In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact system I’m using to restart my prospecting as I’m back from the holiday break. If you can replicate these steps, you’ll already be ahead of your fellow sales reps, as they are emerging from the holiday season without a plan.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Define your ICP and their problems

Start by building your ICP matrix. The ICP matrix is composed of your Ideal Customer Company (ICC) in columns, and your Ideal Customer Title (ICT) in rows. Your ICC is the type of company you’d like to go after, and the ICT is the type of job title you’d like to go for.

When your ICP matrix is done, focus on understanding the problems of your prospects. If you need to go further, I recommend checking the Cold Message System.

Step 2: Find where they hang out

Humans are social creatures, and they typically hang out with other humans who have the same interests. Nowadays, they mostly do it online, on social networks.

For most salespeople, LinkedIn is a great place to find prospects, and identify triggers to help them start conversations.

I recommend following these 4 steps to identify where your prospects hang out, and create personalized messages at scale.

Step 3: Enrich data

Now that you know where to find your prospects, you need to find the correct emails and phone numbers of your prospects, on top of their LinkedIn profiles. You can use the Kaspr extension to do so (+ you’ll get 25 free mobile credits when you sign up with my link).

Step 4: Build a problem centric sequence

You now have all the information you need to start reaching out to your prospects. Before doing so, you need to build a sequence to maximize your reply rate. I did a quick video to help you create a sequence from scratch, with ChatGPT.

When the sequence is ready, you’ll need to use messages that stand out from the hundreds of outbound touchpoints your prospects have to deal with. Here’s a collection of top-performing templates.

Step 5: Restart your daily prospecting routine

All these steps will result in nothing if you don’t create a daily prospecting habit. This step is by far the most challenging, since humans have a hard time building and keeping healthy habits.

I recommend doing the following:

• Step 1: Identify the time when you’re the most productive
• Step 2: Put a recurring blocker of 60 minutes
• Step 3: Follow the steps in this short guide
• Step 4: Repeat until it becomes a habit (at least 21 consecutive days)

You can also try my New Outreach System if you need a more in-depth guide.

And these are the 5 steps I am currently following to restart my prospecting for 2024. Here’s a quick video example if you want to learn more.

 If you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be in good position to grab your prospects’ attention, engage them in conversations, and book meetings with people who are trying to solve a problem you can help with.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my sales resolutions for 2024. With this last newsletter of the year, I’ll share what happened in 2023, what are the lessons I learned, and what I’m planning to do in 2024 to reach these goals.

Let’s dive in:

Resolution #1: Grow my online course sales to $75.000

2023 was a pivotal year for my family. We moved from Berlin to South of France with my wife and my son, and I wanted to find more time to focus on what I love doing; take care of my family and grow a business where I can choose what I do with my time, without having to worry (too much) about money.

Doing so means having options, and online courses are a good way to create value for my customers, while decoupling this value from my time.

I started selling online courses in October 2021, so I have over two years of historical data to forecast 2024. In 2022, I did over $29.000 in online courses, in 2023, over $47.400, and I’m planning to reach $75.000+ in 2024.

Here’s how I’ll do it:

• Keep offering The New Outreach System, The AI Outreach System, The Cold Message System to people who are looking for a specific prospecting outcome (grab these courses for 50% off with code “NEWYEAR” on checkout)
• Launch The Prospecting Engine to reliably equip salespeople with the knowledge and systems necessary to start conversations, book meetings, and generate a healthy pipeline in 2024 and beyond.
• Offer different support options for people who buy my courses (1:1 coaching, peer-to-peer community, monthly office hours)

I’m pretty excited for 2024, seeing the growth in online courses I saw between 2022 and 2023.

Resolution #2: Support my students with a community

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may remember my community, The T-shaped Sales Community. It started as a Discord group, before being rebranded Selling Advantage, only to loose momentum and stop after about a year.

At the time, I didn’t have the systems and the knowledge to run a community that would be useful to salespeople.

But in 2024, being able to exchange with peers on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to booking meetings is essential. I want my courses to produce tangible results for everyone who purchases them, and a lot of my customers need more than just videos to apply their learnings.

This community will be different from the previous one. It will be focused on getting students who purchased my courses a place where they can interact with other students, with monthly group office hours with me (and the recordings if they can’t make it).

If you’re intrigued by it, then join the waitlist of The Prospecting Engine. The Community and the course will go live on the 31st of January 2024.

Resolution #3: Close highly profitable sponsoring deals to help my students

In summer 2023, I started experimenting with sponsoring options for people and businesses who wanted to get their products in front of my 41K+ audience. I initially offered sponsored LinkedIn posts and sponsored newsletters.

