[00:00:00] More activity and more leads and like what I know to be unequivocally true over 20 years of selling and leading sales teams and now working with, with sales teams to build their strategy, is that like more is not a strategy.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Cold To close the show about what actually happens between a cold touch and a closed deal. I'm Jeremy Schiff, CEO of Sales Bot, and I talk to people building Real pipeline today, founders Revenue Leaders, and go-to-market operators. Today I'm joined by Leslie Nettes, B2B [00:01:00] sales strategist, author of Profit Generating Pipeline, and founder of.
The sales led go to market agency, Leslie's made over 250,000 cold calls and now it helps teams rethink how they approach outbound ICP and Pipeline. Leslie helps outbound B2B sales organizations build profitable sales strategies. Leslie, really excited to have you on. Same. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation because I think we speak a bit of the same language about how to get somebody from cold to closed.
Love it. So yeah, I mean, I gave you sort of a quick overview of a bio, but do you mind just sort of for our audience giving sort of 30 seconds background about like who you are and sort of what, what, what you're passionate about? Yeah. Well, I spent a career as an individual contributor a. Frontline, second line, third line sales leader.
Uh, everything from the very, like transactional 2K one call, close to six figure plus plus, you know, year plus sales cycles. [00:02:00] Um, I actually had a, a bit of a non-traditional start because I started in professional services and only came to SaaS later in my career. Um, which I think gives me a unique perspective because I haven't.
Only sold in recurring revenue models. Um, but yeah, I've done a lot of work with a different, a lot of different ICP personas at different price points with different types of products and different lengths of sales cycles, which informs a lot of my thinking and my approach now. It's really exciting.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the first thing I learned when I started moving into sales is like the people who are tar, who are used to targeting SMB and Enterprise are very different people. And, and the sort of, the approaches to how they do it, uh, are very different. So it's very interesting that you have that breadth.
Um, you've got a pretty unique model as a sales strategist, not quite consulting, not quite fractional. How did you land on that and what kind of problems are you typically solving today? I landed on my current strategy, which is more of a [00:03:00] done with you advisory model because I just don't think playbooks work, and this is probably gonna get me in hot water, but I think a lot of the times I would go so far as to say that like the way many people are selling playbooks is dishonest because they know that they're selling something that is just going to sit on a shelf.
And never get used because they're just like dragging and dropping a generic strategy into an organization without figuring out if it's the right strategy or building the processes that support it, or like enabling and empowering the team to execute on it. So I, you know, full disclosure, I was selling playbooks ages ago when I started my company and I was just pouring my heart and soul into them.
And then I was following up with clients and they just weren't seeing the results. So I started asking myself really tough questions about how I can do this most important work of like, you know, sharing the knowledge to elevate the, the profession of sales, but in a way where [00:04:00] I felt. I'm significantly more confident that clients were going to get the ROI that they deserve.
And that's how I transitioned to the done with you model, which is more of a like, you know, teach a man to fish kind of philosophy. Makes sense, makes sense. Uh, very interesting. So you mentioned most of your work happens with companies that are like 50 to 500 thou 500 million. When we were sort of talking earlier, what's different about how, uh, those teams approach outbound versus sort of smaller teams?
Yeah, we were, we were joking last time we spoke that I'd just done a bunch of work building new case studies, and one of my takeaways was that my most impactful work happens between the 50 to 500 million range. Yeah. I was like, okay, but I need to like. Drink the champagne I'm trying to sell and maybe niche down a little bit, but for, for right now, I think that's a good working number because I can still draw some assumptions.
Um, two things that I see a lot Jeremy. One is for an organization to have grown that [00:05:00] big, it means they've made some mistakes along the way. It means they've like built up their tech stack. So what I realized that I found really frustrating is organizations that had what they believed was like the way to solve something and because they hadn't failed enough.
Like they hadn't kind of taken enough lumps. Oh, interesting. Yeah, they weren't, they weren't ready to have, I think they, they. Sometimes earlier stage organizations, not all of them, but many of them, um, have a much more static approach to their thinking about outbound because they like, they just haven't tried and failed enough ways yet.
