Cold Call Openers, Content Creation, and a "Productive Day" as an Account Executive

Question 1:

I struggle in the first 3 sentences when cold calling. I usually go with:

“Hey [name], we haven't met before and the reason I am calling you is that we find marketing managers like yourself are looking for ways to physically meet their target audience to increase brand awareness and generate more leads. Would you be open to a quick chat about that?”

What would your advice be in this situation and how do you like my approach? Any suggestions on openers that are more to the point? 

The opening is focused on the capabilities you can provide. Take a close look, “marketing managers like yourself are looking for ways to physically meet their target audience.” 

That is not a real problem. So I would focus on a problem statement. Before that I prefer to use a permission based opening. So you could adjust your opening to,

“Hi Linda, this is Salman at [company name]. You’re not expecting my call. Do you have a min? I promise to be brief.

I’ve been speaking to a few VPs in your space and they typically tend to struggle [with this problem] leading to [this impact]. This results in [KPI / metric] being affected.

Does that resonate or am I off base here?”

Another example is using closed-ended questions in the first part of your cold call.

Here’s an example of a company called OwnBackup which protects your CRM data from being lost. Their Ideal Customer Profile are companies that use CRM systems like Salesforce, MS Dynamics or ServiceNow.

Following your permission based opening, ask something like this: 

SDR or AE: “Curious, do you use a platform like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or ServiceNow for CRM and workflows?”

Prospect: “Yup, Salesforce.”

SDR or AE: “Do you have a way to protect your mission critical data and metadata? And if you do, could you walk me through how you typically do that??”

Prospect: Yes, we have a process where I have folks extract the data every so often so it’s not lost.”

SDR or AE: “Got it. The reason I ask is because typically we find companies do weekly data extracts from Salesforce. It’s a bit of a tedious and time consuming process and doesn’t provide a good failure plan in case there’s unfortunate data loss of some sort. 

Is that something that resonates, or am I off base here?”

Give those a shot!

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Question 2

“I'm a content marketer who's looking to specialize more in creating content that benefits sales teams. What kind of content works best as a sales enablement tool?”

From my experience I’ve found marketing tends to focus a little more on the capabilities of the platform than the actual problems the prospect is facing.

For example, if I'm selling a Customer Data Platform, you could describe it as, “we are a Customer Data Platform. We centralize your customer data, all in one place, so you can share better and personalized experiences for your customers.”

Now that’s true. But the thing is, that's speaking your language. That's speaking your company's language, your product's language. You want to focus on the language of the prospect. 

What is the prospect's language? The prospect's language are the daily problems they are facing they’re trying to solve for. ‘I need to achieve this goal and I’m facing all these problems.’ You've got to speak your prospect's language. 

So flip it around and focus on the problem. Which is going to resonate with prospects.. That could sound something like this:

“What we find is a lot of marketers have their customer data scattered across a dozen different systems, which makes it very hard to access and it takes a lot of time for developers and marketers to access that data and make sense of it. Therefore, they can't share personalized experiences on their digital channels with their customers. Leading to lower conversion rates and lost revenue opportunities.”

I didn't speak about our capabilities, I spoke about the problems that will resonate with your sellers and will resonate with your prospects.

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Question 3

“What is a "productive day" framework I can use? I just started a role as a new AE with no prior sales experience.”

Here are a few things I’d recommend:

1. Identify who the top AEs are. Sit with them and learn. “What are you doing differently that’s helps you stand out from the pack?” If you want to be the best, you’ve got to learn from the best.
2. Problem enablement. Map out each persona you sell to. The typical problems they face on a day to day basis (not capabilities of the platform, but the actual problems). List out the typical impacts of those problems on them, their team and org. And outline the most common KPIs/metrics those personas are measured on. Map that out on a chart and keep it beside you. It’ll help you in your prospecting, discoveries, demos,... it’ll help you guide and carry engaging conversations.
3. Know your competition. Where they’re good and where they’re not so good. Also understand your key competitive differentiators. What makes you stand out in the space?
4. Read case studies. Know 3 customer case studies inside and out. Something you can bring up with a customer that outlines the problem they were facing, impact on the business and how you helped. Remember to make the champion the hero of the story!
5. Have daily prospecting blocks. The best AEs find time to prospect. I blocked off 10-1130am each morning. Yes, sometimes customer meetings come up. But it held me accountable and forced me to find time to prospect. Always be building pipeline!
6. Ensure the majority of your time is spent on revenue generating tasks. My rule of thumb… 70% of your time should be spent on these activities. That means prospecting, discovery calls, demos, pricing reviews, executive alignment calls, etc…. Block out the noise, limit yourself to only mandatory internal meetings and focus your time which will help you put more money in your pocket! 

That’s all for this week folks. Please don’t forget to submit your questions that you want answered. See you soon!