Tito Bohrt - From cold call to closed | Accelerate 2021

Accelerate 2021 was a 2-day virtual summit that featured 12 sales leaders and coaches, hailing from the hottest B2B companies. An event that brought together the top minds in sales whom everyone loves.

This is a blog series where we cover the speaker's speeches from Accelerate. Today, we’ll run through Tito Bohrt, CEO, AltiSales' talk on ‘From cold call to closed - Strategies, tactics, and metrics to master the outbound sales funnel.’

Transcript

David Youngblood

We did it. We're back. Hey, everyone, welcome back. Hopefully, you had a good break. Join us in the booth, ask some great questions, and met some great people. You should also use that time to network professionally with everybody else here, right, other folks with similar interests, following and talking and seeing similar things. So do absolutely leverage just on your professional network myself to hit me up on LinkedIn. Happy to have a chat. But next. We are very, very excited to announce our next speaker who's promised us a very interactive and exciting session. The man, the myth, the legend, Tito Bohrt, who is as many of you know, the CEO at AltiSales, a company focused on building outbound SDR teams, right. So, he spent the last 10 years building over 50 sales teams from scratch, right? So, he's hired and trained, over 100 individual sales reps and top performers. He's, he's a blogger, a professional blogger, right or semiprofessional blogger, however you want to portray that at sales hacker and on LinkedIn. He's also a mentor at the alchemist accelerator in San Francisco, a public speaker for sales events such as outreaches unleash, and an angel investor in b2b SaaS startups, also, most recently, a celebrity guest speaker here at Accelerate sponsored by Outplay here in 2021. So, with no further ado, we'll bring him on stage. The one the only Tito Bohrt.

Tito Bohrt

Awesome. Hello, everybody seems like my camera went off for a second there. But I'm excited to be here. And we are going to make this session fun interactive, we're going to be covering as much ground as we can. So, I'm going to go a little bit fast on should be a little fun, David.

David Youngblood

Awesome. Well, the stage is yours.

Tito Bohrt

Awesome. So, as you know from the top of the conversation today, we're going to talk from a cold call to a closed one. I'm going to talk about strategies, tactics, and metrics to master the outbound sales funnel, I'm going to help you guys understand where the world is going when it comes to outbound. And for that, I'm going to be sharing all sorts of tidbits of information. I'm going to start probably with a quick PowerPoint. But then we can dive into like life dashboards, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and how to work in different areas. What I really want from this session is I want people to chime in, I want people to participate. I want people to ask questions, and leave comments. Regardless of if it's the Q&A or the chat, do me a favor and participate. So, the first thing I want to talk about is that I think sales is broken. Like too many companies are doing this wrong. Too many companies are hiring SDRs right out of college with zero experience, or they're putting them in a role where they're asking them to do too many things that are unfamiliar with, like, I am seeing my younger brother's friends graduate college, and what are they used to on a daily basis. They never pick up the phone, they don't even call their friends, their mom, or their girlfriends. When they write anything, it's a five-page essay, they're always trying to figure out how do I make it longer? How do I increase the font from 12 to 12.2? So, the professor doesn't realize that I'm trying to increase my wording. And how do I like, you know, add as much fluff as possible.

And then we hire those same people. And we put them in a role where we're like, not only you're going to be making cold calls and sending emails, but the cold calls, you may have to be short and to the point and so do the emails. And by the way, you need to learn, Outplay and Lusha and Lead IQ and Zoominfo and Vidyard on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and by the way, research all your data, copy, paste a bunch of stuff, put it in a place and split your time in a beautiful way where everybody is, where you are being hyper-productive. So, I'm gonna share screens to highlight what we are expecting. Let's see screen sharing. There we go. This is what we're expecting from our SDRs. Right, a million tasks.

Here's your pie chart, of how you split your time during the day, please go do good work on what happens, that doesn't happen. This happens. These sorts of emails that we all get, especially if you're an executive, you're getting these emails, many times. Hopefully, they're not as horrible as this is, but there's no spacing between paragraphs, two bullet points are too far indented. There's bolding for no reason there's a vertical line of the subject line two dots on a question like that makes no sense. No image in the signature, no logo, no phase, nothing. What the hell like this makes no sense to me. So, what I want to run you guys through is what is future self-development? How are we going to succeed? And here's what that will look like. Step number one, you're going to get a phone call. You look at your phone, you're like who the hell is calling me from Florida. You're probably not going to pick up. So, what happens a few days later or a few hours later. Here's what happens a few hours later, if you're running a world-class SDR team, come on screen share again, you're scrolling through LinkedIn, you're going through your day. And suddenly as a prospect, you see an ad. And the ad is personalized to your company. So, if you were working for IBM, you would be seeing this ad from AltiSales, it says IBM is gonna be a world-class SDR team. And by the way, the top part is also personalized. It says there are hundreds of companies out there that need solutions from IBM, but they aren't coming to your website. Even the bottom it says IBM's revenue machine is about to take off, personalize, personalized Ad, okay, cool, good loads of companies not doing that. But what do you think is gonna happen? Nobody's gonna pay attention. They're not going to click a lot. Why? Because they never do. So, what's gonna happen, you're gonna call them again, we're gonna see again, your number from Florida a few days later, they're gonna be like, I'm not gonna pick up so a few days later again, or a few hours later, you're gonna perhaps send him an email, it's or the email we're gonna send them an email, the email is gonna be personalized. I'm here what I'm bringing is different templates from different examples, just so you guys understand that this is in particular to AltiSales. But it should look something like this right? Happy Thursday brand. They called you this number congrats on your new class. This is to a University College Board says you admit X number applicants blah, blah, blah blah, like, what I've done here is I've color-coded this template. So, you'll understand certain parts of this template are exactly what I called a template, and certain parts are variable. If you're using a good sales engagement tool, the sales engagement tool allows you to put nice variables in there. That's what you should be doing. The real question, though, is okay, how am I going to find these variables? How am I gonna get the right information? All you really got to do is be diligent with your process. I said too many SDRs are being tasked with too many things. So, this is a good client experience. This is what I want to receive as a client. But how do I execute as an SDR? Well, let's make it even more complex. Imagine that this email also gets ignored. Okay, you call them again, finally, they pick up they say hello, this is Brent. I'll say, Brent. This is Tito. I'm calling from XYZ company, do you have two minutes. He's like, no, no, dude, I can't. I'm super busy. You can go send him a connect request on LinkedIn and tried to connect. You're starting to see the interplay. What if they don't?

What if they don't pick up the phone? Well, you don't want to let them know you call so maybe you send another email or another you send a LinkedIn request or a LinkedIn message with a message like this right? Hey, I sent you an email I almost called you blah blah the subject line of the email was x by the way, love your experience this previous company yours have a recommendation for this person, blah, blah, blah. I see you speak German Grusse. What I'm trying to take you guys through is what the future looks like for sales development. Sales development is not let’s grab a template and blast the hell out of it unless grab, connect and sell or Orem or cold call the hell out everybody. The future of sales development is as a prospect, feeling excited about people reaching out to me and that looking very, very professional. So, calls, emails, LinkedIn ads, I guess what if you were running ads, you can even text your clients, if you text them, text them from your cell phone, not from a platform. Why? Because you want, I message to work. You're going to continue to improve and evolve the way that you're doing things. So, there's a really good example Hey, a few people in your team clicked on the ad that we're displaying it says Domino's Pizza, right? Domino's. Let's talk about API security, blah, blah, blah, I'm from this company. And then some people might respond. So, I'm going to take a quick break there. Um, to bring David back on the screen. And, you know, what are you thinking about this approach? You know, do we have any questions from the audience so far?

David Youngblood

Hello, yeah, back. Make sure you do your sound-check. Good. Yeah. That is the takeaway that I got from it, right, and a word in me pointing this out in chat is evolving, it's time to evolve. It's time to change and level up the game, right? A new way to go about it. Because what's old is not working. It's broken. It's outdated, antiquated, and not effective, ultimately. In a nutshell.

