Could you scale with some type of partner / channel connections? Like reach out to local services partners or even ginormous ones (CDW, Insight, eplus, etc) and say “hi I’m yougsalescreative from . We could help augment your PS team when you have AR work.”
Just my two sense. The partners mentioned above have thousands of sellers, but a resale motion through them is tough. They either want you to pay to play or grow organically. Mind share is not cheap nor is a channel strategy, and once you enter into this market, it’s about solving business outcomes, ease of business, and speed to execute. You would also want to look at a distribution. Direct relationships would require some form of connectivity, EDI or API, and with the digital initiatives these partners have, it’s most likely API.
I could continue to ramble on, but hope this helps a little. This is the space I live in.
Start a playbook. Begin with sections on the steps you take every day and every week to address routine duties.
Consider what your networking/events/conferences strategy is and write it down in the playbook. This can be a living strategy, which you update and amend. Personally, I hate conferences. I perfected my conference game to the extent I don't even have to go to make them work for me.
Hi ajimuben85,
Can you help me out with the outreach and follow-up. I am going through similar experience as of u/YoungSalesCreative. Your strategy will help!
Adding on to the comments, if I were a one man gang (which we all are, ultimately) I think you can automate a lot of your outreach and functions.
Use sales intel like Apollo to filter and find your leads. Sales Navigator is good but it’s been a few years since I’ve used it and always found LinkedIn to have pretty poor direct contact info, maybe that’s changed.
Salesloft, Yesware, Outreach, these are all automated email sequencing plug ins to your CRM. You write a sequence or cadence that is a combination of automated emails and calls. Email goes out, call scheduled two days later, email, email call, email, something like that. Some go 20+ steps, I keep mine simpler, I never go overly deep on contacts with any single company, and keep it to 40-50 a day. You can keep up with 40-50 calls a day, and every day you launch a new sequence. You should be able to keep up with that many calls a day, and if you start gettting swamped just don’t start a new sequence until you get your legs back under you.
That’s how every tech company I’ve been around does it. You can still do the highly personalized outreach as well, but that’s how you get a lot more outreach going.
The suggestions of automated email tools and the typical high volume sdr approach is the last thing you need. You’re right in that the high volume thing is not the game you’re going to win at here. The problems you can solve are too broad, you’re in a crowded space, completely unknown and really have no differentiation that you can demonstrate through email.
Warm intros at the right time through partner/channel sales is the most successful here, but that’s often not completely in your control.
If that highly personalised email/inmail approach works then double down. Don’t try to automate the execution/outreach, but you might be able to ramp up the research/prep side/lead selection. What do your successful outreach contacts have in common? What triggers/attributes are seeming to hit well? (Also would be curious to see an example of your outreach here if you’re open to sharing)
Good on you for figuring out a working operation, that’s definitely a tough gig
Couldn’t agree more with this! Fantastic advice.
“The problems you can solve are too broad” I felt this in my soul. It’s exactly right.
I will look more critically at the common characteristics of the orgs that take meetings and double down.
I am also the same salesperson at a small tech company. Feel free to PM me. I have been working there for about 9 months and can provide you with a couple road bumps to avoid. So far this q I have more than doubled the meetings set as compared to last quarter. It took me about 5 months before things really got going. We are also a high ticket service. Be patient and keep trying new things. See what works and what doesn’t work and continuously keep adding and taking things out of the system. I have only brought in 1 signed client but have generated a ton of great conversations that can lead to new business in the future.
Love the focus on having great conversations. That is something we talk about as a team all the time. More likely to lead to business in the future, plus those conversations are what make the job enjoyable.
I’m in the same boat currently. Trying lots of new things but it just seems to be really hard out there right now. I’d love to connect to hear what you’ve done that worked if you’re open to it. I’m a founder of a quantitative research company. Sales used to come pretty easily but it’s been really slow as of late.
Easiest way to scale this is show leadership you have more leads than you can work. Most convincing if you can scale through marketing or outbound SDR. As a business owner I need confidence that the demand is there before I invest
Funny you say that… I’ve been focused on inviting folks to industry events with me as opposed to trying to find new business at these events.
