Transcription
All right man, back at it. Going to do a super deep dive into cold calling. And the reason I wanted to bring on Connor specifically to do a very deep dive into everything about cold calling is because we've never had the stance at Higher Levels that our cold calling method is the best. I wanted to show you someone who has certainly elements of what we talk about, but developed their own style.
At Oracle, Connor has a proven track record as a top-performing SDR. He's an SDR manager for two years, where his team was consistently the number one team in his org at Oracle. Like, this is about as legit as it gets in terms of people you're going to learn cold calling from. And Connor, uh, before I kind of brag on you too much, like, feel free to add to that and just share your background so everyone's aware here of like how deep we're about to get into the sauce.
Yeah, thank you for the warm intro. This is, this is one of my favorite topics, is is cold calling. I think it's a really important skill to learn. When people are first breaking into that SDR job, they know it's, that's something that's coming that they probably haven't done before, and it causes so much anxiety. There's many other parts to the job, obviously, when it comes to being successful in the SDR role, but cold calling is one of those skills that everyone knows is coming. It's really hard to learn. I think a lot of the training out there, personally, that I see all over the web, we're on YouTube, YouTube, LinkedIn, it's a, it's misleading. And I basically just came up with frameworks that worked for myself. And if your mind is similar to my mind, and I know there's a lot of you out there because just from the number of people I've coached, there are a lot of people who had some of the same struggles following that ad advice. Is me when I started out. I know these frameworks that we're going to cover today are going to serve you very well. And I can say that with confidence, not just from doing it myself, but actually coaching it to hundreds of people, yes, where I work, but also outside of Oracle as well.
Yeah, for sure. And if I haven't mentioned it already, also Connor has a YouTube channel that's linked in the description. So definitely check it out there for deeper dives. But Connor, I know as a starting point, one of the things we wanted to talk about is like the early days of us cold calling. I, like, if I listen to my early cold calls, I have a few of them saved, it's like disgusting to me. But before I get into that, I'd be curious, like, when you started, just talking about what it was like mentally, maybe some of those early things that you were trying to mimic from other, you know, gurus or personalities or influencers. And, uh, yeah, we'll peel back from there.
Yeah, so I think I started in the same place as a lot of people who maybe are watching here. I was someone who, I was going through training, I'd like to think I had the right qualities, like I was there to work hard, I was taking notes, I was reading the books, I had read The Challenger Sale and all that stuff beforehand, like I was ready to go. And I thought when I was going to start the SDR job and actually get in seat out of training, that I was going to hit the ground running. And something happened when I first started making cold calls. I would just like freeze up. Or when I would follow the techniques that were commonly taught, like leading off with open-ended qualifying questions and using permission-based openers, and these things that didn't feel comfortable for me. I could, I felt like I couldn't get any rhythm into any of these calls. And worse than that, I wasn't even learning anything from the calls that weren't going well because I didn't even have the capacity to think. It was like I would be on the call and I'd be so worried about what comes next after they answered a certain question that I would lose track of the initial goal when you're actually making a cold call, which is to set a meeting.
So for me, I actually struggled. I, I went from thinking I was going to be very hot out of the gate to, I think I was the last person on my SDR team to book a meeting over the phone. It took me like a month. And I practically had, I kid you not, I, I had to beg a guy. Like, I was, I knew I had him, he was interested. And I don't remember exactly what I said, but I, it was along the lines of like, please just take this meeting, I'm going to send you the invite. And the guy was somehow nice enough to accept it. And that's how I got my first meeting. But after weeks of working so hard and doing the things that I see commonly taught and how I was trained, I was like, something's wrong here because I'm putting in the effort, like I'm showing up early, I'm working, I'm making the dials, and I don't feel any better at cold calling now, call it six weeks in, than when I started out. It was really around that two to three month mark where I flipped my strategy, which we could maybe talk about in a second, and my results instantly also flipped. And I started becoming a lot more effective on the phones.