Correct. I agree. Now, the most common question I get here David is okay, Tito, I get it. We can have all but everybody saying that but it's so much work, dude. Like I'm an SDR I'm finding my leads. I'm doing my stuff like I don't have time. You're telling me I gotta make 50 to $100 a day you want me to send 50 to 100 emails you want me to research, you want me to personalize you want me to text you want me to? So, like how am I gonna ever do that?

David Youngblood

Yeah, absolutely. And then like the not just what you need to do, but how you're gonna go about it. Right? Is it we get the why, but the how you're gonna go about it's definitely a challenge for a lot of folks to have to answer? We do have a question if you're ready for one as well.

Tito Bohrt

Yes, sure.

David Youngblood

So, this one's kind of a this or that approach, right? So, I message versus platform messaging. What's your take?

Tito Bohrt

I prefer i-messaging because it feels more human, rather than the platform messaging, which usually whenever you're messaging from a platform, it will show up as a text message, not like an iMessage. So not everybody has an iPhone. But if you're reaching out to, you know, VP, Director, C level executives, those executives usually have money and usually buy expensive phones doesn't mean that everybody's gonna buy an iPhone, but the iPhone tends to have some correlation with wealth. Like, the people with a lot of money have iPhones. So, when you start i-messaging, they will see you, and you'll stand out from the crowd. That's the only thing I'll say,

David Youngblood

Okay. Gotcha way to differentiate yourself, in addition to the right message, in addition to your other approaches, but differentiation can be as much as the device you're using. Right?

Tito Bohrt

Correct. Okay, so I want to go back to tell people how we're going to operationalize this to excellence. It's telling me I can't present while questions are being shown.

David Youngblood

Yep, here you go. I just stopped doing that part. And back to you.

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Tito Bohrt

So, here's what I want to tell people. Before split the SDR or the AE role into several roles. Back in the day, if you were a seller in the 70s, you would do your own prospecting, you do your own closing. And you're also doing your account, your own account management, you would own that account and you would serve as that account. There were no account managers, there was no customer success. There's no onboarding manager. Nowadays, we've split the AE to customer success, I always put the AE to the SDR side, I think the SDR side needs to be split into further steps. And here's what I'm looking at. Here's where we're executing today. And I think the world has to catch up or you're dead. We're gonna do is gonna hire a junior SDR. All they do is data research. So, I'm telling you, you're good to go personalized to how much funding they raise, how many employees they're hiring, how much growth they have on LinkedIn, the ads that they're displaying on Instagram, depending on where you're selling. There are different points that you can personalize. And there are certain things that you can search for in every company, and you'll find them. So why don't companies just hire a junior SDR that all they do is data and research data validation? And they go the tools like ZoomInfo, Lucia lead IQ, blah, blah, blah, and they gather all those email variables and phone numbers and so on and so forth. That should be one role. Your second role is going to be your senior SDR. All they do is make those dials. They work on email responses. Heck, you can even have the junior SDR be sending the emails right the emails are prewritten by your VP of sales development. All the variables are being queued up by the junior saleswoman, another email just needs to trigger the same thing on LinkedIn. I don't need to have the SDR, but I have a call it in the US making $50 An hour whatever it is, right $100,000 A year if they're hitting quota on, they're amazing. Um, you can have somebody else assist with a messaging, you can have a couple of like call an intern like employees helping you out, or the other day you still need SDR management and SDR operations. What I want to dive into first is how we operationalize the junior SDR roles I'm going to get out of here and into LinkedIn. Right, if your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and I'm looking for personas, you should know that you can come and customize certain things, right? So, you should learn Boolean searches. So, this is an example of calling it one of the clients we're trying to sell to the US and Canada.

So, we're looking for people there, director level plus events are certain titles, demand generation, or demand gen, or marketing or account-based or ABM, blah, blah, I'm going to get a list of leads. These leads should be taken by one employee, I'm being put on a big sheet. And you can see that I've purposely kind of obfuscated some of the email and phone numbers, but you can grab this data and copy-paste it and know what company they work for, what are their names, what are their titles, blah, blah, blah, and even get their LinkedIn profiles. With all this data. Now I can upload it into my sales engagement platform, upload into my CRM and then pass it to my sales engagement platform. So, the idea of having a data researcher what this is going to do for this junior SDR is going to free up the time for your senior SDR to actually do the work that requires a lot of communication. One guy is in charge of data. One guy is in charge of communication. I'll take a quick break there before I start diving into the metrics that I really, really want to see from this cohort of people working together as you saw in the slides, David, as I bring you back on stage, there's SDR managers, SDR operations, VP of sales development. Is, is this like, out-of-the-box thinking for you? Or how many companies? Are you seeing this?

David Youngblood

Yeah, a great point and a great question. In fact, I've just been on a panel recently, and at another event at a trade show. Back in October, we were talking about this as well, kind of the future indoor what a healthy indoor quote-unquote, proper sales organization, specifically business development organization would look like, right? So even internally here at outplay, we've, we've evolved and changed and changed our approach. And we have a role now that we're excited about and it's proven very effective, we refer to it as an MRA, or market research executive, right? So, the function is to support the SDRs and provide validating data, lead list, helping and supplementing workflow, automation, etc. So very much aligned with actually what you outlined there, which was, which was reassuring to me.

Tito Bohrt

Cool, awesome, then we need to measure the success of each rep, right? So, on the data research side, you can do cool things like, okay, like, how many leads are you bringing? What's our bounce rate per rep? And like, who's researching what you can measure the role really easily? One of the things that I'm surprised by is how SDRs are not measuring their effectiveness, as well as they should, like, people are managing either on meetings completed or meeting set, or activity is like, how many calls have you made? Okay, how many meetings do you get? One, okay, like, that's good or bad. I like those as far as they go. So, what I want to show you next is some of the metrics because these are the strategies, and tactics I mentioned, I told you the strategy, the strategy is to go out and make the prospects feel warm and fuzzy. And like you really like them. The tactic is to start using a multi-channel approach to start splitting your team into a strategic bundle of people that work together. Now let's talk a little bit about the metrics. Let me go back to screen sharing. I'm gonna run people through what I'm seeing here. And as you can see, I've blurred out the left, because I have some proprietary naming conventions here that I'm not going to share with you guys today.

But if you're looking at it, you can see this data very purposefully, I grabbed a dashboard from 2019. Because I don't, I don't care anymore. But here's what you're looking at on the table over here you're looking at a number of dials, number of connections. And then we have some benchmarks for a number of conversations, deep conversations, or whatever you want to call it. And then meeting set, we have some benchmarks to hit. On the other side, we have the timeline moving in this case, very strangely from right to left. This is because we're using Google Sheets and we want the data to come directly via API to load on the top left corner. You don't want to be doing this manually. So, a bit of a pain. So, API is for us. Here's what we're looking at. This is July 1, 2019. The senior SDR made $111 a day, three days in a row for $333. This is the Fourth of July. In a short week, 19 people pick up the phone, and say, hello, this is John. This is David. What do we say? I say, David, this is Tito Bohrt, I am with AltiSales, do you have two minutes? Six people told me to go to hell. Or said Tito, I'm in a meeting or I can't take the call right now. Or I thought you were someone else. That's fine. So, if people hung up on me 13 People said, Oh, uh, yeah. What is this about? Okay, cool. So, we can continue, I got a conversion rate of 68.42%. I would say, hey, David, I'm calling from AltiSales. We are a company dedicated to building sales development teams. That takes your in-house SDR team to the next level. With metrics, tactics, and strategies, we can elevate and evolve your team to get twice as many meetings per day. I was wondering or twice as many meetings per month, I was wondering how are you currently managing your SDRs processes? Have you built call-calling funnels, email sentiment metrics, and some of those advanced tactics? Right, cool.

