Cold Calling Primer | Dominating SaaS Sales #2

Cold Outreach Part 1/4

Introduction

In the last issue we spoke about how to get a job as an SDR for SaaS Sales, this is most peoples first step into the industry. The SDR job is not easy, it requires you to grind non-stop for months, sometimes years, doing the job that most people couldn’t. The grind and rejection is just too much. So to make this time easier, lets start to take a look at the skills you need to not just succeed in your time as an SDR, but Dominate!

There are a few ways sales orgs structure their sales team. Some have full cycle reps, who do lead generation through cold outreach, and own that cycle all the way through closing, and others that split this up between Sales Development Representative (SDR) who do the prospecting and Account Executives (AE) who handle product demos, negotiation, and closing. Today, and in the next few issues from BTD, we are going to talk about the first half of the cycle, if you’re an SDR this is a primer on how you are going to generate meetings, if you are a full cycle rep this is how you’re going to find your own meetings.

I was originally going to do Cold calling, emailing, and social selling in one post, but as i was writing I realised this started to get far longer than I had planned, so I am breaking this into a 4 part mini series on cold outreach. Starting with cold calling.

Following will be 2. Cold Emails, 3. Social Selling, and 4. Objection Handling

Primer on Cold Calling

This is by far the most important of the outreach methods. You will have Gurus and marketers trying to tell you cold calling is dead. The very simple fact is that anyone who says that is a clown, trying to sell you something themselves, or they are too afraid to cold call and NGMI. If you want to be successful in sales, get used to calling people and interrupting their day now or it's only going to get harder. 

So down to business, you have a product and you have a potential prospect, how do you call them and sell them your product?

The simplest way is to follow a script - a written down guide on the exact words you are going to say and responses in different situations. There are a lot of sales orgs that use scripts, and a lot that don’t. My stance isn’t as black and white, I believe if you’re very new, or just starting with a new product, a script can help build confidence and good habits. Once you know enough about the general objections you’ll usually receive, the best way to pitch your product, and feel confident, ditch it.

Personally when I was cold calling, I would keep a script around in a digital copy and if there is ever a time I found myself in a rut, or that I was getting too feature focused on my calls, I would revert back to it for a little while to revisit the basics that made me successful.

Scripts are very personalised to the business you are working with, so I can’t give any examples, but I can give you a general structure to keep when cold calling. This is a mix of different techniques that have been taught to me over the years, and I think it works well. From there we can dig deeper into the contents of the call, questioning technique, and how to end the call.

COLD CALL STRUCTURE

The purpose of a cold call in SaaS sales is to introduce the concept of your product to someone, learn how they are managing things that relate to your product and if they have any pain points around that, learn about their business and role, convince them that your product will solve their issues, then book a meeting with them.

A cold call in its simplest form is very easy, structured like this:

Intro

Rapport

Bridge

Pitch/Discovery

Close

Introducing yourself, building a little bit of rapport with your prospect, bridging the small talk into business talk, pitching your product, and closing the deal. Not hard at all. Lets look at a simple example:

Intro - “Hi XX, this is Dingo with BowTiedJungle, how are you today?”

Rapport - “Actually I came across your company XX and noticed you recently won the award for YY, with a market this competitive that is very impressive. Were you part of the team that worked on YY?”

Bridge - “Well my company BowTiedAnimals are a software that helps businesses streamline workflows for YY. Are you using a tool like that at the moment?”

Pitch/Discovery - “Well essentially the software helps reduce operating costs for YY and streamline your work flows by ——-, letting you have more time to spend on the work that matters, does that sound like it could be useful?”

Close - “It sounds like there might be a match between your business and what we can offer, why don’t we jump on a zoom call Tuesday next week at 2pm and we can have a bit of a better conversation around it, and I can show you how our software works?”

Now this is a very simple version of a cold call with a lot missing, but I would also be lying if I didn’t say it has honestly been that easy from time to time. When you get the right person at the right time, it all just fits into place.

But the purpose here was to intro yourself in a non confrontational way, give legitimacy to why you are calling them, quickly identify if it is worth proceeding, pitch your solution, heat check, and book a meeting - Although it would be a very under-qualified meeting at this point, but we will go into questioning and qualification later.

(A quick side note on gatekeepers, we’re not going into getting past gate keepers on this post, but a quick way to do it with a high success rate is to say calmly and confidently. “Hi this is Dingo, can you put me through to XX, thanks.” Don’t say where you’re calling from, don’t say why you are calling, and thank them before they even get a chance to say no. No approach is going to get you through 100%, but I use this)

Now, let’s break down options for the different sections of the call.

