Looking to power up your outbound?
We’ll learn seven signals you can use to reach the right person who’s ready to buy.
In this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to Market Leaders.
I’m Geoff Coots, SVP of sales and customer operations for Unbounce and Insightly.
Today I’m joined by Jed Mahrle, founder of Practical Prospecting.
Jed, thanks for joining us today.
Yeah. Happy to be here, Geoff.. Thanks for having me.
Our pleasure.
Maybe just to start with, can you tell us a little bit
about practical prospecting and what you do?
Yeah.
So, essentially, we’re an outbound agency.
We primarily focus on building cold email systems that book meetings
for, typically series. A, series B, SaaS startups.
My whole career has been in SaaS building. SDR teams, and,
I just naturally flowed into this business model.
And we’ve been doing it over the last two years now.
All right, that sounds great, Jed.
I really look forward to chatting with you about this topic.
It’s near and dear to my heart.
I would say that pipeline development continues to be the challenge
I hear about most in sales groups and meetings and talking to my peers.
As a sales leader,. I know there’s only so much
that we can rely on the marketing team to do for us.
No matter how great they are.
So I want my reps to be doing more outbound activity, but it’s not easy.
What do you say to that?
I agree.
I mean, it’s certainly not easy.
It’s always been hard.
And it’s honestly getting more and more difficult
if you’re still doing things the old way.
So I think, we all agree outbound is hard.
It’s not. It’s not an easy thing to do.
But the fortunate thing is that especially over the last two
or 3 or 4 years, with just the progression of AI,
there’s so much more information available to us about our target accounts
and our target contacts that we want to reach,
that if we use that information in the right way,
we can actually connect with people a lot easier than it was five, ten years ago.
But again, if you’re still doing things the old way, sending out blank
templates, it’s not going to be very successful.
But if you do incorporate all the new information available to us
with AI and automation tools,
it is actually it can be easier, you know, you can do it with less volume.
So I know we’ll get into some of that stuff, but that’s
that’s my thinking on it.
It’s never going to be easy.
But, if you if you keep up with the new tools
and new new things out there, it can certainly become easier.
All right.. I like where you’re going with this.
So let’s let’s dive into it, because I think you’ve identified
about seven or so signals that reps can use to put them
in a position where they may be talking to a person
who is actually in a position to buy.
Maybe let’s just go through through them one, one by one,
starting with the first one.
If the company has recent news that’s relevant to our value proposition,
whoever that happens to be or whatever that value prop is,
can you give me example of how you can address that and take advantage of it?
Absolutely.
So, some context
I want to share with you before we get into all the different signals.
You know, when you’re building your app on motion, there’s, there’s,
I think of, like, three
layers to how you’re building your list and deciding who you want to reach out to.
So you have the company level.
What is the type of company. I want to reach out
to, the size, the revenue, the location, industry, things like that.
Then you have the person level.. What are the job titles?
What type of person is this, in terms of who you want to reach out to?
And then the third level is what are the signals I’m going to use
to determine when I should reach out to these companies and these people.
So what we’re talking about,
Geoff, is these seven different signals that are,
for the most part, pretty universal that most people can use regardless
of what they’re selling.
But there’s hundreds that you can come up with or find for your own company.
And so for your first one, the first one you mentioned,
relevant news that relates to your company.
So I’ll give an example of this.
I’ve worked with a client who sells an LMS software,
and we would monitor for news around initiatives
in learning in development if we found those initiatives.
It’s a very easy segue to say, hey, we saw this and tie
that into our learning management system or LMS solution.
And so whatever you’re selling, you can, monitor for the keywords
that are related to the solution you solve for to reach out
to people at the right time.
Now, tactically, how to do this?
There’s the manual way of obviously searching on Google for certain companies
and seeing what sort of news pops up.
You can ask ChatGPT this, my preferred tool that I use is Clay.com.
I can upload the companies. I want to reach out to,
and then I can use their. AI agent to, essentially research
in Google around this company to surface any initiatives that were either
from an executive member, posted on social in a 10-K report,
things of that nature, and then it’ll automatically pull that information
back for me so I can quickly write a message, based on that research.
So, yeah, that’s
that’s pretty much to recap on, on that
signal and it’s honestly one of my favorite ones,
because you can use it regardless of what you’re selling.
Yeah, I love it.
