Is your team struggling with cold calling and cold email?
Let’s talk about some alternative demand channels in this episode
of Closing Time.
Hey, thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders.
I’m Geoff Coutts, SVP of sales and customer operations for Unbounce
and Insightly.
Today I’m joined by Chris Merrill,. CEO of Better Media.
Thanks for joining us, Chris.
Thanks a lot for having me, Geoff.. Appreciate it.
Yeah, we’re delighted to have you on the show.
Maybe just to jump right in.
Chris, I can’t speak for all sales teams out there, but
cold calling and cold emailing seem to be tougher than ever.
There’s just so much noise in the system and everybody’s trying so hard.
There’s got to be a better solution than simply trying
more volume and trying to be louder than everybody else.
We all get inundated in our inboxes from all sorts of different creative ways
of looking at this. How do you view it?
what I’m not going to do is sit here and do the whole, cold calling is dead.
Cold emailing is dead.
Outbound is dead.
It’s not dead.
It’s just like you said.
It’s harder than it’s been in the past.
And let’s look at why.
And again, one of the thing is, I’m a part of the problem.
I’ve been a part of the problem.
I am a spam king.
And I’ve been, I’ve been building funnels and pushing volume.
I’ve done the quality quantity spectrum.
But let’s just think about it.
First we brought in some automation with these send tools,
then data got really inexpensive, right?
So we automatically just started pushing up volume then.
Now you added this layer of cost in terms of the development cost.
We allowed plg motions that gave everybody access to these tools,
you know, for 30 bucks a month, maybe 50, 100 bucks for some credits,
you can send out a pretty meaningful amount of volume.
You know, you do that in the email side, similar on the call side with the Dialers.
And what does that do?
It allows everybody just increase their volume.
All it’s doing is raising the audible floor.
The audible floor is louder.
What does it do for you and I, Geoff, when we open up
our inboxes in the morning, we’re not going through
and trying to get rid of the noise.
We’re only looking for the things that feel familiar to us.
We’re not even we’re subconsciously competent
and to the point of we’re not actually reading messages were pattern recognizing
what they look like.
And so at this point, all you have to find a way to punch through.
I do want to be heard. Cold calling still works.
Cold emailing still works.
But you have to find a very specific approach that works for
you and your target.
And not everybody is up for that task. Yeah.
That really resonates with me.
And I know you’ve got some great ideas to generate pipeline
that are beyond emails and calls.
So maybe we can talk about that a little bit.
Get into some of the details.
Why don’t we start with some live events,
one that I know that’s close to your heart.
Yeah. I mean,
we obviously I to say we double down on it would be underselling it.
Right. Like we we are is all.
And as it gets and I’d love to say that it was there was some soothsayer,
some sage that said that we’re in this protected medium for a little bit.
It really isn’t the case.
We had looked at
and really drove webinars, looking back 5 or 7 years ago.
We looked at these.
There was an open channel for us to start doing really, really dedicated content.
You know, in the sales space.
And we started doing webinars with some of the big brands,
but we were measured by audience reach, by engagement.
Maybe we were in there talking about how we might have affected a deal or,
they we were attributed to some deal flow,
but we really were predicated measured on registration, audit, you know, and reach
and then all of a sudden,. I remember it was shortly before,
Covid hit,
I noticed more than we’d be in the middle of a, like a review meeting,
and all of a sudden the door would open and this new,
new title would walk in the room and it was, hey, guys, meet our CRO.
And this year, oh, I would say, Chris,. I love what you guys are doing for us.
Your shows, the registrants, thousands of people are coming to these things.
And you hold up this wacky looking graph and he’d say, but, but,
but we’re just not getting the direct attribution to pipeline.
And we would look around and be like, we’re
we’re not, you know, we’re competitive.
We weren’t measuring for that.
And it was at that moment that we really started to understand that,
if they were
looking for this marketing spend to be so directly in line,
we better figure out how to directly drive opportunities,
not just marketing outcomes, drive opportunities.
And so for the last 5 to 7 years, we’ve really been working with brands
to understand how can we use the programing the people on the shows,
the content matched up with the product to really drive right into pipeline.
