[02:48] So, for the folks in my audience who don’t know who you are or what you do, let’s start with that. 

• For sure. I’m Dan Englander, and I’m CEO and founder of a company called Sales Schema. Basically, we are a fractional new business team for agencies and marketing service companies, and as well as other B2B service companies, which is a fancy way of saying that we go out to the market. 

We do a lot of very personalized targeted outreach to help our clients keep the pipeline full regardless of however busy, or not busy they are. We have a forthcoming software/data product coming out as well. 

[03:20] Okay, cool. For context for regular listeners of the show, you’ll know that in Flowster, we have this thing called the Outbound Marketing Playbook. That’s the deeply detailed set of instructions on how you could do this, but not everybody wants to do it themselves. Sometimes, people would rather pay to have their car washed versus wash the car themselves. 

It seems as though Dan is one of those folks that you could quote-unquote, “pay to wash the car.” I’m not trying to say that prospecting is equivalent to a carwash, but it’s easy to understand. Let’s start with an example of success.

• Totally. For us — just to kind of like frame that out a little bit — I think most of our clients are selling services that are well understood. The differentiation is more experience, like during or after the process, as opposed to what you might be doing with Flowster or software products that are new, and shiny, and interesting. I think the biggest challenge, like the scarce commodity in that market, is trust. 

It’s the idea that with a service business, “Okay, we know what you do. It’s more like, “Can I trust you?” Our experience has been that the best way to do that has been through tribes — through basically the idea of knowing similar people, having similar experience, being able to speak the same language. The way that we do that is what we call relationship sales at scale, and it’s not anything that new. It’s usually what our clients have kind of done to build their organizations over the course of years, sometimes by working their Rolodexes, or following up with friends of friends, or people you might have met at a trade show. 

The difference is the scale. For example, to answer your question about success, we have a brand new, interesting client of ours — they’re based in Chicago. They go after hard to reach verticals like higher education, health care, governments, some others like that. Most of their business is from referrals which is tough because it’s unreliable and so on. It’s not a system, and there are things you can do to get referrals. 

But we basically said, “It was okay. You’ve got a good network, you know a lot of people, you’ve worked in these few industries for a long period of time.” People kind of understand what you do. It’s not like we can just throw case studies at CMO or whoever, and say, “Talk to us,” because they’re going to say, “Oh, interesting. When I need an agency, I’ll reach out to you.” 

What we’re able to do is, through a lot of our data practices, where we said, “Okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to build a list of your total addressable universe.” It’s an account-based process. It’s a list of several thousand companies for a given campaign. 

[5:54] I think we have some questions that… Because I want the audience to understand how as well. So how do you do that first step? 

• For that, that account-based step — so kind of coming up with that account-based list. It involves some back and forth. Usually, we’re sourcing the data in different ways. I’m not trying to be coy — but we don’t have one way for any one situation. We’re just drawing from a lot of different wells. We might have a giant list of thousands of accounts that fit certain industry parameters.

From there, in where the collaboration comes in is we’re typically asking for our clients to approve that list because the thing that — I think this is bigger, even if people never work with us — I think this is a good point is that the level of market intelligence that it takes to find a good fit for your organization is higher than you might think it is, right. Sometimes, it’s easy. Some of our clients, we can work with any consumer brand that’s big enough, and that’s fine — we just run with that. But we have a lot of clients that are like, “Well, it needs to be a certain size, need to have certain parameters. They need to sell to certain people that have certain characteristics. 

That’s where it’s really worth the eating of vegetables — the time that it takes our clients to go through the company and say, “Yes, if we get a call with this company, this is going to be well worth my time.” I don’t know if that answers your question. But we’re coming up with this list — we’re refining it. Then, all the outreach is essentially designed to get our clients in meetings with those accounts. 

I’m not saying account-based is the best way or the only way. But for most of our clients that are selling complex services to mid to large companies. I’d say it’s where we’re heading most of the time — maybe 70–80% of the time, and that’s a good way to think about it for lots of people. 

[07:34] Okay, so for the purposes of our discussion — let’s assume that we use Flowster as the guinea pig — let’s assume we wanted to go after a new market of property management companies, just pick one randomly. We want to pitch property management companies that have at least 30 employees, and they’re commercial property managers. 

So I come to you and I’m like, “I’d like to get some traction in that market.” Walk me through the process of how you would help us to achieve success in that regard. 

• It’s a good question. I’m not saying exactly what we do — but we’re, one, jumping-off place you might have is you might say, “Okay, Trent. First, we’re going to come up with this total list of accounts. 

