Tech-Powered Sales by Justin Michael and Tony Hughes

PART I SALESBORG THEORY

• The sales rep of the future will be as technical as they are strategic. [They will be] as much a trusted advisor as a quant analyzing data.

CHAPTER ONE From Human to Superhuman

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CHAPTER TWO What’s Your Technology Quotient

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CHAPTER THREE The Rise of the Machines

• Sellers morph into sales engineers designing messaging and programming those sequences, refining based on the analytics, and helping to architect the software road map. They operate like an analyst or data scientist, even product manager. The meta-skill of future salespeople? Maybe you guessed it? Messaging and coding!
• Check out Otherside.ai, compose.ai, copy.ai
• If you want to land in the primary tab, there are three aspects of email deliverability you need to pay attention to:
  • Technical setup (e.g., custom tracking domain, SPF, DKIM)
  • The way you send emails
  • Warming up your email domain

PART II SALESBORG ACTION

CHAPTER FOUR Your Value Narrative

• We best earn the right to engage by having relevance and a worthwhile point of view.
• The most advanced framework hasn’t been written yet. It will use some sort of machine learning (ML) model that will take data sources (job posts, search intent data, press releases, social media posts, and more) and provide a ranked list of the top accounts that should be prioritized for contact.

CHAPTER FIVE Target for Relevance

• Trigger events are essential within our outreach narrative because they warm up the conversation with context
• In business-to-business sales, the most powerful trigger event is a decisionmaker role change because executives hired into new roles are expected to drive improvement.
• Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey from ClozeLoop always say that tailoring the message, in a way that addresses the pain that typically exists for a certain persona, provides all of the personalization most prospectors need to find success.
• For sellers who have large market segments with a seemingly endless stream of prospects, individual personalization is not necessary to get someone’s attention.
• There are only four reasons to buy software and most other things in the world of business-to-business sales: make money, save money, reduce risk, or maintain compliance.
• Run a report in your CRM of all the opportunities closed lost over the past year. Find the stakeholders again on LinkedIn, pull their direct emails out of your preferred sales intelligence tool, and design a custom email sequence for win-back.

CHAPTER SIX Design, Test, Refine

• Avoid inane personalization… it must be relevant!
• We’ve found that by switching the subject lines every forty-eight hours and keeping the body copy hyper-short, we were less likely to be shunted to a spam folder, opted-out, or deleted.
• The average cold email response rate is 1 percent. he average success rate for a cold call is 1.48 percent.
• Visuals need to be used on email two or three at the earliest, because you first must ensure that you get through the spam filter
• We recommend using video from Vidyard, Loom, and BombBomb, building out explainer GIFs, screen grabbing diagrams, and inserting things like a Venn. A powerful video is a live recording of you navigating their website on the screen with your talking head in the bottom corner pointing out flaws or opportunities! Give them the point of view of a customer navigating their site and how it could be improved in ways that make them money.
• If you have to look at them in LinkedIn as part of your process for sending an email, send them an InMail or maybe a connection request. You’re there anyway so hit them up. If they look back at you in LinkedIn, treat it as a trigger event and call them.
• Emails should never contain HTML

CHAPTER SEVEN Automating Everything

• Anything less than perfect validated data costs you more in labor writing an email or making dials than it will to human-validate.

CHAPTER EIGHT Working Your Systems

• treat the view of your profile like a trigger event.
• There is actually a bizarre strength to having lots of weak ties that overlap you into myriad other social networks.
• here is our greatest tactical secret for referrals… prove you were referred. Screenshot the message inside LinkedIn and send it inline in the email.
• The future of B2B is paid micro communities within platforms such as Slack, Patreon, or Discord where membership criteria controls the quality of the vendors placed in front of the CXO.
• Many SDRs and companies get lost in the trap of focusing on only decisionmakers when the reality of the consensus sale means that anywhere from five to ten or more are realistic targets to start conversations with.

CHAPTER NINE Powering Up

• Frequency of outreach should also be tempered based on the seniority of the role being contacted.
• Call everyone at the same time and gain traction with multiple executives before someone seeks to block you. It’s a good thing if they ask each other about your messages and emails… someone needs to get back to you.
• No matter which way you go — top-down, bottom-up, middle-out — take the findings and feedback up to the leadership.
• Never seek to outsource a mess… you’ll just have a more expensive catastrophe.
• If content is bizarre, it will get read… just don’t damage your brand!
• Imagine a new bold era where the machine, almost like Siri meets Google Duplex Assistant, picks the target accounts, parses the relevant case studies, writes the personalized emails per persona, and then generates the back-and-forth to close the meeting.
• The more valuable the prospect and the more senior the buyer, the more important personalization and brevity is for breaking through.
• If you see any outreach achieve more than three or four views (with pixel tracking), then triple them — call, email, vmail in less than ninety seconds.
• If a prospect has expressed interest, feel free to move things forward with a text.
• It’s a giant mistake to “manage by results” instead of managing the activities.

CHAPTER TEN Driving Sales Success

• Look at account level, not person level, metrics and response rate per account per campaign.
• Smart SDRs will stick around a bit longer in that role to learn the ins and outs of the entire sales cycle.
• Real sales professionals act as their own SDRs. They time-block and allocate prime time for executing outbound activity daily.
• Make sure you have lighting behind your screen / camera instead of behind your head.
• Consider platforms such as Ultimate.ai that automates up to 80 percent of customer support interactions to free account managers to focus on high-value activities.

PART III THE FUTURE OF SELLING

CHAPTER ELEVEN A Day in the Life of Tomorrow

• Computers that watch and listen through a camera are already better than people at detecting and understanding human emotion,
• Field sales resources are shifting to inside roles with lower-cost people powered by ever-evolving tech stacks.
• Today’s SDR or full-cycle AE are bogged down in nearly limitless research and list-building.
• [AI sales-bots will] synthesize every possible data source on the internet, prioritize it all, and act on it with the relevant message, at the relevant time, with the optimal prospect in your ICP within a nanosecond, weaponizing relevant insight — and then only bother involving you when the potential buyer is ready, much deeper down the funnel?
• Peter Schwartz: “I’d be more worried about being replaced by another salesperson who is empowered by intelligence than by a machine [alone]. ”
• The meta-skills that save humans in a sales career are empathy, insight, and storytelling — they are how you create emotional connection to transfer belief and build trust.