Yeah, I, I definitely, well, we'll definitely get into that. For everyone's reference, Connor's going to break down what he's taught to literally hundreds of people now at Oracle. And like, for everyone's reference, Connor starting out as probably the slowest member in his start group, went on to like, literally make trainings that Oracle uses company-wide to like train reps. He has videos in Oracle, correct me if I'm wrong here, that are are used, uh, to train people on cold calling. So maybe, maybe just diving in again, for someone who's just getting started or still struggling with cold calls, I'd love to probe into more where you were struggling early on. You said a couple things that stood out where you felt like you didn't even, like, you couldn't even take feedback or learn from the calls that were going poorly. Why was that? What were some of the things that you were doing that just really, like, handicapped you all around?
So yeah, a lot of it, it was not having a plan, like a plan of attack or some form of framework that I could follow. So that I knew what to do, like when that prospect says hello. Every call starts when someone answers, the prospect says hello. I knew I was going to do A, B, C, D as soon as that happened. Where when I was following a lot of the training, it was a lot of, you want to ask open-ended directional questioning and get them talking. And it's stuff that sounded good, but in practice, I found I was getting a lot of pushback. And what I was realizing was, I'm interrupting these people in the middle of their workday. Like, they're not thinking about software like all day. Like, sometimes I think we get in our own world that these people are just waiting for our calls. No, you're calling, like, I sometimes I call finance people, for example, they're probably ripping together some spreadsheet, trying to get like something done for their CFO before the hour ends. And it's like, three minutes before the meeting, they're cramming. And you cold call them and you start asking them, "So what are you currently using for your planning and budgeting system, and how's that going for you? Are there any initiatives in the near future?" And they're like, "Dude, I have a meeting in two minutes. Like, I'd maybe talk about this down the line, but like, I'm not going to have like an 10-minute discovery call with you on a random cold call."
So a lot of the training I was following, I just didn't have a plan. I didn't have like a consistent framework to follow. A lot of other stuff, like the permission-based openers, I just found very uncomfortable. And it's taught as gospel, like, you have to use permission-based openers, or you could combine it with a pattern interrupt, like, "Hey, do you have 27 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling, and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation?" And like, when that's done right, it can work. And I always preface this by saying, use what's comfortable for you. I don't have anything against that stuff if it's comfortable. But what I can't stand at times is when trainers teach this stuff as gospel, like there's no other way. And SDRs are just really uncomfortable using it, and they struggle to get any sort of rhythm on cold calls, and then they just give up on cold calling, quite frankly. And that's why you see a lot of SDRs out there who maybe they do end up promoting to the account executive role, but they get there strictly through email. They act, there are so many account executives out there who actually never learned how to cold call because they were like, "This is too hard. None of what I'm trying is actually working. I'm not getting better at this. I'm booking enough meetings on email. Let me just double down on that." And it's just such a crucial, crucial skill. You miss out on it. It's like riding a bike. Like, once you learn how to cold call, it's so hard to learn, but once you do, you never forget how to do it. And it's a skill you'll have for the rest of your life. That's a money-making skill that's valuable. And it's unique because a lot of people don't go through the trial and error and the pain of learning how to do it.
Yeah, and I think even aside from directly cold calling, which I 100% agree is very valuable, it's like, if you get to a point where you can guide an effective cold call and set a meeting, that pays dividends. And for instance, discovery calls, or even now when I'm working with more enterprise and strategic clients, when they come in, everything has seemingly gone great. Some director you've never heard of comes to the call and is like, "Hey, we're actually really dissatisfied with this and we don't want to renew unless you do X, Y, and Z." Like, handling all of that on the fly. If you just work at a solid brand where you can more or less barely scrape by by just doing email, it's going to handicap you when you have like real strategic level conversations down the line because you haven't, quite frankly, like, at least from from my perspective, like, gotten the kicked out of you like while you learn these types of things.
So, um, maybe, maybe transitioning a little bit now to to when things started to turn around. Not like you went from zero and the next day, like everything was perfect, but like, maybe talking to that person that's struggling, looking for those first couple of things to dig, dig themselves out of a hole. What really started to click for you? When did it start to turn around? And then we'll get to more of like your actual frameworks and methodologies that, that you teach.
