RP Advisory’s Post

How many cold calls does a CEO receive per month? Three! What in the world is going on? We're spending so much time focusing on AI and automated blurb in outbound emails, we're missing the low-hanging fruit. James Isilay, CEO of Cognism shared a brilliant post last week about how an #SDR got through to him on a #coldcall And most importantly, what she did right. James explained that for him, cold calling is the breakthrough channel. He is a religious zero-inbox fanatic. He deletes emails almost immediately. He rarely sees a truly personalized email. And his LinkedIn Inbox is worse. This is why, his mobile phone is the best channel to reach him. Let me clarify my message here before anyone chimes in. Cold calling mobiles is not the best #sales channel for everyone. But it is one of the channels that must be used. Along with email. And LinkedIn. And along with a diverse range of approaches, because every single one of your buyers is unique. They prefer certain channels. Certain types of approaches. Certain media types. Enough with the one-trick pony approach. It's time to diversify your #outreach Or forever be average.

Cold calling is a great way to get in touch with decision-makers! 👀 Our research has shown that there's around a 75% chance of prospects picking up the phone on the first try. AND this same research revealed that CEOs are most likely to pick up. And if you ever wanted to know what's the best way to approach a CEO over the phone, check out what got our CEO James Isilay's attention 👇

Last Friday I received the best cold call from a SDR. Here’s what she got right (and why it was so refreshing): BACKGROUND: In 2023, I received only 3 cold calls. That’s right. Three! And the calls were not great. The typical issues with the cold calls I got: - Not researching our pain points before they call me - Reps from the same company calling me (unaware I spoke with their team) - Absolutely no personalisation (it was clear they put in zero time before dialing) Then last week I received a call from Kay-leigh Johnston from Playroll. What did she get right? - Friendly and personable (so held my attention immediately) - When I noted I was not the right person, she immediately looked to add value  - She discussed our solution in detail, showing she had researched Cognism - When I mentioned our current provider, she had her battlecard ready - She shot down our provider so well, I forwarded her follow up email to our DM - I do really like our current provider so their AE now has an uphill battle! - She followed up with me multi-channel - email, LinkedIn, direct call - When we connected on LinkedIn, I noted she had already connected to our HR team and my CIO showing research and preparation before hitting the CEO For me, like many executives, cold calling is a breakthrough channel. I am a religious zero inbox fanatic. I delete emails almost immediately. I almost never see a truly personalized email. It's happened once in two years (and yes I did respond!). And my LinkedIn Inbox is worse. So mobile phone is the best channel for me. SDRs like Kay-leigh (only in the role for 5 months) show that good training and systems mixed with the right hire can cut through the noise and generate pipeline for the team.  Remember: If you're trying get ahold of executives, pick up the phone! Be like Kay-leigh. She has a bright future in sales.

Really excited to be growing my team!! Hinterview are looking to hire 2x SDR's to help the team continue to grow and enable recruiters to maximise their outcomes Maybe I'm biased, but I believe the SDR role is the most important role in SaaS, without pipeline AE's have no one to close, and CS have no customers to help succeed! What the business wants: - Pipeline Generation: Engage potential customers across all channels (Phone, Linkedin, Video (of course), email campaigns, social selling etc) - Professionalism: How you do something is how you do everything, we want someone that holds themself to a high standard in every aspect of life - Problem Solver: Things happen, things change, calm seas never made a skilled sailor. We want someone who is adaptable, reactive and confident enough to deal with challenges as they present themselves What you will get in return: - The strongest commission package I've seen on the market, we don't pander to low achievers to be "fair", we reward top performers - Top tier tech: We use tools that before I joined didn't know existed, allowing you to spend as much time as possible focused on revenue-generating tasks - Learning from myself, our Leadership team who have all done unbelievable things in the world of recruitment, and the current team who consistently exceed target What I want: - Self control: working an outbound role you have no control over how people speak to you or how people respond to you, only how you react to it - Resilience: Sales can be hard, everyone has days where nothing they do works, I want someone who doesn't let that turn into a week or a month, but bounces back and comes back stronger the next day - Personality: Someone that can laugh through the pain in the tough times, and celebrate with in the good times - Passion: As Joey Diaz says, you have to have something!! I don't care if it's lawn bowls or ancient coins, you have to have a hobby, interests, some fire in your belly, because if your heart isn't in it I don't want you in my team SDR's make things happen, so if you think this could be the role for you, consider this your 1st stage interview!! Find my contact info, get in touch and we can discuss further

