT and training it to respond in a way that best suits you. By clicking on your name and selecting “Custom instructions,” you’ll access the following screen: