editione1.0.1
Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
It’s a rare situation where your first email or first call results in a prospect getting back to you and agreeing to an appointment. Instead, you’ll need to implement a series of outreach actions targeting your prospects, typically alternating between emails, calls, and voice mails. In sales, this interleaving of outreach actions over time is known as a cadence.
You can of course implement this yourself via your lightweight Google Sheet CRM or in a more formal fashion through an actual CRM. Or, if you want to get really crazy, there is a set of solutions that are designed specifically to orchestrate this outreach cadence—two primary players being Outreach and SalesLoft. Both have pricing that accommodates an individual inexpensively and can help you be much more efficient in your appointment-setting workflow.
Regardless of whether you’re doing it yourself or using an orchestration system, typically you want to alternate emailing and calling. That might be an initial email and call on day one, followed by a call on day two, and then maybe a call and a voicemail on day three. From there, you might skip a day, and then email on day five, followed by an “I’m breaking up with you” email on day seven. By no means is this a cut-and-dried approach—you could decide to do calls with follow-up emails every other day, or some other permutation, if it works for you. To some extent, this will be related to how much content you have to share. If you have a lot of great things to say about your solution, and you have lots of video snippets you can add to consecutive emails, your cadence could potentially be longer and perhaps more frequent.
In addition to pure time-based cadencing, you can involve contextual data into this process as well. Part of your cadence could be reviewing the previous day’s opens and clicks and prioritizing those prospects for calls. Or it could mean breaking out of your cadence to immediately call a prospect who opened an email when you see the alert. Or it could mean sending an immediate follow-up email to a prospect who just opened one of your emails. All of this contextual activity can raise connect rates and appointment-close rates by focusing on prospects who are already thinking about your solution.
importantWhatever strategy you employ, it is important to realize that multiple touch points, and a system that requires you to work through them, are core to being successful here. Having a cadence compels you to do the actual wood chopping to connect to your prospects, where you will have a chance to book them for an appointment.
With the advent of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, it has become far easier to understand who someone knows, and thus, could potentially refer you to, than ever before. This can be helpful for prospecting and reduce friction for getting your foot in the door to set an appointment.
Doing this at small scale can be a great way to initially supercharge your pipeline, but it will eventually run out of steam, in that you, your team, your investors, and so on will eventually run dry. So while it can’t be a long term solution necessarily, it can help early on.