When I asked that question, nine people said to go to hell, we're all set. I don't want to outsource, four people said, oh, yeah, dude. Um, you know what, we are only using basic metrics. Cool. I have a commiseration of 30%, out of those four, I got two to take a meeting two told me to screw you even though they weren't using something else. Now, what's happening here? How are you measuring this data? Well, today we're looking at with these arrows, I'm pointing you to the problem. The problem is that we lost too many people here. I'm not going to be the script. It can be the pitch. It can be how the rep is saying certain things, the objection handling, we're not prepared. We don't understand the position. It could be a million different things. Cool. So, what are we going to do the manager's action item here was to calm down and change the top of the script to do XYZ 123? They're trying to increase engagement. And then this was changed on seven nine. I'm going to test for three weeks. Oh, that's three weeks we tested that, as you can see went from 30%. Even this week was changed on seven nine, which was a Tuesday this is anchored, I think, two, Mondays. So, this even got a little bit better. And then better, better, better, right? Like, it's not going to be linear, like, we're not going to get always a little bit better. There are good weeks, there are bad weeks, if you're lucky, you get on luck. But on average, these three weeks you got 18 plus 28, that is 38. 49 out of 49 you got 22, 29, 29 out of 49. Call it 30 out of 50. That's almost 60%. I got I got results. I got much better than I was before. I'll take that. I love it. Right. So that's one of the metrics. Um, the other thing that I look at metrics is email. And when we look at email, there are ways that you can measure sentiment according to the sales engagement tool you're using and whatever else. Or you can even use a rudimentary pen and paper-like it doesn't really matter. I used to do this on pen and paper. Now I have some APIs coming here. But here's what I want you to think about. This is a step of the sequence. Step two, steps 5,6, 7. And you can see that there are multiple templates per step. So, what are we looking at? I can see how many of those were delivered.

How many were open, replied, and how many of those replies were positive, neutral, or negative? What does this inform another 1690 emails? Right? I got nine positive replies. So, nine people either took a meeting or gave me a referral. 21 People gave me some objection, pushback, and timeline or whatever else. And three people were really annoyed by my outreach. But now if I divide 1690 by nine, if anybody's good at math, you'll get 187.8. That means that if I send another 187 emails with this template, I'm going to get a meeting. Let me say this template, your templates in your emails, or templates, what the hell are you doing? Yes, sir. These are templates and the templates look amazing. They look amazing because they got variables. And the variables are amazing because I get the data research team that is willing and able, to research that data and bring it back to me. So, when I go back to these metrics here on here, these are templates. Now, what do I need to do, I need a very smart guy who knows how to write awesome emails but not only write awesome emails, one-off, writes awesome email templates, and understands the variables. And then I can A, B, C, D, E, F test this email, and you can see that we've tried to beat it we've been unable to do so every 187 emails I send, I get a meeting, how many emails I sent today, about 100. Okay, so if I send only this, but I get in a meeting every two days, I mean, every two days is about 10 meetings a month, just sending a template. Now, the problem with just sending this template is that I'm gonna burn through my market really quickly. So, it's a sequence. Step number 2, 3, 4, or five, you get the idea, man, I know the people attending today aren't newbies to the sales development world. So, bringing you back here, David, I assume now the audience is going crazy because I just went really deep. Ah, what questions are we getting from you or the rest of the viewers?

David Youngblood

Yeah, just crazy and perplexed with questions. Really peppered throughout everything you presented as far as there's one actually, that's a pretty good one, in my opinion, I think more than one person wants to know the answer to but how do you train the data researcher? Right? What's your approach internally, to empower enable, and groom them for that role and position?

Tito Bohrt

Yes, um, you got to read a book by Tim Ferriss called The Four-Hour Workweek, because he will teach you how to train people with very low skill levels into doing things that you need them to do. The methodology I follow is to delegate, automate, I don't automate anything, I haven't delegated. And I don't delegate anything I haven't done. I haven't done it, I don't delegate. Right. This is when you are the leader of your department. Obviously, I'm gonna delegate HR to somebody else, because I'm not an HR leader. I'm a sales development leader. But within my world of sales development, nothing is delegated unless it was done by a leader, and nothing is automated unless it was delegated before. So how do I train the data research? I figured that the data research for a month I mean, I hired an intern, and I was like, dude, sitting next to me six hours a day and watch what I'm doing the same thing. And then they watched it. They did. And then because I'm using Google Sheets, when we're working remote, I can log into their sheet they can I can see what they're doing. And if I see him screwing it up, I'm like, Oh, boo, yo. That is how you do it.

David Youngblood

Courses correct. Yeah.

Tito Bohrt

That's it. You train the data researcher the same way you train any employee in any role and the same way you train your dog to do tricks. You tell them what to do when they do it. You give them a reward, you pay him a salary, that's what you do.

David Youngblood

Yeah, that's how it should work. Right. It's kind of a no-brainer. Good deal. Well, I've got another question here from Brian Badillo. If the company won't invest or can't justify, you know, this many people right to create such a robust sale or gristly already that you've outlined here. How do you study? If we wanted to start or get started in your model, so is there a virtual solution to start down that path?

Tito Bohrt

So, it's a good question. It's a hard question. Because if you're like, hey, Tito, my company doesn't want to invest in anything. They just hired me as the SDR, like, I'm the only SDR at this company. And I don't even have Outplay or any other sales engagement tool. And I don't even have any other data research tool, like how do I do my job? I say, Dude, you don't do your job, you go to your boss to say, this company is not good. I'm out of here. See, I'm gonna go work out in sales, and then you apply to work with us. And you send me a LinkedIn message, right? There when you get to do because you can do your job without tools. It's like you asking me, you know, oh, like, I want to be a good tennis player. I don't have a racket, how would I start my job? Like, you're really, you can't be a good tennis player with a rocket. You need a rocket, you need the tools, you need the processes. Now if you're telling me Okay, Tito, here's what I have. I have my sales engagement tool. I have my, my, my my, you know, data tools. I just don't have the data researcher. Yes, you need a virtual assistant. And when I was an account executive, before I start out in sales, I hired a virtual assistant for $4 an hour. Back in the day, right now, you might need to pay eight or 10 or whatever, seven. But I hired somebody in the Philippines or in India, and I would literally, I would work my nine to five, doing my own work other than 5 PM to 11 PM. I was preparing the work for the data researcher and then meeting with them, coaching them on it, and inspecting the work. I would do my meetings with the Philippines when it was, I don't know, like 8 PM or 7 PM. Pacific. And it was like 10 AM in the morning for them. And we would meet and chat, blah, blah, and give them a task and get back to work. I wake up the next morning all my leads were ready. Hell yes.

David Youngblood

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a life hack. I love it.

Tito Bohrt

It's a life hack. So, Tim Ferriss taught me how to communicate with those people and how to train them through his book, The Four-Hour Workweek, which is highly recommended.

David Youngblood

Awesome. Another one. This one's actually kind of a common theme. And I feel like we kind of addressed the some with the messaging but, you know, again, on the notion of using those personalized messaging services, right, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Does it feel too invasive? And if I recall correctly, you're saying it doesn't depend on how you package it, right?

Tito Bohrt

Yes, my opinion is that the world is evolving, right? Like Dwyane this, what's I feel too invasive? It depends a little bit on the country and the culture, right? Like in the US, I feel that WhatsApp is not very much used, because so many people have iMessage, you look at the evolution of telecommunications around the world, the US was one of the first countries to roll out unlimited free text messaging. Right. I grew up in Bolivia, I remember paying the equivalent of like, three US dollar cents per text message. Like you're sending 50 It's fucking it's so expensive. Like, you're crazy. I'm not gonna pay $15 per text for text messaging, or whatever it is $1.50 to like, text message my friend today like no way. So, WhatsApp became very popular. So, if you're reaching out to Latin America or Southeast Asia, places like that, I think WhatsApp is fine. It's maybe even better than the iMessage. If you're in the US, maybe it's different. But I'd say test it tests your personas test does the people as it might also depend a little bit on like, some people might not even have WhatsApp, right. But if you look at their profile, they speak three languages and they've traveled a lot, WhatsApp is probably a really good idea. Like I've lived in five countries I've traveled. If I show you my notifications like There you go, there's a WhatsApp done. So, like if you WhatsApp me, I'll see it. Now. If you WhatsApp me with a terrible messaging, I'm gonna be really pissed if you're like Tito, I want to show you my platform, I will be like screw you, but if you were like, like, Tito, trying on WhatsApp as I know, you're overwhelmed with people reaching out and every other platform, would love to chat with you about API security for blah blah blah. Ah worth it. Or should I piss off? No, right? Okay, fair, like bold attempt, you know, like, you gotta get the lingo right within with the channel. I can't say the same thing via LinkedIn that I said via email. I can't say on message like I said on phone. Video is different from voice messages, and that is different from WhatsApp. You got to understand how invasive you are being? Are you apologetic? Are you know, you do the opposite? Like, you're gonna test a little bit. So, I won't give you all the secrets today. But yeah, I think, fine.

