Blake's Simple Guide to Big Paychecks (working title)

In my last full year at Clearbit my outbound sequence averaged a 23% reply rate (I added just north of 1k new contacts to it), and with roughly 2/3 of those being positive by adding ~ 4 contacts a day I had roughly 3 net new meetings a week.

The good news is I did not do anything revolutionary and will share my exact steps below (you don't even have to pay for a course or sign up or a newsletter). The bad news is most of this is actual work you have to do and cannot be automated by AI (at least yet).

Blake's Simple Guide to Big Paychecks (working title)

1. Define your Ideal Customer (Company and Person) as specific as possible.

• Outbound is hard, it is time consuming, and nothing will suck up more of your time then not reaching out to the right people
• Go beyond the traditional. Industry, revenue, title, etc are all great places to start, but the more specific you can get, the more likely you are to succeed. Here are a few “non-traditional” data points I used above the normal data(which again requires some work). Every box they checked was a point and that is how I would rank my accounts (I had about 10).

2. List your ideal personas and the top 2-3 use cases you solve for each persona

• Depending on what you sell this could be 1 or many. Again the more specific you can get on your ideal persona
• Be as specific as possible about what you solve for those personas and account for the different types of companies
• Write some example copy for your emails/calls that don’t speak to features. You should be focused not just on the problems they solve, but also on the future state of what their life could be like if they worked with you.

3. Source 2 Accounts (may vary) and the relevant contacts every single day (non-negotiable)

• In working with people for years on improving outbound, the simplest things always seem to be the hardest. Every successful prospector I have worked with did it every single day, no exceptions
• This number can vary based on your ICP and your goals. I prioritized the mid market space for outbound (we did better here, less legacy systems to rip out) which meant 2-3 contacts per company on average. As mentioned above adding 4-5 contacts daily got me to 2-3 outbound meetings per week which for my Math of Sales was a great place to be.?
• I liked using intent to source accounts (website visits, product usage, G2, etc) as they converted higher, but I know this is not an option for everyone. Find a way to consistently source high fit accounts, and I also would recycle after 6 months of no contact (or a role change)

4. Drop those contacts daily into a sequence with NO AUTOMATION

• I mainly used Outreach as an organization tool, which means any engagement tool will work for this process.
• My sequence was 5 emails, 5 social touches and 5 calls (generally would do one of each on the same day) spread out over ~3 weeks

5. Use your previously generated copy to write your emails/frame your cold calls

• I am going to pull the old man card and say with certainty that automation (and I would even argue templates) have made a bunch of us lazy, and honestly not good at outbound. If someone is worth reaching out to, they are worth researching and sending relevant messaging to.
• The reason I suggest having 2-3 dialed in use cases is because at the end of the day we are still guessing about what they care about, or at least what they care about now. The more “Gaps” you can reveal about their current state, the more likely one is to not just be relevant but timely

6. Your CTA should be a value add

• No one, absolutely no one, enjoys getting on a call to be peppered with a bunch of questions about something they don’t even understand yet.
• WIth outbound your first meeting should be something that even if they don’t talk to you again they walk away from knowing something they did not know before.
• No one just has 30 minutes to spare, but if you come across as an expert that will teach/show them something relevant to their company/role that they did not know before, they often will make time.

7. Do This Everyday

• I already mentioned this, but I honestly believe consistency is the #1 differentiator between top and bottom performers.?
• Doing something everyday also makes you better if you are doing it the right way (loading 100’s of contacts into automated emails does not make you better at anything) which will lead to being more efficient and you can spend less time in getting the same results

I know this is not revolutionary, but it works.

PS - don’t hesitate to show my questions or tell me why I am wrong, I love chatting about this stuff and showing that success in sales does not have to be complicated.