Two months ago, I interviewed an SDR leader who built $100M+ in pipeline for a famous SaaS Company. One of the first things he told me was, “SDR calendar blocks are bullsh*t.” Here was his reasoning: Let me set the stage… A young and charismatic SDR leader enters my office. I could feel the energy in the room. Without telling me, our recruiter canceled all my other interviews before this one. She knew I was going to hire him That leader was Alex Choi, our Head of Sales Development As part of the interview, I asked him what he thinks the ideal calendar schedule is for SDRs. Emir: Alex, how should SDRs manage their calendars? What are the calendar blocks they should have from the beginning of the day to the end? Alex: Emir, respectfully, calendar blocks are BS. When you have blocks for prospecting, cold calls, emails, etc, SDRs just move from one task to another JUST because it’s time for the other block even if they don’t finish the other task. Here is how our SDR’s manage their calendar: 8:30~9:30 - Admin Work (ZERO unread emails) 9:30~11:30 - Outreach Tasks (ZERO overdue tasks) 12:00~3:00 - Sequencing (X number of accounts) 3:00~3:30 - Bounced Emails (ZERO bounced prospects) 3:30~4:45 - Prospecting (X number of accounts) 4:45~5:00 - Meeting Reminders (draft reminders for prospects set to meet tomorrow) You DON’T move on from a step until it’s complete. Period. A month into this approach we’ve booked $1M in pipeline with 1.5 SDRs. NO calendar blocks. Just focus on completing the work vs filling the time. What do you think? What’s the best way for SDRs to structure their day?

If you're a newer SDR here's a few things you can do to crush this new quarter 🪙 Love that we have a clean slate every 90 days. It's like the sins of yesterday are washed away 🚽 Unless that sin was not prospecting, in which case the lagging indicators will show up halfway through this quarter 🤣 If your org doesn't formally require you to have a "top 5" accounts. Go ahead and make them yourself. This is a great way to learn how to actually penetrate accounts and will easily set you apart if your org is like most orgs. Most orgs don't really value anything other than spray and pray tactics. Volume looks good on an board deck 😎 "Our SDRs spent countless hours doing research, assembling POVs and building business cases after talking to multiple people within our target companies," does not. Because it's not measurable. The selection critera of these top 5 accounts will vary a bit depending on your industry and persona, but generally here's a few ways to decide what accounts to target 1. Job openings/new hires - Are they hiring people that indicate your solution could be a priority? For me it's network engineers and telecom related titles. 2. Growth of course... but this is so basic it's almost not even worth mentioning. You have to find a compelling reason why "growth," means they should talk to you. 3. Mergers and acquisitions. This is a big one for me and I suspect it'll be a big one for a lot of you too. If they're bringing in entire new companies into their org chart, what could this mean? Maybe they need a new book keeping tool, maybe their current HR stack isn't sufficient to keep up with changes like this... The list goes on. 4. If you're selling a website related tool, BuiltWith and other services like it are clutch. What tooling makes up their website? Maybe they use Hubspot, and you're a hubspot implementation partner, and someone in their company posted about needing a better way to track attribution data. A perfect storm for sure, but it happens! That's why this kind of intel is so important. Once you have a good reason to reach out - all you gotta do is nail the pitch. Easier said than done for sure 😎 If you want to know what kind of cold calling approach I take once I have all these points available - head on over to my website and download my breakthrough script for FREE (enter "0" when prompted for a price) - https://lnkd.in/edNuMQvy #sales #sdr #outbound  

Hiring your first SDR won't get you more meetings. I mean, at least not in the way your spreadsheet tells you. The biggest, most overlooked reason this happens: once you've hired them, you've signed up to be a SDR manager. And if you do it wrong, it's a complete waste of money. Some tips to reframe expectations as you prepare to do this: 1. Most SDRs have very little experience. You'll have to teach them how to cold call, sell, prospect, list build, use a CRM, etc. 2. You'll have to teach them a lot of basics about business. Most won't have this context and the best ones start to learn this fast 3. You'll have to be IN the trenches with them EVERY SINGLE DAY for at least the first few months. This will help reduce the gap of knowledge transfer from founder → SDR. This is the biggest, most common problem I see 4. You'll have to take the sales process you've run as a founder and 'SDRify' it. I mean, they won't have networks, relationships, VCs or friends they can work to get deals done. You'll have to dig deep in what you've learned as a founder to extract a GTM motion that a SDR can execute. Similar ICPs with similar networks that'll answer an email, inMail or phone call. A lot to this process 5. It'll take a lot longer than you think to get this motion going. If your spreadsheet says 3 months, I'd expect it to be 6-9. Assuming it'll work at all. Happy to chat through this if you're considering this move.