Intro

This is a very important section. You need to sound confident and hook your prospect’s attention quickly, or the rest of your call won’t happen. There isn’t a lot to say here, it isn’t in your words, it is in how you speak. Be confident, and try and match your prospects tone.

The first thing I want you to do always is confirm you’re speaking with the right person.

Just say: “Hi, John?” or whatever the contacts name is, and wait. Don’t speak until they do. Don’t say you’re looking for john, you could say is that john, but just simply, Hi, John? with an upward inflection in your voice is perfect.

Now let’s assume you’ve got your man, now what?

Generally the line I go with is simple: “Hi John, this is Dingo, from the BowTiedJungle, how are you doing today?”

It doesn’t push to deep into business chats right away, and if they are in a good mood you’ll usually get some small talk back, i’m good how are you etc. But most likely you’ll get a response more along the lines of “I’m good, sorry who is this?”

This is exactly what you want, and where the flow chart in your mind needs to start changing course as we go into the Rapport.

If you get something along the lines of “Look, I am busy right now” you’re going to need to go straight into objection handling. This isn’t going to be discussed today, but I would recommend looking for articles from Gong.io and Hubspot about this, they are very good.

Rapport

Now that you’re on the phone, and he’s talking.

”Actually John, this is a cold call. Do you want to hang up on me, or do you have 30 seconds to let me explain why I’m calling” - risk reward, they may hand up, or chuckle, I usually use this if I’m in a slump to get the mood back up.

“Sure, my names Dingo, I’m calling from BowTiedJungle, we’re a XXX solution, I came across your business on LinkedIn and was wondering, are you the best person to speak to about XX“

“This is Dingo, from BowTiedJungle, I came across your company XX and noticed you recently won the award for YY, with a market this competitive that is very impressive. Were you part of the team that worked on YY?”

The point is simply get them to stay on the phone, whether that is through humour, flattery or a straight question, just keep them on the phone and talking.

I’ve had colleagues who have kept people in this part of the call for a while, just talking, shooting the shit and relationship building. It has worked for them, but not really my style, I want to get in and out in an efficient way, so after this line and a quick back and forth, if it seems possible I just move on. Play around yourself and see what works for you.

If they’re open to talking, after this, you’re golden, time to talk business.

Bridge

So you’ve got your prospect talking, they seem a little bit more open now to discussing whatever, you should have some indication on if they are the right person to be speaking to about your product (If you don’t, then just ask). This is where we turn this from small talk into a business call. You want to introduce what your product does, and ask how they are managing that at the moment. Keep it simple and end it with an open question.

”Well John my company BowTiedAnimals are a software that helps businesses streamline workflows for YY. Are you using a tool like that at the moment?”

Play around with this one, the better this first open question is, the easier the rest of your call is going to go.

”What’re you doing to manage that at the moment?”

“How are you doing that now?”

“How much time do you spend on YY each day?”

You just want to get an idea on if you’re a fit from a single question. Come back and read this section again after the next, as I will go deeper on open questions there.

From here they may say again they don’t need a tool, they already have a software for that, they don’t have budget for a tool. Unless they are either in contract with a competitor for a long time, they don’t have anything to do with what you’re selling, or they are just a useless person that you want to hang up on, feel free to ignore their objection here. Say something like “That’s okay, i’m just trying to get an idea of the market at the moment”. Or anything that brushes things to the side. Then follow that up with your further open questions.

This brings us into the pitch.

Pitch/Discovery

This section is actually more about learning than it is about pitching your product, but there is a bit of both. With most organisations your booked demos/meetings are going to need to be qualified. Meaning there will be a certain framework asking you to tick off boxes before you book the meeting. This is to make sure that the companies AEs are not wasting their time, and that SDRs are not booking shitty leads just for the commission. If you’re in a company that just wants numbers and you’re paid per meeting, I would milk the fuck out of that, book everything and anything, but that is unlikely. An easy qualification framework, and the one I will use to give examples is B.A.N.T (This is usually used in SMB - Mid Market sales orgs, as solutions get more complex, so too does the qualification. As this series progresses we can explore different frameworks).

Budget - Does the prospect have a set budget for what your solution provides, and is it inline with what your solution costs.
Authority - Is the person you are booking in for the meeting the one who also owns the budget and will sign a contract, i.e the Decision Maker
Need - Does your prospect have a need that your solution solves
Timing - Is the prospect within their buying window, do they have a deadline to get a tool in place, do they need to choose before a renewal of a competitor.

