Prospecting Strategies and Tactics with Jason Bay

Good afternoon everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. I'm excited to introduce my guest today, Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting. Jason, how you doing today, man? Introduce yourself to the audience.

I'm doing good. I appreciate you having me on the show, man. I'm super excited for this. Yeah. So, this was funny because you actually prospected to me for this one, right, to get on the podcast. Yeah. I uh you know, we sort of talked about this before we hit the record button here, but uh I'm definitely one of those people. What I love about running a prospecting company is that we do the same exact stuff to find our own clients, too. So, we get to try things and, you know, video is one of the hot things right now that we'll probably spend a little bit of time talking about, but that was something that we tested quite a bit um ourselves to get on podcasts, to get our our the attention of our dream clients, and then we get to kind of roll that out with our clients. So, yeah, I sent you a video and something must have stuck out to you. I don't know what it was, but you sent it over to someone on your team and and now we're talking.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's hard to get attention these days, but I think, you know, it's all about relevance, so we're going to get into that. But I think the, you know, and and there's a million different ways to skin a cat, and this is why I look at, you know, people talk about like competition, right? Um, I really don't think in the sales world I look at competition in any way, shape, or form, right? because we're all really good at certain areas and there's all these nuggets and tips and ideas out there of how to approach things and my hope is is that between you and I, you know, we can give the audience here a nice collection of different approaches to use to go out and execute, right? Because one of the things I found and and tell me what you think is uh you know selling sales training to sales professionals like that's it's a little bit like selling crack to crackheads, right? Because it's just like it's like [laughter] It makes sense, right? Whereas when you when you pull out and and you go from selling prospecting or or prospecting into accounts with without that connective tissue, right? You're trying to sell a completely different service. It's a little bit harder. So, I definitely understand the challenges of of non-sales trainers uh prospecting into, right, because I've done it for years before this. But Mhm. [clears throat] Let's talk about some of the stuff that you're seeing right now uh that's working for your customers. You mentioned video, right? Um but where are you seeing the highest return? Well, actually, let me even take a step back. You you talked about how you get to test out a lot of stuff. Mhm. How do you test out like what's your what's your approach to testing approaches? Because I think we'll talk about how we approach testing approaches and and what's the runway you give them and then what approaches you're finding are working these days.

Definitely. Um, I think that I always like looking at data. I think that uh as sales people, as business leaders, we tend to make decisions based on how we feel emotionally and and your not that your emotions are not important, but you do have to if you have the data, you got to use the data, right? So, the way that I look at testing is there are companies that do a lot of this type of outbound work and they survey a lot of companies to see what's working. And one of the big trends that we found out about last year, because when we started doing this, we used to just do cold email. And what started happening is I'm sure you've noticed, you're probably getting a lot more cold emails these days than you got two or three years ago. And the reason for that is uh you know, guys like you and I are helping people with prospecting and we're consuming a lot of content. We put it out on the internet and guess what? People are so lazy that they'll copy and paste the templates and just start doing that and stuff stops working, right? And one of the companies that uh I was checking out was a company called the Bridge Group. And they wrote uh the sales development playbook. And one thing that they did re that's really cool is they studied close to 500 B2B companies that do sales development and outbound over the course of four or five years. And they noticed that the number of quality conversations per day is going down and the number of attempts to get those conversations is going up. No surprise, right? But really what they were making a case for is multi-channelannel. So what we needed to really adapt in our business model was, hey, if you're just sending email, if you're just sending LinkedIn, the likelihood that you're going to get a hold of that person because everyone else is doing that is very, very low compared to, hey, are you doing email? Are you combining that with LinkedIn? Are you combining that with other forms of social media if they have Twitter and like that sort of stuff? And the big thing right now is video. So when we to answer your question about testing, it's really about statistical, you know, relevance or whatever the the term is in terms of having a big enough sample size to actually make a decision, yes or no, if something's working. And usually that number is a hundred. So typically what we're doing with the type of clients we serve, we're sending out about a hundred uh we're emailing about a 100 prospects per week for them. and that'll typically help them hit the appointment targets that we're trying to to set for them. So, after we send a 100 or 200 emails, we might test that across three different ideal client profiles. And then we're going to get enough data right there right away. Uh, we're going to know if people are opening the email. We're going to know if people are responding to to the email. And then we're also going to know if hey, are they converting into an appointment? Those are the three metrics that we look at. Uh, outbound can be kind of tough because it sometimes it takes a month or two to get your pipeline sort of ramped up, but right away in a couple weeks usually after you've sent a couple hundred emails, you'll be able to tell like, hey, if the open rate's not over 50%. Something's very wrong with the subject heading. If you're not getting a response rate of at least 5 or 10%, even if that's people saying not interested, something is just not right with your email copy and you need to do something different. And if you're not converting, usually we shoot for 3 to 8% of the total emails we send out to convert into an appointment. That number there is is usually going to pencil from an ROI standpoint for most of our clients. So, but that can you might not get that number for three or four weeks into a campaign. So, two weeks, couple hundred emails, that should be enough data for you to know if something's working and and and what's working specifically that you might need to test.