David Youngblood

Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you ready for another one? Or do you want to jump back somewhere?

Tito Bohrt

We can do we know a couple more questions. I know we only have 10 minutes and I'm showing a lot. The next thing I want to talk about is account executives. Like you're getting the right meetings with the right people. Okay, now what? Like I've seen horrible things there. But I'll take one more question before it before we dive into that.

David Youngblood

Yeah. So, if I get one to choose from the available ones, I'm going to go actually with our sheets, which is a statement followed by a question which is on the SDR of my company, I have my tools ZoomInfo list and everything else. I'm thinking to start with account-based sales as normal outbound isn't working currently. What roadmap should I follow?

Tito Bohrt

Um, I don't know if you telling me that it's not working? What should I do? Because I would need to inspect it. I would need to charge you $2,500 an hour for me to be a consultant and go inspect that or I can drive it to one of my managers They only charge 1,200 Maybe that's better. Probably you can't afford it. I don't if your company can afford it. Oh, that was a really hard question. I get asked all the time what the three keys to SDR success and I say three keys. Are you joking? 157 keys to SDR success, right. And you don't need to get all of them perfect. If you got, you know, all of them good. You're a genius. Right? And it's like any sport like think about American football or like soccer. We have an international audience a soccer Okay, Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best players, or Messi, whoever you like I don't care. What are the three things they do that make them successful? Three things are you joking about? Christiano Ronaldo sprints point one mile faster than the competition, he jumps half an inch taller, he kicks, you know, three miles per hour faster. He puts his body in the right position, like better hit his arm is 14% stronger. Like it's all about? Like, what are the three things? What do I do? If it's not working? Dude, there are a million things to troubleshoot. And that's why you need good managers without good managers you're dead. So sorry, I can't help you today. But I'd rather be honest, I'm trying to give you some canned BS answer that any other person will write on LinkedIn be like, oh, it's of course because you need x. Like you need my tool that.

David Youngblood

There's no one answer to it. Absolutely. And to your point, it all depends. There are lots of variables. So, anybody or she to give you an answer to that off the cuff, it's probably doing a disservice to Tito's point. Furthermore, you're welcome to join one of our booths and one of our sessions and pose that question or questions around it to our team. We're happy to help your brainstorming kind of like at least to get you pointed in the right direction on some answers as well, for what it's worth. So, another question, I want to jump back into your content.

Tito Bohrt

I will jump back to content because I want to talk to people quickly about this. Yeah, the goal, there are three buckets of leads people getting the wrong people talking inbound, outbound. Inbound, outbound is BS, there are three buckets, what are the three buckets one is fast response inbound is what I call it. And that includes demo requests, contact us forms and chat, the characteristic of that type of lead is that the lead is expecting a response quickly from you. If it's chat, it better be less than a minute or less than five minutes. If it's a demo request or contacts us forms, it better be less than an hour, right? And what you need there is SDRs are like paying attention to it on a 30-minute basis. You don't want to have the same STR doing that as the guy who's doing the complete opposite job, which is cold outbound, cold outbound is what the question was saying is, hey, I'm an SDR I have a list of ABM target accounts. I'm finding that persona, so I want to go after them. Right, and then your third bucket is MQLs. With MQLs, you're gonna have a really tough conversation with marketing. Because marketing wants to label as many leads as possible as MQLs. And you as an SDR you don't want that.

Because what do I rather do if my biggest client is Verizon, let rather place a call to the VP at AT&T where I know he has a problem that I can solve even though he's not recognizing the problem at the moment. Although I rather call the data analyst lead that came from south Florida pancakes because he attended a webinar. Come on dude, don't call the South Florida pancakes guy for a webinar, call outbound call to AT&T and Verizon, like those are your clients. Right? So, there are a lot of things to dissect there. But the one area I want to focus on is what we do when we do cold outbound on the role of the SDR is only one which is let me give you the right person or the right account. I'm the right person I consider to be somebody above the power line or with influence on decision making, which should be a director-level plus other company. Right? And the second thing is getting the right company like don't call south Florida pancakes. Call the good company. Once you get the meeting that means -  Should we send it to the account executive? And the one thing that companies fail on is I've seen directors of sales development or even as an outsourcing company. leads come to me and they're like Tito, we need some outsourcing help. And I'm like, Yeah, tell me more. They're like yeah, so This year we produced 1000 leads, and we closed. We closed 10 deals. So next year instead of closing 10 deals want to close 150 deals, so I need 15,000 meetings. No, dude, you don't need 15, 000 meetings, you need to close a higher percentage of the meetings that you're actually having. So, what I'm gonna show you guys is a little dashboard. And if you don't have this dashboard for your AE team, as SDRs, you are dead, because the only thing that they will say is that meetings are low quality, we need better meetings, we need better meetings and better meetings, and doesn't matter how good of a meeting you get, the only thing they want is they want prospects that are ready to buy and outbound prospects are never ready to buy, they're ready to buy when the leads are an inbound request because everybody has a project, they're not ready to buy when there's an outbound need. So, when you're selling the problem, rather than the solution, here are some dashboards that I recommend people build on, they got to be very conscious about how they do. This is the bottom of the funnel. So, this top dashboard just takes one by one is measuring our conversion rate or the number of meetings in April, that had a survey completed after every meeting is taken, I asked the account executives to take a survey, it's a two-question survey. What are the outcomes of the meeting, and which is a picklist, and then give me more context, what else can you tell me about it? And here's what ends up happening. Like out of these meetings, three meetings were taken, they said the three meetings were qualified. So, it was the right person, the right account, two meetings were engaged, which means that two meetings were open-minded about scheduling a second follow-up conversation. And then one meeting was what we call Mark A, Mark A means AE is very confident this is entering the pipeline.

Tito Bohrt

Out of those same three meetings, we looked at CRM, and we correlated it to the survey. And we said that one meeting on this an old screenshot from June, as you can see, but that one meeting enter the discovery stage, what I'm going to be able to see in this dashboard is how many of those means enter discovery ended up moving to scoping, tech evaluation, business valuation, legal procurement, and close one. Obviously, my sales cycle because I'm an enterprise takes six to 12 months, I'm middle of June, taking the screenshot of my April data, I don't expect anything else other than something having joined the discovery stage. But the beautiful part about building this dashboard is I can see how my conversions continue to evolve. So, my number of qualified accounts is averaging 94%, which is really good. The number of qualified counselors engaged has continued to get better, that's good. The engagement being A is not good.

And then moving to the pipeline is okayish. If you're smart, you're going to start splitting this data by persona or by sales rep. So here are four or five different sales reps, we see how many meetings have they taken out of those meetings? How many have they moved to pipeline, and out of that pipeline, how far have those meetings gone? If you start looking at your data in the smart way, where you're correlating the success of different months, different people, or even different personas, how's cloud security moving into the pipeline compared to non-cloud security compared to operations versus DevOps, compared to a generalist, if I can understand how many of those are moving? That gives me a lot of insight into what I need to do. So, when my AE says the meeting is crap, I said, what was wrong with it? Was it this the seniority? Was there that persona? Was it the account? How can I help you better? And then let me go to something if this is the AE, that's telling me that the meetings are bad, and he's moved zero to the pipeline. And, as an SDR I support five AES and this other AES moving 30% of the meanings of the pipeline. I look to the VP, and I say, hey, dude, I don't know if you noticed this, but like, the guy who's complaining has moved zero to pipeline, the guy who is now complaining has moved 30% of pipeline. Is it me or is it then? I don't know. I don't know. But if you don't have the data, you can't go up to your CRO and say, here's how you got to do it. So, I know we're running out of time. David, what else? Do we have? Time for anything else? Any other?