And so it’s something that, nothing new to us.
We’ve been running this motion for quite some time, and what is evolved
is as cold calling and emailing, and these other channels have gotten harder.
We believe that people look at running webinars
and looking at running live content as being both laborious
and expensive, and the truth of it is, it really isn’t.
I mean, think about, you know, we’re on you can light up our riverside,
you can light up a zoom and you can. I mean,
all you really need to do is have knowledge.
And if you have knowledge, share it.
And if you don’t have the knowledge, get curious and you can drive a topic.
What you just need to understand is a pain or priority
for some group of human beings that doesn’t.
That’s the other thing is it doesn’t.
You can have 20 people.
I, I’m part of a company that does interior design, management, the back
office, small rooms of 10 to 15 interior designers talking about the best way to,
you know, mark up their services or, how often they bill their customers.
Well, it turns out that the service that the company does is $100,000 a year.
They don’t need the volume in that room.
And so if you think about it from a standpoint of
we talk a lot about intent and signal right now,
and everybody has the same intent and signals being pushed to them.
But what is a better intent or a signal than somebody choosing to spend
the most valuable resource they have, their time, 45 minutes,
an hour on a very narrow subject
that they’re registering for.
They’re coming in, attending, they filling out polls, they’re in the chat.
There’s so many, there’s so many avenues
to use that to then drive those opportunities.
Right.
That’s high. High intent.
Couple things you said really resonated with me.
One is the attribution concept.
We’re.
You probably know we’re in the attribution business.
We have great marketing attribution solutions that we sell to our customers
and our agencies.
And being able to, you know, to justify the ROI on the spend is really important.
So that that hit me square in the nose.
The other thing is, you know, being a sales leader,
I care most about what will convert into opportunities.
So that piece of it really resonated.
And and of course, my partner in crime, on the marketing side,
we work really closely to say what’s driving brand awareness,
what’s driving actual opportunities in the pipeline that we can close.
And we have that discussion all the time.
So really valuable to talk us through just a little bit how some of these events
we’re talking about, like webinars or training events or coaching seminars,
how can they be cost effective in building the pipeline?
Sure. So there’s.
There’s two ways I look at it.
One, you do not need an expensive stack to do these things.
I we’ve played this this, game quite a bit with either friends
who are firing up companies for side projects for ourselves, thinking
if we didn’t have the budget, if we didn’t have the tools and the things
that we built, what channels would we use to get our first ten customers?
And to be honest, it wouldn’t be email.
It wouldn’t be calls.
I know that lift, it would be a podcast.
It would be an in-person small meetup.
It would be a webinar.
And so first of all, you can just take the cost of running these things out.
The second piece is where you have to build an audience.
There’s ways to one, you don’t need a huge audience.
Two, if you truly know your ICP’s pain or priority, you can play to both.
You can go.
You can run 30 minutes on a very narrow pain or a priority,
because you have to believe
that there’s other people within your ecosystem that share that.
The second piece is to offset cost.
Share the burden.
One of the best things that we use is something called OPL Other People’s List.
It’s one of my favorite ways to grow.
If you look in our little ecosystem of the creators and influencers
and sales trainers, we use the brands that we work with.
When we do these things, partner up, find complementary people and brands,
and you can use the intersection
of my small little audience and your little small audience.
And guess what?
Over a period of time, you’re starting to to grow that out.
So the fastest path to doing this is partnering up with others
that have these lists, because a lot of people
will push back on me and say,
but if I don’t have the audience, how can I drive for the people?
But there’s always a way to kind of grow that part out.
And I doing that through the OPL has been kind of it.
We still can.
It’s still contributes probably 25, 30% of our growth.
That’s really creative thinking.. I love it, right?
Other people’s lists.
Other people’s budgets.
All those good things. That’s fantastic.
Another, idea.
I think you have is around community management, building a community
or engaging in, in other communities to create pipe for yourself.
Same kind of concept, maybe leveraging off of partners.
I assume, in what you just described there.
