How to engage executives using outbound

Yesterday the COO of an $8B public company told us that only 3 people in their entire ~4,000 person organization could sign off on the purchase of Champify (even if it’s under $75k in spend). That's crazy!

Three years ago, he said there were 15-20 people who could buy.

That's why getting to power is more important now than ever.

But it's a hard skill to build and enable your team on. 

We sat down with David Vertin, VP of Sales and Business Development at Salesloft, and Champify CEO, Todd Busler to get the loaddown on best practices for engaging executives. The takeaways

1. Have a reason to reach out like a job change, intent, compelling news
2. Build a compelling point of view
3. Make sure your team is compensated to drive the behavior you want
4. Work collaboratively across BDRs/AEs

Make sure your problem is big enough to make an impact at the exec level

Nobody cares about the software that you’re selling. They care about the problem you solve and the value you deliver. 

Executives care about making an impact and moving the needle.

Salesloft’s CRO has a rule of them to help sanity check the value you’re offering really moves the needle. It has to have an impact of more than 1%

That means if it’s a $1 B business you need to be delivering then $10M in revenue or saving them $10M in costs to start. 

Do your research and craft a compelling message 

Note that creating a compelling message doesn’t mean just an email. It could be an email, but it could be a linkedin, personalized landing page, video, or call too. 

A compelling message has two key ingredients: a hook and unique point of view. 

Both Todd and David emphasize prospecting throughout the account to test your POV and iterate on messaging. 

1. Understand what is happening at the account using any publicly available information and intent data like website visits, job changes, new executives, etc. 
2. Run your POV by below the line prospects - they know what’s happening and are less likely to be bombarded by cold emails (i.e. are more likely to engage)
3. Regroup and update your POV with every new piece of intel you get from these conversations
4. Use these updated POVs to update who you are engaging with as you navigate to power

Collaborate Across AEs/BDRs to attack the same account

Spicy take but often, AEs have been out of the prospecting game for years, and are just starting to have their own PG targets again. Rather than always rely on AEs for the best practices, David advises successful SDRs to take initiative in the account planning process. 

There are a couple of ways to collaborate:

1. When there is a strong intent signal BDRs should reach out to their AEs to build the account strategies 
2. Find a way to divy up the account by persona, seniority or department
3. After engaging with a few people, regroup and share learnings to update your POV and iterate on your strategy
4. Once the meeting is set, don’t stop! Multi-threading is important. AEs should take the primary use case, but that doesn’t mean the BDR stops - reach out to different functions or BUs to become threaded deeper into the account

To encourage this post meeting collaboration, Salesloft adjusted their compensation model accordingly: BDRs are comped on later stage pipeline in addition to (and yes David thinks that although unpopular at first it drives the right behavior and teaches reps they do have influence over what closes). "Having Sales Development at a company is a privilege, and to earn that we need to be able to pay for ourselves."

How to enable your team on tactics that work

Like many of our other experts, David echoes that enablement is ongoing. Strategically leverage your top reps to help build confidence in strategies and to keep enablement interesting.

Keep enablement short and engaging, focusing on more frequent opportunities to learn vs. long sessions with extensive coverage. 

“Give opportunities to those that are maybe some of your top performers to give input and then getting the global team together for regular enablement and break out sessions where we're collaborating and sharing best, and not necessarily doing death by PowerPoint” - David Vertin

Watch the whole thing here!