David Youngblood

Yes, so much like before with the others. For those still with us? Here? We will, what we'll do is we're going to answer one to two more questions. And then we'll do our transition with a poll and wrap things up here. But uh, so one or two more questions. Let's see. Okay, your take as Tito for, is video prospecting a fad or a bubble?

Tito Bohrt

Is video prospecting a fad or bubble? Um, I will reiterate what I said before I'm going to be congruent with my answer. You can do video prospecting very well if you know how to do it. And different SDRs have different skills we do we use video a lot. We don't. I think that video is a slow mode of communication. Just like I was saying to David earlier today like I don't go to a lot of conferences in person unless I really want to ask questions. What I do is I watch them later. 3x speed, you sent me video unless I can watch it at three speeds. I don't want to watch it. It's too long. Like, if I tell you what are you gonna tell me in the text? I prefer that or tell me over the phone, just speak to me and have a conversation. Video is a one-way speech. So, if you're good at video, you can do good things with video. But I don't think video is for everybody. And I don't think the video should be like everybody trying right now I think it's a little bit of a bubble. So many people have tried a video that when I send a video, people just don't even click on it.

David Youngblood

It's not a differentiator anymore. It's kind of what you're saying. And don't do it if you suck at it. Paraphrasing. Got it. Another question from Navin, how do you develop consideration on a cold call? You know, make them consider listening to you? How do you do that?

Tito Bohrt

Have them listen to you, there's gonna be a lot of things here that influence a lot of it has to do with your tone of voice and your accent. I am from Bolivia.

10 years ago, when I was trying to make making cold calls, I was getting shut down so bad because I had an accent. So, if your native language is not the language that you're calling you're on theirs is you're gonna have a problem. So, if you are from Japan, or from Bolivia, or from India, or from Russia, and you're calling the US and they're like, hello, you're like, hello, this is Tito Bohrt from Russia, like your dead dude, I am sorry. It's not your fault. They just perceive that to be low quality, and therefore you're getting killed. Now, assume that you got that right. You got to learn how to have an executive conversation. So, a good opening is understanding what the psychological journey is. So, when I get a phone call, right? I look at my phone and think who the hell is calling me. So, the first thing you got to tell me on the phone is your name. If I don't recognize your name, then the next thing I think is what the hell are you calling me about? Why me? So, the way I open a call is if I'm calling David. David will be like, hello. Right? You won't people don't pick up the phone today with like, hello, my name is David Youngblood. How can I help you like that does not happen? It's like, hey, right. So, I'd say Hey, David, this is Tito Bohrt, I am the CEO here at AltiSales. I was just hoping to speak with you briefly. Do you have two minutes for me? Because what do I want? I want to in create curiosity. There was gonna be like, okay, Tito Bohrt, AltiSales. I've never heard of you. I don't know your name; you have two minutes. Maybe I'll say yes. Maybe I'll say what the hell's this about? Either way, they're saying yes. What the hell is this about? That's exactly what I was about to tell you. So, like, I don't need to change anything. I will tell you. Hey, David, I'm calling you because I saw you guys are hosting accelerate. And I'm a really good speaker, bro. People love my content; you should have me in. But before that, I wanted to ask you, what are the three topics of content that you wish you had on that conference that you haven't yet put content together? Or whatever? Like, yeah, coming up on the spot with a script, right? But they wouldn't be like, Oh, Tito. Ah, that's a good question. Dude. Um, you know what, we really want somebody to talk about the evolution of SDR strategies. I mean, like, okay, cool. What is number two? Right? And now he's engaged because I'm talking to him about something that he cares about. And your customers, for everybody who's doing cold calls, your customers don't care about your product whatsoever? 0%.

David Youngblood

They care about themselves.

Tito Bohrt

They care about their problems. So, when you call, don't talk about solutions. You talk about problems. So hey, prospects, how are you making sure that your SDRs are maximizing the engagement of their prospects when they're doing all my dials and blah, blah, blah? How are you making sure that you're not paying excessive amounts of money for platforms like SalesLoft? How are your blah, blah, blah, just how are you blown by solving this problem? And that's how you get them curious by asking for two minutes. Get them intrigued by asking about the problem.

David Youngblood

So, with that, we will be wrapping up we went a little bit over apologies, everyone. That's my fault. I'm getting yelled at and slack again. It's my favorite thing to do. But uh, Tito, yeah, you are amazing. Thank you so much, for the plethora of information. Definitely looking forward to following up and connecting and sharing some more conversations via LinkedIn as well as maybe doing something next year together. So, we'll see what that.

Tito Bohrt

I will be on LinkedIn. Yeah, if you're a high-performing SDR and you feel like you need better management, better tools, better mindset. We are hiring like crazy here at AltiSales, so ping me there. And if you ever need just feedback, advice ideas, don't write me like seven paragraphs expecting me to inspect all your work but if you have something very concrete in short, message me on LinkedIn I'm here to help thanks for hosting me David has been a pleasure thanks everybody

David Youngblood

Absolutely, thanks, Tito.

Tito Bohrt

So, here's what I want to tell people. Before split the SDR or the AE role into several roles. Back in the day, if you were a seller in the 70s, you would do your own prospecting, you do your own closing. And you're also doing your account, your own account management, you would own that account and you would serve as that account. There were no account managers, there was no customer success. There's no onboarding manager. Nowadays, we've split the AE to customer success, I always put the AE to the SDR side, I think the SDR side needs to be split into further steps. And here's what I'm looking at. Here's where we're executing today. And I think the world has to catch up or you're dead. We're gonna do is gonna hire a junior SDR. All they do is data research. So, I'm telling you, you're good to go personalized to how much funding they raise, how many employees they're hiring, how much growth they have on LinkedIn, the ads that they're displaying on Instagram, depending on where you're selling. There are different points that you can personalize. And there are certain things that you can search for in every company, and you'll find them. So why don't companies just hire a junior SDR that all they do is data and research data validation? And they go the tools like ZoomInfo, Lucia lead IQ, blah, blah, blah, and they gather all those email variables and phone numbers and so on and so forth. That should be one role. Your second role is going to be your senior SDR. All they do is make those dials. They work on email responses. Heck, you can even have the junior SDR be sending the emails right the emails are prewritten by your VP of sales development. All the variables are being queued up by the junior saleswoman, another email just needs to trigger the same thing on LinkedIn. I don't need to have the SDR, but I have a call it in the US making $50 An hour whatever it is, right $100,000 A year if they're hitting quota on, they're amazing. Um, you can have somebody else assist with a messaging, you can have a couple of like call an intern like employees helping you out, or the other day you still need SDR management and SDR operations. What I want to dive into first is how we operationalize the junior SDR roles I'm going to get out of here and into LinkedIn. Right, if your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and I'm looking for personas, you should know that you can come and customize certain things, right? So, you should learn Boolean searches. So, this is an example of calling it one of the clients we're trying to sell to the US and Canada.

So, we're looking for people there, director level plus events are certain titles, demand generation, or demand gen, or marketing or account-based or ABM, blah, blah, I'm going to get a list of leads. These leads should be taken by one employee, I'm being put on a big sheet. And you can see that I've purposely kind of obfuscated some of the email and phone numbers, but you can grab this data and copy-paste it and know what company they work for, what are their names, what are their titles, blah, blah, blah, and even get their LinkedIn profiles. With all this data. Now I can upload it into my sales engagement platform, upload into my CRM and then pass it to my sales engagement platform. So, the idea of having a data researcher what this is going to do for this junior SDR is going to free up the time for your senior SDR to actually do the work that requires a lot of communication. One guy is in charge of data. One guy is in charge of communication. I'll take a quick break there before I start diving into the metrics that I really, really want to see from this cohort of people working together as you saw in the slides, David, as I bring you back on stage, there's SDR managers, SDR operations, VP of sales development. Is, is this like, out-of-the-box thinking for you? Or how many companies? Are you seeing this?

David Youngblood

Yeah, a great point and a great question. In fact, I've just been on a panel recently, and at another event at a trade show. Back in October, we were talking about this as well, kind of the future indoor what a healthy indoor quote-unquote, proper sales organization, specifically business development organization would look like, right? So even internally here at outplay, we've, we've evolved and changed and changed our approach. And we have a role now that we're excited about and it's proven very effective, we refer to it as an MRA, or market research executive, right? So, the function is to support the SDRs and provide validating data, lead list, helping and supplementing workflow, automation, etc. So very much aligned with actually what you outlined there, which was, which was reassuring to me.

