Steven Bryerton, SVP of Sales at ZoomInfo, shared this cold-calling tip

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You need to come with a strong hypothesis on what you think the prospect is focused on.

I call this a reverse pitch.

Instead of pitching your solution within 60 seconds of meeting someone, you pitch the problem. What you hear every single one of their peers working on.

This sounds like:

"In a few recent conversations with Logistics leaders at companies like A & B, we're seeing a theme around two challenges:

1) Reliable Capacity. Securing affordable capacity in an uncertain marketplace to stay under our transportation budget.

2) Visibility. Get better freight visibility in transit to improve predictability and overall customer experience."

You can layer in more relevance based on your research. But those are the nuts & bolts of a great reverse pitch.

⛔️ What to do if none of this resonates with your prospect

This is where Steven's tip comes into play. Don't make a big deal about it. Keep moving.

This sounds like:

"That's interesting, Steven. That's all the logistics leaders are sharing in the last three conversations I've had. What's #1 or #2 for you?"

~~~

Make your best educated guess. Show you did your homework.

That will activate the law of reciprocity to work in your favor.

Put in the work and, even if you're wrong, the prospect will put in the work to correct you.

 

Ways your RevOps team should be leveraging AI:

 

✅ 1) Finding similar clients

 

This is a big challenge in many larger orgs. You're looking for a few companies to name-drop in cold outreach or to weave into your sales deck. You end up messaging half a dozen people to find companies of a similar size, industry, etc.

 

RevOps can use AI to automatically populate 3 similar companies in a Salesforce account field.

 

- Similar employee count

- Similar department size (if applicable)

- Similar industry

- Similar product / use case

etc.

 

✅ 2) Customer success stories

 

We all want reps to use more stories in their outreach and during the sales process. But this is really hard if you weren't the rep who closed the deal.

 

So enablement/ops ends up creating a spreadsheet for everyone to use. It gets messy.

 

RevOps should use AI to automatically populate customer success stories to a Salesforce account field.

 

- The problem

- The approach

- The result

- Name + role + testimonial

 

✅ 3) Measuring adherence and behavior change

 

Conversational intelligence tools are doing a decent amount of this with multi-threading in deals, etc. But the problem is that most sales leaders spend little time on those platforms.

 

They spend more time on Salesforce reports.

 

RevOps can use AI or a conversational intelligence tool to append adherence metrics to in-flight deals like:

 

- # of active stakeholders (buyer and seller side)

- Adherence to specific techniques or language

- Follow up time of emails after calls

- Use of customer stories

etc

 

The possibilities are endless with this one.

 

Then run a report on everything you want to see.

 

Kyle Norton talked about this quite a bit in his recent podcast episode with Mark Kosoglow.

 

✅ 4) Contact & Account data

 

Reps spend hours hunting for emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Reps may need to see Crunchbase profiles, investor pages, etc as well.

 

RevOps can use AI to automatically append most of this data to contacts and accounts in Salesforce.

 

 

~~~

 

 

This list is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

Where do you see RevOps using AI to improve rep efficiency?

The best AEs use this simple cold-calling hack

 

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✅ Use what prospects share in sales calls as the opener for your next cold call

 

This is as agile as it gets. Take, word for word, the language your prospects are using to describe their problems.

 

And drop that right into your outbound phone calls (emails too).

 

Here's an example:

 

Let's say you're selling cybersecurity. The last two vulnerability leaders you ran a sales call with shared something like this:

 

"Our biggest challenge is that there isn't clear ownership of what to do or how to handle findings. We don’t know who the point of contact is for assets and applications.”

 

That's the PERFECT language to drop into emails or outbound phone calls.

 

It could sound something like this:

 

Prospect: "Yeah go ahead, you've got 30 seconds. What are you calling about?"

 

Rep: "Great, thank you. I'm reaching out because the last two vulnerability leaders I've spoken with at companies like A & B are sharing a common challenge. There isn't clear ownership of what to do or how to handle findings. There isn't a scalable system set up to route to the right point of contact based on who owns the asset or application. I'm curious, how does that resonate for you at ABC COMPANY?"

 

 

~~~

 

 

The best language for your outbound messaging is sitting right in the sales calls you run every week.

 

Bring snippets from those conversations into your next cold calls and you'll see much better success.

 

AEs, when you hear nuggets in sales calls—share that snippet with your SDRs. They'll love you for it (and will book a sh*t more meetings for you).

 

Kyle Nelson from Varicent shared this tip in our most recent episode of PipeGen live.

 

In this episode, we’re talking about why traditional account plans might be slowing you down and how to replace them with a streamlined approach: Reasons to Meet (RTMs). Jason walks you through how to ditch the exhaustive research and focus on the minimum you need to land that critical first meeting—because you don’t need a full account strategy before making contact. RTMs take just 15 to 30 minutes to create, saving you hours of prep time while keeping your outreach sharp and targeted.

Check out the show notes, more free content, and get coaching at https://outboundsquad.com

Life Update: Just moved to Seattle

You may remember a post not too long ago about our move to New Jersey. Well, we made it about 7 months and just had to move back to the Pacific Northwest.

I'll tell you what—WA has the best DMV out there.

In and out in about 20 min.

Their motto:

"We'll be friendly and helpful—every time."

And they lived up to that. Every single employee there was positive, helpful, and great at their job.

Made me think about an important sales lesson:

✅ Be easy to work with

Nearly every SaaS category is FLOODED with competitors. Your customers have dozens of options.

Every net-new logo and renewal is a dogfight. You have very little, if any, feature differentiation.

Buyers will choose to work with companies who:

1) Respond quickly to emails, phone calls, chats, and texts

2) Have helpful SDRs, AEs, AMs, and CSMs

3) Their stakeholders like the most (why being multi-threaded is so important)

This is the last month of the year for most of you.

Be the easiest and most helpful rep your buyers have ever worked with.

Who's with me?

World-class cold calling isn't about:

⛔️ Fancy permission-based openers
⛔️ Clever rebuttals to objections

It's about your ability to get problem acknowledgment.

And to do that? You have to do some discovery.

I repeat. You have to do some discovery.

Is it 30 min? No. But the best cold calls last a lot longer than 2 min.

Here's how to land stronger meetings with an 80%+ show rate

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Find a problem.

The best way to find problems is by asking about them. But tread cautiously—no one likes to lower their status by admitting weakness to a complete stranger. Or put their team or another leader.

Here’s what you want from the prospect:

⛔️ Admit I have a personal problem
✅ Share a problem I have in common with my peers

This is best accomplished using a technique called question stacking:

[context] + [open-ended question]

Question stacking demonstrates credibility while making it easier for the prospect to answer your questions.

Here’s an example:

Prospect: “...wait so who are you with?"

Rep: “Again, I’m with ABC COMPANY. We’re a CX solution many outdoor ecomm brands use to find a balance between delivering a world-class customer experience—and reducing the cost to serve their customers. Chatbots oftentimes don’t answer questions well, and customers end up calling into customer service anyways. How does that compare to your experience?"

See how much context this question provides to the prospect? It’s open-ended but laser-focused.

You also bring a "give." You're sharing an insight from their peers.

You’ll know you’re done here when the prospect shares a problem or pain point your solution can help with.

There's ZERO incentive for your prospect to show up to a meeting without an acknowledged problem.

Agree or disagree?