And so and so what's your philosophy around uh like personalization versus scale right because there's the you know and I don't know what tools you use you know I use sales loft um you know there's this whole conversation around personalization and scale right and I used to train or I still do train you know probably about you know when I took this training it was Bashio back in the day um you know over I think 12 years ago at this point I've been training it now for 10 um it used to be very focused on this one email. It's called the why you why you now email. It's Jeff Hoffman came up with it and it's a [clears throat] very specific structure which is hey I was on your website and I noticed this thing happened whatever that trigger is. The reason that prompted me to reach out to you is because many of our clients who have that happen use our solution to drive these type of results. Who can I talk to about that? Right? And about, you know, I'd say about 10 years ago, it was totally worth spending 15, 20 minutes sitting down, crafting this really, really wellthoughtout, very personalized email, and sending it off to an executive, getting a referral down because you were getting a 15 to 20% response rate if you did it right. But now, it's been bastardized. It's been genericized. It's been blasted out to a million people, right? Because, you know, people are using the same format and just hammering it out in, you know, in these mass blast tools. So, it's definitely not worth doing like 30 minutes of research on anybody, but I read a report recently on sales uh sales loss recent report that said the optimal personalization level is 20%. And they found that by like comparing a 100% personalized email to a 20% personalized email, the 20% was actually getting a better response rate. And so, you know, that's where, you know, if I look at the YU now email, that's like that first sentence needs to be the personalized part, right? So it's it's hey Jason you know I was on your website I noticed this happened whatever personalized now the next section which is hey the reason I wanted to reach out to you is because well that can be pretty standard based on whatever that trigger was. So I guess h how are you testing quality and quantity right now and what are you seeing out there? Um cuz I wish that the purely personalized stuff was the answer because it would kind of force us all into the quality, but I'm starting to see that the the volume being very targeted is actually getting better results.

Yeah, I I'm really glad you brought this up. The approach that we take that I always tell people is we take the murder by numbers approach and flip it on its head. Everything right now is steering towards accountbased. So accountbased selling, accountbased marketing. So really where you want to spend the research is on the account. And where people make a big mistake is they say, "Hey, I uh you know, I'm a software company and I serve the construction industry." Okay. Uh what size of companies, what needs might they have? Are they doing commercial? Are they doing res? I mean, there just so many layers that you can dig there. So instead of focusing and making the ideal client profile about the industry, make it about a niche. Find a niche within that industry. Saying you serve software companies, that's that's not niche. Is it SAS companies? Is it B2B SAS? Is it B TOC? So, I think really nailing that niche down is going to help you personalize. So, that's where you really want to spend most of the research. Personalization should only take a really just a couple minutes at most. And I agree 100%. It's the sweet spot we found is the first couple sentences in the email. And then you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. If you have a strong value prop, like that language obviously works. So just use what's worked in the past. And if you're working at a company that's been doing this for decades, obviously they figured out what their value props are. Don't reinvent the wheel there. So the personalization, the first couple sentences, and then what we've also been doing is is video people have been using to personalize, too, where you people are getting really smart these days. So just using merge tags like first name and company name is is is not going to work. And you can't fake a video. And honestly, if you've done your research, uh, a video might be actually easier for you to do than, um, writing the two sentences because you can be on their website as you're doing it, put a face to the name, all that good stuff. Um, so yeah, I I don't like the murder by number stuff. I I would rather reduce the volume, make sure it's a good account, and we hardly ever get emails back from people telling us to [ __ ] off, [laughter] you know, because we at least did our research and know that they're potentially a good fit for our client's product or service. So, it's not like us sending an email to a company and it's not related at all. They just say not interested or hey, I'm I don't really want any more of these emails. We never hardly ever get emails that tell people why the hell you're reaching out to me.

Yeah. And it's and it's funny because you can start to see right now that marketing, you know, even little nuance things. Um, marketing is picking up on those, artificial intelligence is picking up on these things and they're trying to use them, but you can always sniff them out. I'll give you an example. You know, I used to the YU now email. it used to start with and this very specific word and I'm noticing certain things I I'm taking out uh just because I think it's triggering people in the wrong response because they're so overexposed to it. So for instance like I used to write I was researching your account and I noticed this happened right because it showed personalization like I was researching you I was researching your company type of thing and so the word researching I think caught on and what happened was marketing now and I'm getting I don't know if you get these but I get marketing email I get prospecting emails where it says hey John I was researching your company and it looks like you'd be a really good fit for our services and then it goes into this throw up elevator pitch that literally has nothing to do with anything I would ever want. Even like if you I got prospected you by a pro like so it'd be like you reaching out to me, right, doing prospecting training and saying, "Hey, John, I was on your website and I know you'd be a great fit for our services. I'd like to talk to you." Like I literally got prospected by a company that sells prospecting training. And I'm like, and I'm like, "Dude, come on." And I'm like, this is obviously a templated email. Cut the [ __ ] You know what I mean? And I think that's where I'm a little I I was a little bit nervous a while back about how artificial intelligence was genuinely going to take over pretty much any aspect of outbound, especially email, right? Because I was seeing tools like Nova.ai and Shakespeare and a few other ones where I was like, "Holy shit." But what I'm noticing is it's like their personalization. And they do that 20% personalization part right there. But it's like it's like circa it's like LinkedIn circa 2000 in the sense that it'll be like uh it it it makes no connection to the value proposition. So for instance, if I so if I turned an you know an artificial intelligence bot onto you to write you an email, it would say, "Hey Jason, I see uh you're based in Austin, Texas. Do you want to keep Austin weird?" and then it would hard shift into a like like this we're the leading provider of software and it's like okay [snorts] right so I I really do think that in in order for artificial intelligence to really make the connections we have to do so much work on the back end to craft messaging that aligns with triggers personas and all those type of things so AI can actually connect the dots there because AI isn't going to be able to craft some really wellthoughtout connective tissue between something that I saw about your business and our value proposition So that's why I think we're still in a pretty good shape of of it's almost like the last mile. Like you want your sales rep, you need to be the last mile. You need to take a look at what marketing and artificial intelligence comes up with and put that little flavor on top that shows it's a human to be able to make it. And to your point, it should only take a couple of minutes to do that.