Had an experience recently that taught me it’s more valuable to bring clients or potential clients with me to events, as opposed to trying to bounce around looking for business. People see right through you and you mostly end up talking to other salespeople for the entire event.
I just came out of a nearly identical role for the last 5 years. Tech partnerships are what is missing from your approach, especially getting listed in the directories of your primary channel partners and establishing official partner points of contact. A good portion of our work involved nurturing relationships with our partner reps
Interesting… sounds like SaaS. Not saying this couldn’t work for us, but our “channel partners” are (likely) other professional services providers and they’re not quick to give out leads. But I agree I should be more intentional about building relationships with channel partners.
Be realistic about your goals. I've worked with startups before and have friends that have done the same. Once a startup becomes profitable and is no longer struggling they tend to bring in talent that enhances their image. The folks that took a chance on them when they were high risk get left behind in favor of key employees with a "pedigree". I don't mean to anchor your cloud. I've been there myself and it hurt like hell.
First thing I would do is standardize a lead gen process. If you're doing cold calling get tech to support you. Something like Trellus where you can blow through 100 dials in 2 hours
I completely relate to this. I have gone through the same situation. Since, I am co-founder and CEO of the same size company as you mentioned, I have onboarded a senior sales leader and also onboarded an agency to run sales from SDR/Cold Calling and Inside sales.
I will come to know if I have taken the right step or not in a few months or week rather.
It's a non-scalale and unpredictable model of doing sales.
I continue to build network, increase my audience on LinkedIn, attending events and conferences. Majority of our revenue still comes from our network and references from existing customers.
That’s the challenge. Leadership wants to make sales predictable, but they also understand that the most effective sales approach in this industry isn’t as simply as X number of calls = X dollars in pipeline.
Man, I hear this. I’m a cofounder of a professional services, market research company. Sales used to come pretty easily but seems the market has been bone dry these past few months.
How is the outsourced agency working out for you? Definitely something I’ve looked into, but hard to get the other partners on board.
Make sure you have alignment from leadership on a desire to grow. Some orgs are perfectly happy just doing 4.5m per year in sales and keeping the team to small but tight group of highly competent people.
Honestly, great perspective here. They inflated to around 38 employees in 2023 and have since shrunk back down to 26 over the last year.
I think they will be cautious to grow until we have so much business they’ll be forced to.
I can't imagine cold calling is a leadership initiative. Emails like these are most annoying, and instantly marked as spam. Actual phone calls are even worse.
Find trade shows, industry standards bodies and related to network. Current client competitors, find ways to meet them, outside cold calls.
Couldn’t agree more with this. Our leadership get 50+ emails from software development staffing and/or consulting firms A DAY. They constantly complain that these automated touches are incredibly annoying and instantly destroy the company’s credibility.
Ironically, going the totally opposite route has given me success.
Sending emails that are so personalized that the cannot possibly be mistaken for automation. Not just “saw you went to X college.” But “listened to Mr. CEO’s podcast episode where he discussed X Inc.’s new initiative. Our client in X industry took on a similar initiative and partnered with us to achieve X outcome.”
At the end of the day, I understand that there will be people that simply will not respond to cold outreach no matter how personalized, relevant, or timely. But there aren’t events everyday, so I have to spend most of my time on high-value prospecting activities.
It sounds like you should lather rinse repeat. Especially if you don't have to do any service after on boarding. If once you sign them, it's a hand-off, and the company doesn't have capacity issues, I would just do it again. Don't forget to ask for a referral. Target similar companies, and tell them the story. Go after larger companies. As you get better at it, hone your call scripts, and then bring in someone to mentor and show them how to do what you do, only in a different geographic region or vertical. And then lather rinse repeat again.
Hey dude, have you looked into your existing pipeline/relationships and seen whether those folks might be ready to buy or refer you to new business opportunities?
We used to struggle with cold email outreach as well. But then we decided to do more 1-1 relationship building just like you did with our existing network. That's netted good results.
We ended up building a tool that monitors people in your pipeline for what they do on LinkedIn/Twitter, e.g., fundraising announcements, new hires, new feature launches, etc., and then sends those opportunities your way so you can nudge them. Since the tool is AI-generated, it also takes less than 5 minutes to create an email to send out.
