Banish Cold Outreach: Innovative Approaches to Boost Client Trust

Brandi Starr [00:00:35]:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandy Star, and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Dan Englander. Dan is the CEO and founder of Sales Schema, a fractional new business team for marketing agencies, and he hosts the digital agency growth podcast. Dan was previously the first employee head of new business at Idea Rocket. He's also the author of Relationship Sales at Scale, how to find your virtual tribe and reliably grow your professional service business, as well as mastering account management and the B2B sales blueprint. In his spare time, he enjoys developing new aches and pains via Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and and spending time with his wife Sarah and their son Adrian in New York City. Dan, welcome to Revenue Rehab.

Brandi Starr [00:01:34]:
Your session begins now.

Dan Englander [00:01:37]:
Brandy, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Brandi Starr [00:01:39]:
I am excited to talk to you today, but before we dive into our topic, I like to break the ice with a little woosa moment that I call buzzword banishment. So tell me, what industry buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

Dan Englander [00:01:57]:
Yeah, I love this question. For me, it's virtual assistant. I think it. I don't know what it means anymore. And I think it's a way for people to just turn their brains off when it comes to getting work done because they're just like, I'll just get a VA to do something. And it's like, you know, we're getting to the point where there's great talent everywhere, abroad, you know, offshore, nearshore, and people develop skill sets and have an expertise. So. And we're all virtual anyway, so I just don't know what it means.

Dan Englander [00:02:28]:
So that's. That's my rant.

Brandi Starr [00:02:31]:
All right, well, we can definitely take that one and put it in the box. I can promise that I won't bring up virtual assistants for this conversation.

Dan Englander [00:02:40]:
It's okay. I probably will, too. Watch me break my own rule and be like, yeah, here's how you can use a VA to go do these 100 things. So anyway, you.

Brandi Starr [00:02:47]:
That's what always ends up happening. Someone banishes it and then they're the one that uses it.

Dan Englander [00:02:53]:
Right? Yeah. Or we. What is it? You. You teach what you most need to.

Brandi Starr [00:02:57]:
Learn kind of thing, I guess so true. Well, now that we have gotten that off our chest, tell me what brings you to revenue rehab today?

Dan Englander [00:03:06]:
Yeah, what brings me to revenue rehab is I'm. I and our company, I should say, are looking to help people sell in the context of a low trust environment and basically, you know, to make it more tangible, de risking conversations in the sales process.

Brandi Starr [00:03:27]:
Okay, perfect. And I believe in setting intentions. It gives us focus, it gives us purpose, and most important, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our conversation. So what do you hope people take away from our discussion today?

Dan Englander [00:03:42]:
I'd like people to take away tangible ways that they can go after their markets and get calls for in the context of selling things that are complex, that where the value is not often realized at the beginning and it takes a while to realize that. And basically, you know how to get these doors open in a situation where there's more noise than ever, there's more direct and indirect competition. So to get more tangible, you know, figuring out who's doing this first, like who's actually doing the work before we go down any tactical rabbit holes, then getting into ways you can actually think about this in the context of doing outreach, which is what we're really focusing on is outbound and that sort of thing.

Brandi Starr [00:04:28]:
Okay, so let's start with. I always like to level set with definitions. And so you talk about selling in a context of a low trust environment. Help me understand what does that mean for you.

Dan Englander [00:04:42]:
Yeah, so I think we're at a place where so much of the services that we consume, especially in the B2B world for complex services, are from businesses that can be started anywhere where there's a laptop and an Internet connection. Right. So we've seen direct and indirect competition skyrocket. I think this went, this was already going up in the course of the history of the Internet. Then with COVID it just skyrocketed. Right. Because everybody went remote. And if everyone's remote, then you can hire anybody anywhere.

Dan Englander [00:05:14]:
So I think we're up against that. We're up against information overload. And then there's all sorts of cultural forces that are increasing people's skepticism. So it's created this, this, this lower trust environment in response to that, to bring this down to earth. Internet service providers, you know, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, have made it harder to communicate with your audience. We've seen other social media platforms basically restrict how you can communicate with your audience. So all of that stuff, all those tech changes are companies catering to their market. Those are all downstream of the overall cultural force of noise and skepticism and competition.

Dan Englander [00:05:52]:
So what sales scheme, you know, what we're looking to help people do is often identify potential buyers that already have some level of trust or, or in other words are in our clients circles of influence already and starting there as opposed to just doing the cold outreach thing over and over again.

