1|Page Hacking Sales 28 April 2018

A. Questions to ask Sales People to assess their skills

1. How do you figure out your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
2. How to map your Total Addressable Market (TAM)?
3. How to find the companies in your TAM and harvest accurate data?
4. How to build list of potential buyers?
5. How to find the contact information of potential buyers at scale?
6. How to find different strategies for targeting prospects?
7. How to segment your customers?
8. How to look at the messaging process and how to track, measure, and
optimize your outbound emails?
9. How to implement outsourcing and how to hire, train and manage virtual
assistants?
10. How to pick a CRM system that best fits your needs?
11. What are the best ways to nurture and follow up leads?
12. The process of preparing for your first call?
13. How to negotiate, handle objections, and close the deal?
14. How to navigate introductions, how to phrase introductions and how to get
your point across?
15. The importance of asking for referrals?
16. What are your measures of success? What are your KPIs? How do you
measure and optimize your KPIs?
B. Other takeaways/insights
1. It is critical that, as an organization, you have a product market fit, and that
your sales and marketing team can clearly articulate what a target customer
looks like so that they can know where to find information about that target
customer on the web
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2. Where your ideal user can be found depends on who that person is. You’ll
probably need to spend some time getting to know your users and looking
around the web to see where they hang out
3. Keeping tabs on your competitors and their customers is an essential strategy
for filling your pipeline
4. Personalization is everything when doing outreach
5. Definitions:
i. Total Addressable Market = highest potential of people who could
possibly buy
ii. Served Available Market = people reached via current and standard
sales channels
iii. Target Market = low-hanging fruit; most easily and likely to buy
6. We should have a qualitative and quantitative feedback loop from our
customer success/account management team to continually improve the ICP
and TAM. Keep refining your ICP and TAM until you have a core audience or
perfect profile
7. In advertising world, they say that customers need to see your brand seven
times before they can start to recognize it
8. In sales, “NO” is the second-best answer. “Yes” is the first but a “maybe” or
not receiving an answer at all are by far the worst
9. Segmenting your leads to personalize the messages: (1) the top group or the
low-hanging fruit would get phone calls built into your campaign; (2) the next
group would only get emails but with a high personal touch; (3) the bottom
group would get a standard outbound drip campaign from the salesperson
until they responded
10. Responding to a recently opened email results in a 30 percent higher
connection rate
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11. It is critical to have deep insight into how engaged a prospect is with any
content that is being shared
12. According to Yesware, Monday is not the best day to send an email while the
highest number of opened emails occurs on weekends
13. A lead called within 5 minutes of requesting information is over ten times
more likely to answer and four times more likely to qualify
14. Reps should focus on the quality of outbound sales instead of just quantity.
This means take the time to think through and create prospect profiles and
create targeted messages. Try different messages, wait different periods of
time between touchpoints and segment differently. Find what works for you
15. Tips on messaging psychology
i. Make your email conversational and human
ii. Be persuasive and try to evoke emotions
iii. Talk about your products and services in terms of benefits instead of
features
iv. It is more convincing to show the benefits of using your services in the
form of a case study sentence rather than simply letting them
v. Try to add value, evoke fear of loss, or play on people’s competitive
nature
vi. Be focused, and don’t try to cover too many tangential points in one
email
vii. Develop a clear persona for each segment list
viii. Introduce only one concept or idea per email. If you have a lot of value
propositions and ideas, relax, and save them for the other touches in
your campaign
ix. Send six – eight emails for every person you are reaching out to
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x. In some cases, you may actually get more responses by sending six –
eight emails than any other touch point earlier in your campaign. Even
if this is not the case, it is still worth it to get the people who respond
ton email six – eight that would have otherwise stayed cold
xi. Test everything. Every persona and industry is different, so you need to
test things to find out what works
xii. Stay away from long sentences or long paragraphs
xiii. Don’t be afraid to ask for things or demand things; just do it politely
xiv. The difference between being pushy and persistent is politeness
xv. Try putting the company name in the subject line
16. Build lists, segment, test, and optimize your email campaigns
17. Questions to ask ICP
i. When was the last time you bought something similar to our solution?
ii. What was that experience like?
iii. How long did it take?
iv. How many people were involved in the decision-making process?
v. Was the purchase of that product ultimately a success?
vi. If so, why? If not, why not?
vii. What would it take for you to become a customer of ours?
18. When you make a call, take good notes, and follow-up immediately with a
nice, neat, sharable version of your notes
19. Rules of Negotiating
i. Rule of Reciprocity
ii. Conditioning: Nothing comes free. Make sure to give and get
iii. Know what to ask and when
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iv. Follow good protocols for pre- and post-conversations. Nail down a
time prior to conversations and make sure all decision makers are able
to join. Be sure to send summaries to follow
v. Objective health measurement: stay aware of the health of your
accounts so that you know which ones need nurturing and which ones
are ready to close
vi. Time management: know what accounts to focus on first
vii. Common language: make sure you relate conversation to what you are
working with
viii. Story time: know what stories to share and when it is appropriate to
share them
ix. Know when to walk away
x. Don’t jump to discounting as it has such a negative impact in so many
ways
 Whoever feel the most pressure will make the most concessions
 Discounts kill credibility and create a negative perception of you
and your solution
 Discounts set the stage for future discount
20. We all know that sales should be about the client, not about us, so we need to
do what we can to get the client to buy when he/she is ready to buy, not
when we are ready to sell
21. Spend 30’ a day prospecting in some way. It can be making cold calls, sending
direct emails, searching through LinkedIn, asking for referrals, or something
else
22. If you start by aligning your goals with your clients’ goals, you won’t get stuck
with common objections or roadblocks
23. When presenting a demo
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i. Create a demo that is short and to the point

ii. Don’t make customers do too much to get started, and be considerate
of their time
iii. Go slowly, and don’t talk too much
iv. Ask questions such as “what are your thoughts on this?”, “Does this
make sense to you?”, and “Does this interest you?”
v. Take good notes on customers’ comments and feedback
vi. Always look for ways to get better
24. Introduction / Business Development
i. Try to make introductions only when you truly believe that there is real
mutual benefit, even if that benefit on one side is in the future
ii. A Good connector will circle back later and see if the parties have
connected: “how did it go?”. If the parties never connected, be sure to
ask why
iii. The best connectors and the most connected people I know write very
thoughtful introductions. It is not just a task on their to-do list
25. Sending mails: you will have a lot less competition getting in front of someone
in his or her physical in-box, and the target customer will appreciate the
gesture
26. Sending the flowers was a great way for us to indirectly advertise our services
to the rest of the office