This was a simple way to monetize my content, but I’m now working on longer, more profitable sponsoring deals with people and business who can create immense value for my audience and customers.

A good example of that is a sponsoring campaign including multiple sponsored LinkedIn posts (still tactic with a specific outcome), multiple newsletter sponsoring, and a co-branded lead magnet.

If you’re interested in discussing these options, go check my sponsoring page.

And these are my 3 sales resolutions for 2024. I’m really excited to keep building Tactical Selling, and I want to wish you a Happy New Year.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my top 3 prospecting tactics of 2023. I tried over 23 different outbound messages and tactics in 2023, and the following ones got me the most replies and meetings.

Let’s dive in.

Tactic 1: Direct Approach

The Direct Approach can be used as a LinkedIn connection request, a direct message, or even an email. I personally booked 12 meetings with this framework, when I was looking for sponsors for my content.

Here’s how it is structured:

• Trigger: {First Name} mentioned that your worked together on {Common Work}.
• Opposed: Would you be opposed to {desired outcome}?

Example:

• Trigger: Joe, Morgan mentioned that you worked together on a campaign.
• Opposed: Would you be opposed to putting Kaspr in front of my 40k+ audience?

This framework is effective because it begins with a personalized element (the trigger), piques the curiosity of the prospect by presenting an opportunity to solve a problem, and encourages a response if the prospect is interested.

Tactic 2: Do the maths

Do The Maths is an amazing framework, inspired by a post from Kaitlin Conner.

Here’s how it is structured:

• Trigger: {First Name}, noticed {quantified public information}.
• Quick pitch: We help {similar businesses} reduce {key metric}.
• Calculation: With a typical {cost of key metric}, this would mean going from {current state to better state}, resulting in {quantified savings}.
• CTA: Worth a chat?

Example:

• Trigger: Mary, noticed you have over 50 open positions on your job portal.
• Quick pitch: We help tech scale ups reduce their new employee churn from 30% to 10% or less.
• Calculation: With a typical cost of mis-hire around $30,000 per employee, this would mean going from 15 mis-hires to 5, resulting in $300,000 saved.
• CTA: Worth a chat?

This framework works so well because it shows your prospect that you have done your homework, and you have a quantified idea of their problems. If they are trying to solve this problem, your message will stand out.

Tactic 3: PS

PS is a framework I heard about in this post from Charlotte Johnson.

Here’s how it’s structured:

• Question: {First Name}, curious to know how you’re preventing {problem with negative consequence}.
• Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a {resource to solve negative consequence}.
• CTA: Sounds interesting?
• PS: Saw you’re {personal information on LinkedIn profile}.

Example:

• Question: Eric, curious to know how you’re preventing your new hires from taking too much time to go through their onboarding.
• Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a short, 3-step playbook on fixing your onboarding process.
• CTA: Sounds interesting?
• PS: Saw you’re also a sommelier. Big fan of wines from Languedoc-Roussillon myself. Ever tasted one?

This frameworks is really powerful because you can mention something personal in the PS, without having to worry if it is relevant with the problem of your prospect. It humanizes your outreach, and makes you stand out.

These are my top 3 outbound prospecting tactics of 2023. They contributed to the following outbound prospecting results in 2023:

• Prospects contacted: 633
• Prospects replied: 294 (46.45% reply rate)
• Meetings booked: 66 (22.45% meeting rate)
• Opportunities generated: 34 (51.52% opportunity rate)

If you’re interested in discovering the exact system I used to get these results, then join over 130 salespeople in the waitlist of my 2024 course, The Prospecting Engine.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 steps you can follow if you’re trying to build a solid lead list for 2024. If you follow these steps, you’ll find the right type of prospects, enrich their profile with all the data you need to contact them, and set yourself for success in 2024.

First, let me introduce you to a tool called the ICP matrix (you can find it the New Outreach System):

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share exactly how I reached at 57.5% win rate in 2023, so you can get some inspiration and increase your win rate as 2023 is coming to an end. If you follow these steps, you’ll start more conversations, turn them into meetings, and create momentum to close your deals faster.

Let’s dive in:

Part 1: Refined my triggers

In 2023, you need 3 things to get replies from cold outreach: creativity, relevance, and timing. In the past, creativity and relevance were enough, but nowadays, you need to reach out to a prospect right when you find a trigger.

Here are two examples of triggers I used to start conversations:

Example 1: Product announcement

Back in October, I received a product announcement by email from Mixmax. The announcement was about an AI composer they had just released. Here’s the message I sent and the reply I got: