Jen Abel: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, so you mentioned clay and you kind of nerd sniped me there of just what tools do you find useful? And it makes me think about finding leads, which is kind of going backwards through the sales process, but it might be okay, so maybe let's spend time there. Just like what do you recommend to founders to find the good leads? Glengarry Glen Ross good leads. So I say before you buy any tool, don't even think about tools. I feel like people turn everything into this complicated mess with all of the tools that they start integrating. And then they're engineers, I get it. So now they start to engineer these sales tools together and then they blast their market, and now they have 5,000 notes out in one day and their domain takes a hit. So I think before you even overthink about the tools right now, can you manually find 30 people that you want to spend 15 to 20 minutes writing a rock solid note to? Are there 30 people that you are deeply excited to learn from, that you are willing to invest 15 to 20 minutes to write a really thoughtful note? Let's just start there. So some questions. One, are they even discoverable? How hard is it to find 30 people? What have you noticed across those 30 people? Are there any interesting insights? Maybe it's the size of the team they work on, maybe it's the industry they're in, maybe it's the length of time they've been in their role, maybe it's their previous roles in their career. Are there some commonalities? There's always some level of a commonality usually in most cases. Okay, so now you're starting to collect some parameters. Just by doing this exercise, you're starting to collect some parameters around who you want to learn from and sell to. Now if you send out those 30 notes and you wrote them specifically, and you spend good quality of time on it. And you've hit them on email, you've hit them on LinkedIn, maybe even tried to call them, maybe you've sent them a Twitter DM, pulled out all the stops. How many people respond? If it's zero, it begs the question, do you now want to do another 30 in a very similar fashion? Do you want to change the messaging a little bit? Now it forces these natural experiments. Or do you want to maybe go after a different role? So it forces you to answer these questions in a very manual way before you even think about integrating and spending time on tools. And then you get to a point where it's like, okay, now I'm starting to get some learnings and now I've realized, okay, it's this group of people, I've spoken to maybe two or three, now I want to go out and actually build a campaign to now talk to the next 10 to 15 people in that group. Truncate this as much as you can because I think people focus so much on volume in the beginning. Even if you're selling down market, mid market, enterprise, volume comes once you've identified it and know the parameters. Parameters then allow you to do really strong enrichment with a clay. You now know the types of questions to give it. If you're not asking it the right questions, these enrichment tools, these sales tools will yield nothing. So it all comes back to even before you start your sales call, you need to make sure you're asking the right questions with am I even engaging, or do the people that I want to learn from or sell to, am I even messaging them in the right way? tart your sales call, you need to make sure you're asking the right questions with am I even engaging, or do the people that I want to learn from or sell to, am I even messaging them in the right way? Are they even the right person? And the only way you can do that is by actually truncating these little experiments.…

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