You don’t have to painstakingly go through each one, but we need to figure out that each one of these is going to be worth going after. So we had this account-based foundation. There, we might say, “Okay, Trent…” Well, we ask the CEO, “How much of a base do you have in property management? Do you know people already? Have you gotten to the property management trade shows?” 

[8:35] What’s… We got one. Then, we realized they were such a good fit for our software. So we, now, want to go deeper into that market.

• Okay, cool. What we might do is we say, “Okay, Trent. Export a list of your LinkedIn contacts. Let us know everyone that you would feel comfortable asking for an intro from — somebody that at least knows you loosely, and that it’s not somebody you have a conflict with or something.

Let’s say you approve 200 out of your thousands of contacts, right? Then, what we’re able to do is say, “Okay, we’re going to find everyone that those people know in those accounts that we’ve approved in a certain handful of titles that are worth speaking with.”

[09:20] When you say “no”, I would assume that’s like, “I have a connection on LinkedIn.” Like, how else would you know if they know them?

• Exactly. LinkedIn is just kind of a source material, but then you’re approving those names. It’s not like we’re going to just spam everybody where you approve everyone you feel comfortable reaching out to, so. From there, once we have A, that account list, and B, that list of pre-approved connections that you have, then what we’re able to do is say, “Okay, we’re going to find everyone that is in that first-degree network that you know, that has a connection into that specific pre-approved account. 

There’s a couple variations on how we would do this. But channel-wise, it’s very simple. It’s a simple email that usually says something to the effect of, “Hey, Bob. We haven’t connected in a while. Working on some new initiatives here at the company. Can we find some time to connect?” Our clients get on those calls — and this is a little more time than if it’s the direct approach. 

We also do plenty of direct approaches that I can talk about. But we often start here because our clients get on these calls. Meanwhile, they’ve got a spreadsheet that says, “My friend, Bob, has these one to three specific connections in these accounts.” They get on the call to catch up.  You do your thing. You’re hopefully useful to them too. Then, you say, “By the way, I saw you know this person, this person and this other person. First off, do you know those people?” 

Then, usually one out of three, at least, they’ll say “yes”. “Would you feel comfortable making an intro?” Then, our better clients are the ones that are following up getting that intro. What’s cool about this is — could you do this yourself? Yes. You’re a special case because you actually think in terms of systems and do this all day. Not the best example. But I think that our clients could do this themselves, but the problem is it would be very tedious. 

The hard thing is getting this data, getting in the right place of the Venn diagram with the people you want to reach with the connections you have. Essentially, what would have been years of networking happen over the course of a few weeks or a few months — and basically being able to get these referrals at scale. So, that’s one of our favorite tactics. That’s something we do a lot of, and that’s probably one of the things we would do to start to help you break into a new market. 

[11:33] In a nutshell, you’re going to review the people I have on LinkedIn. Bob is one of those people. Bob knows three people in the property management space. I’m going to get a call with Bob — going to catch up, “Hey, Bob. How’s life? How’re the kids?” And maybe, add some value to Bob in some way, shape, or form because I’ve got knowledge that maybe would be helpful to Bob. 

At the end of my call with Bob, I’m going to say, “Bob, I’d really love to talk to people at this, this and this company — these three companies. Do you actually know these people, and would you mind making an introduction for me? Thanks to the law of reciprocity. If I’ve already done Bob a solid on that call — I’ve given him some great advice. Maybe, I introduced him to some people or whatever. He’s going to probably say, “I don’t mind making those introductions for you.” 

• Exactly. The important thing is what you mentioned — that’s specificity. I think what we see is a lot of people will do this, and they’ll go to somebody and say, Do you know anyone in this space?” It becomes hard to do. So our whole thinking on it is, does this require work? Yes. Do you have to talk to your network? Yes. 

But it’s better than anything else you could be doing because once you get that intro, you’ve now got a vetted referral-like situation, but you’ve done it deliberately and on your own terms, and in a way that’s really focused. That’s one of our favorite things. 

[12:45] If I was doing this for accounts that were going to be worth an annual contract value of $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year, I can justify cutting all the time to do it. We’re selling something that’s worth $500 a year — not so much. That doesn’t pencil out. 

• Exactly. Then, what we find is our clients get all these calls with people. Then, there’s other opportunities that we didn’t even identify. Things happen if you can keep up the activity within reason. 

[13:11] Okay. In our pre-interview, we talked about the tennis example, and I don’t even remember what the tennis example was — but hopefully, you do.