Yeah. Have you seen the Terminator? Yeah. Yeah. Where he's like trying to teach him slang. He's like a le vista bab, you know? It's just like so bad. That's really what I think AI is like. I think that's the max capacity in our lifetime of what how AI is going to be able to personalize this stuff. And yeah, because we use Nova. I love the Nova tool, but we don't use the personalization feature. Really, where you're going to get a lot of insights with AI and machine learning is it's going to be able to gather all the data in a really, really easy format to you to make a really quick decision and be like, I can spend 30 seconds personalizing this because all of the data is just sitting right in front of me. Yeah. You still need to apply a human element because you're emailing and prospecting to humans. You still got to apply that element whether you're doing it, you're have a a sales assistant doing it, someone's got to spend that time to really like what you said was so important there. You have to connect the personalization to the value prop. It can't be something completely unrelated to what it is that you're trying to help them with. The better it's connected, the more likely it's going to work.

Yeah, absolutely. So, let's let's talk about video. Like, what are you seeing? Because I see the same thing on video. I'm seeing people abuse video like figured and those type of things where look like what you sent me where it was you know hey John hey John what's going on man blah blah blah love to be on that type of thing but you're seeing the same thing that people do they put the the whiteboard up there that insert name here and then when you click on it it's like hi thanks so much for opening up my email I really appreciate you know you know we work with companies and it's and it and it seems personalized but they It's it's definitely something that they've sent out to 50 other people. So, how are you currently use how are you optimizing video in your cadences if you will um so that so that it is personalized and you are seeing the success that you're seeing. So, how are you leveraging video right now with your team?

So, what is really important with personalization and anything when you're prospecting is to not be fake. So, don't pretend like you because like a lot of people will say, "Hey, I created this personalized video for you." and then you click on it and it's exactly the example that you gave. It's very disingenuine. And the thing that I think is just important just to step back a little bit with prospecting in general is to be very upfront about who you are and what you want and don't try to fake anything because if you do, the people that respond to that, in my experience, they haven't been very good clients. The people that you really want to work with have their [ __ ] together are going to respond really well if you do it the right way. So the bottom line with video is you can use it we've been using it in two different ways and I would suggest a third as well. You can use a a templated video but don't make it the first thing that you send to the person. It could be a piece of content that you had and it could be you using the video and then doing like quick screen share of like the content. Don't make that the first thing you send though. The primary way that we've been doing it is in two ways. So we either look at so with prospecting I think one of the most underrated things is taking like an 8020 approach to it and saying hey I'm going to spend the most amount of effort the extra effort on people that are actually most receptive to what I'm doing. And the way that you find that out is hey if I send a 100 emails last week 50 people open them. Uh like tools like Nova Sales Loft they all will tell you like you can create an engagement score. So what we do is we prioritize based on we don't always use click tracking. It depends on if we're emailing a lot of companies that use Outlook. We try not to use click tracking because Outlook's there's filters are crazy. Um but you at least know how many times someone's opened an email. And a lot of times I mean because people are forwarding around. We'll see people open up emails 5 10 15 times in a week because they've been forwarding it around. I'm going to send a video to those people. It's worth me spending an extra minute or two. So, the way the cadence might work is something where you're sending that introductory email and it's got the personalization, that first three sentences in it. It's got your value prop and why you're reaching out and then a a quick call to action like, "Hey, I created this uh piece of content or we have this white paper that's going to help you accomplish this." So, they might get that on a Tuesday and then a Thursday email. It'll be a quick follow-up call. Hey, what did you think of the white paper? What did you think of the case study, etc. So, we're not really asking for a meeting necessarily. really really strong in those first couple emails. Email number three is going to be that video.

Oh, go ahead. No, I was gonna say it's like I I'm sure you follow Gary Vaynerchuk, right? You know, he's got that book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, where it's like you kind of lay the foundation. It's like, hey, check this out. Check this out. Check this out. And then you come with your hard right hook of of the ask, right? So, what's that third one you were talking about?