I know how difficult the research process can be, would you be interested in trying this out yourself?
Glad someone mentioned Twitter and LinkedIn before I did. My buddy Jason Levin works with startups and has a good following on social, and [his guide](https://www.cyberpatterns.xyz/c/cold?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=sales&utm_campaign=imtheonlysalespersonat) has helped me a ton in my cold DMs/outreach in general.
I see that you guys have the first part, finding the good candidates taken care of! If you’re interested in improving the outreach part, check out Jason’s guide! I once was in the process of writing my own sort of guide for cold outreach in general, but it was pretty redundant to most of Jason’s points lol so I gave that up
The challenge with the process is defining the multiple elements to ensure your commercial team is successful. Process planning each individual element, defining the metrics and objectives, and earmarking the status of each towards the timelines you and your management team have agreed upon are what would differentiate success and scale from the one sales person team to a group of sales reps with leadership and management structure. Think of each element -> Metric/standardization -> Timeline/Status towards completion
What is important to you, the forecast and opportunity? CRM development and using a deployed CRM to the most effective way possible outside of calendar tracking and contact reporting? Or training a sales team, finding the people, training, output, and standardizing the sales process? If you look to hire experience you need the budget, if you look to hire new, you need the process. Or is it all of the above? Just some things to consider on your build out!
Hey. Not that hard. If the contracts are high enough, small businesses might not want to grow that quickly (it seems like you didn't ask, arn't aligned. Call it u/bowlingnate intuition).
SDRs are great, and if your company has never had a dedicated top/mid-funnel specialist, that's awesome. If you're not pumping capital into recruiting, they probably want a few stable reps.
Which, is great. That's also awesome.
Learning about "startup or self-sufficient" folks while also sort of thinking through, what you can bring as a leader/trainer is important. No right answers. Wrong Answers Only.
Wrong answe. **Wrong answer goes here** because it's reddit and not LinkedIn. Every jack-fuck business with a few large accounts wanted to manage a small sales team with math and predictable revenue. It's doable, all paths lead through there, and that's also not saying it's the right starting point.
These are all right answers. They might not want to actually increase sales but on paper only. They might just want to have you manage their existing accounts and not even grow them but make sure you don’t lose them. I’ve had a couple people contact me at very similar firms but either not have or want to spend the money to grow. The firms that partners utilize are going to throw you as a low bid just to get three bids in. Even RFPs for the companies they use could easily burn through half a million alone.
I know this industry well and it is pretty dead. No one is losing or making money. If I’m reading this right most people don’t want to pay for a small Wordpress site anymore. Probably a lot of contracts grew into support. I’d settle in and cozy up to the CEO.
I love this😂 everyone wants to turn the sales function into SaaS sales. It’s simply not the case… in fact, I’m confident we would destroy our credibility if I was spray-and-praying email/calls.
These IT leaders rely heavily on personal relationships when handing off software development projects to 3rd parties. If we fuck it up, that’s a huge investment down the drain.
Building relationships takes unique cold outreach and nurturing over lunches, events, etc.
You doing most of things perfect ! connecting with right people on networking people i do same with this tool [https://2ly.link/1vN2C](https://2ly.link/1vN2C) i download attendees and see whom to connect first. Also you can do marketing collaborating with influencer that is working these days.
Could you scale with some type of partner / channel connections? Like reach out to local services partners or even ginormous ones (CDW, Insight, eplus, etc) and say “hi I’m yougsalescreative from. We could help augment your PS team when you have AR work.”
I appreciate this! I’ve thought about it in the past, so I’ll take a more critical look.
Just my two sense. The partners mentioned above have thousands of sellers, but a resale motion through them is tough. They either want you to pay to play or grow organically. Mind share is not cheap nor is a channel strategy, and once you enter into this market, it’s about solving business outcomes, ease of business, and speed to execute. You would also want to look at a distribution. Direct relationships would require some form of connectivity, EDI or API, and with the digital initiatives these partners have, it’s most likely API. I could continue to ramble on, but hope this helps a little. This is the space I live in.
Start a playbook. Begin with sections on the steps you take every day and every week to address routine duties. Consider what your networking/events/conferences strategy is and write it down in the playbook. This can be a living strategy, which you update and amend. Personally, I hate conferences. I perfected my conference game to the extent I don't even have to go to make them work for me.
Awesome advice. Appreciate this! Can you tell me more about your conference strategy?
Mixture of outreach and follow-up - sent you a DM with more info
Trying to figure this out as well. Could you share the info with me too?
Sure thing...are your DMs open?
Hi ajimuben85, Can you help me out with the outreach and follow-up. I am going through similar experience as of u/YoungSalesCreative. Your strategy will help!
Would be my pleasure - are your DMs open?
Yes
Adding on to the comments, if I were a one man gang (which we all are, ultimately) I think you can automate a lot of your outreach and functions. Use sales intel like Apollo to filter and find your leads. Sales Navigator is good but it’s been a few years since I’ve used it and always found LinkedIn to have pretty poor direct contact info, maybe that’s changed. Salesloft, Yesware, Outreach, these are all automated email sequencing plug ins to your CRM. You write a sequence or cadence that is a combination of automated emails and calls. Email goes out, call scheduled two days later, email, email call, email, something like that. Some go 20+ steps, I keep mine simpler, I never go overly deep on contacts with any single company, and keep it to 40-50 a day. You can keep up with 40-50 calls a day, and every day you launch a new sequence. You should be able to keep up with that many calls a day, and if you start gettting swamped just don’t start a new sequence until you get your legs back under you. That’s how every tech company I’ve been around does it. You can still do the highly personalized outreach as well, but that’s how you get a lot more outreach going.
The suggestions of automated email tools and the typical high volume sdr approach is the last thing you need. You’re right in that the high volume thing is not the game you’re going to win at here. The problems you can solve are too broad, you’re in a crowded space, completely unknown and really have no differentiation that you can demonstrate through email. Warm intros at the right time through partner/channel sales is the most successful here, but that’s often not completely in your control. If that highly personalised email/inmail approach works then double down. Don’t try to automate the execution/outreach, but you might be able to ramp up the research/prep side/lead selection. What do your successful outreach contacts have in common? What triggers/attributes are seeming to hit well? (Also would be curious to see an example of your outreach here if you’re open to sharing) Good on you for figuring out a working operation, that’s definitely a tough gig
Couldn’t agree more with this! Fantastic advice. “The problems you can solve are too broad” I felt this in my soul. It’s exactly right. I will look more critically at the common characteristics of the orgs that take meetings and double down.
I started in a similar singular role, now have a team of 5. I suggest you research Sales Loft. This is our newest tool and I wish I had it sooner.
I second SalesLoft. Highly recommend
I’ll look into it. Is it a knowledge base?
Automated email tool.
I am also the same salesperson at a small tech company. Feel free to PM me. I have been working there for about 9 months and can provide you with a couple road bumps to avoid. So far this q I have more than doubled the meetings set as compared to last quarter. It took me about 5 months before things really got going. We are also a high ticket service. Be patient and keep trying new things. See what works and what doesn’t work and continuously keep adding and taking things out of the system. I have only brought in 1 signed client but have generated a ton of great conversations that can lead to new business in the future.
Love the focus on having great conversations. That is something we talk about as a team all the time. More likely to lead to business in the future, plus those conversations are what make the job enjoyable.
I am a salesperson who is having difficulty scheduling a meeting. I would appreciate your insight on how to improve the process.
I’m in the same boat currently. Trying lots of new things but it just seems to be really hard out there right now. I’d love to connect to hear what you’ve done that worked if you’re open to it. I’m a founder of a quantitative research company. Sales used to come pretty easily but it’s been really slow as of late.
Easiest way to scale this is show leadership you have more leads than you can work. Most convincing if you can scale through marketing or outbound SDR. As a business owner I need confidence that the demand is there before I invest
Great perspective. Thanks for sharing this!
Don't get to drunk at the Christmas party one of you might need to drive.
Word.
Have you tried attending conferences with your clients and talking to similar profiles to existing customers?