So when it started to turn around, it was out of frustration. I, it was, I don't remember the exact day, but it was probably a day where I went in a conference room, ripped like a hundred dials, and got nowhere. And it, it might have been, I kind of remember this one blowout call that I feel like might have been the call, not positive on that, but I had this like five-minute call where I was doing executing the typical sales training perfectly, like asking the directional questions, like, and it just went, it was a, it felt like a good conversation, and I really thought I was going to get it. And then they were like, "Ah, actually, just send me an email," and like quickly got off the phone. And I sort of had this realization, and I, yeah, I sort of had this realization once they got off the phone. I was like, "I just spent 10 minutes on the phone with that guy, and I didn't even ask him for a meeting." The reason for my call, like, is to, I want to set a meeting. Like, yes, you can have some back and forth, but I just spent 10 minutes and didn't even ask the person the whole point of the reason I picked up the phone in the first place. And I kind of had this realization in my head that if you don't ask for the meeting, you have a 0% chance of booking the meeting. You have to, to book the meeting, you have to ask for it. So even if you ask for it, and let's say your call call script is awful, you get through it, but you at least meet, like, ask, "Are you free next week?" Even if it's not great, you have a non-zero probability of booking the meeting. It might not be high, maybe it's a 1% chance. But I basically told myself in that moment that going forward, I was going to take control of these cold calls rather than doing most of the listening at the outset and asking a bunch of questions and trying to get some random person whose day I just interrupted to open up to me. I'm going to take control and answer three questions: who I am, why I'm reaching out to them specifically, and then state what I want, which is time on their calendar. And at first, I probably wasn't great at it, but I could feel with that structure, the calls started going better. And even when I got told no, it wasn't as bad of a no because in my head I'm like, "At least I asked. Like, at least I gave myself a shot of booking that meeting instead of just asking a bunch of random questions and hoping they sounded interested enough to the point where I could eventually go for the meeting."
So I came up, and I didn't name it this at the time, this is more after I became an SDR manager and had to coach people, this stuff, and how I made this transition. I call it a value statement. I call it a value statement framework, where it's a little bit contrary to what's taught out there, that you want to be doing most of the listening. In the value statement framework, we're going to take control, deliver value first. I say the burden of proof is on us as the cold caller to deliver that value first and convince them that we may be worth spending more time with before we start asking for anything in return. And what we typically ask for in return too early are these questions, are for their time, and asking them about what they're using, how that's currently going, are there any other initiatives going on right now? Like, yes, you can ask that, but you have to deliver value first. And what I found is once you get good at the value statements, a lot of people just say yes right out of the gate because you can make them more targeted. And we could go really into it on, it's designed to be a repeatable structure so that it's almost the same words every single time. You kind of just plug and play a few keywords depending on who you're calling to make it more targeted. M, so that was really the big mindset shift though, was that I decided, "I'm going to take control of these calls and go down swinging." I would rather get told no asking than have a 10-minute conversation and just get a quick, "Send me an email, see you later, click."
Yeah, fair enough. And I, I, I think that that's a really great overview because I feel like a lot of people, yeah, there's different symptoms. Some people come in aggressive, they're quite frankly, like, not handling a conversation smart enough. I feel like that's less common. It's very, are, I don't know, maybe 10, 20% of people are not afraid of calling, but then don't have like the mental chops to like actually lead a conversation. So when you're talking about things like value statement, let's maybe start to, for the person watching or listening, start to define like, what that looks like, right? Whether it's a framework or whether it's a script, like, how do you articulate this? What's the repeatable thing that viewers can take away from this video?
