In today’s issue, I’ll share exactly how I use triggers to get a 46.45% reply rate. Without understanding intent-data and how to use triggers, you won’t book outbound meetings in 2024. However, if you use triggers to create relevant outbound messages, prospects will pay attention to what you have to say, they’ll reply more, and you’ll book more meetings as a result.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Understand intent-data

Before reaching out to your prospects, you need to understand what is intent-data, and how you can use it to make your prospecting more relevant. In short, intent-data is data about a potential buyer’s online behavior that indicates what they could likely do next or buy.

For example, your marketing team will use website visits, clicks on email marketing links, or a business card collected at a tradeshow as intent-data. They then nurture the leads until they request a demo, or pass them directly to you (the salesperson) to try to book a meeting.

This kind of intent data is interesting, but you have no control over it. That’s why I suggest using a second type of intent-data – the one you find on LinkedIn. Post reactions/comments, profile visits, LinkedIn event attendance are all great intent-data you can use.

Step 2: List potential triggers

Now that you know better about intent-data, you can start listing potential triggers you can use to start conversations with your prospects. This is what I call trigger-based prospecting – you focus on finding interesting creators and influencers who attract your ICP, and use the post reactions/comments as triggers.

For example, I love using posts from other creators to find potential prospects to reach out to. That’s why I recommend listing the types of triggers you want to track, so you are sure you know what you’re looking for. Here’s a cheat sheet to help you list your triggers:

In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact process I use to design my Power Hour. A Power Hour is an uninterrupted, focused prospecting block. Without a regular prospecting ritual, you won’t be able to create consistency, which is 80% of your success as a salesperson. But if you follow these steps, you’ll create the right habit to be successful in prospecting.

Here’s how to design your Power Hour:

Step 1: Protect your calendar

Start by identifying the moment when you’re the most productive in your workday. Personally, mornings are when I get most of my work done, and when I’m the most productive.

I’m not a big fan of prospecting (it’s boring and repetitive), but it’s the healthiest habit for my business and my pipeline. That’s why I prospect first thing in the morning, from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM.

When you have identified your most productive time, create a 30 to 60 minute blocker, and repeat it every day, indefinitely. This will help you protect your schedule, and avoid being booked by your manager, colleagues, or anyone distracting your from this ritual.

In today’s newsletter, I will walk you through an important mindset shift for salespeople:

Moving from booking meetings to starting conversations.

This shift will help you simplify your prospecting, making it more relevant to you and your customers.

It’s important because it will change your focus from something you can’t control – booking a meeting, to something you naturally do every day – starting conversations.

Let’s dive in.

The biggest mistake

Most salespeople who are prospecting have one goal: booking a meeting. This approach is understandable, because that’s what they are paid for (as SDRs), or it’s the best way to maximize their earnings (as AEs).

However, when you are focusing on booking meetings, you tend to skip the most important part – generating interest from the person receiving your message. Without focusing on conversations, salespeople tend to pitch their products, insert meeting links in their messages, and turn prospects off as a result.

Before you know it, you’re sending hundreds of emails each week, without getting any reply, and you start worrying about reaching your targets. You change your messaging too often, and your inner voice starts doubting your capacity to book a meeting.

A better approach: focus on starting a conversation

Here’s how I recommend building your prospecting sequences:

1. Review your ICP: What companies are you trying to sell into? To which job titles inside of these companies?
2. Find big problems: What massive problems are these people trying to solve every day?
3. List symptoms of these problems: What concrete symptoms these problems create?
4. Find resources to alleviate the symptoms: Are there resources you can share to solve these problems?
5. Insert point 3 and 4 in your messages: Ask questions about these symptoms, and tease the corresponding resource.

Example: Selling a Global Employment Platform

For example, let’s say you’re a rep working at a Global Employment Platform, helping HR teams hire the best talent worldwide.

Start by following the 5 steps from above:

Review your ICP: You may be selling this platform to so many different types of companies. Pick one Ideal Customer Company and find two Ideal Customer Titles (Above The Line and Below The Line). For example, you could sell to remote-first scale ups with distributed teams in more than 3 countries. Your ATL could be a VP of People and your BTL could be a Payroll Manager.

Find big problems: VPs of People typically have issues navigating compliance when hiring employees and contractors. They have big risks related to local rules around employment. Payroll Managers are typically dealing with increased complexity for each new employee in a different country.

List symptoms of these problems: Let’s say your prospect’s company is expanding into the French market. They’ll have huge financial risks if hiring a full-time employee as a contractor. This is called “disguised employment” and could get your prospect’s company into legal problems, which is a headache for a VP of People. A Payroll Manager’s symptom would be the time wasted on shifting from country to country to fill-in the payroll documentation for each employee, every month.

Find resources to alleviate symptoms: Your company should have some free resources to market to your prospect. In our example, a cheat sheet of all countries that won’t ever consider full-time contractors as disguised employees would be incredible valuable to a VP of People. A checklist on structuring your schedule to fill-in payroll documentation in different countries would be great for a Payroll Manager.

Insert point 3 and 4 in your messages: Here’s an example of a cold message to a VP of People:

“Martha, saw your press release on expanding into the French market in 2024.

Curious to know if you’re adding employees or contractors locally. If that’s the case, how do you plan on avoiding the URSSAF from considering your full-time contractors as disguised employees?

If that’s a challenge you’re faced with, I have a cheat sheet on French-speaking countries that won’t ever consider full-time contractors as disguised employees.

Worth a peek?”

And for the Payroll Manager:

“John, saw your press release on expanding into the French market in 2024.

Curious to know how you’re avoiding wasting hours (and neurones) filling-in French payroll documentation.

If you’re into it, I can share a 7 point checklist on structuring your schedule to fill-in payroll documentation in 180+ different countries.

Worth a peek?”

Tying it back to you

If your job involves booking meetings with prospects (it should be if you’re in sales), start by reviewing your ICP, and listing concrete problems they are trying to solve every day.

Once you’ve done that, list detailed symptoms of these problems, find or build resources to help solve these problems, and include these into your messages.

This approach will help you start many more conversations, and help you focus on what you can control.

And if you want a step-by-step guide on doing this, and much more, then go check my new course, The Prospecting Engine. I’m making it available for 50% off until the 31st of January.

Hope to see you in there.

Cheers,

Thibaut

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 5 simple steps to turn your targets into daily prospecting activity. If you follow these steps, you’ll have a clear understanding of the daily effort required to reach your targets.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Review your sales goals

Start by defining or reviewing your goal. If you are an Account Executive, your goal may be a booking, MRR, or revenue goal. If you’re an SDR, your goal may be an opportunity or meetings booked. In both cases, having a clear understanding of your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goal is critical to being successful in your job.

In the example below, the goal is 138 discoveries performed per quarter:

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:

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