Cold to Committed

by Kyle Vamvouris

  So how should Jamal summarize his performance last month? I would say Jamal is putting in the effort. In a 20 working day month, he is doing 125 activities a day. He could use some help improving his conversion rate to match up with the other reps. Doing this alone would have resulted in 8 more sets, which would have yielded 2 more SAOs and Jamal would have hit his quota of 15 SAOs. That sounds great, but the cause of his conversion being 2% lower than his peers may be tough to pinpoint. It’s possible he needs to get better at asking for the meeting, or he might have had a bad week that caused his total conversion rate to be lower than average. Jamal should absolutely try to improve his conversion, but we saw something else that might be an even bigger lever to pull.

  Jamal has a 30% set to completion rate, which simply means that the majority of the meetings he sets don’t show up. His peers have a 45% completion rate, which forces us to ask the question. Why? Jamal speaks to some of his colleagues and realizes that they are calling and sending an email to confirm their meetings. Jamal doesn’t, which must be what’s causing his show-up rate to be so much lower. What would happen if Jamal achieved the same 45% complete rate as his peers? With all other variables staying the same, Jamal would have ended the month with 19 SAOs, 4 over his quota! Couple this with that 2% increase in conversion rate and Jamal would have ended the month with 22 SAOs, 7 over his quota! Jamal’s high activity levels in conjunction with the average connect and complete rate would make him the top SDR at his company!

  I hope this illustrates how to use metrics to identify where you may need to improve. Everything we track is designed to give insight into that improvement. Also, looking at these numbers can give alternate ways to achieve your goal. For example, Jamal could have increased the number of activities he was doing daily from 125 to 140. This would have allowed him to hit his quota of 15 SAOs, but might not have been feasible because his activity levels were so much higher than the average already. This will work for you as well. Play with the numbers and decide what metric has the largest impact. If it’s realistic to improve that metric, then make that your focus—that will improve your overall results. It’s like that super famous quote that everyone knows and loves... “It’s just math.” Ok, maybe that isn’t everyone’s favorite quote.

  Organizing Your Day

  One of the most important things you can do to maximize your efficiency is to go into each day with a plan. Doing this will help you avoid letting tasks flow into parts of your day that you should be using for something else. How you organize your day is completely up to you, but you must take into account your productivity levels at specific times. Optimization is always important so your original plan might need to change, depending on the situation. Remember, be flexible.

  I’m going to walk you through how to organize your day from my own perspective. You may need to alter some of the suggestions I make to accommodate your personal prospecting needs, productive times, and industry.

  I have always been in environments that required a heavy amount of cold calling. I’m a morning person who achieves the highest levels of productivity before noon. I tend to find my creative energy slipping around 3:00pm and completely exhausted by 5:00pm or 6:00pm. However, after 6:00pm I am still able to absorb information effectively enough to retain it. My social abilities stay consistent through the day and anytime I’m awake. If you want to wake me at 2:00am and have a conversation about the probability of the earth being flat, prepare your evidence and I’ll make the coffee.

  Blocking off your day

  The most powerful advice I can give you on the topic of organizing your day is to cherish your mornings. If you are not a morning person you must do everything you can to become one. The morning is the most vital time of the day for multiple reasons. It is often when you will have the most success connecting with your prospects, since there are less distractions, and it will lead to early successes that can jumpstart your day. The morning time is your most valuable so you should use it on tasks that are a top priority.

  Typically most cold calls you make will be during the morning because for most people it’s when the connect rate is highest. If you have access to that information, I recommend you take a look and see what times during the day you have the highest call to connect rate. This is how you will want to block off your day. For example if you find that connect rates are the highest from 7:00am to 11:00am and 1:00pm to 3:00pm, then you will want to make sure that the only thing you do during those times is make cold calls. This is how your time blocks will start to look.

  As you can see, this is six hours of cold calling scheduled. This might be too many hours of cold calling, or too few. Go back to the section of this chapter about metrics and use that to estimate how many calls a day you need to make. You will be sending emails and LinkedIn messages as well, but focus on calls for this exercise. Once you have that number, look and see how many calls an hour you would have to make if you dedicated only the hours with the highest call to connect to do your calling. If you came across a number that is possible, then you’re in good shape! If you came across a number that would be impossible to make per hour, then you’ll need to call during some of the less effective hours to make up the difference.

  Cold calling is a high priority task, which is why we started with it. You’re most likely not to be calling all day and there should be some free hours. So, what should be your next highest task priority? For most, this will be sending emails. This is less of a priority because emails can be written at any time and scheduled to send in the future. So, unless you need to send an important email ASAP, you can write all your emails at once and then schedule them to send at the time you feel would be the most effective. I suggest writing emails at the end of the day and scheduling them to go out the following morning. Of course, to see if this is right for you, use the data you have available to determine the times with the highest email open rates.

  We have plenty of time in the afternoon to write emails if we follow our schedule above. Let’s block off some time.

  An hour and a half should be enough time to send emails if we are following the 3x3 research method we covered in a previous chapter. You may need to adjust this if your prospecting efforts require more emailing.

  You may be wondering how to handle the situation when you’re on the phone with a prospect and they ask you to send them an email. For the most part, you will want to send this prospect an email at the end of the day, but use good judgment. If you feel that sending the email sooner would benefit you, use your flex time. What is flex time you ask? Flex time is scheduled time where you allow yourself to choose what tasks you work on. Choose an hour that has a low call to connect rate. In our example we choose 11:00am to 12:00pm. This is great for sending out mid-day emails, LinkedIn messages, confirmation calls, or follow-up calls. Think of this as productive free time, like an adult version of recess in elementary school.

  If you’re responsible for hunting for new accounts and contacts, you will need to schedule that time as well. This is the lowest priority item so save it for the very end of your day, and that, in our example, is from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm. By having this task saved for the end of the day, you won’t sacrifice any productivity and you’ll still be able to build your pipeline and stay organized.

  Let’s take a look at what our day looks like now.

  Beautiful, isn’t it? What’s that, LUNCH?! There are calls to make people, so we don’t have time for lunch! Alright, the truth is...I love lunch and you should too. It’s a pretty high priority task for me, so block off 30 minutes to an hour for it, 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm in our example will work well. You should also take a break or two throughout the day, just to keep your head clear and recharge a bit. I will use 3:00 because that’s when I tend to feel the most sluggish. The last thing you may have noticed with our schedule is that it’s an 11 hour day. This isn’t possible for a lot of people, either because of company policy or burnout. Always take care of you
r well-being, but I do encourage you to work as hard as you can while in the SDR position. You are building the foundation of your career and that requires a lot of drive and grit. Don’t be afraid to push your limits.

  Handling Distractions

  Distractions are everywhere, whether it’s your colleagues walking around the office, to a bird flying by, or, into the window. Everything and everyone will try and keep you from getting your work done. If you work with a bunch of people who are just as focused and motivated as you, then you’re in good shape. The truth is, you will probably end up working with someone who lacks motivation or worse, someone who has such natural ability that they can hit quota and spend half their time walking around the office talking about their favorite waffle house. There are only so many hours in the day and you will need them all. Being in control of your environment will be very important to your success, so make it a priority.

  One of the best ways to keep distractions away from you is by making sure that everyone on your team is either following your same schedule or knows your schedule, so they won’t bother you. For those who don’t follow your schedule, make a sign that you can put up when you’re focused. This is a great way to deter visitors, and your coworkers will understand, because, as much as they want to chat with you, they want you to succeed more.

  There is one distraction that comes up from time to time that will not only kill your productivity, it will kill your drive.

  Negativity

  If there is someone in the office who is very negative, it is important to keep your distance. There is something in sales that I call “The Virus.” The Virus is a person who is so negative about the job that they infect others with their own beliefs. The problem is that most negativity is intertwined with truth, so it is easy to get “infected” and let it hinder your productivity. I have a firm rule when it comes to negativity, I don’t get involved. I don’t care how true it seems, I have no interest in complaining about things out of my control. This does not mean to keep your constructive feedback to yourself—quite the contrary. Focus on solutions—that’s the constructive piece. If you don’t have any solutions, then ignore the negativity and go back to focusing on what you can control. If you don’t, the negativity will consume you.

  Priority Notetaking

  The most important time to avoid distractions is when you’re on the phone with a decision maker. This is the most important part of your day and you need to be laser focused. Something that will help you on the call is taking notes. The challenge most SDRs have is, other than the basic qualifications, they don’t know what to write down. The reason why this is tough is because we are listening so hard in order to hear the prospect talk about their need for a solution, that we sometimes forget all the little things they say that could have led us there.

  Listen Carefully!

  Listen to your call recordings and you will hear On Call Alarms that you didn’t hear when the call was happening. To help avoid missing opportunities to book a meeting, I developed a note-taking system that helps keep track of what the prospect says and prioritizes what to talk about next. I call this method Priority Notetaking.