So, the third one, that's that's where we'll throw in the video. And the the big thing is that just to comment on what you said about jab, jab, right hook. For some reason, people think this doesn't apply when you're doing outbound. You still have to lead with value before you ask for something. And the value can't be something that it's not like really sticky that's going to help this person. So, one quick thing I want to interject before I talk about the video is everything is so context dependent and everything right now is steering towards very high personalization. And that's more than just those two sentences. It's also not only am I reaching out to the right company, but we separate the personas in the company based on above the line versus below the line. Y so essentially what we're doing is we're segmenting VPs and seale people because they're really revenue and profit and risk focused reducing risk and they think in terms of quarters usually the below the line people the directors and managers those are typically people that are more focused on the dayto-day what they can have is they might not have the ultimate decision-making power but they could have just as much impact on the decision so if you're selling sales training the sales manager is probably feeling the most pain and you'd be able to help them and I'm you found this in your business. Yep. Getting that person to champion what you're doing is is really key. Those emails though, the verbiage is going to be not a lot different, but it's going to be you're going to be more features and more helpful and the content is going to be more how-to that you share with below the line versus above the line. People are going to want to know like, dude, how is this going to help me hit my revenue targets? How is this going to help make our investors happy, etc. So, when you're sending emails, just just keep that in mind. So that third email though with video, that's where we'll insert into the cadence that video. It'll be very similar to the one type of email that I sent to you where this is like very personal. It's like like hey John uh was want to do something a little different here. Put a face to the email. The reason why I was reaching out is that I I run a company called Blissful Prospecting. We do a lot of really cool stuff with prospecting. We're testing things out like video. I thought it'd be really valuable for your audience. I listened to your last episode on this. I thought this was really cool. Uh, want to know if you're accepting new guests. If not, totally cool, but thought I'd reach out. If nothing else, keep up the good work. Hope to talk to you soon. Something very short like that. So, for me, it was podcast outreach. So, I'm going to be very specific like and show you that, dude, I listen to your podcast, right? I listen to an episode. Here's what I got from it. Um, and it could be completely different for if you're reaching out to a VP of sales somewhere. Hey, I checked out your LinkedIn profile. Oh, hey, I I really like this blog post that you guys wrote on this, whatever that might be. So, that's one way of doing video is waiting until you see who is most engaged and then prioritizing your extra effort on those people.

Big fan of that. Yeah. Uh, number two is I I really believe that you should separate your prospecting based on like who are the dream clients. like these are the companies like if you're if you're running a company like you might want to work with like the Googles of the world or the Fortune 1000 companies, you might lead with video with those people because you know that especially a VP at a company like that is getting hit up a ton and to get their attention you're going to have to do some extra stuff. So again, everything's about prioritization. Don't treat every prospect the exact same way because there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are not receptive at all to any any sort of outbound cold outreach. And a a quick pro tip, too, is whenever someone says they're not interested or take me off your list, always say, "Hey, cool." Um share a resource with them that you think would be helpful, but ask them, "Is there anything I could have done to make this email more helpful? Do you have any feedback?" And people will actually respond to that and they'll let you know. And you're going to get people, like I said, that say, "I just am not responsive to this type of thing." Don't waste any extra time. You know, if you're an SDR especially, and it's such hard work to get these appointments, don't spend any extra time on people that are not even opening up your emails, right?

Yeah. I think that's that's key is is I think the prioritization is key. Unfortunately, too many reps, they get their territory and they get whatever a thousand names in their territory based on very basic demographic information, right? Industry, size, number of employees, whatever. and then they just start at one and they start hammering through and you know and then they recycle back through and I think that you know one of the most important things that you can do as a rep. It's kind [snorts] of like that old saying and I forget who said it but whatever. If I had you know four hours to cut down a tree I'd spend three hours sharpening my axe type of scenario. Abraham Lincoln I think it was or George Washington one of the I've stopped actually quoting [laughter] was because I've been called out too many times like John that's not who said that like whatever. So, whoever said it, right? But the idea there is you you frontload, you know, everything with, you know, that that ICP figuring out even your research. Like, so for me, as an example, when I'm putting together a cadence for a client and like especially one of those logos, it's not uh I don't do research, find one thing, send one email, and then schedule another activity three or four days later and then try to figure out what else to say. I sit down and I go do all my research at the same time. So, I'll pick I'll say I want to go after blissful prospecting. I'm going to go on your like I'm going to spend 30 minutes, but instead of 30 minutes looking for and writing one email, I'm going to spend 30 minutes finding five, six, seven, eight things that I can reach out to you about and then taking a step back and figuring out how am I going to tell my story? Like, what's my first touch, second touch, third touch, fourth touch? What content am I going to share? and then putting that all together into a system to then let it run as opposed to template emails crammed in press play or personalization every single one you know one at a time right yep

I love that um let me ask you one of the things that I'm I'm struggling with how to do at scale I I know how to do it when that scenario when I just that scenario I painted which was I want to go after you specifically your logo I want to go after I'm sitting down like for I I spend the first I have a two-hour recurring on my meeting on my calendar the first business day of every month where I pick five accounts and I go deep on them and I come up with a six seven eight touch campaign to each one of them and I just let that roll. So I got, you know, five accounts once a month and that's for me personally what I do for my prospecting and then and that makes it a little that makes it easy for me to share content to know how to retweet and what you know and go on your LinkedIn and make a comment so there's impressions there so you see me all over the place, right? One of the things though that that I find that sales reps don't do a great job at is the whole going back to Gary Ve's jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? The jabs, the adding value, right? Um, I've seen a lot of fake value fake value attempts where it's, "Hey John, here's a case study. Hey John, here's a white paper and there's no here." And you said the word earlier that I've stole from Gary Vee too, which is context, right? There's no context around that content that says, "Hey, this is why John, I think you specifically should read this, right?" And the easy way is, "Hey, John, like you said, I listened to your podcast recently and I noticed where you were talking about something about this. I wanted to share this piece of content with you that is directly relevant to what you just said there because I thought it might add some value based on what you were talking about there." Right? Yeah. That to me is, holy [ __ ] game changer. I look at that rep a different way, especially if that piece of content is directly relevant, right? But that's hard to find at scale. So, how are you sharing content uh and and doing the jabs out there to add value with at at to a certain degree any type of scale that isn't like the eye rolling, yeah, this kid is trying to send me some quote unquote value so I pay attention to him because I'm starting to see that like people who do that to me, I I've gotten to the point where to I'm like rolling my eyes. It's like look, I appreciate what you're trying to do there, but that piece of content was so off base as far as what I give a [ __ ] about. And by the way, I'm not going to read a 39page ebook that you send me, you know, or like a book. Like, I'm going to tell everybody out there who's listening to my podcast, stop [ __ ] sending me books. I don't [ __ ] read books, okay? Like, I want the best [ __ ] book on the planet. I'm not going to read it. I'm a blog post guy. I'm a snippet guy. I can't stand books. But yet, I get books all the [ __ ] time from reps saying, "Hey," and I'm like, "God." Uh, so what are your thoughts on how to share content that's relevant that will add value as opposed to eye roll value?