Brandi Starr [00:06:14]:
Okay, yeah. And I know it's one of those things that, you know, I think most companies are still doing some form of cold outreach and a lot of it really is how do we get smarter about this? And you know, to a certain degree we're always trying to get in front of new people who don't know who we are. But it's like, how do we do that in a, in a more friendly way instead of feeling like old school calling names out of the yellow pages to totally tell my age.

Dan Englander [00:06:46]:
Yeah. And I've done a good amount of that myself back in the day. I think that a lot of the times like we, you know, we were sold this model of doing sales largely from tech companies in the, the whenever, the 2000 and tens, these funded tech companies. And there's some issues with it that I think haven't been addressed. I think first off, that sort of BDR model where you have a low level salesperson smiling and dialing and trying to get calls for a higher level person doesn't work so well when you have a consultative sales process. And it's complex. And that's because people need help from other people as opposed to help from a product. Right.

Dan Englander [00:07:25]:
So I think there's already like an inherent flaw to it. But even, I mean, I think even aside aside from that, due to the issues I was talking about like trust and skepticism, the landscape's just changed. Right. If you, if you have a BDR and you want them to get on the phone with probably a lot of your listeners at that VP or CRO level, it's going to be a really uphill battle unless there's a really interesting tangible product that's doing the selling as opposed to a, hey, we'll work together. And after 612 months you might be able to see a benefit from this thing that we claim to do. Right. So a lot of it before getting into the tactics is like having somebody on the call that can offer value, of course, but also just be a resource to that person over like the short to medium term. Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:08:12]:
Okay. So I'm hearing, you know, a lot of the here's what doesn't work. And you know, being a consultant like you, I work across A lot of different types of companies, different industries. And I do agree that when there is a complex sale, it is, you know, it's not as simple as someone dialing for dollars and, and getting someone, you know, on the hook, so to speak, and that and then making a purchase. And so tell me, what are you seeing that does actually work in these scenarios?

Dan Englander [00:08:45]:
Yeah, I'll answer that through a story. We were working with an agency a few years ago that was basically selling into blue chip tech companies. They'd work with every big tech company under the sun. And this is probably right before COVID I want to say. And we tried everything under the sun. We did the whole like cold outreach game. We did multiple channels, had all sorts of versions of their collateral and messaging etc, really it was just kind of crickets. And then one of us had an idea where we're basically going to say, okay, we're going to go find everybody that used to work for their biggest client and has now gone on to a different tech company that they might want to reach.

Dan Englander [00:09:23]:
So then we sent all of those people a two line email. We said, hey, saw used to be a company A, hope all is well. Company B, we've done a lot of work with company A, we should probably talk, open to a call and got dozens of appointments, several of which went on to close for multi six figure deals. And that like in a very loud way planted the seed. And we said, what did, what did we not do? We didn't do any of the things everyone tells you to do. Everyone's like, you need to offer value, you need to be sending people this and that material, you need to be sending content, you need to be doing all these other things. Things. And that's all true, that that all has its place, but what we sort of realized is that like at the top of the funnel, when you're dealing with a skeptical buyer, there's a lot of irrational reasons people make these decisions to invest their time.

Dan Englander [00:10:08]:
Right? A lot of it isn't always based on value information. What we think is, it's really based on are you in our world? Like are you in our tribe? Can we trust you? Not even to buy from you yet, but just to have a conversation. Are we going to cross paths again? Like could I see you at the next conference? Like those are the sorts of very quick lizard brain decisions we all make when we take time with people. And it doesn't seem like a big thing, but just de risking that call and having that call is a game changer because then re Engaging that person and nurturing them happens at a whole different level than if that relationship had never been established. So that's, that's kind of how we're thinking about it. And then from there, you know, there's a lot of other tactics I can get into, but they're all kind of along those lines of doing the thing that is not infinitely scalable, but doing it over and over again. Well, in a leveraged way. Right.

Dan Englander [00:11:04]:
By identifying these groups of people that have that meaningful commonality.

Brandi Starr [00:11:09]:
Yeah. And I know it was quite some time ago, but I talked to another guest and I can't remember the name of the company, but they did something similar with Champion Tracking. And the key was when people left your current customers to figure out where they were going to then be able to re engage. And you know, you talked about that circle of influence and really being able to get in there with the people that already know you. So I do know that there, you know, it is becoming a, especially for service based businesses, a much more common approach because you do have that level of friendliness in that, you know, even an initial conversation, there's a whole lot less pressure because it could just be a catch up conversation of like, what have you been up to? And it could potentially lead to actual business. But there's not that same pressure as if you are having the conversation with like a completely new person that, you know is in sales whose goal is really to, you know, get you to buy something.