That’s contextually relevant for what you’re going after with your ICP and the.
And the content.
That’s, that’s very specific.
And I like to plug for for clay.
It’s, it’s an interesting, new way of looking at, at contact management.
Okay, great.
The next one is a former customer of whichever company
you’re you’re calling from.
That’s that’s moved and changed roles.
Why is this a signal?
Yeah.
This one I think, is
especially become really popular over the last five or so years.
And unfortunately, it’s not going to be a great signal
if you’re, a smaller startup that doesn’t have a lot of customers.
But if you’ve got,
you know, a few hundred thousand customers,
if you’re in that range and you’re starting to grow,
naturally, people at your customers are going to change jobs.
And it’s probably the warmest signal out of the ones that we’re going to mention.
And I think pretty clearly, if you’re reaching out to people
who used to work for one of your customers but now work somewhere else.
They either have familiarity with your your tool or your service because
they used it in their last company, or at the very least, if they didn’t.
When you reach out to them, letting them know that their former company
is a current customer of yours, that is obviously a personalized email.
That is something
that’s going to stand out to them, it’s going to build social credibility, etc..
So there’s a lot of tools that will help automate this for you.
User Gems is one of the big ones that come to mind.
Champify as well.
But if you don’t want to pay for expensive tech, I mean, those tools are great.
You can do this in Sales Navigator, by just uploading your customers
and then turning on the filter
that say that says, show me contacts who used to work for this company.
And then the message is really simple use.
You simply start your email or your call or your LinkedIn message with,
you know, hey, I saw you were working at so-and-so company.
They’re customer of ours.
Did you use our product or service during your time there?
And then flow that into the rest of the email.
So it’s never going to be a high volume of leads
unless you have a lot of customers.
But when you do find those leads, they’re,
usually very highly, very high likelihood that they’ll convert.
Yeah, that’s. That’s a great description.
Thank you for that.
And I tend to think this is one of the most valuable ones. It’s
a long way you can have an opportunity come a long way down the funnel.
Very quickly.
If you’ve got somebody who turns out to be,
since they’re knowledgeable about your product,
they’re probably at least an influencer if not becoming a champion
because it helps them.. And it could help us.
So it’s a really good one.
We just treat those as gold.
I can tell you
that my team has
several of these on the go right now, and you just know that they’ve got
a better chance of closing when that happens.
So it’s definitely good.
The next one is quite relevant for our company as well,
because we’ve just gone through a pretty significant merger.
Just last year.
And so this is all about getting those signals
and figuring out how to take advantage of a recent announcement
of an acquisition or a merger.
What would you say to that one?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I wonder if anyone’s prospected you since that happened,
or if you’ve seen any compelling messages, but, Yeah.
Mergers and acquisitions that are happening all the time.
And, like, at the core of what’s happening is,
you know, when there’s a merger, there’s
going to be new processes, potentially new tools in place.
And so it’s just a good signal for timing on when decision makers at that company
might be considering new options that are going to, work for both parties.
And so another piece of that, too, is usually when there’s a merger.
Acquisition, there’s more there’s more news
and things you can read about around why this happened, what their goals are,
what sort of things are working on in the coming months with this new event.
And so whether it’s, you know, looking into that news to find, insights
that tie into what you can help with or just simply the timing of it,
understanding that they’re probably reevaluating
the tools and the processes
they’re using,
and seeing how your solution can tie into that and potentially help them.
It’s just always a great, timing trigger for when to reach out to people.
And that’s really the key.
The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that it’s
usually a headache for the people involved.
And so bombarding them with messages and asking them
to take a demo of your solution isn’t always the best approach.
You do want to be, mindful and acknowledge the fact that, like, hey,
especially if it’s a decision maker, you’re probably really busy.
Your your plate is probably full with everything
going on with the recent acquisition.
Let me know if this is something you’re open to talking about.
Once things die down a little bit, like that’s a call to action I would use
because they’re going to appreciate that, you know, you you understanding
that they’re in probably a really busy time at the moment.
yeah.
I’ll just react to that and answer your question.
I think, you know, with our merger, I’ve.
I’ve been targeted quite a bit around, around how companies can help us
with a merger, especially in my role leading a sales team.
When you think about the tech stack
that goes along with that, which is quite vast,
and you,
there’s probably a really good chance you’ve got two of a lot of things
and you need to consolidate to one of a lot of things.
So that’s if you’re in that kind of business, it’s
it’s highly relevant to reach out to.
In my case where there’s Rev officer, head of sales or head of marketing etc..
So that’s great.
So similar to that.
Also your company can be in the news around something like a new product launch
and they make an announcement about what’s coming out that’s new and fresh
and maybe a bolt on or additional features or enhancements.
How can you use that as a as an engine for lead gen?
Yeah.
So product launches impacts almost every area of the company.
Right?
When there’s a new product launch,
the sales team needs training and how to sell that.
It’s a new motion for them.
You know, marketing is trying to figure out
how to market that better and get the news out there.
Sales enablement, for example, is focusing
on training the team on those new on this new product launch.
The engineering team as well.
Like, there’s there’s a lot of departments that are impacted
by a product launch.
And so depending on what department you sell to, you can use that information
to potentially, essentially what it is, is making
hypotheses around potential pain points they might be running into.
And so it’s a very like universal signal that can tie into your solution
if you do it correctly.
There’s always product launches happening.
And so it’s a it’s just a good timing trigger for when to reach out to people.
And I think just a big one about that is that it tends to impact
most departments and just, you know, same with the merger and acquisition.
There’s usually a lot of news, a lot of, you know, articles
or whatnot that are coming out around why this product launch even happened.
And if you can really
figure out the overall reason for why that company decided to go
with that product launch, if you can tie that reason into your value
proposition, that’s when you’re going to have a good message that stands out.
And just like kind of a recap on all of these signals,
the goal is not to just say like, hey,. I saw you had a merger and acquisition
or merger and acquisition, you know, do you want to learn more about my product?
Or, hey, I saw this product launch.. Do you want to take a demo?
You want to understand the underlying reason
why they did that and then tie that reason into your value proposition?
So that’s just something. I wanted to mention,
because sometimes you can get confused and,
you know, the former is certainly not a message that you want to send.
So yeah, that’s that’s how I think about, you know, product launches as a signal.
Yeah.
It’s a good point you make, because I think it’s
being relevant with the value prop and personalizing at the same time.
They go hand in hand quite nicely with some of these.
All right. This is a great list.
The next one is, quite interesting to me because it’s a little bit different
of a tactic and that’s, looking
in a different area of a company’s website or on LinkedIn.
And it’s when you see a job post that’s relevant to your product
or service, how can that be a buying signal?
Yeah.
I think, job postings are by far my favorite signal to use.
I will say they become far more overused.
And there’s there’s two levels to using.
Job postings as a signal.
So the very surface
level way to do it, that’s very popular now and I think is not as effective
as simply saying like, you know, hey, Geoff, I see you’re hiring
another account executive, you know, do you need more sales tech to support him?
Right.
That’s that’s the surface level way to do it.
The more personalized and effective way to do it is to read
that job posting and understand why are they hiring the sales rep?
What is the current tech stack there? Use it.
You can find it in a job posting.
What are their responsibilities?
It doesn’t obviously just have to be a sales rep, whatever that position is.
There’s two key things in every job posting their
what they want them to accomplish, like their responsibilities.
And then internal processes.
Internal processes give you context on what’s already going on in the company.
So you can personalize around that.
And then responsibilities gives you context
on where the company is trying to go, what are their goals,
and how can your value proposition tie in with that.
So it’s just a goldmine of information
that makes it really easy to personalize a message.
But where people tend to get stuck is they just see a job posting and immediately
assume that that person needs whatever tech they’re selling.
So just something to keep in mind there.
But yeah, job postings are by far my favorite signal
and people are always posting new jobs.
So, there’s always new new leads to reach out to.
Good, good.
I’ve got a different kind of one here that’s on your list.
But it’s.
We talked before about a friendly connection.
Moving to a new company that could potentially become a great lead
with a champion or somebody who really is a positive influencer for your product.
What about if you come across a posting on LinkedIn or in a community area,
but you find out that this company is actually or
this person is using a competitive product to what you’re trying to sell.
How can you use that?
Yeah.
So, there’s a lot of tools for this,
especially on LinkedIn, but really across all social channels.
Reddit is another one
where you can find this sort of information
on Twitter as well that people can under utilize.
There is constantly content being posted
and you can search for keywords around like your competitors names, for example,
and see who is using your competitors, who’s considering your competitors.