So there's three steps to a value statement. There's the opening of the cold call, there's delivering the value statement, and then once you state what you want, the final part is the close. And it's meant to be this framework every single time. So I can start with the opening because the opening is one of these things I teach a little differently than a lot out there is to keep it simple, repeatable, ideally goes the same way every single time. I, to this day, just say, "How are you?" But what I call it is an assumptive formality. Basically, what I'm, what's going on in my head is, how do I get this prospect to just give me a quick formality back? And once they do, I'm going to immediately start going into who I am, why I'm calling, and what I want, and get rid of those thoughts in their head, like, "H, this is a cold call. I didn't know this person who's reaching out. I wasn't expecting this." So the key to the assumptive formality is using a downward inflection. I say, "How are you?" You can say, "How have you been?" Again, contrary to a lot of training out there is like, "Oh, you can't say how are you." But it's like, this is how normal people communicate with each other. Like, if you were calling someone and it was a sales call, you'd say, "How are you?" I think at this point, the pattern interrupt stuff and the permission-based openers that maybe used to actually be a pattern interrupt, now you kind of have sales breath in my opinion when you start saying things like, "Hey, do you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling?" So I more say, "Hey Jim, this is Connor Murray, call from XX company. How are you?" The key is that downward inflection. Where, slight difference, if instead I said, "Hey Jim, this is Connor Murray, call from X company. How are you?" It's, it's very like, same words, but the upward inflection is like, "This person might actually want to know how I'm doing and might be here a while." Where the first one is more designed to get them to just say, "Most of the responses I get are along the lines of, uh, good. How are you?" Some are like, "Quick, they're like, yeah, good. How are you?" Some are confused, like, "Uh, good. How are you?" But whatever it is, I just say, "Good. Yeah, I'm just reaching out because," or "The reason I'm calling is," and then that's when I start going into my 30-second value statement. I like to keep it around 30 seconds. I answer those three: who I am, why I'm calling, and state what I want, which is time on their calendar. And now, a lot of those objections you normally face early on in the call, like, "Where did you say you were calling from? How'd you get my number? How, who knows?" How they responded, "Do you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling?" They're like, "Ah, no, I'm going into a meeting today." The goal is to limit variants, get a formality from the prospect, and then as quickly as possible start delivering value. And they'll very quickly forget this is a cold call and that they weren't expecting the call and start listening, like, "Oh, this person's rattling off a bunch of priorities that are important to me. How they solve them. They came to play ball."
Yeah, it's kind of how I look at it. What's an example there? So you do the downward inflection, "How are you?" They're like, "I'm good. How are you?" What's an example of a value statement there that you have for 30 seconds?
Yeah, a basic one. Like if I was calling someone in a finance department. In most of these, it's designed to be, yeah, 30 seconds, 45 max. I would say, "Hey Eric, this is Connor, call from Max Company. How are you?" "Good. How are you doing?" "Well, good. I'm just reaching out because I'm part of the team that supports why company regarding back-office financial applications. And we work with companies in the retail industry, specifically on priorities related to strategic planning, budgeting, forecasting, usually by reducing the reliance on Excel and automating a lot of those monthly financial reports. And I know I kind of called you out of the blue here, so I'm more just looking to set aside some time next week, just to get introduced and align with your priorities going forward. How's your calendar look on Wednesday or Thursday?" So that's kind of an example. I chose retail as an industry, and I could break, I have whole videos on on my channel where I break this down, but you could keep that structure and call most finance people, and that's going to be a relevant script for them. So this is how you design a script for SDRs that's, they don't have to think that much. You can literally, so this is what I did when I was new and starting to try this stuff. I would literally just rehearse that like 10 minutes a day. And at first, I didn't sound confident, but over time, I developed little pauses that were comfortable for me, little words that were comfortable for me. There's no exact value statement script that I have that works for everyone. It's more that framework of taking control and then answering those three questions. I've found this to be a way more effective way to coach SDRs than like open-ended directional questioning that they're just not ready to riff and go back and forth when it's the first time they're making cold calls to like executives.
Yeah, what, one thing I want to double tap on there, first of all, that's great. And also just to mention again, like, you detail this and a ton more on your channel. But I also think while we're kind of on this thread and kind of digging into this deeper now, my natural question that I think of when you get done with that is, what are common objections you get there, right? And how do you handle those?