Tito Bohrt

Cool, awesome, then we need to measure the success of each rep, right? So, on the data research side, you can do cool things like, okay, like, how many leads are you bringing? What's our bounce rate per rep? And like, who's researching what you can measure the role really easily? One of the things that I'm surprised by is how SDRs are not measuring their effectiveness, as well as they should, like, people are managing either on meetings completed or meeting set, or activity is like, how many calls have you made? Okay, how many meetings do you get? One, okay, like, that's good or bad. I like those as far as they go. So, what I want to show you next is some of the metrics because these are the strategies, and tactics I mentioned, I told you the strategy, the strategy is to go out and make the prospects feel warm and fuzzy. And like you really like them. The tactic is to start using a multi-channel approach to start splitting your team into a strategic bundle of people that work together. Now let's talk a little bit about the metrics. Let me go back to screen sharing. I'm gonna run people through what I'm seeing here. And as you can see, I've blurred out the left, because I have some proprietary naming conventions here that I'm not going to share with you guys today.

But if you're looking at it, you can see this data very purposefully, I grabbed a dashboard from 2019. Because I don't, I don't care anymore. But here's what you're looking at on the table over here you're looking at a number of dials, number of connections. And then we have some benchmarks for a number of conversations, deep conversations, or whatever you want to call it. And then meeting set, we have some benchmarks to hit. On the other side, we have the timeline moving in this case, very strangely from right to left. This is because we're using Google Sheets and we want the data to come directly via API to load on the top left corner. You don't want to be doing this manually. So, a bit of a pain. So, API is for us. Here's what we're looking at. This is July 1, 2019. The senior SDR made $111 a day, three days in a row for $333. This is the Fourth of July. In a short week, 19 people pick up the phone, and say, hello, this is John. This is David. What do we say? I say, David, this is Tito Bohrt, I am with AltiSales, do you have two minutes? Six people told me to go to hell. Or said Tito, I'm in a meeting or I can't take the call right now. Or I thought you were someone else. That's fine. So, if people hung up on me 13 People said, Oh, uh, yeah. What is this about? Okay, cool. So, we can continue, I got a conversion rate of 68.42%. I would say, hey, David, I'm calling from AltiSales. We are a company dedicated to building sales development teams. That takes your in-house SDR team to the next level. With metrics, tactics, and strategies, we can elevate and evolve your team to get twice as many meetings per day. I was wondering or twice as many meetings per month, I was wondering how are you currently managing your SDRs processes? Have you built call-calling funnels, email sentiment metrics, and some of those advanced tactics? Right, cool.

When I asked that question, nine people said to go to hell, we're all set. I don't want to outsource, four people said, oh, yeah, dude. Um, you know what, we are only using basic metrics. Cool. I have a commiseration of 30%, out of those four, I got two to take a meeting two told me to screw you even though they weren't using something else. Now, what's happening here? How are you measuring this data? Well, today we're looking at with these arrows, I'm pointing you to the problem. The problem is that we lost too many people here. I'm not going to be the script. It can be the pitch. It can be how the rep is saying certain things, the objection handling, we're not prepared. We don't understand the position. It could be a million different things. Cool. So, what are we going to do the manager's action item here was to calm down and change the top of the script to do XYZ 123? They're trying to increase engagement. And then this was changed on seven nine. I'm going to test for three weeks. Oh, that's three weeks we tested that, as you can see went from 30%. Even this week was changed on seven nine, which was a Tuesday this is anchored, I think, two, Mondays. So, this even got a little bit better. And then better, better, better, right? Like, it's not going to be linear, like, we're not going to get always a little bit better. There are good weeks, there are bad weeks, if you're lucky, you get on luck. But on average, these three weeks you got 18 plus 28, that is 38. 49 out of 49 you got 22, 29, 29 out of 49. Call it 30 out of 50. That's almost 60%. I got I got results. I got much better than I was before. I'll take that. I love it. Right. So that's one of the metrics. Um, the other thing that I look at metrics is email. And when we look at email, there are ways that you can measure sentiment according to the sales engagement tool you're using and whatever else. Or you can even use a rudimentary pen and paper-like it doesn't really matter. I used to do this on pen and paper. Now I have some APIs coming here. But here's what I want you to think about. This is a step of the sequence. Step two, steps 5,6, 7. And you can see that there are multiple templates per step. So, what are we looking at? I can see how many of those were delivered.

How many were open, replied, and how many of those replies were positive, neutral, or negative? What does this inform another 1690 emails? Right? I got nine positive replies. So, nine people either took a meeting or gave me a referral. 21 People gave me some objection, pushback, and timeline or whatever else. And three people were really annoyed by my outreach. But now if I divide 1690 by nine, if anybody's good at math, you'll get 187.8. That means that if I send another 187 emails with this template, I'm going to get a meeting. Let me say this template, your templates in your emails, or templates, what the hell are you doing? Yes, sir. These are templates and the templates look amazing. They look amazing because they got variables. And the variables are amazing because I get the data research team that is willing and able, to research that data and bring it back to me. So, when I go back to these metrics here on here, these are templates. Now, what do I need to do, I need a very smart guy who knows how to write awesome emails but not only write awesome emails, one-off, writes awesome email templates, and understands the variables. And then I can A, B, C, D, E, F test this email, and you can see that we've tried to beat it we've been unable to do so every 187 emails I send, I get a meeting, how many emails I sent today, about 100. Okay, so if I send only this, but I get in a meeting every two days, I mean, every two days is about 10 meetings a month, just sending a template. Now, the problem with just sending this template is that I'm gonna burn through my market really quickly. So, it's a sequence. Step number 2, 3, 4, or five, you get the idea, man, I know the people attending today aren't newbies to the sales development world. So, bringing you back here, David, I assume now the audience is going crazy because I just went really deep. Ah, what questions are we getting from you or the rest of the viewers?

David Youngblood

Yeah, just crazy and perplexed with questions. Really peppered throughout everything you presented as far as there's one actually, that's a pretty good one, in my opinion, I think more than one person wants to know the answer to but how do you train the data researcher? Right? What's your approach internally, to empower enable, and groom them for that role and position?

Tito Bohrt

Yes, um, you got to read a book by Tim Ferriss called The Four-Hour Workweek, because he will teach you how to train people with very low skill levels into doing things that you need them to do. The methodology I follow is to delegate, automate, I don't automate anything, I haven't delegated. And I don't delegate anything I haven't done. I haven't done it, I don't delegate. Right. This is when you are the leader of your department. Obviously, I'm gonna delegate HR to somebody else, because I'm not an HR leader. I'm a sales development leader. But within my world of sales development, nothing is delegated unless it was done by a leader, and nothing is automated unless it was delegated before. So how do I train the data research? I figured that the data research for a month I mean, I hired an intern, and I was like, dude, sitting next to me six hours a day and watch what I'm doing the same thing. And then they watched it. They did. And then because I'm using Google Sheets, when we're working remote, I can log into their sheet they can I can see what they're doing. And if I see him screwing it up, I'm like, Oh, boo, yo. That is how you do it.

David Youngblood

Courses correct. Yeah.

Tito Bohrt

That's it. You train the data researcher the same way you train any employee in any role and the same way you train your dog to do tricks. You tell them what to do when they do it. You give them a reward, you pay him a salary, that's what you do.

David Youngblood

Yeah, that's how it should work. Right. It's kind of a no-brainer. Good deal. Well, I've got another question here from Brian Badillo. If the company won't invest or can't justify, you know, this many people right to create such a robust sale or gristly already that you've outlined here. How do you study? If we wanted to start or get started in your model, so is there a virtual solution to start down that path?