Dan Englander [00:12:14]:
Right, exactly. And even when we're doing the salary, it's like they still know it's a sales call. Right. The, the prospects, like they understand that. But I think that there's been this, this misconception that like the only way to get people in is through, through just content at Thought leadership. And we, we do all the content in the world. Like we're on a podcast, we have our own podcast. Which you'll be joining on very soon.

Dan Englander [00:12:38]:
But I, I think that a lot of the times, you know, when we're dealing with the decision makers our clients are going after, they're just overwhelmed by the amount of information and having like this lifeline of somebody that's speaking their language, it's like, oh, through the subtleties of your message, I can tell you actually do understand Fintech or you know, about this conference in the CPG space that we're about to go to. Like them having that resource can, can save so many hours of time that they would spend spinning their wheels, trying to make sense of the world basically.

Brandi Starr [00:13:14]:
So let's talk about this in context a bit because you know, one of the places that I look at like if. And we like to use the simple, simple funnel shape. Not that it's perfect, but it's really simplified way to think about the journey. And there are scenarios where you do have marketing that is, you know, doing some things to drive some interest. And then you do have scenarios like this where you do have some form of a sales team operating at that top of funnel trying to get in front of people. How do you see the whole process working? Because the dynamic between marketing and sales and where they lean in and connect is a place that I consistently see companies not be able to do well. It's almost like there are just these two separate work streams happening. And it's like marketing generates some stuff, they push it to sales.

Brandi Starr [00:14:11]:
In a lot of companies, sales ignores it and all they're focused on is what they're bringing in themselves. And I know that, I've seen what this can look like and how much more effective it can be when you have, you know, both sales being more effective in their outreach and who they're going after, but when the two sort of sides of the house really work together in driving revenue. And so I'd love to hear your perspective and what you're seeing on what the whole picture looks like and not just how we are getting that engagement for that initial conversation.

Dan Englander [00:14:49]:
Yeah, it's a great question. And again, the main thing I can, like we haven't been running, you know, marketing departments and everything like that. So the, our main focus is working with business development people and owners and so on to, to get meetings. So with that, with that grain of salt, I think this is definitely the domain of the sales department to be conducting the sort of outreach that I talk about in relationship sales at scale. And the reason for that is it has to have this real one to one vibe, right? Like we're, we're not even huge believers in having just this one size fits all sales process that you can have the exact same copy between multiple salespeople. You know, if we're running campaigns and somebody's, you know, in the Boston area, like we have a client there that's doing B2B data, for example, on a massive scale. We're like, well, why don't, why don't we start with the people in Boston, right? Because you have that salesperson can be starting local and they're just going to get more meetings from it. It doesn't mean that that's the be all, end all but that's a better starting place.

Dan Englander [00:15:51]:
So it's the domain of the sales department to do this. That said, I think to answer your question, there can be lots of like connective tissue with, with marketing. Right. And I think where we see that live in a big way is when there's specific events. I don't mean like events, just like a trade show, although that's a really good example of one. But specific things happening like, and that affects that call to action. Right. So you have an email that's being sent that feels like the sort of thing that you would send or receive if you actually met somebody in person.

Dan Englander [00:16:25]:
But if you're, if you're aligning that with some marketing initiative, it just goes that much further than if everybody that you don't know is getting some sort of generic, what looks like one to many email. Right. So this is kind of the front lines, like tip of the spear sort of thing. This is primarily for net new. But you can still use the methodology to make a warmer relationship with people that have showed intent, maybe they've opted in for something or they've, you know, reconverted on the site or shown up on the site again or whatever it might be. So I think that outbound and inbound are getting a lot blurrier. But if you take this approach to outreach, whether it's a warmer audience or a colder one, it just goes a lot further. Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:17:09]:
Okay. So backing up a little bit for companies. You know, I always like to think about the. If I'm listening and I'm hearing what you're saying and it sounds good, how do I know if I have a problem that I need to be looking at this differently?

Dan Englander [00:17:29]:
Can you elaborate a little bit on the problem?

Brandi Starr [00:17:33]:
Well, it's whatever I'm looking to understand because in some cases there we all have blind spots. And you know, I was just talking to someone about a tool that we had that and this was a technology change. But what we had seemed fine. And then it was like in a moment we became aware that like, oh, what we have is actually really limited and we could be doing so much more. And that was the thing that prompted me to say, I need to figure out how to solve this. And so recognizing that some of the revenue leaders listening may be having a challenge, that they are unaware of that or you know, they may be thinking it's sometimes, you know, we think it's one problem, but it's really something else. And so this is one like, because if you think about it, relationship sales trying to be Very personal. Not sending out the same cold outreach.