So yeah, and this is what I teach reps is try and be prepared for the most. So here, let me take a step back. Once you physically, this is what I like about this framework, is once you physically get that out: who you are, why you're calling, and what you want, there's only three possible outcomes now. They either give you what I call a hard no, where they basically say, "Take a hike, take me off your list," click, and they hang up, and there's nothing you can do. So you don't even need to be prepared for that outcome. The other outcome is they say, uh, "Sure." Like, when you get good at it, a lot of people will just say "Sure" out of the gate. And they might ask you some questions after that, but they'll say, "Uh, yeah, sure, Wednesday doesn't work, but maybe Tuesday in the morning," or something. In which case, book the meeting. So two of the three outcomes are very self-explanatory. Either make your next dial if they just hang up on you, nothing you can do. They say yes, book the meeting. Otherwise, try and be prepared for the most common objections. So a common example of a common objection I recommend people make flashcards for is, "Hey Connor, thanks for reaching out. We already work with XYZ competitor, so I don't see why it makes sense to meet." I would immediately, instead of asking them, "So how's that currently going for you? How's XYZ system going for you? Are you open to making any changes?" Like, because you're not going to convince them to do that on and off the cuff cold call. I more double down and meet them at the end and say, "Got it. Yeah, that's actually why I was reaching out. We work with customers of X competitor all the time. So if there's ever a fit, we can move ahead. But this is more just to get introduced and align with your priorities going forward and introduce you to our team that will be supporting you in this area for the foreseeable future. So does XYZ date work for you?" And now you've just given yourself a second shot on net. That's a non-zero probability of booking the meeting. But here's the thing is, now if they still say no to that, which a lot of time, I'd say the majority of times they still do, they push back, but usually they'll have some sort of question for you or go deeper into why they still don't think it makes sense to meet. And this is when you can use the opportunity to open up the conversation. Here's the key distinction I have with a lot of sales training out there is that now is that is when you can start asking for something in return because you have delivered value first. So instead of leading off with questions at the beginning of the call, before you've even answered those key questions: who you are, why you're calling, and what you want, now they clearly know again, yeah, who you are, why they know the intent of your call. And here is where you can start opening up the conversation. But I still do recommend pulling it back to setting a meeting because realistically, I'd rather be having this deep dive discussion on an actual discovery call than have my first one chance be on an off-the-cuff cold call when they're not expecting it.
Yeah, for sure. And maybe just restating of how we got here and, and also a few points now. So you basically asked for time twice. You've done the intro with a downward inflection, "How are you?" And then you've given that 30 to 45-second value statement with the ask for time. They said, "Hey, we're using a competitor, so it really wouldn't make sense to, you know, talk." You've then reiterated like, "Hey, it's just an introduction conversation. This is the team that supports you for the foreseeable future." Now they've rejected your second line of questioning and say, "Hey, no, I don't really think it makes sense right now." What's a common example from here of where you might coach someone to take the call, whether it's a question or something to talk about, etc.?
Yeah, and what's happened here at this point is you haven't built enough credibility in their eyes yet. Like, what you're ultimately doing here at a high level is you're trying to sell time. You're trying to sell that you and whoever you work with, and the way you're communicating, you're valuable enough to where it makes sense for them to set up, set aside more time to meet with them. So here's where I would open up, and this is going to change depending on where you work. But if they said, "We already work with XYZ competitor," and double down, so the time they still didn't meet, then I would start telling them, "Well, typically what we see and how we work with customers of X Y Z competitor is this," and ask them some question related to like, "What are they using for that gap that your company fills when working with that competitor?" and getting them to open up there. But then I still recommend you pull it back. But you kind of want to signal your expertise in these questions that you actually understand how your solution fits in with that solution. And this is just a competitor example. There's all sorts of examples where you should have flashcards ready where it's like, "Oh, we don't have the time or bandwidth right now. Reach back out six months down the line." You want to have some sort of pre-prepared response. I recommend like the top three to five objections have those down before you start branching out and worrying about niche objections because then you're giving yourself the best probability to book the meeting. And that's how I look at it. Your first probability is when you ask for the meeting initially. Your second probability is when you double down and ask for time. The third one is when the conversation opens up and you ask one more time there.