  Priority notetaking is a method of notetaking where the goal is to prioritize what to talk about next while keeping your mind open to take in new information. Often times while an SDR is on a call with a decision maker, they will get excited about something they heard that they feel is the path that will lead to a booked meeting. What can happen is that the SDR may miss other important pieces of information, because their brain is so focused on the first thing. The problem occurs when the prospect says something that’s more powerful than the first thing the SDR heard. This can lead to a missed opportunity.

  PRIORITY Notetaking Steps

  The first step of this process is to write down what the prospect says that you believe is important and could guide the conversation in a direction of a booked meeting. Once you have that written down circle it with your pen and don’t stop circling. Let your hand continue to circle those words or phrases while you free your mind to pay attention to what else the prospect is saying. When the prospect says something else that you find important to write down, go ahead and write it down. Once you have written that word or phrase, make a decision about which one you feel is a better direction for you to take the call. Start circling that one, keep circling and free your mind again. Keep doing this until the prospect is done speaking and when you take a look at your notes, what to do will become obvious.

  Take the call in the direction of the word or phrase with the most circles around it. This is a very simple concept that, in practice, does an incredible job freeing your mind from the pressure of trying to remember what to say next. Allowing you to listen better without sacrificing your ability to keep track of what you feel the best direction to take the call is.

  Log everything

  Sales operation analysts everywhere are rejoicing because this section is in the book. Salespeople are notorious for not logging calls accurately…or at all. There are many reasons why this is the case:

  the rep is really busy and forgot

  they think it’s a waste of time

  Regardless of the reason, there is no excuse for not logging your calls. Having a record of each of your calls, even the unsuccessful ones, gives you insight on how to approach your accounts. To be clear, not developing the habit of logging everything will impact your success. With that said, I do understand that it can take some time to do this.

  I want to share a way to shorten the notes you write. First, let’s look at a common example of a note.

  Note: I spoke with the director of customer success, Lisa, and she said that they have had trouble getting their customer support team to complete tickets. There’s a lot of missing information. She seemed interested in our solution, but is too busy to look at it now. She asked that I send an email and follow up next month.

  The good thing about this note is that it tells us what happened. The not so good thing is that it uses more words than necessary—59 words to be exact. Becoming more efficient with note taking will save you time writing and reading. It’s not an insignificant amount of time either—roughly, 8 hours a month if you are making 80 calls a day.

  If we can cut that in half than you just bought yourself a half a day in extra time each month. That half a day could be the difference between hitting your quota or missing it by one.

  Remember…it’s a numbers game.

  Let’s take a look of the same note done in a more efficient way.

  Note: DM, Lisa - Challenge getting CS team to complete tickets, tickets missing info - seemed interested - requested email and callback next month.

  This note says the exact same thing in 20 words and that’s 66% less time spent typing. Notice that one way we accomplish this is by using some abbreviations. We are taking advantage of common abbreviations for “decision maker” and customer success. I want to make a point to mention that we are not creating our own language. You do not need to abbreviate everything, but take advantage of what you can abbreviate. Here’s a few abbreviations that you can take advantage of.

  VM: Left a voicemail

  LM: Left a message with a gatekeeper

  NA: No answer/no message left

  GK: Spoke with a gatekeeper

  DM: Spoke with the decision maker (should include follow-up notes about the content of the call)

  NDM: Spoke with someone who isn’t the decision maker (should include notes as well)

  Following Up

  As you build and manage your pipeline you will find yourself making more and more follow-up calls. This is great! It means that you are doing a great job building interest. Not everyone will be willing to schedule a meeting on the first call, even if they are interested in your solution. People have priorities and just because they were blessed by your cold call doesn’t mean they will drop everything. T
hese follow-up calls will be the key to your success month after month, as long as you keep your activity up and your pipeline full. In this section we are going to cover the difference between warm and cold follow-ups, when to follow up, and what your messaging should be.

  Warm vs. cold follow up

  As I write this, I have the space heater running in my office. You see, I like my office the way I like my prospects—warm and toasty! However, follow ups are not all created equal. How you approach each depends greatly on your previous conversations.

  So, what is the main difference between a warm and a cold prospect?

  Interest

  The more interested the prospect, the warmer the follow-up. Take a look at the definition of each, specifically as it relates to the account.

  Warm follow up accounts:You spoke with the decision maker or stakeholder who expressed a problem that your product or service solves and demonstrated interest.

  Cold follow up accounts:You spoke with a decision maker or stakeholder who expressed a problem that your product or service solves and demonstrated a lack of interest.