This one seems like a bit of a longer term play, but also very effective.
Would you agree with that?
We can all
look back, if you remember, in dating myself at meetup.com.
I mean, you don’t have to have.
This doesn’t have to be a big funded.
Or if it’s in person, over the top thing, getting 10 to 15 people together casually
to talk about something that you’re passionate about is not a difficult thing.
I mean, you can probably walk outside
and yell with a megaphone and get enough people to do that.
But where it really comes from, growth through community,
because I do think it is something that both individuals
within organizations, organizations and freelancers can do.
It really has to be is known.
The most powerful people in your ecosystem are the people that are known
to be connectors.
I was sitting at a, a startup. I was running,
it was a version of a service as kind of product
in the agency space, staring at a really ugly pipeline.
And my mentor came over to me while I’m staring at the wall
and basically said, don’t know where to start.
Go make a connection between two other people.
Take yourself out of the value equation, but create value.
It costs you zero.. When you build community.
It’s the network effect of that.
If you can be the catalyst to getting ten people together to talk about, don’t.
It’s not that you have to offer.
You don’t have to train them.
You just have to bring them together with common interest patterns or priorities.
Foster the conversation.
And then what happens is, as that grows you, you earn the right for the leverage.
Ask questions, poll, conversations, meetings.
It’s growth by community is very powerful, but it has to be nurtured.
It has to be fostered. In my opinion.
It also has to be very, very narrow.
I think a lot of people who try to do this, they always think,
I need this big piece of software to maintain my community thinking.
And hundreds and thousands community can be small.
Think about a book club at the most rudimentary kind of approach to it.
And I think, again, these are also things that you can do within your organization.
So if you are, if you’re buried deep down inside of an org,
but you’re trying to figure out a way to punch through this, build
your own, build your own humans, build your own cohort,
and you’ll be surprised of what you can draw from it.
I like that a lot.
You know, in the, in the sales cycle. I think a lot.
And we talk in my team a lot about a micro community.
I might call where
somebody who’s a
prospect wants to hear from somebody else who’s gone through similar experience.
If they’re moving from solution A to solution B,
or they’ve got a similar pain point or similar industry, that’s invaluable
in the sales cycle, but at a slightly more macro level
to build the communities up front to create those opportunities.
I love what you’re saying here. It’s really good advice.
Sure. Yeah. One thing real quick on that.
That’s a fun one as well.
Like, let’s just take people who do cold outbound,
get a group together of your same position across other organizations,
and do one hour work together sessions, ten people on ten
people on zoom, all on camera.
Everyone explains their intent of what
they’re going to get done in the in the hour.
And you sit down and, you know, think about like, cold calling boiler
rooms, right? Like, just get out there and do it.
They’re actually really fun.
And it’s a great way to kind of, you know, build up some community.
And in that sense, you usually earn the right for a conversation.
Yeah, I agree, and there’s a lot of sharing of best practices for that
that as well. That’s good advice.
So so we covered a couple different ways of of building pipeline.
The next idea might be a little
bit different and perhaps maybe add some some cost to the equation.
But it’s around using a gifting service.
So I know you’ve got some advice on that.
What are your thoughts there? sure.
So I think the modern way of doing it in the more programmatic is using a platform,
you know, sendoso, you know, reach desk, something like that.
And we there is a cost basis.
What, what we had growing up was this, this concept of lumpy mail,
which was anything you could do to break the pattern of
like the relationship, a oversize pink manila envelope with a handwritten letter
inside of it, sending something thoughtful that that person may connect
with, that you know, something you know about them.
A perfect example here is
I had I had, someone banging on me quite a bit to get in for,
a good sized piece of software, and I was just not having it.
I knew they were there acknowledging it.
And then one day. I got a wrapped up like a kid,
wrapped it up. Christmas present and opened it up.
And it was an old boot.
And I was like, what the hell is this thing?
And next thing you know, you know,. I found that I was like,
it was someone saying
I wanted to get my foot in the door so it doesn’t have to be a big cost basis.
One of my friends owns it.
Owned a UI company called. Fresh Tilled Soil.