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think, lot, lots that resonates. I think it, it's, it's interesting to hear how you've architected it because I think there's similarities and differences from the way I do it. But exactly that, it's like, any type of objection for me is never going to be like, "Okay, this call's over." Now, granted, like, yeah, like at some point, if they keep saying no and like they're clearly losing steam, like, you probably lost the call. But I think, yeah, it's funny how so many people will hear like an objection or like, "Oh, we're using their competitor," and it shuts you down. They have no idea how to handle it, or they haven't even thought just about like, when you plan ahead for these types of objections. And I'm using your competitor, or we talked to you guys in the past, it's not a fit, all these different things. Like, when you actually plan ahead for those, you can spin it. And I'm not even saying that it's a guaranteed like to get a meeting, but people will hear that and be like, "Ah, damn," and like close and just miss so many opportunities. Like, last thing I'd say before I hand it back to you to close is like, I literally had a call where I reached out to an SRE, a site reliability engineer, who covered the East for this company. And I was trying to sell them on this deployment technology. A past company I worked on, I saw from the news that they were moving from Amazon to Google Cloud. And I reached out to him. I was like, "Hey, I saw you're in the midst of a transition to Google Cloud and using all these different toolings." And he's like, "No, we're not using that. We just started using this other tool." Which was actually the open-source version of the enterprise version that I sold. So for those of you watching, they were basically using the free tool of the enterprise version that I called. I literally, my next call was to an SRE on the West Coast who covered the West Coast team. And I opened the call by saying, "Hey, I just spoke with your your team in the East who's developing on Argo, which is like the free open-source tool." And same exact thing. I was like, "I was wondering if we could sit down and show you how we're working with XYZ to go through cloud migrations from AWS to GCP." Got the meeting booked in like 15 seconds. Right? The first guy hung up on me. I was like, "Damn." But I actually extracted something meaningful by staying there, trying to just stay through any type of objection, get as much as I could, and parlay that to the next one. So anyway, that kind of ties into where I wanted to ask you, kind of in closing, right? This is what you teach SDRs when they're first new on the phone, right? I think it's a good fallback. It's a, like to your point, it's a lot more manageable early on to handle objections, even if it sounds a little bit scripted and robotic early on, you at least build like the emotional and psychological capacity to like actually handle these objections. Right? So as someone gets better and better, how do you see them taking this framework, which again, is not a script, this isn't like the golden thing you have to say every call, how are you seeing top performers on your past teams that have taken that and enhanced it, or how have you developed that over time and made it sharper and sharper?
So the whole framework is designed, the one, the way I just laid it out, is to help new SDRs maintain control of the process and be as prepared as possible. So that at every layer of the call, they are at least prepared for what to do. Because where I've seen new SDRs struggle is once, once things go off script or what they're not anticipating, they just don't have the confidence, the product knowledge, they don't have the confidence to answer the questions they're getting asked. And you start to hear their tonality falter, and the call just goes south. And then if they're never taught a different way, they just sour on sales in general. And there's so many people who have probably just given up thinking they just suck at sales or suck at cold calling when really they just needed a starting point to help them maintain control and get used to hearing yes. The key difference as SDRs progress, and quite frankly, once you're in the account executive role, is you can modify this framework to, to go to not be as rigid. So an example of this, and this helps a lot of people. I teach new SDRs to tell them who you are, why you're calling, and what you want, and get all three of that out of the gate. What I teach more experienced SDRs who are used to going a little off script and having a little back and forth is, I still preach the assumptive formality, take control as quickly as possible, tell them who you are, try to try to sound a little more targeted, maybe based on the industry this person's in or their title, trying to make who you are a little more targeted. But you don't need to overthink it. So say who you are, and then why you're calling. But then truly just finish with a statement and get their feedback to what you just told them before you go into what you want. First, you save that bullet in the chamber. Instead of immediately going for it, you try, and this allows you to to beef up the why you're calling too, to keep it 30 seconds. You can add a little more value in there. But there's a misconception in my opinion. I love statements. I don't think salespeople think they need to be the one leading, asking questions. Questions. You can truly just tell someone, "Here's who I am. Here's how I, here are the priorities and challenges that I solve that are relevant to you, and here's how we solve them." Sometimes there's a little like, one to three second awkward pause, but then they start telling you how what you just said to them is relevant. And now you have more information to go off of, and you can start doing a little bit of that discovery. But then now you have that bullet in the chamber after you've had a little bit of back and forth and more information to act off of. And you can say, "Hey, and by the way, I was actually more reaching out because I wanted to set some time next week," and kind of naturally go in that direction. Because yes, on on aggregate, it is a little weird to go straight for the meeting. But I think it's a better framework to get SDRs used to doing that. And once they've heard yes, and they know cold calling is possible and something a skill they can learn, that's when I dial it back and get a little bit more advanced and teach them to open up the conversation a little bit more.