Uh, this is such a great topic. I'm glad you brought this up. Um, I think you have to step back and think about like one of the big mistakes that we can make with prospecting is to not put ourselves in the prospect's shoe. So, when you look at the email cadence, don't look at it, I'm a salesperson, your only goal is to set up a meeting with this person. the prospect has a bunch of other [ __ ] they're dealing with that day and your email needs to grab their attention right away. So, when you look at it through that lens, it's kind of obvious when you think about if I'm sending a 40page ebook to this person, [snorts] are they going to [ __ ] drop everything that they're doing right now to read that ebook? Like, it's just not going to happen, right? So, the way that you can do this, again, I think you have to separate out the like the type of prospecting you're doing, you want to work with companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn. Well, you already have, but like companies like that. So, it's worth it doing the way you're doing it is awesome. Like that is very hard to scale. Like if you have a team of talented people to do that, you know, to kind of help you with that, that's the way to do it. for the rest of the companies that are maybe a little bit more mid-market. One of the things that you can do that we started implementing that you know because my background is primarily selling business to consumer at the beginning of my career in the last half of my career the last five or six years has been selling B2B. Yeah. You did the whole thing in college, didn't you? Like paint. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they had excellent sales training actually there. Um, but what what we didn't learn because it doesn't apply in B TOC is the buyer's journey. With a B2B company, the person you're talking to is not going to be the only one that has decision-m power or that is going to collaborate on this. So, what we've been really implementing with our clients is just basic buyer journey stuff and understanding, you know, awareness and consideration and interest like what what does it take to create that awareness? And where you can really tie this stuff in with a prospect is through empathy. And this is something that I think is actually really hard for harder for men than it is for women. And I put myself into that because when I I grew up, I had a very, you know, I grew up in a 5,000 person town in Brookings, Oregon. Very bluecollar. My dad uh mill worker, you know, it was very much you don't talk about your feelings and and and what that made me do is kind of suppress that stuff and not put myself in the shoes of someone else and let them empathize with me. Mhm. So where that comes out in an email though is I'll give you an example. We work with a client that sells these really high-end cloud security services for tech companies primarily SAS. So in SAS what you have if you do something in healthcare for example you have to deal with HIPPA. So the data that you collect there's a lot of regulatory requirements and these SAS companies a lot of them don't do that in house and a lot of times if they want to work with a big Fortune 1000 company they have to get thirdparty verification from someone outside their company that says hey your stuff's secure. So when we reach out to people at their company for our client we're reaching out to chief technology officers and VPs of uh engineering and that sort of thing. So a way that this could come out is hey I know that you're super busy like meeting deadlines and you probably want to spend the most amount of time that you can like working on your product. So security might be one of those things that you just push off to the side and don't really want to deal with. That's why we help companies with this and we've worked with this company and this company. And what we can help you do is that next time you know a third-party verification is required from one of your clients or one of your you know partners is asking for a compliance review that's where we might be able to help you and this is not a good fit for everyone but wanted to reach out because you're very similar to the type of clients we work with. are you interested in chatting? That's the type of context that you would need. Um, for content, it could be, hey, I I know that, you know, for the reasons that I just talked about, that empathy that this is a challenge for you. Like, here are some things that you might be able to implement with your team really quickly. I wrote up a really short blog post on it that you can read in a minute. You know, um, that's where the empathy needs to come in and really give context. You can do that at scale. Now, [clears throat] that's not going to be as effective if you're reaching out to a sea level at Salesforce. you're going to be need to be much more personalized than that. But if you're reaching out to a company that's, you know, a couple thousand employees, like those people are not quite as busy and getting pestered as much as a Fortune 1000 company.