Brandi Starr [00:18:29]:
Like everybody talks about that. And I think most people believe that they're not, you know, that they're doing the right things and that they're not being generic and all those sorts of things. So I'm asking for like, you know, when, if you're talking to a prospect for your company, like what sort of questions do you ask or ask them to ask themselves to understand is this a problem they're really experiencing?

Dan Englander [00:18:55]:
Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, I think for us the main problem is pretty loud and clear, which is like I'm not getting enough net new relationships or conversations with my market. Right. So that's the biggest one. And what we tend to hear in the context of outbound is like, hey, this used to work and it stopped working and we usually know why. And it's because of all those technical changes that are downstream of the bigger cultural shift towards skepticism and lack of trust. Right. So, so again I, those are the, the bigger issues.

Dan Englander [00:19:28]:
I think that how many meetings, you know, how many, that's really context dependent. It's just depends on, you know, who you're going after and all the other variables and so on. But I think that you bring up a good point that it's like most of us are doing this when we do it in a non leveraged way, right? When we're doing our networking and we're looking at people and we're saying, hey, this person should get this message and this other message. But there isn't often a sustainable or repeatable process for doing it. And that repeatability doesn't necessarily have to always mean full automation. There might be little pockets of automation, there might be other situations where it's systematized, where you have similar copy, but you have somebody that's putting more QC on it because it's your first degree network or something on LinkedIn for example. But that's, that's the main thing is that just like the, what we found is like just the straight up super cold approach is not going to work for most people anymore. And it's more about finding these areas where you already have trust.

Dan Englander [00:20:30]:
And I can get more, I can get way more into tactics, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Brandi Starr [00:20:34]:
Okay, well that actually was the direction that I was going to go because I always, you know, I like to tackle what is the problem. But then thinking about tactically, what are some of the ways that we solve this?

Dan Englander [00:20:48]:
Yeah, for sure. So I think the first one, and this might be table stakes that People are already doing, but for us in the B2B world anyway. So speaking to my experience, it's about starting with a foundation of really good data on companies on the company level. So not shorting that process and not just clicking three buttons. AI is making that easier, but it's still not there yet. And if you like, we have clients that, let's say they sell to fintech, they still have to look at that list and make sure it's actual fintech companies or else they're going to get other software companies or they're going to get banks mixed in and then the ship just goes off into this other weird direction and you get unsubscribes and stuff. So getting the foundation of data first, you know, the company level, all the people across all of those companies, and then what we like to do is segment again by, by relevant commonalities to the salesperson that's doing that outreach, right? So what most people will do is just figure out this automatic repeatable system that will last forever and work for anybody that they might hire. The issue with that is it's because you're not working with any scarcity.

Dan Englander [00:21:56]:
Everybody does that. And then all of a sudden all the outreach kind of looks the same. Even if you're using AI personalization, it's sort of like saying, hey Brandy, here's all this stuff I know about you and I'm just going to regurgitate it back at you versus saying here's something I have in common with you which is inherently scarce and is valued more for that reason. So to give examples of that, a very simple starting place is using geographies, right? And that might sound basic, it might not sound that compelling, but it can go a really long way. And also there's a lot of really creative ways to use geographies. We have clients that are going to be at a trade show in three months. We have clients that are thinking of going to a trade show in three months. We have hometown connections, we have backyard connections, we have all sorts of things.

Dan Englander [00:22:43]:
My partners in this city, even just that is a cut above what most people are doing in terms of outreach. We can get more sophisticated, go on to similar companies, we can go on to mapping connections and finding friends of friends that can like get us introduced into certain accounts. But. And then we can also just look at the, the warmer first party data we already have and then use the commonalities layered on top of that. And then that can get really interesting. So those are a few of the things we're up to.

Brandi Starr [00:23:14]:
Okay. And I love that it is all rooted in data and I know sometimes we can over talk about data and data usage, but I feel like what you have articulated is a really practical and easy way to look at that. We talk a lot about hyper targeted segmentation and it really does get to those levels of like not just who you know, could we target, who could we target, where the main contact is in my city or you know, those sorts of things I do think is a great way to, you know, go after, go after things. Now the question that comes up all the time, and this is a buzzword that has been banished at least three or four times here on the couch, but how do we make that scale? Because that is always like you've talked about it being systematic and repeatable, etc, how do we get to that point? Especially because, you know, not all salespeople are created equal. Some are going to be better at, you know, finding those commonalities than others. If we've got, you know, a solid size sales team, how do we scale this?

