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.

 

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?

You want an easy button for cold emails, but it doesn’t exist…

News alert: AI ain't writing a great email on your behalf anytime soon.

At least not at the enterprise level.

Outbound will never be "set it and forget it" at the enterprise level. Enterprise meetings require enterprise effort. Period.

AI isn't an extra brain (yet). So use it as an extra set of hands.

Instead of using AI to write your email from scratch, have it help you take your email to the finish line.

✅ Cold Email Editing Prompt

Can you help me shorten down this email following these guidelines?

- Must be shorter than 80 words total
- Must have a first line making an observation about a specific trigger
- Must mention a problem they might be having
- Must mention social proof or how we can help
- Must have a call to action that asks for interest in a closed-ended question. It does not ask to meet with the prospect. Just asks if they're interested
- Speak to the impact of the problem that's mentioned.
- Follow any advice from cold email from Outbound Squad, Jason Bay, or Lavender.ai

Here’s my email:


~~~


Give this prompt a try for the next cold email you send.

99% of marketing-built personas will NOT help you sell better.

It's not useful to know their:

⛔️ Age
⛔️ Salary
⛔️ Gender
⛔️ Education
⛔️ Coffee preferences

Seriously, that information doesn't help you land a meeting or sell a deal.

But you know what does? Knowing their:

✅ Priorities
✅ Challenges
✅ Status Quo

Now here's the cool part.

Download transcripts of recorded sales calls, marketing personas, content, and anything else you can find.

Upload and then drop this prompt into ChatGPT


✅ Create Persona-Based Messaging

Take the attached messaging and turn this into an Outbound Squad Messaging Matrix. The messaging should be written using the customer’s voice.

This messaging matrix should be formatted into a table with these four columns:

1) Priorities

Format this into a statement like this: [headline]. [outcome] + [avoid problem].

Here's how to come up with the information for the headline, outcome, and avoid problem boxes.

- Headline: What is top of mind for your prospect’s peers? Imagine you have a dozen of your prospects gathered in a room.

What is top of mind for that entire group right now?
What trends are they worried about or focused on?
What do they want your help with?

- Outcome: What outcomes do they want?

What are the specific outcomes, metrics, or KPIs they want to improve?

- Avoid problem:

What problem do they want to avoid?
What problem are they hoping to address or solve?

Here's an example for different personas:

Skill gaps & staffing. Find and attract the right talent to accomplish our IT business goals—while avoiding unnecessary costs and project delays.

2) Current solutions

Now think about how the prospect is getting the job done. This is their status quo.

“Solutions” doesn’t necessarily mean “technology.” There are many methods your prospects use to make progress on their priority:

People: Are they hiring, reducing headcount, etc?
Process: Are they implementing a specific process?
Technology: Are they using technology? A competitor?

3) Problems

Problems are what get in the way of priorities. This is what your prospect hopes their current solution will help with. It’s important to understand the difference between pain and problems.

Pain: Inconveniences and frustrations.

This sounds like: “Manually processing payroll is labor intensive and frustrating for me.”

Problems: The impact on the business.

This sounds like: “Our team is manually processing payroll across multiple systems. We need to hire extra employees just to handle the manual work, and we can’t hire as quickly as we need to. We won’t hit our hiring targets this year.”

Help me define the problem in the customer's voice.

4) Aspirations

This is your prospect’s desired future state. These should be similar to the outcomes your solution provides to your customers.

This is for: [company name] who sells [solution] to [persona]. Example clients of theirs are [insert examples]


~~~


Voila! Persona-based messaging to write emails and create talk tracks.

Account Plans: Stop wasting your time

Yes, I'm talking to you.

Stop spending 3 hours (or multiple days) creating an enterprise account plan for a completely cold account. It's an absolute waste of time.

How to approach account planning:

⛔️ What's everything I could possibly find about this account?
✅ What's the minimum I need in order to land the first meeting?

If you haven't landed a meeting yet, ditch your account plan. Keep it minimal and the opposite of fancy.

And start creating "Reason To Meet" (RTMs) plans.

It takes a fraction of the time (15-30 min. or less). Bonus points if you leverage AI to help.

Here's what's included:


✅ 1) Problem

The basics. You have to find evidence of a problem in the business.

A lot of different ways to do this:

1) Find common triggers that could indicate a problem
2) Look for visual evidence of a problem (like a website issue)
3) Groundswell and speak to ICs/Managers on their team (the best way)
4) Dig through quarterly transcripts, 10-Qs, etc

The best info for your account plan isn't a webpage away—it's a conversation away. Go talk to people. The best reps nail this.


✅ 2) Stakeholders

Map out the potential buyers. Start with 3-5. Base it off of how your typical deals come together.

Then find your Best Path In:

1) Mutual connections, internal referrals, etc
2) Groundswell with existing contacts within the account
3) Go direct

Leverage Sales Nav, your CRM, etc to find the best strategy here.


✅ 3) Value

The most important (and overlooked) part. You need to give the buyer value in return for their time. It's the value trade Anthony Iannarino always talks about.

What are you going to teach the buyer?

Here are some ideas:

1) Experience the brand: If the account sells B2C, experience their buying process
2) Create a competitive analysis report
3) Share industry trends (they have to be non-obvious)
4) Share how you're helping their peers
5) Do a free analysis (website audit, etc)
6) An approach they haven't thought about


✅ 4) Differentiator

Specifics on how you solve the problem in a unique way.

Could be:

1) Feature differentiation (not great)
2) Similar customers you've helped
3) Differences in the approach or model


~~~


That's it. If you haven't landed an initial meeting yet—ditch those account plans.

Replace them with RTMs and stop wasting hours

What's missing from this list?