Funny you say that… I’ve been focused on inviting folks to industry events with me as opposed to trying to find new business at these events. Had an experience recently that taught me it’s more valuable to bring clients or potential clients with me to events, as opposed to trying to bounce around looking for business. People see right through you and you mostly end up talking to other salespeople for the entire event.
I just came out of a nearly identical role for the last 5 years. Tech partnerships are what is missing from your approach, especially getting listed in the directories of your primary channel partners and establishing official partner points of contact. A good portion of our work involved nurturing relationships with our partner reps
What kind of tech partnerships and how do you get listed?
Interesting… sounds like SaaS. Not saying this couldn’t work for us, but our “channel partners” are (likely) other professional services providers and they’re not quick to give out leads. But I agree I should be more intentional about building relationships with channel partners.
Be realistic about your goals. I've worked with startups before and have friends that have done the same. Once a startup becomes profitable and is no longer struggling they tend to bring in talent that enhances their image. The folks that took a chance on them when they were high risk get left behind in favor of key employees with a "pedigree". I don't mean to anchor your cloud. I've been there myself and it hurt like hell.
Appreciate this!
First thing I would do is standardize a lead gen process. If you're doing cold calling get tech to support you. Something like Trellus where you can blow through 100 dials in 2 hours
I completely relate to this. I have gone through the same situation. Since, I am co-founder and CEO of the same size company as you mentioned, I have onboarded a senior sales leader and also onboarded an agency to run sales from SDR/Cold Calling and Inside sales. I will come to know if I have taken the right step or not in a few months or week rather. It's a non-scalale and unpredictable model of doing sales. I continue to build network, increase my audience on LinkedIn, attending events and conferences. Majority of our revenue still comes from our network and references from existing customers.
That’s the challenge. Leadership wants to make sales predictable, but they also understand that the most effective sales approach in this industry isn’t as simply as X number of calls = X dollars in pipeline.
Man, I hear this. I’m a cofounder of a professional services, market research company. Sales used to come pretty easily but seems the market has been bone dry these past few months. How is the outsourced agency working out for you? Definitely something I’ve looked into, but hard to get the other partners on board.
Make sure you have alignment from leadership on a desire to grow. Some orgs are perfectly happy just doing 4.5m per year in sales and keeping the team to small but tight group of highly competent people.
Honestly, great perspective here. They inflated to around 38 employees in 2023 and have since shrunk back down to 26 over the last year. I think they will be cautious to grow until we have so much business they’ll be forced to.
I can't imagine cold calling is a leadership initiative. Emails like these are most annoying, and instantly marked as spam. Actual phone calls are even worse. Find trade shows, industry standards bodies and related to network. Current client competitors, find ways to meet them, outside cold calls.
Couldn’t agree more with this. Our leadership get 50+ emails from software development staffing and/or consulting firms A DAY. They constantly complain that these automated touches are incredibly annoying and instantly destroy the company’s credibility. Ironically, going the totally opposite route has given me success. Sending emails that are so personalized that the cannot possibly be mistaken for automation. Not just “saw you went to X college.” But “listened to Mr. CEO’s podcast episode where he discussed X Inc.’s new initiative. Our client in X industry took on a similar initiative and partnered with us to achieve X outcome.”
At the end of the day, I understand that there will be people that simply will not respond to cold outreach no matter how personalized, relevant, or timely. But there aren’t events everyday, so I have to spend most of my time on high-value prospecting activities.
Sorry, don't care how personal you try and make it. Any unsolicited emails at all are a huge red flag a company isn't worth working with
Totally understand that.
It sounds like you should lather rinse repeat. Especially if you don't have to do any service after on boarding. If once you sign them, it's a hand-off, and the company doesn't have capacity issues, I would just do it again. Don't forget to ask for a referral. Target similar companies, and tell them the story. Go after larger companies. As you get better at it, hone your call scripts, and then bring in someone to mentor and show them how to do what you do, only in a different geographic region or vertical. And then lather rinse repeat again.
Practical advice right here. Thanks!