So I like working with slightly more mature organizations just in terms of their willingness to try new things. Also like their, their tech stack and they often have somebody in-house that does rev ops for them. Those are all things that I find important to successful engagements. [00:06:00] And the other thing that I look for in those organizations is they are going through some sort of big market shift.
So like they're going through rapid acquisition, they are. All, you know, hands on board for their next funding round and have a specific date for that. They are launching a brand new product to market or launching in a new market. So there is something like really significant happening that they cannot afford to get wrong.
Makes sense. It's also seems like an opportunity, right? Because if I have a catalyst like that, it's an opportunity to be like, Hey guys, we need to go and band together just to accomplish x. We need to think differently. 'cause if we do the same sort of thing, we're not gonna get there on its own. So it also seems like a good way of like.
Driving, like there's always sort of good excuses for bringing people on board, whether it's a new milestone or a new leader or something like that. But yeah, it makes sense that sort of, for sure, the, the, the orgs will be a little more malleable in those sort of situations. Yeah, they're a little bit bigger and I also think that when there's some sort of big market shift [00:07:00] happening that they are more inclined to admit that what got them here.
Probably will not get them there, get them to their next set of goals, so, so I think like even reflecting on how I maybe would react to that situation as a former sales leader, I think it allows us to like drop the zone of resistance or drop the ego a bit and be like, okay, I've never done this before.
It'd be really nice to have some external support, some external perspective. For sure. Makes sense. Uh, one thing you brought up is that, that I think really interesting is the idea that like most teams aren't actually doing enough like segmentation, uh, or aren't doing it properly. Can you break that down a little bit?
Yeah, I see a, a couple of things happening. Um, one unfortunately is that I actually am seeing teams kind of go backward in that they maybe had a pretty clear som or like what marketing might describe as their general ICP and that's what they were focused on. But now that we [00:08:00] have the ability to use technology to use these LLMs, um, to.
Scale, right? To like send out thousands of messages to thousands of people. I'm watching teams actually expand to their Sam, even to their tam. And it's atrocious because what they are doing, they're spamming, like they're not sending sales outreach. Yeah, for sure. Um, so unfortunately that's one thing that I'm seeing some of this new technology enable is sort of a reversion to like the very worst techniques that that sales people sometimes fall, fall victim to.
Uh, but more specifically. Even when I start working with an organization that does have a pretty clear song, like all of the accounts that are in their CRM are, are generally pretty solid fits for what marketing and product has defined as their, their broader ICP. But still Jeremy, I then find that they try to write sales messaging [00:09:00] that fits every single account.
Yeah. And that like you and I both know that that doesn't work. And so what I teach them is to build further segmentation into that Psalm, into that territory. So I call those ICP segments, and then that allows us to make some much more educated assumptions about the things that are most important. To those accounts, to those personas.
So we can write what I call value based or like segment specific value props. Um, and clearly when you are talking to somebody and it really feels like you're talking to them and about the outcomes that matter most to them, that type of messaging is going to earn attention faster and more often. Yeah, it makes sense.
Actually, something we've been sort of playing with is we've been hearing a lot of customers that it's not even just like the account based segmentation, but like the messaging for different personas in the buying committee should be different, right? Like the way you're gonna talk to your champion versus an influencer versus the technical validator are all gonna be like really different.
And [00:10:00] if you use the same messaging, it'll resonate for the champion and no one else. And so. Very interesting. Yeah. One of the big, like aha moments that teams often have when I'm, I'm coming in and I'm workshopping this with them, um, is I will find some emails that they're sending that are like finance executives, like you, you know, people in the business space like you.
Yeah. And then we'll have a conversation about like, at this specific account. How would you say that the, you know, like manager of operations is thinking about the same problem differently than say the chief operations officer? Right? And it's this, it's this moment where you can see the light bulb go off.