Yeah. No, I think the empathy piece is is is so critical. I mean, you you think about when you know, it's funny Morgan so my I I hired this kid. I don't know if you know Morgan Ingram, but um hired him about a year and a half ago and you know, SDR SDR manager now. was doing full cycle sales and all that stuff. And when we first started, you know, we we worked on messaging for cadences for those type of things. And he was and he's very like, you know, sales loft driven, like he lives and breathes in sales loft, lives and breathe in cadences, right? Which is great from an efficiency standpoint. But, you know, but in but the and the results were okay when he was when he first started, you know, first couple of months, whatever, we were doing okay. But he came to me and he goes, uh, you know, well, six months in, he goes, "Hey, John, uh, I'm not getting the results that I that I would expect to get, you know, based on what we put together here. You know, what we got to, you know, what's going on here, you know, that type of thing." And I said to him, I said, "Morgan, you know, your your results aren't really going to change all that much until something until one thing happens." And he's like, "What?" And I I said, "Until you start giving a shit." And he was like and he was like, "Excuse me?" I go, "Look, I know you give a [ __ ] about your job. I I I see the hours you put in. I know you're working your ass off. I know you genuinely care and are passionate about what we do. But until you start really genuinely giving a [ __ ] about the client, the results aren't going to change, you know, in the sense that like that and I think that was the the I won't say aha moment for me, but when I first started uh when I was doing before, you know, I was doing this started a company 25 years old and it was a pure numbers game for me. It was come up with an elevator pitch, make $400 a week, send out a [ __ ] thousand emails, go to as many events as possible, tell my story as many times as I possibly can, and basically just trip over opportunities. You know what I mean? It was it was really a timing thing. Like my pitch almost didn't matter. We we sold outsourced IT services and if I was calling enough times, I would eventually trip over somebody whose network was on fire or who just had a, you know, server crash or something like that. I'd come in, you know, yay. Then all of a sudden, I took this training. It goes Basho and it was hey do your research right so what I started doing was I started just connecting the dots oh you open up a new office here's my value proposition for opening up new offices oh you went through merger and acquisition here's my and look my results went from here to here no question about it they they definitely improved with with just literally connecting the dots there but then when they then when they went from here to here is when I stopped and I had enough experience doing this to know really where we made a difference you know what I I mean like looking at like because I had sold enough accounts, I had seen enough of the results that we drove for our customers like genuinely saw them and that's when I started looking at clients with a whole new lens to say holy [ __ ] like I know we can help there. Well, I don't know if we can help them, but I know we've helped other companies that that thing has happened to or are at that stage of their business. And then I would write a really truly genuine empathetic email to them saying, "Hey, look, you know, and I and I caution people on the using the word help, right? Don't ever tell somebody you can help them, right? [snorts] You don't know that yet." Now, middle of the sales process, you can help, you know, that's why I want to figure that out. But but what you can say to get around that because like you come after me, Jason, you say, "John, I can help you do this." I'm automatically on defense. Like, who the [ __ ] are you? Like, you don't know me yet, right? So, but what you can say to get around that is we've helped other people like you. Yep. Right. And that's and let me share with you some examples there. So I think that's and that's where it kind of it was you I think it to a certain degree it takes a certain amount of just general business experience especially in what you sell because now Morgan's results are great because he's done enough of these trainings and he's seen the results like he's gotten the feedback from the clients that have said oh my god Morgan that was gamechanging like look at like check out this email I got a response back. Oh my god I got into this company. And so he's seen the genuine impact that the training has had and so now it's easy for him to transfer that enthusiasm over to somebody based on their situation. Right. Yep. And I think so to your point of empathy and just one more point, you know, as I think about this because I there's a cautionary tale out there for everybody on when somebody isn't responding to your email, don't be a dick because [clears throat] my like because most people like we get mad. So, this goes to your point of empathy. Like, we send these emails out to people and if they don't respond to us, all of a sudden we're starting to get ordinary, right? Like, what the hell? Those type of things. Especially if somebody's engaged with us in some way, shape, or form and said, "Yeah, send me information or whatever." And then they ghost us, all I got to say is before you send that what the [ __ ] email, put on top of it, hey, I hope everything's okay. I haven't heard back from you in a little while. I hope everything's okay. Because I don't know about you, man, have you ever gotten like been pissed off that somebody sent that basically f you email and found out they were in the hospital for the past two weeks or the kid was sick or something like that? Is that happening yet? [snorts] Uh not quite that extreme, but like major [ __ ] was going on in their business. It was way more important than talking to me. Absolutely. And that's the point, right? So have some empathy. Be like, look, I hope everything's okay, but you had said earlier these things, so can we reconnect here or whatever it is. So um because without that empathy what then then we get replaced right then technology and AI to your point earlier empathy is what we will still have as the power over the machines to continue to make connections with humans and until robots buy you know what I mean robots buy from robots okay people still buy from people and I believe that to this day.

Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I love everything that you shared and and one thing

That you could do if you're an SDR or training SDRs is have them go through those buyer persona exercises together and share those things like the three areas that we focus on getting from our clients because we don't know their industries as well as they do. Right? So that's the most challenging part of running a prospecting business, by the way, is we have to learn about new businesses and industries. But goals, fears, and obstacles. So what are those, uh, prospects that they talk to? Like, what are they trying to accomplish that's related to your service? So if you're selling, you know, outsource software development, which some of our clients sell, like, what are they trying to accomplish? What are their fears? What are their challenges? And you work that into the email copy.

And another thing is, if you're working at a big company, and you're the SDR, and you just hand it off to an account executive, and then you don't see what happens after that. If your company is not already doing this, you've got to spend some time talking to account managers and people actually fulfilling the product or delivering fulfilling the service, excuse me, or delivering the product and ask them those things that you figured out, right? Is like, what are the results that we create? And most importantly, what is the language that the prospects and the customers actually use when they talk about those things? Because you have to use their language. One of the worst things that I get, I get so much of them on LinkedIn, is people that are like, their emails are filled with a ton of jargon. And I'm a marketing sales guy. I know what the jargon is. It still turns me off even when I know what the jargon and the abbreviations and all this other stuff mean. It's just be a human and empathize with the person.

