“How about a little illumination,” quote from the Broadway Musical Phantom of the Opera.
“How about a little acceleration,” quote from Chad Burmeister, VP of Sales & Business Development at talentReef, and Co-Founder of SalesHack, LLC when he clicked the “Go Button” on 10/17/2017!
On October 17th, 2017, my son’s 16th birthday, I ran the very first ConnectAndSell calling session against call tasks that were in my Outreach sequences. As a busy Vice President of Sales & Business Development, I had somehow let 45 past-due calls back-up and had been delaying the inevitable knowing that someday soon, Outreach would have push-button conversation acceleration.
On this brilliant Colorado day, late afternoon, I loaded a list of 45 contacts, dialed into a phone bridge, clicked GO, and dialed all 45 of those tasks, in <10 minutes. Unfortunately, nobody picked up. However, those 45 calls without conversation acceleration would have taken a typical sales professional 3-4 hours to make, leading to frustration and a lack of overall conversions.
What’s the big deal about a “little acceleration”? Within weeks, just like fidget spinners, people will be talking about what this means for their business. And not just any people, venture capitalists, CEOs, CSOs, VPs of Sales and all of the Outreach customers who hear that “Uber for sales conversations” is now available via Outreach integration.
Why does this matter for companies of all sizes and in all industries?
- Sales Reps are tired of logging into their Sales Enablement platform and seeing 50 – 250 sales activities due for the day, especially when 75 of them are manual phone calls.
- Sales leaders are tired of seeing Sales Reps struggle to achieve 50 sales activities/day. The Bridge Group and Topo put out an annual SDR study and the numbers rarely move Year over Year. For the past several years, even though sales enablement tools are available for < $100/month, the average sales activities/day is still below 50. This is a shame – at an average cost of $60,000/year, the typical SDR will cost a company $4.80 per email sent or phone dial made.
- CEOs are under pressure to perform – especially companies who accept venture money. The day the check is deposited, they hear a very loud BANG, and they better be running. Do you think a CEO prefers 20,000 sales activities in a month delivered by 28 sales professionals or 100,000 sales activities delivered by 21 sales professionals?
This is NOT an advertisement for technology. This is a cold, hard fact, that these fluffy social selling variety are up against a real threat if they continue to tout that “content” sells the deal. At the end of the day, whether you are Steve Richard, Founder & CRO of ExecVision or Jamie Shanks, CEO of SalesForLife, everyone agrees that the purpose of these other channels is to drive a sales conversation.
The punchline – when you combine a sales enablement platform with a sales acceleration platform, you get Mult-Channel Sales Acceleration.
What does this mean for my business:
- Sales Reps are excited! They are excited to come into work every day because instead of 50 dials, and 1-2 sales conversations, in 3-4 hours of hard labor, they can now have 250 dials, 10 – 12 sales conversations, in 1-2 hours of “uber for sales conversations”.
- Sales leaders are excited! Imagine the look on the faces of a board of directors when they see a graph that starts on the lower left at 20,000 sales touches, and in <1 quarter moves up to 100,000 sales touches in a month. Deployed properly, at the same average cost of $60,000/year, the typical SDR will cost a company $0.50 to $.96 per email sent of phone dial made. (75-90% lower cost means more market domination).
- CEOs can finally take a much needed day off! It’s true that CEOs of Silicon Valley start-ups never sleep. I’ve seen it first hand. When Mutli-Channel Sales Acceleration Technology is deployed properly, now whether the team gets to 98,000 or 102,000 sales activities in a month, when it’s 5X of what it used to be, the CEO can finally have a day of rest by having a much more predictable pipeline.
What to avoid? There is a lot of “fine print” when accelerating your tech stack by 5-10X. Too much to describe here. SalesHack’s advice, hire a professional who has done this before! You can (and will) mess this up if you try this at home!
Good selling,
@SalesHack