Depending on your company, you may only need 1 of these, or you may need up to all four, so focus your questions around finding these out.

Now let’s talk about questioning technique. Questioning for a cold call for many seems unnatural, it doesn’t fit the flow of a natural conversation, because you need to find out specific detail, but if you go too hard it feels like an interrogation and the prospect will want to hang up. So I would recommend structuring your questioning like this:

The general idea is this: Think of each question you ask as part of a funnel, digging deeper into the prospect’s needs and pain, letting you know how you can help. Then when you really understand the source of the pain, explain how your solution fixes it, check if the prospect is interested, and start over with another very broad question. Each funnel should find more pain points you can ask about and dig into in the next funnel. 3 is used in the example, but is not the rule, keep going as long as you can to know everything you need about your prospect.

Each question during this funnel should be an open question. One that cannot be answered with yes/no or a single word. I’m going to give recommended reading on this one, as I think hubspot have done a good job explaining it. https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/the-art-of-asking-open-ended-questions

Lets get into a dumb but illustrative example. You’re selling twitter’s service to BTB. Hypothetically they weren’t on twitter, and wanted to grow their audience in a way that will allow it to take on life of its own, and grow organically.

It would be a great meeting, but we don’t know that yet, we just see a blog that is writing about finance, crypto, and life. How do we get this information out of them:

N: Yes - A way to quickly have a community of degenerate animals all working autonomously come together in a single movement that would mimic a city. They will need the ability to private message, post publicly, connect and disconnect from each other, as well as interact with the outside world.

Well from our previous steps we do know that they have a large audience and they are trying to build something with them.

We would start with the first topic’s open ended question, digging into their needs:
”How are your audience interacting with each other at the moment?” - Well they are doing it in our blog’s comments section. Although that’s not really ideal because it is siloed off from the outside world. (so we’ve got a hint that they want to get more people involved)

Dig Deeper: ”Okay, If they are siloed off, how does someone new join that conversation?” - Well they would need to find out blog, and then find the specific post that a specific conversation is being had on, and then comment there, we want to build the community, we’re getting some impressive traffic to the blog, but the comments section isn’t working well for that… (wasted time, and unlikely to happen)

Dig Deeper: ”You’re right, that doesn’t sound ideal. Something else I was wondering, if someone was to join the conversation from the outside world in your comments, how are they seeing what everyone else in your community are talking about across posts?” - They can’t at the moment, unless they go through our 10 year history post by post. (

Pitch Solution:
”Well actually my company Twitter offers a platform where your community can interact completely autonomously, following you and sharing your content, while also creating their own, in an open ecosystem essentially, it is open to the world, letting your community grow organically through their conversations publicly, rather than just through people finding your blog.

Heat Check: Does that sound like it would solve the siloing issue with your comments section?

They will probably say yes, but also have some sort of other issue or question, as that hasn’t solved all of the problems they have in their own mind, this is where we start again. If your prospect has mentioned another topic they need solved that you can solve, mentally note it or write it down, because thats you’re next open topic question. Keep doing this on repeat until there is a strong case to show the prospect your solution. They are convinced you can solve their pain. That is when you start to ask some closed questions and book in the meeting.

Close

This is the book a meeting/close section.

They trust you, they know your company can ease their pain, now you just need to not fuck it up, and get a meeting booked.

It’s wild just how many SDRs I hear losing the prospect right at the end because they aren’t confident asking for a meeting. This is the main point here, be confident, assume they want it, and book in a time.

I also back load the rest of the BANT questions here, if I am convinced the need is strong, I am relaxed on the others, as long as I get them before I end the call.

“It sounds like twitter would be able to help you a lot with building your community organically and giving them autonomy. Are you free this Thursday, we can jump on a call and I can show you exactly how it works, and we can talk a bit deeper on your exact needs. Does 10am work for you?”

The important part here, you’ve made it easy for them, given them a time and a date, and reminded them why they want to schedule this meeting. If you’ve gotten this far, you should get a positive answer. If you don’t, you’ve got the wrong person or not convinced them how much pain you will solve.

If they say the time doesn’t work ask them when they would prefer. If they say yes, ask to confirm their best email. When they do that say “Okay great, I’m just going to send you a calendar invite. While I do that, if you did choose to move forward with Twitter, who would be the person that would sign this contract, is it you?” Repeat this for Budget and timeline. As you get better, try getting all of those in between your open funnel questions, so that at the very end all you need is to send them an invite.

At this point well done, you’ve officially booked a demo meeting with a prospect. Go put it in your CRM.

Thanks,
BowTiedDingo

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