'cause nobody's ever asked them to think about how a different persona, even in the same business unit, in the same account, would approach a problem differently. So I, I totally agree with you there. Totally makes sense. Uh, so how do you actually think about, uh, like TAM and, and breaking it into usable segments with reps?[00:11:00]
Yeah. Um, well, I love to use an analogy about like all of the fish in the ocean when I, I'm working with teams and so if I think about tam, it's like the entire ocean. And then if I think about Sam, it is, you know, maybe the ocean that we actually have the resources broadly to fish. But when I think about some our sales obtainable market, it is the part of that ocean that we have the resources to fish that also have the hungriest fish.
So I like to share that analogy because I think often, and I've done this in my career as well, so this is not throwing shade, but I think often when times get tough, when our pipeline looks thin, when we don't feel like we have enough leads, we have this tendency to default to like more, more activity and more leads and like what I know to be unequivocally to the team thinking about, okay, looking at my territory.
How can I chunk out pieces of my territory where those hungry AST fish are [00:12:00] those people that for one reason or another, maybe it's signal based, maybe it's general like persona trends or account trends are most likely to be interested in a conversation to buy now, to buy at the highest price points to buy fastest.
Um, and that's a really great place to get the conversation started. Totally makes sense. Uh, you also mentioned that like territory management was like the biggest problem people are looking for help with right now. Why do you think that is? And like, what are are people doing wrong isn't so interesting?
Yeah, so I did a like LinkedIn poll at the end of last year because I was just sort of curious what type of content people were most interested in. Sure. I would've. Soon that the top thing would've been sales messaging, because I just feel like, you know, in our LinkedIn echo chamber, that's the type of content I'm seeing people put out most.
And certainly I put out a lot of that content as well. Um, but I heard back from a ton of, of reps, a ton of individual contributors that they are being told to like, own their territory, manage their [00:13:00] territory, like have a point of view on their accounts. But nobody's actually teaching them how to do that.
Yeah. So they're being told on something and then they're, they're not being enabled to do it. So I think part of it is that they're trying to self-teach and, and fill in the pieces. And I think part of it too is man, like as somebody that's made 250,000 plus cold calls, like my teams have made over 10 million.
I know what it feels like to just be like banging the phone all day. And not getting results, like not having any of those conversations convert to meanings. So I, I think there is an appetite for reps to figure out how they can increase their efficiency and increase their conversion rates. And territory management is certainly a strategy to get there.
Yeah, totally makes sense. And yeah, I mean all the time, right? People are like, Hey, go and execute on this thing. Go work it out. Um, and again, it's not just the sort of strategy, but it's also the tools to go and actually enable this so that they actually know how to like actually execute on that [00:14:00] day to day.
Uh. Uh, it's actually really interesting. So, yeah, dovetailing here, a lot of what we see in teams is that they, they, they're so focused on fixing their messaging or activity when the issue is really just like targeting, like we were just talking about. How do you think about like targeting, segmentation, messaging and like, which really can have the most impact?
And like where, I mean you touched on this a little already, but like where you really want teams to be investing to like go and see the sort of outsized returns you're hoping to sort of get for them. Yeah, great question. Um, oh, like so many different ideas just spring into my mind. I think first I'll start with one of the like, frustrations that I see, that I experience and I see teams experience, uh, is that their, like emails aren't working or like their outbound generally isn't working.
Sure. And then they will focus on this like. One little piece of minutia in this whole big strategy. Um, and I'll see it often with like obsessing over [00:15:00] just a call opener or obsessing over just a subject line. And you see, like I have genuinely, I'm thinking of a specific rep that was spending like. I don't know, a couple hours every single week, just like brainstorming new subject lines.
But it never mattered what new subject line they were trying, because their open rates weren't converting to click. Throughs are replies because they were saying the wrong thing to the wrong people. Yeah. So like that is, that is such a, um, I, I feel for folks when they are. Kind of finding themselves in that trap, like that quick sound where they're like, I'm trying so hard to like.
Figure out the small little tweaks I can make to get results. But they are often missing the bigger picture, which is they need to take a step back. But like the, the actual writing of the messaging and the sequences, if I look at my nine step proven formula, which is what I outline in, in my book profit Generating pipeline, that's five.