There’s even tools like Trigify that I’ll shout out that does,
it will automatically scrape social media to find people
posting about your competitors or keywords that are relevant to you,
but specifically as it relates to people who are using your competitors or
or considering your competitors.
This is something that’s kind of unavoidable for some people.
I’m sure it’s relatively unavoidable, with Insightly as well, too,
considering that, you know, CRM is a competitive space.
And so, I’m sure a lot of people listening are in that, boat
as well, where people are using a competitor for the most part.
And the goal there, and it’s it’s obviously easier said than done,
but you want to have,. A, a very strong understanding
of your competitors and why people choose certain competitors over the other.
And then B,
you want to have a couple good examples of where you win against your competitors.
So one like maybe specific feature that you have
that a competitor doesn’t, or one thing that you do a little bit better.
And in your messaging to these people,
you want to ask them how they’re getting that thing done.
So the thing that you do best,
the thing that you have a feature for that your competitor doesn’t,
your messaging should be kind of poking at the pain there and asking them, hey,
how are you doing this with so-and-so competitor?
Or have you ever ran into this problem with so-and-so, a competitor?
You’re not bashing the competitor.
You’re not just pitching your product and saying you’re better than them
because you have this feature, but you’re simply poking at where you know,
there’s the most likely pain point if they’re using a specific competitor.
And again, it doesn’t it’s not always as simple as that,
but that on a surface level, with the limited time we have in
this podcast is how I would approach those people using competitors.
And again, you can use social media
to find a lot of people talking about or using your competitors.
That’s really good advice.
And I particularly like that. It.
It kind of forces you to up your game from a competitive positioning
standpoint, too,
so that you and your whole team really know if it’s competitor A,
what are your main value propositions
against that competitor, where they’re potentially
having challenges that you should all be aware of. So that’s great.
These are really good.
Okay.. The last one is one that I like a lot.
It’s it’s a what you refer to as customer lookalikes.
Tell us about that one.
And then we’ll wrap up.
Yeah.
So I, I use this a lot with some of the startups I work at.
I work with,
who maybe don’t have a lot of customers, but they have a couple really good ones.
And one of the best places to start when you don’t have a ton of customers
who don’t have a ton of data.
And who’s your best customer is finding lookalikes of your best customers.
And there’s manual ways to do this right.
You can get down to the nitty gritty of, you know, what’s their company size?
How big is a department that uses our product?
What is their niche industry.
So going beyond, let’s say, tech companies, but let’s say they are,
you know, marketing tech, for example, like going a little bit of a layer deeper.
If you sell to, you know, small businesses or local businesses
looking for companies that are nearby,
right, like, so companies are down the street
so they’ll restaurants sell to a restaurant down the street from that one.
But then there’s also tools out there.
Ocean.io is an example of one that I use quite a bit
that you can put in the website of one of your customers,
and it’ll pull back very relevant look alikes that you can reach out to.
So this is something that, again, anybody can use, as long as you have
at least one customer and the messaging here is very simple.
You just tell the story
of how that other customer solved the problem with your solution.
And you say, and I like to be very blunt, like I’m reaching out to you
because you guys are very similar.
You play in the same industry or you’re down the street from this customer.
And just be honest about why
you specifically reach out to them and tell the story
so you don’t have to get super creative here.
It’s just pretty straightforward.
And again, it’s a campaign that you can always run.
I tend to do it once a quarter, particularly whenever
there’s a new case study that a client of mine has come out with.
Because if you have a case study, it’s even better.
You can share that in the messaging.
But yeah, I like to share that one,. Geoff, just because,
again, it’s pretty universal.. Anybody can use it.
And it’s usually a pretty high converting campaign.
Yeah. That’s got to be one of my favorites, for sure.
Yeah. This is a great list.
Thanks for taking us through
all these potential different signals that that you have identified here.
It feels like we’re all a little bit more able to power up for our outbound motion.
So this is this has been really useful.
Where can folks find you
if they want to get more advice about your outbound strategies?
Yeah. Just, follow me on LinkedIn.
I also run a weekly newsletter.
A little over 30,000 people are subscribed.
And I talk about the actual outbound strategies
that I am doing with my clients.
So if you want to, a bit more of a detailed breakdown
on some of these strategies,
you can subscribe to the newsletter and kind of see those details there.
Excellent.
And thanks to everybody listening for tuning in today.
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