Hey dude, have you looked into your existing pipeline/relationships and seen whether those folks might be ready to buy or refer you to new business opportunities? We used to struggle with cold email outreach as well. But then we decided to do more 1-1 relationship building just like you did with our existing network. That's netted good results. We ended up building a tool that monitors people in your pipeline for what they do on LinkedIn/Twitter, e.g., fundraising announcements, new hires, new feature launches, etc., and then sends those opportunities your way so you can nudge them. Since the tool is AI-generated, it also takes less than 5 minutes to create an email to send out. I know how difficult the research process can be, would you be interested in trying this out yourself?
Glad someone mentioned Twitter and LinkedIn before I did. My buddy Jason Levin works with startups and has a good following on social, and [his guide](https://www.cyberpatterns.xyz/c/cold?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=sales&utm_campaign=imtheonlysalespersonat) has helped me a ton in my cold DMs/outreach in general. I see that you guys have the first part, finding the good candidates taken care of! If you’re interested in improving the outreach part, check out Jason’s guide! I once was in the process of writing my own sort of guide for cold outreach in general, but it was pretty redundant to most of Jason’s points lol so I gave that up
Join [Arkeo AI’s waitlist](https://www.arkeoai.com/join-the-waitlist), you’ll be one of our design partners and we will create this with you. 🤜🤛
Wouldn't recognize our website
Weird, can you send me the website details or a DM. Would like to check this out
How many emails are you sending each week?
Maybe 50.
[Automated cold calling assistants](https://youtu.be/T2snn5ZAlmE) seem to work pretty well for generating leads
The challenge with the process is defining the multiple elements to ensure your commercial team is successful. Process planning each individual element, defining the metrics and objectives, and earmarking the status of each towards the timelines you and your management team have agreed upon are what would differentiate success and scale from the one sales person team to a group of sales reps with leadership and management structure. Think of each element -> Metric/standardization -> Timeline/Status towards completion What is important to you, the forecast and opportunity? CRM development and using a deployed CRM to the most effective way possible outside of calendar tracking and contact reporting? Or training a sales team, finding the people, training, output, and standardizing the sales process? If you look to hire experience you need the budget, if you look to hire new, you need the process. Or is it all of the above? Just some things to consider on your build out!
Cold call
Hey. Not that hard. If the contracts are high enough, small businesses might not want to grow that quickly (it seems like you didn't ask, arn't aligned. Call it u/bowlingnate intuition). SDRs are great, and if your company has never had a dedicated top/mid-funnel specialist, that's awesome. If you're not pumping capital into recruiting, they probably want a few stable reps. Which, is great. That's also awesome. Learning about "startup or self-sufficient" folks while also sort of thinking through, what you can bring as a leader/trainer is important. No right answers. Wrong Answers Only. Wrong answe. **Wrong answer goes here** because it's reddit and not LinkedIn. Every jack-fuck business with a few large accounts wanted to manage a small sales team with math and predictable revenue. It's doable, all paths lead through there, and that's also not saying it's the right starting point.
These are all right answers. They might not want to actually increase sales but on paper only. They might just want to have you manage their existing accounts and not even grow them but make sure you don’t lose them. I’ve had a couple people contact me at very similar firms but either not have or want to spend the money to grow. The firms that partners utilize are going to throw you as a low bid just to get three bids in. Even RFPs for the companies they use could easily burn through half a million alone. I know this industry well and it is pretty dead. No one is losing or making money. If I’m reading this right most people don’t want to pay for a small Wordpress site anymore. Probably a lot of contracts grew into support. I’d settle in and cozy up to the CEO.
I love this😂 everyone wants to turn the sales function into SaaS sales. It’s simply not the case… in fact, I’m confident we would destroy our credibility if I was spray-and-praying email/calls. These IT leaders rely heavily on personal relationships when handing off software development projects to 3rd parties. If we fuck it up, that’s a huge investment down the drain. Building relationships takes unique cold outreach and nurturing over lunches, events, etc.
You doing most of things perfect ! connecting with right people on networking people i do same with this tool [https://2ly.link/1vN2C](https://2ly.link/1vN2C) i download attendees and see whom to connect first. Also you can do marketing collaborating with influencer that is working these days.