• Well, I think I brought that up as just a case of how kind of crafty and crazy we can get with it —- one of the weirdest campaigns we did is we identified people that play tennis in college. Our client played tennis in college. We said, “What if we were to identify C-levels, and VPs in certain industries that also did?” Then, that campaign went really well because everyone getting that message is thinking, “Wow, this person actually researched me, wrote me a custom message.” And it’s just going to be a lot more likely to reply. 

To kind of get more academic or cerebral with it, I think one of my favorite copywriting books is Breakthrough Advertising. You know that one? Eugene Schwartz? He writes a lot about the stages of market sophistication. You have something that’s new, you have an unaware stage —  like Ford producing a car and so on. We all end up in stage five — which is the most sceptical, and which is where I’d find… Maybe not what you’re doing, maybe not software products as much. Some, it depends. 

But again, service businesses like agencies, like a lot of our clients. At that point, the scarce commodity is no longer information; it’s trust. It’s basically, “Can I trust you to not waste my time? And if we do need the solution, can I trust that it’s going to work?” As opposed to widgets and case studies, and that kind of thing, which really don’t build trust because anybody can put a case study together. That’s kind of the thing that’s informing everything we do. 

[14:48] A lot of this… For the DIY folks who are listening who want to do it themselves, or train one of their employees to do it, how would you go about training somebody to do this on your behalf? 

• I honestly think what you’re doing with Flowster can help a lot with that. So I would say start there. There’s some great SOPs there. We talked when we’re going to have you on our show. That’s a great way to think about it is getting that fine line between personalization and scale. 

That’s kind of what you’re going for. If you go too far into personalization, you’re not going to have enough output or activity. And if you go too far to scale, you’re going to not be personalized enough, and people are going to click the spam button. That’s not going to work either. 

I think the first way to think about it — it depends on your situation. If you have a very large market size — like I have a friend that has built a marketing agency for trusted estates lawyers. He’s not going to go account-based. He can just go via less or… carpet bomb. 

You’re in the carpet bomb situation. You’re painting purely by numbers. If you’re like our clients, and you’re, let’s say, an agency for biotech firms — I just pulled that out because that’s one of our recent clients — you probably want to go account-based. That means you’re first building that account-based list. There’s lots of list of vendors. You can use LinkedIn to do that. I won’t go down that rabbit hole too much. But you can build that list. Ideally, you know where you’re going with that account-based model first. 

From there, you might pick certain networks. If you’re doing this yourself, you might not be able to get as sophisticated as we are. You might start by thinking of it in terms of things like trade shows — like was there a trade show you last attended? Well, okay, can you identify people that are exhibitors at that trade show? Can you use that as a way in, “Hey, we attended the XYZ event.” :We’re going to attend the XYZ event.” “We wanted to attend the XYZ event, but we couldn’t.” Those are all good ways in. They’re going to build a lot more trust. 

Beyond that, if you can do some kind of like targeted — finding people in your network and identifying the ones that are already in that industry, Sales Navigator makes this very easy. Then, have those calls. Then, before the call, you’re going on those people’s LinkedIn, and you’re finding like two or three contacts that are in those accounts that you want to reach. 

That all becomes stuff that’s very templatable and doable. I think that’s a much better way to approach it than purely going to carpet-bombing route and hoping that a funnel or case studies are going to save you. So that’s kind of where I go. Hopefully, that’s useful in some way. 

[17:21] How about some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making? Because there’s, I’m sure, plenty of ways to screw this up.

• That’s a great question. I think the biggest mistake overall is backloading the work too much — not really thinking about the hard question of, “Who are we selling to? And what’s our connection to them, and what’s going to direct the conversation?” And just hoping that more funnel, and more automation and tools are going to help you. I think that’s probably the biggest one. Another one is more technical, but it ties into everything else, and that’s related to deliverability in that kind of thing. 

What’s happening is the robots are getting smarter. If you send a campaign that people don’t want, you’re going to be more likely to have your domain slapped on the wrist, and kind of go into spam. Then, people are thinking, “Oh, crap. Our open rate is bad.” Really, you’re just going to spam and nobody’s seeing it at all. That’s the biggest thing. 

I liken it a little bit to SEO where I’m sure there was a time where you could just do SEO paint by numbers, and build a bunch of fake links and have it work. But now, it’s really more about putting content up that people actually want to read so you get ranked. Outreach is becoming more like that as the email inboxes get smarter. 

I think that’s the other thing, is just finding that fine line between the personalization and scale. For context, what we’re doing — like most of our clients — we’re sending about 50 to 200 contacts per day or contacting 50 to 200 people. That’s another one. Then, a lot of it is just about being able to budget, the right amount of time for this, being able to get on calls with people and optimizing the sales process which is probably a whole other conversation. 