Growing ideas out of the ground.
They went and bought cheap ace hardware like rakes and hoes.
And just think about it.
If you were at home or an office and you got a rake, you’re it’s memorable.
You’re going to know it.. So it doesn’t have to be expensive.
It needs to be thoughtful, connected to the reason you’re reaching out.
Or. And I got a point back, I know. I think you just had John Barrows done.
I know that you’re doing some work with him.
John might be the most thoughtful gift and message writer I’ve ever met.
He just, in his discovery, hangs on every word he thinks
about the words you say.
And when he sends you a gift, it always hits.
It always connects.
And you’re going to remember that feeling.
You’re going to take the call.
You’re going to have that Yeah.
That’s a great example.
I’m on a forum of CROs and, we talk about lead gen quite a bit.
And I can’t tell you the number of of sales leaders
that are reverting back to something.
It’s it’s creative and it’s thoughtful.
It feels like it’s old school, but it’s very effective because
it’s standing out from everything else and it’s very personalized.
yeah. I want to bring lumpy mail back as the concept.
I love the lumpy mail.
All right, one last one.
And maybe an obvious one. Podcasting.
So what we’re doing.. But also you do a lot more of it.
What, how do you see moving the the needle on pipe Gen with podcasting?
So there’s three things one, establishing yourself
as, it’s validating as a thought leader or as a connector.
And if you keep your programing.
Because, again, you can just light up your own podcast.
It doesn’t matter how many down the subscriber you have.
But if you start having conversations that keep following the same pattern
of the things that you talk about and problems
you solve, you can use that content to get what?
Take that content, post it, and form the comments as people you know.
Hey, here is a really great clip from that conversation Geoff and I had.
I thought it was really interesting when Chris said, Xyz, what do you think?
As the comments light up, you can use that as cannon fodder for reaching out.
But more importantly, there’s two other ways to do it.
I just casually dropped, let’s just say I was trying
to sell into, Reach Desk or Sendoso.
I’m going to call it Chris from Sendoso right now after this call,
after this goes live,. I’m going to grab that clip
and I’m going to go back and contextually say, hey, Chris.
Yeah, I don’t know if you caught it, but
gave you guys a shout out on the podcast, but oh, by the way, and you, you move
right back into it.
But the third way the most powerful.
But it has to be higher, ticket items.
It has to be, you know, that the juice is worth the squeeze.
Geoff, after this call, we have a connection.
I did not know you before we came on this call.
I now know that you were in IT services at HP, right?
I now know that in this part of who else you’ve done
the podcast, you now know things about me as well.
You probably would earn if you if we’re now trying to bring and you knew
it was contextually appropriate to bring one of your three platforms
to me, something tells me that you and I would be on a call booked for tomorrow.
And so the fast path there is, bring on think about your tier one customers.
And again, don’t call it in. It’s not.. Oh, I had you on my podcast.
Let’s do business contextually appropriate.
Make them shine, make them shine, make them shine, make them shine.
Clip them up.
Send it back.
I’m telling you the one of the fastest ways.
And it’s not just bringing them on, it’s also bringing on their customers.
That’s the other thing, bringing on your target customers,
customers and using that as cannon fodder to earn the right for a call.
I love the prospect is all about creating that connection.
And it’s got to be contextually relevant.
So that’s that’s, music to my ears for sure, because I love these ideas.
Especially because it gives an opportunity for sales
and marketing teams to work together on these initiatives.
And I’ve always been a firm believer that pipe gen in general
is a very much a shared responsibility across the whole go to market teams.
So figuring out the best ways to do it and analyzing that attribution
we were talking about earlier what works and what doesn’t.
So listen, thanks so much for joining us today at Closing Time.
Where can they find you
if they want to learn more about the work that you’re doing?
Yeah, I think right, it’s Sell Better.
From that standpoint, there’s programing every day, tons of resources from the
the new seller all the way up to the experience veteran.
And, there’s some edutainment in there as well.
So the majority of the work we do is all like in that area.
Yeah. awesome.
And thanks, everybody, for tuning in.
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