Tito Bohrt

So, it's a good question. It's a hard question. Because if you're like, hey, Tito, my company doesn't want to invest in anything. They just hired me as the SDR, like, I'm the only SDR at this company. And I don't even have Outplay or any other sales engagement tool. And I don't even have any other data research tool, like how do I do my job? I say, Dude, you don't do your job, you go to your boss to say, this company is not good. I'm out of here. See, I'm gonna go work out in sales, and then you apply to work with us. And you send me a LinkedIn message, right? There when you get to do because you can do your job without tools. It's like you asking me, you know, oh, like, I want to be a good tennis player. I don't have a racket, how would I start my job? Like, you're really, you can't be a good tennis player with a rocket. You need a rocket, you need the tools, you need the processes. Now if you're telling me Okay, Tito, here's what I have. I have my sales engagement tool. I have my, my, my my, you know, data tools. I just don't have the data researcher. Yes, you need a virtual assistant. And when I was an account executive, before I start out in sales, I hired a virtual assistant for $4 an hour. Back in the day, right now, you might need to pay eight or 10 or whatever, seven. But I hired somebody in the Philippines or in India, and I would literally, I would work my nine to five, doing my own work other than 5 PM to 11 PM. I was preparing the work for the data researcher and then meeting with them, coaching them on it, and inspecting the work. I would do my meetings with the Philippines when it was, I don't know, like 8 PM or 7 PM. Pacific. And it was like 10 AM in the morning for them. And we would meet and chat, blah, blah, and give them a task and get back to work. I wake up the next morning all my leads were ready. Hell yes.

David Youngblood

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a life hack. I love it.

Tito Bohrt

It's a life hack. So, Tim Ferriss taught me how to communicate with those people and how to train them through his book, The Four-Hour Workweek, which is highly recommended.

David Youngblood

Awesome. Another one. This one's actually kind of a common theme. And I feel like we kind of addressed the some with the messaging but, you know, again, on the notion of using those personalized messaging services, right, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Does it feel too invasive? And if I recall correctly, you're saying it doesn't depend on how you package it, right?

Tito Bohrt

Yes, my opinion is that the world is evolving, right? Like Dwyane this, what's I feel too invasive? It depends a little bit on the country and the culture, right? Like in the US, I feel that WhatsApp is not very much used, because so many people have iMessage, you look at the evolution of telecommunications around the world, the US was one of the first countries to roll out unlimited free text messaging. Right. I grew up in Bolivia, I remember paying the equivalent of like, three US dollar cents per text message. Like you're sending 50 It's fucking it's so expensive. Like, you're crazy. I'm not gonna pay $15 per text for text messaging, or whatever it is $1.50 to like, text message my friend today like no way. So, WhatsApp became very popular. So, if you're reaching out to Latin America or Southeast Asia, places like that, I think WhatsApp is fine. It's maybe even better than the iMessage. If you're in the US, maybe it's different. But I'd say test it tests your personas test does the people as it might also depend a little bit on like, some people might not even have WhatsApp, right. But if you look at their profile, they speak three languages and they've traveled a lot, WhatsApp is probably a really good idea. Like I've lived in five countries I've traveled. If I show you my notifications like There you go, there's a WhatsApp done. So, like if you WhatsApp me, I'll see it. Now. If you WhatsApp me with a terrible messaging, I'm gonna be really pissed if you're like Tito, I want to show you my platform, I will be like screw you, but if you were like, like, Tito, trying on WhatsApp as I know, you're overwhelmed with people reaching out and every other platform, would love to chat with you about API security for blah blah blah. Ah worth it. Or should I piss off? No, right? Okay, fair, like bold attempt, you know, like, you gotta get the lingo right within with the channel. I can't say the same thing via LinkedIn that I said via email. I can't say on message like I said on phone. Video is different from voice messages, and that is different from WhatsApp. You got to understand how invasive you are being? Are you apologetic? Are you know, you do the opposite? Like, you're gonna test a little bit. So, I won't give you all the secrets today. But yeah, I think, fine.

David Youngblood

Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you ready for another one? Or do you want to jump back somewhere?

Tito Bohrt

We can do we know a couple more questions. I know we only have 10 minutes and I'm showing a lot. The next thing I want to talk about is account executives. Like you're getting the right meetings with the right people. Okay, now what? Like I've seen horrible things there. But I'll take one more question before it before we dive into that.

David Youngblood

Yeah. So, if I get one to choose from the available ones, I'm going to go actually with our sheets, which is a statement followed by a question which is on the SDR of my company, I have my tools ZoomInfo list and everything else. I'm thinking to start with account-based sales as normal outbound isn't working currently. What roadmap should I follow?

Tito Bohrt

Um, I don't know if you telling me that it's not working? What should I do? Because I would need to inspect it. I would need to charge you $2,500 an hour for me to be a consultant and go inspect that or I can drive it to one of my managers They only charge 1,200 Maybe that's better. Probably you can't afford it. I don't if your company can afford it. Oh, that was a really hard question. I get asked all the time what the three keys to SDR success and I say three keys. Are you joking? 157 keys to SDR success, right. And you don't need to get all of them perfect. If you got, you know, all of them good. You're a genius. Right? And it's like any sport like think about American football or like soccer. We have an international audience a soccer Okay, Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best players, or Messi, whoever you like I don't care. What are the three things they do that make them successful? Three things are you joking about? Christiano Ronaldo sprints point one mile faster than the competition, he jumps half an inch taller, he kicks, you know, three miles per hour faster. He puts his body in the right position, like better hit his arm is 14% stronger. Like it's all about? Like, what are the three things? What do I do? If it's not working? Dude, there are a million things to troubleshoot. And that's why you need good managers without good managers you're dead. So sorry, I can't help you today. But I'd rather be honest, I'm trying to give you some canned BS answer that any other person will write on LinkedIn be like, oh, it's of course because you need x. Like you need my tool that.

David Youngblood

There's no one answer to it. Absolutely. And to your point, it all depends. There are lots of variables. So, anybody or she to give you an answer to that off the cuff, it's probably doing a disservice to Tito's point. Furthermore, you're welcome to join one of our booths and one of our sessions and pose that question or questions around it to our team. We're happy to help your brainstorming kind of like at least to get you pointed in the right direction on some answers as well, for what it's worth. So, another question, I want to jump back into your content.

Tito Bohrt

I will jump back to content because I want to talk to people quickly about this. Yeah, the goal, there are three buckets of leads people getting the wrong people talking inbound, outbound. Inbound, outbound is BS, there are three buckets, what are the three buckets one is fast response inbound is what I call it. And that includes demo requests, contact us forms and chat, the characteristic of that type of lead is that the lead is expecting a response quickly from you. If it's chat, it better be less than a minute or less than five minutes. If it's a demo request or contacts us forms, it better be less than an hour, right? And what you need there is SDRs are like paying attention to it on a 30-minute basis. You don't want to have the same STR doing that as the guy who's doing the complete opposite job, which is cold outbound, cold outbound is what the question was saying is, hey, I'm an SDR I have a list of ABM target accounts. I'm finding that persona, so I want to go after them. Right, and then your third bucket is MQLs. With MQLs, you're gonna have a really tough conversation with marketing. Because marketing wants to label as many leads as possible as MQLs. And you as an SDR you don't want that.