[19:20] What are some of your favorite tools that you use to be able to get this done?

• I mean, a lot of the stuff we use is custom and proprietary, and so on and so forth. But I think that if you’re a DIY-ing this, Sales Navigator will actually get you really far. LinkedIn has some things that are messy about it. But as of now, at the time of this recording, it’s really kind of like not the only game in town. It’s the thing that we all update because I think a lot of the time, people think that, “Oh, well. This data provider must have this crazy edge,” and there are people that have an edge.

But I think at large, it’s more about not information but how you use it now. This is like the world at large. This isn’t just the sales world, it’s really about being able to use this information and make it immediately actionable. Sales Navigator is a great tool. 

In terms of email outreach, we’ve used Reply.io in the past, and I’m pretty happy with that. There’s some others that do different things, and I can’t speak to all of them. I think that once you have a positive response and/or a meeting, then that’s where you’re in more of CRM land. 

One of my favorites — and a lot of different opinions about this — but I really like Streak because it lives in the inbox. If you’re on Gmail, having everything be in one place, and then being able to do batched email is really useful, I found. But then again, it’s kind of what you can make work. I think there’s lots of arguments for different tools. 

[20:49] Have you ever used GMass? 

• Sounds familiar, and I might have a long time ago. But I can’t say for sure. 

[20:56] It’s a pretty cool tool. We’ve used it a lot. It lives in the inbox, or it lives in Chrome — it’s an extension. It allows you to send bulk emails from your Gmail account, but yet you can customize and insert fields into them and have it pull all the data from a Google sheet. So you could, for example, have a field cell where you’ve got your first sentence in a cell, for the second sentence and the third sentence. 

When you got your VAs, and they’re writing in those custom sentences on a person-by-person basis but they’re putting it into the Google Sheet, and you could have GMass send all of those emails, and it was going to pull all of that data from the sheet so each email is highly customized. Then, it allows you to use your own Gmail and gives you analytics and so forth on. 

I’m not saying it’s the be-all-end-all. I’m just saying it’s a low-cost tool that’s been effective for us in the past. 

• Cool. There’s a lot of stuff like that I think like a spreadsheet can get you really far. I think that whether you’re using GMass or different tools, the important thing is like front loading that work, and trying to get more people to just reply from the initial email as opposed to saying like, “Well, if I hit this person up, they’ll reply.” 

I think consistency does matter. But in some, follow-ups can be useful. If somebody’s not interested in the first email, the chances that they’re going to be interested in the fifth one in a short period of time are kind of unlikely. 

[22:20] I get those all the time. When I start to get the third and the fourth reminder that’s not adding any value, that’s when I start clicking spam. I’ll give you the first chance. I’m not going to put you in spam the first time because I get it — it’s business. We all need to go out and try and sell our wares. But you also need to do it in such a way that’s adding value to me so that even if I don’t buy your stuff, it wasn’t a waste of my time to have read your email. 

But when your second email says, “Hey, have you read this yet?” You’re basically saying, “Hey, is my money ready yet? Can I come pick it up?” 

• Exactly. They couldn’t agree more. Not only that, we had Robert Rose on the show — you might know. He made the point that people, decision-makers, and especially in large organizations, they don’t necessarily want to read a bunch of stuff. We’ve heard all this stuff about sales at the last leg, and people don’t have to do all this research first before they ever agree to speak. 

That’s true sometimes, but those people don’t necessarily want to have to digest a bunch of material. The barrier to getting a sales call isn’t necessarily super high. There just needs to be the right vibe and the right connection, strength of connection, in order just to have somebody say, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you.” That’s why it’s contextual. That’s why we’re big believers in outreach, assuming it’s done the right way. 

[23:41] Well, Dan, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. For people who would like to get in touch with you, what is the single easiest way for them to do that? 

• Totally. If you don’t mind, I’ll plug our recent live training which goes through a lot of this which is just salesschema.com/relationships — plural as in… 

[23:57] salesschema.com/relationships

• Correct. That’s the best way, and dan@salesschema.com is my email, and I’m always happy to connect. 

[24:06] Alright. Well, Dan, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for making time. 

• Thanks, Trent. I really appreciate it. 

[24:11] Thank you so much for listening. To get to the show notes for today’s episode, go to brightideas.co/386. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would take a moment on your favorite podcast listening app and just subscribe, rate, and review the show because when you do that, that is the best way to help new listeners discover the show. Thank you so very much. We’ll see you back in the next episode soon. Take care. Bye-bye.