Dan Englander [00:24:27]:
It's a really good question. I think it's, I think things are evolving. I think that the way that we think about scale isn't going to be, you know, how it was before again because like if we just go for infinite scale from the beginning, then we're just going to end up sending messages to look like everybody else's, right? And saying, and the issue with that is it's kind of like saying, hey, unless you're bet ready to buy right now, you have permission to ignore me or tell me to go away versus what we're looking to do is de risk the conversation through the commonality offer this third path. So to answer your question, I think the way it scales is through constraints and through process, right? So you're like here you hopefully make this more tangible. Like if you have a new salesperson, they might have a menu of options to draw from for how they customize their own campaigns and then they can modularly. Modularly, is that a word? Build them based on those things, right? So instead of having infinite scale, you might have a pocket of five hundred or a thousand prospects in the Denver area that are going to be really likely to talk to you. And then you're thinking of like 10 other versions of that same commonality and then doing that over and over again. So the bad news is it's always going to take some human thought like this idea of just the machine doing everything that's going to decrease in value as AI gets bigger Counterintuitively, like that's actually going to be less interesting because it's going to blend in with everything else.

Dan Englander [00:26:00]:
So that's the bad news. The good news is once you have the, the system or these systems and this way of thinking about it, it becomes easier to come up with these ways in. And it doesn't take that much time once you have the, the structure built for it, if that makes sense.

Brandi Starr [00:26:18]:
No, it does. And that is super, super helpful. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things that I love that you fact, the fact that you touched on the fact that humans still have to be involved, at least for the time being. And that is one thing that sometimes people hear the word scale and they equate scale with automate. And those are not necessarily. I mean, in some cases automation plays a role, but that's not always the case. And so having that process around, how do we, you know, find multiple similar commonalities that we can then, you know, tackle in these personalized ways is a great way to scale this very, you know, human centric effort.

Dan Englander [00:27:03]:
Yeah. And, and the other thing that I think is going to become a much more important skill as AI becomes bigger is like having marketers and salespeople that can do a really good cost benefit analysis on automation. Right. And figuring out like, not just where can I add it. It's kind of like if you were a cook and you're like, I'm just going to add more salt to everything all the time, constantly. It's like everything's gonna, it's gonna taste horrible. Versus figuring out like this part of the process can and should be automated. It's worth the cost.

Dan Englander [00:27:35]:
Yes. People might not get the best message, but the overall upside's worth it versus like there should be less automation at this part of the funnel and those. That decision making is going to become of greater value as AI gets bigger. Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:27:51]:
Awesome. Well, talking about our challenges is just the first step. And nothing changes if nothing changes. And so in traditional therapy, the therapist gives the client some homework, but here at Revenue Rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. So what is your one thing? If someone is listening and they're like, oh, I gotta make a change, where do they start? What's your one thing? Your one action item?

Dan Englander [00:28:17]:
Yeah, who. Answering the who questions first is my one action item. It's. And this is, you know, we talked a lot about tactics and about what we do and the data and all this stuff. It's all Very intriguing. It all is inspiring because you can go move fast and turn knobs and do things, but then the person turning the knobs doesn't want to turn the knobs or they get busy or a million other things happen and it falls apart. So I think it's really getting back to the stuff that's timeless, which is like who's doing what, are they trained, are they motivated and all that. All that classic stuff that we didn't cover too much but I think is more important.

Dan Englander [00:28:54]:
Yep.

Brandi Starr [00:28:55]:
Okay. Well, no, that, that's a good one. Is to reflect on the who is doing what. Well, I love that and I have enjoyed our discussion, but that's our time for today. But before we go, tell our audience how can they stay connected with you and definitely give us the shameless plug for sales schema.

Dan Englander [00:29:20]:
Yeah, for sure. So the main thing we're looking to help people do is we work very closely with agencies and B2B services, service companies to help them ramp up to getting high value meetings consistently every week using tasteful targeted outreach. So that's, that's our main value prop. We do a lot of training and implementation. If you want to talk to us@salesschema.com if you're not ready for that, we have a video training. It runs about an hour. It covers examples of commonalities, copy examples. It covers the right team structure for this, the why behind it.

Dan Englander [00:29:53]:
It's definitely geared towards complex consultative services. That's probably where the most value is to be had. If you want to get access to that, we'll make a custom link to salesschema.com revenurehab is the best place.

Brandi Starr [00:30:05]:
Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to both of those links. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, check the show notes and you will be able to connect with Dan and salesschema. Well, Dan, thanks again for joining me here on the couch.

Dan Englander [00:30:23]:
Brandy, thank you so much. This is fun.

Brandi Starr [00:30:25]:
Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining me. I hope you have enjoyed my discussion with Dan. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time, bye. Bye.