Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline

PRAISE FOR PREDICTABLE PROSPECTING

Most of what has been written for salespeople about prospecting and pipeline management does nothing to improve their sales results. Either it’s too theoretical, which makes it complex and impractical or, even worse, it’s too simple to help in the real world. This is the Goldilocks of prospecting books. It walks a just-right balance, with useful cases and examples.

—Neil Rackham, bestselling author of SPIN Selling

Prospecting is the most important work in sales. It’s also the one activity that virtually all salespeople and sales organizations struggle to do consistently. In Predictable Prospecting you’ll learn how to streamline your prospecting activities into an effective selling system that works! If you’re ready to make more money and accelerate your sales productivity, then this book is essential reading.

—Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, Inc., and author of Fanatical Prospecting and People Buy You

Marylou is one of the finest and brightest minds I know when it comes to upping the game. She makes outbound prospecting far more productive, predictable, and profitable. Her latest thinking is not only worthwhile reading, it’s a MUST if your business goal is increased revenue performance.

—Jay Abraham, founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc., and author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got

Predictable Prospecting does for the modern seller what Predictable Revenue did back in its day. In this book you get an updated process that integrates with what is currently working in your playbook. Not a rip-and-replace strategy . . . just better.

—Trish Bertuzzi, CEO of The Bridge Group and author of The Sales Development Playbook

Predictable Prospecting offers a great mix of tactical recommendations within a strategic methodology for predictable pipeline generation. This is a great book for staying current on the technologies and processes that are proving to be the most effective.

—Brent Holloway, VP of Corporate Sales at Talend, Inc., and coauthor of Sales 2.0

Most sales organizations suffer from an unoptimized sales process. The result? Inconsistent sales and revenue as well as missed forecasts. In Predictable Prospecting, Tyler and Donovan show you how to reengineer your sales prospecting into an opportunity machine.

—Max Altschuler, founder and CEO of Sales Hacker, Inc., and author of Hacking Sales

This book is my team’s go-to playbook for generating predictable revenue.

—Paul Fifield, Chief Revenue Officer of UNiDAYS

Marylou Tyler combines great wisdom and knowledge to help solve the pipeline development challenge we face daily. This book will unlock the door to consistent and predictable pipeline growth like never before.

—Nick Scaglione, VP of Sales and Business Development at VoxGen

This book leads you to a true understanding of sales productivity.

—Mark Kosoglow, VP of Sales at Outreach SaaS

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To my parents, who taught me

never to stop learning

—MLT

To my GLG colleagues

—JD

CONTENTS

Foreword by Aaron Ross

Acknowledgments

Introduction      Turning the Unpredictable into the Predictable

PART I

TARGET

CHAPTER 1    Internalizing Your Competitive Position

CHAPTER 2    Developing an Ideal Account Profile

CHAPTER 3    Crafting Ideal Prospect Personas

PART II

ENGAGE

CHAPTER 4    Crafting the Right Message

CHAPTER 5    Getting Meetings Through Prospecting Campaigns

CHAPTER 6    (Dis-) Qualifying Prospects

PART III

OPTIMIZE

CHAPTER 7    Measuring and Optimizing Your Pipeline

CHAPTER 8    Leveraging the Right Tools

CHAPTER 9    Managing Sales Development Professionals

CHAPTER 10  Twelve Habits of Highly Successful SDRs

Conclusion       The Future of Predictable Prospecting

Appendix          Quick Guide to Predictable Prospecting

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

In 2011, Marylou and I published Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com, which was referred to by Inc. magazine¹ and others as the sales bible of Silicon Valley. That book revealed how I created the outbound prospecting program at Salesforce.com and introduced several breakthrough ideas for adding qualified opportunities at the front end of the pipeline in a way that ensures rapid and consistent revenue growth.

The first breakthrough idea was that organizations need to have dedicated prospectors to get off the revenue roller coaster. Blowing out quotas some months and bombing during others is a natural consequence of asking salespeople to do everything—prospecting, qualifying, closing, servicing, and managing accounts. Even the greatest of the great, people who excel at both prospecting and closing, will end up on the roller coaster. It is almost impossible for a single salesperson to balance prospecting and closing in a way that delivers consistent results. To get predictability in revenue, you have to have predictability in lead generation. The way to achieve that is by having dedicated prospectors who feed experienced closers.

The second breakthrough idea was that phone- and e-mail-based outbound prospecting is the most predictable way to create qualified appointments. This concept remains particularly heretical with gurus espousing that the road to riches is paved with inbound marketing and social selling. I too would like to make money while I sleep, but I know sales accrue to salespeople who work the hardest and the smartest.

When Predictable Revenue was published, many sales leaders operationalized it by developing phone scripts and e-mail templates as well as measuring the volume of e-mails and dials per day or the number of appointments set. What people miss is the fact that success is not solely about templates and activity. Building a predictable pipeline requires diligent implementation of an end-to-end system. The system starts by finding the right targets and, critically, avoiding the wrong ones. After that, you move the right prospects through an increasingly personalized assembly line toward a final outcome—they buy or they don’t.