Because what do I rather do if my biggest client is Verizon, let rather place a call to the VP at AT&T where I know he has a problem that I can solve even though he's not recognizing the problem at the moment. Although I rather call the data analyst lead that came from south Florida pancakes because he attended a webinar. Come on dude, don't call the South Florida pancakes guy for a webinar, call outbound call to AT&T and Verizon, like those are your clients. Right? So, there are a lot of things to dissect there. But the one area I want to focus on is what we do when we do cold outbound on the role of the SDR is only one which is let me give you the right person or the right account. I'm the right person I consider to be somebody above the power line or with influence on decision making, which should be a director-level plus other company. Right? And the second thing is getting the right company like don't call south Florida pancakes. Call the good company. Once you get the meeting that means -  Should we send it to the account executive? And the one thing that companies fail on is I've seen directors of sales development or even as an outsourcing company. leads come to me and they're like Tito, we need some outsourcing help. And I'm like, Yeah, tell me more. They're like yeah, so This year we produced 1000 leads, and we closed. We closed 10 deals. So next year instead of closing 10 deals want to close 150 deals, so I need 15,000 meetings. No, dude, you don't need 15, 000 meetings, you need to close a higher percentage of the meetings that you're actually having. So, what I'm gonna show you guys is a little dashboard. And if you don't have this dashboard for your AE team, as SDRs, you are dead, because the only thing that they will say is that meetings are low quality, we need better meetings, we need better meetings and better meetings, and doesn't matter how good of a meeting you get, the only thing they want is they want prospects that are ready to buy and outbound prospects are never ready to buy, they're ready to buy when the leads are an inbound request because everybody has a project, they're not ready to buy when there's an outbound need. So, when you're selling the problem, rather than the solution, here are some dashboards that I recommend people build on, they got to be very conscious about how they do. This is the bottom of the funnel. So, this top dashboard just takes one by one is measuring our conversion rate or the number of meetings in April, that had a survey completed after every meeting is taken, I asked the account executives to take a survey, it's a two-question survey. What are the outcomes of the meeting, and which is a picklist, and then give me more context, what else can you tell me about it? And here's what ends up happening. Like out of these meetings, three meetings were taken, they said the three meetings were qualified. So, it was the right person, the right account, two meetings were engaged, which means that two meetings were open-minded about scheduling a second follow-up conversation. And then one meeting was what we call Mark A, Mark A means AE is very confident this is entering the pipeline.

Tito Bohrt

Out of those same three meetings, we looked at CRM, and we correlated it to the survey. And we said that one meeting on this an old screenshot from June, as you can see, but that one meeting enter the discovery stage, what I'm going to be able to see in this dashboard is how many of those means enter discovery ended up moving to scoping, tech evaluation, business valuation, legal procurement, and close one. Obviously, my sales cycle because I'm an enterprise takes six to 12 months, I'm middle of June, taking the screenshot of my April data, I don't expect anything else other than something having joined the discovery stage. But the beautiful part about building this dashboard is I can see how my conversions continue to evolve. So, my number of qualified accounts is averaging 94%, which is really good. The number of qualified counselors engaged has continued to get better, that's good. The engagement being A is not good.

And then moving to the pipeline is okayish. If you're smart, you're going to start splitting this data by persona or by sales rep. So here are four or five different sales reps, we see how many meetings have they taken out of those meetings? How many have they moved to pipeline, and out of that pipeline, how far have those meetings gone? If you start looking at your data in the smart way, where you're correlating the success of different months, different people, or even different personas, how's cloud security moving into the pipeline compared to non-cloud security compared to operations versus DevOps, compared to a generalist, if I can understand how many of those are moving? That gives me a lot of insight into what I need to do. So, when my AE says the meeting is crap, I said, what was wrong with it? Was it this the seniority? Was there that persona? Was it the account? How can I help you better? And then let me go to something if this is the AE, that's telling me that the meetings are bad, and he's moved zero to the pipeline. And, as an SDR I support five AES and this other AES moving 30% of the meanings of the pipeline. I look to the VP, and I say, hey, dude, I don't know if you noticed this, but like, the guy who's complaining has moved zero to pipeline, the guy who is now complaining has moved 30% of pipeline. Is it me or is it then? I don't know. I don't know. But if you don't have the data, you can't go up to your CRO and say, here's how you got to do it. So, I know we're running out of time. David, what else? Do we have? Time for anything else? Any other?

David Youngblood

Yes, so much like before with the others. For those still with us? Here? We will, what we'll do is we're going to answer one to two more questions. And then we'll do our transition with a poll and wrap things up here. But uh, so one or two more questions. Let's see. Okay, your take as Tito for, is video prospecting a fad or a bubble?

Tito Bohrt

Is video prospecting a fad or bubble? Um, I will reiterate what I said before I'm going to be congruent with my answer. You can do video prospecting very well if you know how to do it. And different SDRs have different skills we do we use video a lot. We don't. I think that video is a slow mode of communication. Just like I was saying to David earlier today like I don't go to a lot of conferences in person unless I really want to ask questions. What I do is I watch them later. 3x speed, you sent me video unless I can watch it at three speeds. I don't want to watch it. It's too long. Like, if I tell you what are you gonna tell me in the text? I prefer that or tell me over the phone, just speak to me and have a conversation. Video is a one-way speech. So, if you're good at video, you can do good things with video. But I don't think video is for everybody. And I don't think the video should be like everybody trying right now I think it's a little bit of a bubble. So many people have tried a video that when I send a video, people just don't even click on it.

David Youngblood

It's not a differentiator anymore. It's kind of what you're saying. And don't do it if you suck at it. Paraphrasing. Got it. Another question from Navin, how do you develop consideration on a cold call? You know, make them consider listening to you? How do you do that?

Tito Bohrt

Have them listen to you, there's gonna be a lot of things here that influence a lot of it has to do with your tone of voice and your accent. I am from Bolivia.

10 years ago, when I was trying to make making cold calls, I was getting shut down so bad because I had an accent. So, if your native language is not the language that you're calling you're on theirs is you're gonna have a problem. So, if you are from Japan, or from Bolivia, or from India, or from Russia, and you're calling the US and they're like, hello, you're like, hello, this is Tito Bohrt from Russia, like your dead dude, I am sorry. It's not your fault. They just perceive that to be low quality, and therefore you're getting killed. Now, assume that you got that right. You got to learn how to have an executive conversation. So, a good opening is understanding what the psychological journey is. So, when I get a phone call, right? I look at my phone and think who the hell is calling me. So, the first thing you got to tell me on the phone is your name. If I don't recognize your name, then the next thing I think is what the hell are you calling me about? Why me? So, the way I open a call is if I'm calling David. David will be like, hello. Right? You won't people don't pick up the phone today with like, hello, my name is David Youngblood. How can I help you like that does not happen? It's like, hey, right. So, I'd say Hey, David, this is Tito Bohrt, I am the CEO here at AltiSales. I was just hoping to speak with you briefly. Do you have two minutes for me? Because what do I want? I want to in create curiosity. There was gonna be like, okay, Tito Bohrt, AltiSales. I've never heard of you. I don't know your name; you have two minutes. Maybe I'll say yes. Maybe I'll say what the hell's this about? Either way, they're saying yes. What the hell is this about? That's exactly what I was about to tell you. So, like, I don't need to change anything. I will tell you. Hey, David, I'm calling you because I saw you guys are hosting accelerate. And I'm a really good speaker, bro. People love my content; you should have me in. But before that, I wanted to ask you, what are the three topics of content that you wish you had on that conference that you haven't yet put content together? Or whatever? Like, yeah, coming up on the spot with a script, right? But they wouldn't be like, Oh, Tito. Ah, that's a good question. Dude. Um, you know what, we really want somebody to talk about the evolution of SDR strategies. I mean, like, okay, cool. What is number two? Right? And now he's engaged because I'm talking to him about something that he cares about. And your customers, for everybody who's doing cold calls, your customers don't care about your product whatsoever? 0%.

David Youngblood

They care about themselves.

Tito Bohrt

They care about their problems. So, when you call, don't talk about solutions. You talk about problems. So hey, prospects, how are you making sure that your SDRs are maximizing the engagement of their prospects when they're doing all my dials and blah, blah, blah? How are you making sure that you're not paying excessive amounts of money for platforms like SalesLoft? How are your blah, blah, blah, just how are you blown by solving this problem? And that's how you get them curious by asking for two minutes. Get them intrigued by asking about the problem.

David Youngblood

So, with that, we will be wrapping up we went a little bit over apologies, everyone. That's my fault. I'm getting yelled at and slack again. It's my favorite thing to do. But uh, Tito, yeah, you are amazing. Thank you so much, for the plethora of information. Definitely looking forward to following up and connecting and sharing some more conversations via LinkedIn as well as maybe doing something next year together. So, we'll see what that.

Tito Bohrt

I will be on LinkedIn. Yeah, if you're a high-performing SDR and you feel like you need better management, better tools, better mindset. We are hiring like crazy here at AltiSales, so ping me there. And if you ever need just feedback, advice ideas, don't write me like seven paragraphs expecting me to inspect all your work but if you have something very concrete in short, message me on LinkedIn I'm here to help thanks for hosting me David has been a pleasure thanks everybody

David Youngblood

Absolutely, thanks, Tito.