The SDR role is not dead. The reason it stopped working is companies stopped experimenting. Instead they just kept loading their sequence machines with more spam emails. I got into sales in 2002 at the Corporate Executive Board in a job that was called 'Marketing Associate.' We now know that job as a sales development rep or business development rep. When I first started I was absolutely horrible. I was number 89 out of 100 on the leaderboard. They were going to put me on a performance improvement plan (aka a PIP). What would you do? I had $65,000 in school loans with no backup plan. I had to figure it out. Rather than getting upset or making excuses, I sat with the top people. I observed what they did. I wrote it down. Then I got back to my desk and tested it. I had two notepads. One on my left hand. One on my right hand. I would use little tick marks to tally up how many I did of each method. At the end of the week I saw which one - group A or group B - got me more meetings. What a shocker. The stuff I learned from the top performers got me way more meetings than my natural instincts. Then in 2005 David Stillman and I founded Vorsight. Over 16 years our teams scheduled 35,000+ meetings on behalf of 200+ clients. Want to know what I learned from all that? What works for one company to get killer meetings doesn't work for the next. What worked last year doesn't work this year. And we haven't even dreamed up what's going to work tomorrow. Back then we were doing pay for performance meetings. If you didn't get meetings, you didn't get paid. And we like eating. Funny how that has a way of sharpening your mind. We would constantly look at the data and then run different experiments. It was never ending A/B testing. That's what you need to do now. Stop looking at your team and saying, "We've got to get rid of these people because they're not performing." Start looking at your team and asking yourself, "Why isn't this working?" "What other companies can we observe to learn what they're doing?" "What methods should we A/B test next?" Right now I have clients who do 45 activities per week and generate seven meetings. The activities they do are not what you think. I know all of you are going to be asking what are they what are they. But the truth is it probably wouldn't work for you. What will work for you to get productivity back up again? I don't know. Start running tests.

Many organizations claim they want to build an elite SDR team. But is this statement reflected in their recruiting and onboarding efforts? Previous misconceptions about the SDR job as a low-level position lead to poor practices, which are hard to shake off. This makes it challenging to attract top talent and build a high-performing SDR team that generates millions in revenue. Leaders must shift their recruiting and onboarding approach to reflect the value SDRs bring to the table. Here are some strategies that help Cato attract SDRs ranking in the top 2% of reps: 🟢 Each week, our SDRs publicly share content that includes insights about working on our team. Applicants get a 360° view. Talent has the opportunity to build a relationship with us and understand job and cultural fit before applying. Top candidates have enough information to apply to openings, prepare for interviews, and understand our onboarding process. 🟢 Our SDRs are product specialists —Reps focus on becoming product experts during onboarding; this sets them up to take on bigger tasks beyond prospecting. —Reps are given full autonomy over their selling style; we don’t have rigid rules, and this helps new hires ramp up quickly and develop their own approach in presenting our product and finding the kind of problems they like to solve. —We support SDRs in building a personal brand on LinkedIn and positioning themselves as consultants to hundreds, even thousands, of professionals, generating larger-scale leads. These strategies have attracted the best of the best to Cato’s SDR team, and any sales organization can implement them! What’s your approach to building an elite team of SDRs?

After evaluating countless Sr. SDR candidates, I’ve decided to narrow down my “ideal candidate profile". Preferred scenario: Have a Sr. SDR in seat by the beginning of September. I’ve given myself two weeks to relentlessly evaluate candidate after candidate, extend an offer, and pop a bottle of champagne. Here are 10 qualities I’m specifically looking for in my next Sr. SDR: 1. 6+ months of SDR experience in SaaS 2. EXCEPTIONAL and VERIFIABLE track record 3. Highly motivated by money 4. Has an “if you’re not first, you’re last” mentality 5. Has a goal to become an AE in the next 6-9 months 6. Has a high sense of urgency and intensity 7. Isn’t afraid of a team that demands hard work and high expectations 8. Highly coachable and trainable 9. Carries oneself in a professional manner 10. Can work on-site at our San Francisco office BONUS: Has prior experience selling MarTech Here are 5 reasons to join HockeyStack: 1. $120,000 OTE (80/40) + Equity + C/W Commissions 2. One of the fastest-growing YC companies in recent years. Your equity will matter 3. Began Outbound on July 10th and it's now August 20th—we’ve exceeded our goal for both months with zero ramp time. First iteration of outbound is proving promising 4. Strong PMF in marketing attribution with great early signals for our sales intelligence and ABM products 5. Fast track your way into a successful AE role If you fit the criteria, feel free to DM or call me personally @ 213-505-7586. Note: I will auto deny anyone who asks to work remotely or has less than 6+ months of SaaS experience. This isn’t to be a jerk but I simply don’t have the time to interact with candidates who don’t meet these non-negotiables. Please thoroughly read the post before reaching out. Thank you.