Don't Cold Call! We Talk to Samantha McKenna of #samsales

I don't believe in cold calls. I think they are phenomenally rude. You're calling somebody unannounced in the middle of the day to try to pitch your product without permission.

I believe in warm calls and picking up on triggers, and I will say that the outreach we do between email and LinkedIn and what we advocate for is simply doing your homework right. 

There's a reason why we at #samsales believe for all things; ‘show me you know me’. There are so many different ways to do that - from looking at the person's LinkedIn, their company, or their vertical, so if this person has three connections on LinkedIn and hasn't logged in since the 80s, even though LinkedIn hasn't been around that long, you've got that information. Go to their company's site. What's happening in their space? What do you know about what they're probably going through or thinking about or the challenges within that vertical? Worst case? Find something - a press release that you can tie your value proposition to. 

Relevance in Essential

Outreach is important. The subject line is super important. In our first outreach, paired with the first sentence, this is where people miss the mark. No matter how loudly we talk about it, show me your domain; the outreach we receive at #Samsales has zero personalization in a meaningful way. It might have the brackets of the names and things like that, but it hasn't done any research on us in advance to try to get our attention. 

Let's just show that we gave five to 10 minutes of research on them for the 30 we're asking for in return. 

The thing to think about is the relevance when we do our outreach, whether it's email or LinkedIn, or even on a cold call, we tend to focus on our value proposition at a 30,000-foot level. Our 30,000-foot level will be we can help you with sales training and LinkedIn training. Great, everybody can do that. Goodbye! Or I have a CSM at LinkedIn who can do that. Goodbye! 

We've got to think about their specific challenge, how they're motivated, and how they're judged and reviewed annually. How did they get raises? How did they get promoted? You have to think about the things that are top of mind for them and find one specific challenge we can solve and then one specific way to solve it. 

So we might say to a marketer, I suspect that one of the things you're always focused on is new streams of MQLs. Let's think about what that marketer or that salesperson is thinking about, and let's do that. 

Finally, don't just chase the meeting. Think about ways to connect better digitally. The idea of connecting on LinkedIn is to build a relationship. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, I've won. I have a new subscriber to my content, so then I've got a win. But, if you reach out and say, ‘I’d love to meet with you,’ and that person says, not the right time, but thank you for connecting, make sure that we don't forcefully try to continue to pitch. Ensure that we also do not connect without context and then do the pitch slap afterward. That’s when we just say, ‘thanks for connecting. I'd love you to buy my stuff’. Don’t do that.

Check out #samshorts for more!