Before I created the outbound prospecting system at Salesforce.com, I read countless books on sales prospecting, and almost all of them were a waste of time. Most sales books rehash the same high-level ideas over and over again, albeit with new, trademarked names. What made Predictable Revenue successful was one strategic concept supported by a few simple, highly actionable tactics that most types of companies could employ. And that same formula is what will make Predictable Prospecting indispensable. For starters, Marylou and Jeremey have enhanced the strategic concept. While outbound prospecting remains the big idea, they acknowledge the world has moved from spray and pray to account-based sales development (ABSD). In addition, they have taken the tactical elements of Predictable Revenue and added pressure-tested details to explain precisely how to build and operate a successful outbound prospecting program. Nothing like this book has existed before.

Each year, outbound prospecting gets more complicated; there are more data sources, more apps, and more tasks. All of this complexity has made it exceptionally challenging to build, maintain, and sustain a consistent sales development system. One of my favorite things about this book is that Marylou and Jeremey have decluttered ABSD by coming up with a step-by-step system that anyone can implement. Importantly, their system delivers the nitty-gritty with tips on how to move customers through the buying cycle from unaware to aware to interested to evaluating to purchase. And, while I think it’s important for you to stay focused on their complete system, I have to admit that I love the line-by-line analysis of sample e-mail templates.

The information in this book is critical to senior sales executives looking to establish an outbound prospecting team, sales managers leading existing teams, or individual salespeople seeking to improve performance. Individual reps, in particular, can implement Marylou and Jeremey’s system by scheduling recurring calendar blocks of two or more hours. Without consistent time blocking, nothing else in this book, or any other book, will predictably increase your sales pipeline.

Marylou and Jeremey’s follow-up to Predictable Revenue goes deeper, making Predictable Prospecting a perfect complement. I decided to go higher-level in my latest book, From Impossible to Inevitable, by asking: How do successful sales teams achieve and sustain hypergrowth? Underlying this question are many others, including: Why engage in outbound prospecting in the first place? How does it compare to inbound marketing and word-of-mouth? When does it succeed? When does it fail? In the end, I found what matters most is to nail a niche of customers who value your offering as a must-have, not merely as a nice-to-have.

I leave you with this universal truth: prospects don’t care what you do. They care about what you do for them. At its core, prospecting is simply people selling to people. It’s not about templates, scripts, and activities. Prospects need to connect with you and to trust you as a partner who is helping them achieve their goals. If you nail a niche, stay organized with the system outlined in this book, and bring your genuine humanity to prospecting, you will outperform everyone else.

—Aaron Ross, bestselling coauthor of Predictable Revenue and From Impossible to Inevitable and cofounder of Carb.io (Twitter: @motoceo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Creating a book is very much a team effort. We are indebted to our agent, Jackie Meyer, our secret line editor, PJ Dempsey, and to the following individuals on the McGraw-Hill team for the magic they create behind the scenes: Donya Dickerson, Chelsea Van der Gaag, Pattie Amoroso, Cheryl Hudson, and Steve Straus.

We would like to add our special thanks to our editor extraordinaire, Casey Ebro, whose guidance made the book 10 times better after every draft. We are grateful that you took us to task for any logical inconsistencies. And we appreciate your pushing us to make the book more personal even though both of us are wired for process.

Finally, this book would not have been possible had we not been able to stand on the shoulders of giants, including Aaron Ross, Trish Bertuzzi, Jeb Blount, Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, Zig Ziglar, Neil Rackham, Stu Heinecke, Mark Roberge, Mike Weinberg, and so many others.

To my clients: inside this book are our secrets, revealed. Twenty-eight years of figuring out how to start conversations consistently with people we don’t know. Getting them to buy predictably so that your businesses can scale and grow. In the late 1980s, we tweaked regular mail to improve response rates, then predictive dialers, and now, the Internet. It’s an honor and privilege to teach, mentor, fight in the trenches, and emerge victorious with you.

To my business partner, Bob Kelly: you are a superb sales executive and true master of the sales conversation. I hope we continue working together until we both decide the beach (and golf for you) are more fun than crafting e-mail sequences and building buying scenarios.

To my husband, Jeff: Do you know how many cold e-mails you’ve read, FTRP and AWAF calls you’ve listened to, and top-of-funnel schematics and drawings you’ve viewed? And have you ever objected to a Honey, can I run this by you? You are a gift to me.

To my beautiful daughter, Nicki: I love your laugh, and it’s so incredibly adorable the way you roll your eyes every time I start conversations with people at airports, in restaurants, waiting in line, asking them what they do, how they describe their job, what they like most about it, what their clients are like. I appreciate your allowing me the opportunity to indulge my curiosity and desire to learn and connect. You are my light. You take my breath away.

And finally to you, my dear reader and newfound friend: I’m so happy you picked up this book. You and I, we’re in this together. I’ve done my best to share what I’ve learned in the 28 years I’ve spent doing what I love. In these pages, I hope you find the true secret to predictable prospecting.

—MLT

Those who know me well know that I was born, for better or worse, with intellectual wanderlust. Rather than pursue mastery in a single domain, I strive to hit the professional reset button about once every three years. I was incredibly lucky during my 16 years at Gartner Inc. to have