Yeah, that's, uh, I think the, it's funny because I wish every company would was able to do this, but, you know, when I, the few companies that I've started, anytime a new hire has come on board, I give them a blank org chart. So, here's something that people can do out there, especially smaller businesses or small divisions of bigger companies. I gave them a blank org chart with titles and I said, "I want you to go find these people and I want you to interview them. I want you basically treat it like a prospecting call. You have to basically find out who these people are. You have to do some homework on them. You have to earn the right to get time on their calendar. And then you have to run a quote unquote meeting to understand why they work here, what's so special, what do they do, those type of things. And then write a book report for me, basically a one-pager that says, this is what I learned about why people work at this company and why they love working at this company." So that's side one.

The other side is, now here's a list of customers that I want you to go grab lunch with, get a call with, or whatever it is, and ask them, "Hey, why do you still work with this company? What, what, you know, what were you doing before our solution? What are you doing after our solution? What are the main pain points that it addresses for somebody like you specifically?" So now with the internal, like, I understand why people work here, are passionate for what I do, and why customers buy from us. That's sharpening the axe before, right? That month that I give those kids to do that, all of a sudden, as soon as they hit the phones, they've got stories to tell, they've got passion, they've got, you know what I mean? They're fired up to actually make those calls, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Yeah. It's, it's allowing you to actually put yourself in the shoes of of someone else. It's no different than how you feel when you watch a really great TV show or a really great movie and you're like, "They just have this down. Like, I've felt that emotion before." Um, you have to show the prospect that you understand what they're going through. And honestly, it doesn't take a lot, but this stuff is, uh, it's not simple. It does take a lot of work to actually do this, but it's, it's a pretty straightforward. It's pretty straightforward if you put in the work. I think that most people aren't thinking about the fact that I, you know, beyond your quota, what you got to do and reaching out to this person, like actually think about, "I am sending this to another person. Who is that person?" And doing that exercise. And, and it could be as simple sometimes as before you send an email to someone, like, look at their LinkedIn profile, look at their picture. This guy Jeffrey, who's Jeffrey? What's he going through right now? You know, I do that with sales calls too. Every time I make, I mean, right now I have your profile up. Against, I mean, thankfully we're, we're, you know, video-wise, we're seeing each other here, but every single call that I make to somebody, I always have their LinkedIn profile up there. So I'm looking at them as a person. I'm talking to them. Even if it's static, I'm talking to them, and it helps. It really helps, uh, me make the connection and them make the connection with me too.

Yep. Love it. One more piece of advice, uh, that I'm looking for for the audience here. What do you tell the kid who's out there who listens to this podcast and is like, "I get it. I think, you know, I really want to be empathetic. I want to spend the time, but my boss is telling me I got to make a hundred dials a day." Like, outside of quitting that job and going finding another one, what do you tell the kid that understands that that wants to move in the quality of the empathetic world, but is being beaten over the head saying, "You have to make a hundred dials, you have to send out 150 emails a day." How do you find, you know, what do you do?

This is a tough one. Uh, so what your boss cares about is you hitting your quota. So at the end of the day, it's whatever is going to hit the quota. So what, what I've always told people and what I've done in the past in scenarios like this is, it's no different than starting a side hustle when you have a full-time job. It's going to be a little bit of extra work for you at first, and it's going to look like this. And then you can get the workload down as soon as you start showing results. Mhm. So, what I would suggest is, you know, if you're working eight hours a day at your job Monday through Friday, spend an hour or two outside of that doing some of this research and actually put together a test that you could show your boss and say, "Hey, actually, what I did, so all the new work that and that I've been closing here, the 20% of my effort that I spent actually segmenting this, doing the messaging, showing the empathy, those clients that I got from this or those, uh, new users for our software, like they came from me doing this." Yeah. And you might be the person that actually gets to teach other people that leads to promotions and all that other stuff. But bottom line is, it's going to suck at first. Yeah. And you're going to have to make the calls. But if you can spend a little bit of extra time doing the other stuff and most importantly, document it and show it, it's like an, it's like a personal case study, essentially, at that point.

I've had to do this a lot actually in my career, um, both from a sales standpoint and just a marketing standpoint, where the company I was working for in college, college works painting, didn't have a marketing department before I came became their marketing director. This is a $35 million company with no marketing department. I had a really good feeling that, hey, I don't want to go about the way that you're telling me to because I, my boss was one of the partners at the company, but I had to actually do that without telling him and and show him a little test and be like, "Hey, here's the data." And all they care about is, "Hey, are you hitting your numbers?" That's, that's all your boss cares about, ethically obviously, but that's really all they care about at the end of the day. Yeah.