Out of nine [00:16:00] steps, that's five. So before that, we need to write those segment specific value props. But to do that we need to identify what our segments are. But to do that, we need to understand what our Psalm is and we need to be able to go from, you know, Tam to Sam to Psalm. So there's, there's so many steps that happen before we are actually deciding.
What type of copy to write on what channels and how we are building it into a sequence that's going to get us the replies and the results that we want to, to have, uh, in our pipeline. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it's, it's very interesting for us, we'll see sort of something similar where people are going and, uh, tweaking things and like, effectively there, there, it's gonna affect like 1% of the, like the, the difference between a, like a terrible subject line and a great subject line.
Is like maybe a couple percent, but people see on LinkedIn et cetera, of like, oh, all I did was tweak this. I used AI to [00:17:00] personalize this subject line and now I've three x my, my click through rates or whatever. Uh, I feel like it's doing a real disservice to the market and yeah, I totally agree that like.
If you're targeting the wrong people, it doesn't really matter what you say, right? Yeah. Um, so there's so much work that needs to be done before those like incremental improvements in a subject line or in your, you know, CTR or whatever it is actually are the right thing to spend your time and energy and resources on.
Totally makes sense. Um, so what do you think teams are doing today, uh, that is that, that they think is working in outbound that actually isn't, and again, feel free to just sort of expand on the themes we've been talking about. I have an unpopular opinion on this one. The, the, the thing that I think teams believe is working, but the data absolutely shows isn't, is contact level hyper-personalization.
Hmm. And that always sounds like, Hey, I see you're the founder at, [00:18:00] congrats on your new job. Congrats on your series A. So it is some like. Random pieces of information or I've seen some that are like very weird. There's, there's one that I always think of that was like, um, somebody was on their personal social media and they saw that they went, went and swim with dolphins in Hawaii.
And they were like, how was your trip swimming with dolphins in Hawaii? Oh, that's awkward. What? And so what happens is, just like we were saying, these reps are told to personalize. But nobody's teaching, but not how to personalize. Yeah, totally. So they're going and they're scraping like. Either inappropriately personal details or totally meaningless details from social media because nobody you're reaching out to needs you to read the news back to them.
They know what their job title is, they know they just got a raise. They know they raised a round of funding. They don't need you to tell them that. Sure. And then the worst part of Jeremy is that they do that contact level personalization, and [00:19:00] then the very next sentence is, anyway, our widget is anyway.
Right, right. It pivots immediately into this very like product centric, seller centric language. And so that, like, I see that as a huge misstep because folks are like, personalization doesn't work and it's not that personalization doesn't work. It is that like that disingenuous, irrelevant personalization.
Oh, for sure. Doesn't work. And it certainly doesn't work when the next sentence in your email is something completely unrelated to the opening line. Yeah, we have a, we have a running joke at our company, which is the only thing worse than No personalization is bad personalization because it like actually can come across as less authentic, right?
Oh yeah. It's, it's sort of like you, you walk up to a dinner party and you're like, Hey, I heard about this wonderful thing, so do you wanna buy my widget? And like if you did that in practice, someone would throw the drink in your face, they'd be like, what are you actually doing? For sure. And yet, somehow we do it in email.
Yeah, it, it, I mean, yeah, it's sort of nukes trust, like it, it goes [00:20:00] from like, it's the opposite of rapport building. It's like a rapport destruction or something. Yeah. Um, so thank you. We've really gone through a lot of like very interesting topics. Uh, where can people learn more, uh, or follow, uh, your work?
Yeah, absolutely. So if they want to check out the book and maybe buy a copy for themselves, their team, the best place to do that is sales led gtm.com/book. Um, so they can get the book there. That's also my website, sales led gtm. And then I'm a chronically online human, so I'm on most social media just under my name, which is Leslie Nettes.
Uh, LinkedIn is my primary up close there every single day, at least once a day. Thank you much for your, thank you so much. Uh, that's a wrap for cold to close. Big thanks to Leslie Nettes for sharing how she thinks about outbound ICP and all these things that are actually working right now. Uh, if you got something out of this, please share this with your team and follow along for more conversations.
See you on the next one. Thanks [00:21:00] everyone.