Yeah, and maybe just making this like super explicit for anyone listening. So I know you've given the example of what you and asking for the time right out of the gate. What's an example of a statement as opposed to that question asking for time right out of the gate?
It'll be a variation of what I did earlier, but I might beef it up a little more based on like, let's say I'm just going to try and come up with one. If I'm calling into a, we'll do finance again, in the life science account. I'll get the assumptive formality, "Hey, how are you?" "Good." "I'm just reaching out because I'm part of the strategic life science team that supports X company regarding back-office financial applications. So we work on things related to clinical trial planning, commercialization, supply chain execution, usually by reducing the amount of spreadsheets and point solutions that you're using for that and getting everyone on a common system and a single source of truth." But you finish with a statement. And if you just pause, they'll start. A lot of times they'll just start sharing, "Oh, we use this," or "This is how we do it." Now, and they might have a question for you, but you get a, you can get a sense of their vibe, whether they received it positively. And you can do way better than what I just did. That was like off the cuff. But if I, this is what I preach, is making lists upfront that are as homogeneous as possible. So it ideally is like, you make a list of as many people in your territory that are in the life science industry that also work in finance. And then you can come up with one value statement that's going to be pretty targeted towards. That's how you can just go, go, go and move fast at a high quality. Because in the end, this framework I've taught is to help SDRs. This is for your, you, you can set aside your A accounts that you want to be more strategic with. This is for the other C of accounts and contacts that you have in your territory to help you make like, go from making $25 a day to $100 a day without sacrificing quality.
Y, man, uh, ton of great takeaways. And like, we could probably do a part two on this. I'm sure. And I'm sure we will throughout this weekend where we're filming, uh, more episodes. But also for those of you that made it this far, like, if there's any questions you have, fire away in the comments below as well. We definitely appreciate that. More than happy to ask questions. Also, just want to restate, Connor's YouTube channel is in the description. He actively monitors his comments as well. So check out his other deep dives as well where he goes into this even further, has templates, whiteboards, a lot more than I do. And, uh, I think it's great. So definitely check that out. And lastly, just mentioning Connor is also part of our team at Higher Levels as well. So he is a coach, he is going to be contributing content in the future, and also available on live calls. But Connor, before we hang it up, um, I guess the only thing I haven't asked, like, and subscribe if I haven't over asked you for a ton of stuff now. But, uh, Connor, anything else, man? This is great, by the way. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I mean, I would just say, push through. There's so many people who give up on cold calling. And email can get the job done. I, this is my take, that over time, I actually think a lot of the email stuff's going to become less effective as like AI and automation just becomes so easy and everyone's sending the same type of emails. People just are inherently going to learn to ignore that stuff in their email inbox. And I, I truly think it's the people who can pick up the phone, make a dial. Like, that's such a good money-making skill. Whether you stay in tech sales or just, it's just going to serve you for the rest of your career. But if you don't push through and learn that, there's going to be a little piece of you on the inside as you, let's say, continue through the tech sales journey, that's like, "It just feels like you're missing something. Like, I never learned how to do that." And it's just doable. So yeah.
Yeah, well, man, great place to end. I'm sure we'll talk more about it on future episodes. And appreciate everybody if you made it this far. [Music]