I, and I can't, again, for everybody out there listening, the most successful reps I've ever come across are the ones who do the extra stuff that they're not being asked of in addition to what they're being asked to, right? It's the same thing like the side hustle. Make your side hustle your existing job, but a component of your existing job to get better. It, it really, I will say, you know, there's a lot of [ __ ] that millennials take these days about, you know, blah, blah, blah, and I think that's a lot, a lot of jealousy from, you know, my generation and above, uh, because it's a lot easier than it was, type of scenario in some cases. But the one thing I am a little bit concerned of these days is the work ethic component of what's going on right now. Because I used to, you know, so I do usually, I'll do an 8:30 to 4:30, right? That's my training. I'll do 8:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and then 4:30 to 5 is usually, you know, reps asking questions, wrapping. And then usually from 5 to 6 or 5 to 5:30, I kind of light up my laptop. I check my emails right before I head off to the airport to the next one, right? And when I leave offices at 5:30 in the afternoon these days, they're [ __ ] ghost towns. [laughter] Like ghost towns. And it's like, and it really disheartens me to walk around a sales org that isn't crushing it. You know what I mean? Like that isn't just making it rain or whatever. And by 5:30 in the afternoon, everybody's out at happy hour doing their thing. Like, this is where I do, you know, I think Gary's a little bit extreme with his, you know, [ __ ] your 20s, like, you know, work 20 hours a day. I mean, I did it, but, but I, I, I, I do think you do have to have a little bit of fun, you know what I mean? Work hard, play hard type of stuff. But, you know, the side hustle stuff and applying it to your business and spending your weekend doing some research on some accounts, spending, you know, you know, Thursday night instead of watching the lineup or whatever it is, actually jumping on and kind of poking around some websites and being, you know, connecting with people and those type of things. Like that stuff. The most successful sales reps I've ever come across in my life are the ones that do that. The average or not successful ones are the ones that just kind of show up and do their job.

Yeah. And what I don't [ __ ] understand is like, why you're not so like lit up about what you're doing? Cuz I, I used to do that. I would work the 80, 90, 100 hour weeks at times. And I don't, I think that's a bit extreme, like you're saying, you don't need to put in that much, but a 50, 60 hour work week in your 20s. What the [ __ ] else are you doing? You know? Like right now, what people don't, like I'm married now. I don't have kids yet, but dude, when you get married and you have a family, you have actual real responsibility. It's going to be much harder to actually put in that time. And for me, I don't, I don't want to be, I'm 29. I don't want to be in my 30s having to grind out 60 hour work weeks. Um, and the reason why I don't have to do that right now is that from 18 to like 24, 25, I was hustling, you know? Like I wasn't just going to college and saying, "Oh, you know, I'll work 10 hours a week at Starbucks." No, I was working 30, 40 hours a week. I, I worked every weekend in college. That's what we did. We had to drive home to where we're running our house painting business and then I knocked on doors and did estimates with homeowners. So if you don't have that fire under your ass, you got to think about why am I doing this? And it's, and find out. It's very pretty simple. I don't want to get like motivational, like preachy, but find out your why. Why are you doing this? If it's money, that's cool. If it's just you need to make a [ __ ] ton of money to get to your next job or to start a side hustle or whatever, find something to get jacked up about and like find a way to connect what you're doing right now to something in the future. And if you're doing sales and you're passionate about sales, what you're doing right now as a salesperson, developing those skills, that's going to help you later on. The stuff that I did at 18 years old going door-to-door, although I don't go door-to-door technically right now, that stuff laid such a great foundation for what we do now. I'm not afraid of rejection. I know how to start a relationship in 30 seconds with someone at their door and get them to pay me five or $6,000 to paint their house. You know what I mean? Like those are all stuff that are going to be really helpful for you in the future. And if you can't see that right now because it doesn't exist, just know that these skills are going to transfer. And do you want to be grinding it out in your 30s and 40s or do you want to get that out of the way and like get your 10,000 hours in in your 20s?

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. I will tell you as a 43-year-old though, the grind never stops. [laughter] Depending, like I'm still grinding. I mean, I put in that work that makes this grind easier and makes me put puts me in a position to do what I want to do, but man, stops, even even when [laughter] good luck, good luck, stop slowing down. But awesome, man. Well, we got to, we got to roll things up here, but, um, appreciate the conversation here, Jason. What, um, any, any last thoughts or and any last thoughts and also tell the audience where they can find out a little bit more information about you and what you're doing over there at Blissful Prospecting?

Definitely. [snorts] Um, the best place to check us out is just on our website, blissfulprospecting.com. I highly recommend, excuse me, checking out our newsletter. We don't do one of those like [ __ ] company updates newsletters. Um, every other week or so, what I send out is I consume a lot of content. So, I listen to podcasts like yours, blog articles, etc. And I pack all of that down into like an email you can consume in like five or 10 minutes. And it's really like, here's a book review with the three things that I think you should take away from this book and start doing right now. Um, not just, here's a link to the article, but here's the one thing I think that's going to be really important to tweak in your call to actions in the email. That's the type of newsletter it is. So, I definitely, that's going to be the best taste of what we do. And then I love connecting with people on LinkedIn, too. So just Jason Bay, Blissful Prospect, and you'll find me on LinkedIn. I, I try to do, I don't do them every week, but every other week or so, I'll do a cold email breakdown. So I'll take a screenshot of a cold email that I get, blur out the person's name and company, and just give feedback on the email, and that's so you can get like a really good, you know, sense of what you might be doing that's not working and sort of how we might tweak it and make it better.

Love it. Awesome, man. Well, great conversation. I appreciate it. Um, thanks for coming on and everybody go check out Blissful Prospecting, Jason, what he's doing over there. And, uh, go make somebody smile today because, uh, there's too much negativity out there. Uh, try to make somebody happy these days. All right. Thank you very much, Jason. Everybody, make it a great day. Cheers. Awesome.