Exactly How to Make Calls, Earn Millions & Outrun Your Competition!

Hitting OTE (on target earnings) every year stacks up fairly quickly and it actually becomes easy to make millions of dollars in 3-5 years in enterprise SaaS sales at even moderate to elite levels. 

So would you pick up the telephone for one million dollars? 

Why don’t sellers do it anymore? Well, why is there an obesity epidemic? Why are people dying from cigarettes?

We each know what’s truly good for us but it’s so hard to make good decisions.

There’s a cacophony of pseudo-experts pontificating about how “cold calling” is dead and social selling is the new phone, new black, and even new pink. LinkedIn is the new telephone. Social is the new hotness and magic bullet. But there’s never been a magic bullet in any industry where 5% get all the results and thus commission dollars. When 50% of how you survive is based on a commission - aka CLOSING business - and 80% of sellers are missing quota, the odds are stacked against you. The deck is stacked against you in favor of the blackjack dealer, the venture you're making rich with your hard labor as you hustle and grind. Maybe I can help you... please read on:

If you eat anything and everything you want, as you get older, the odds are badly stacked against you. You will likely get fat and then it’s likely you’ll have heart complications.

These are just facts - inconvenient truths. Sure, some are blessed with an insane metabolism but it's still unlikely to bring you balance, homeostasis and longevity. 

You can send 30 InMails without a single response: if they’re spammy, lack personalization and insight, and are careless. You wing it, you lose. You can also send them thoughtfully (seconds of research) and see them convert even higher than email. You can add a call - buzz their smartphone in the pocket - leave a voicemail (buzz it again!) and then send an email with ONE relevant insight hook. 

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." Ben Franklin

Generating that critical insight is on you via pragmatic research. Time is your enemy. This doesn't have to take all day. I go through a multitude of hacks to do this in under 2 minutes in my book. It’s easy to get near perfect information these days. Executives are busy building their brand and leaving a lit guide path in cyberspace. Google search their name and relevant news. Scope their twitter feed. Their Published articles. Their press mentions. Their quote. Your connection in common - 1st degree in your network or through Team Link (someone at your company will know them or someone close to them.)

It's six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's all insanely small, connected, and incestuous at the very top!

There’s really no excuse not to be successful and make millions in sales but the enemy holding 95% of sellers back is CONFUSION on exactly how and what to do: there are TOO many methods and systems being promoted simultaneously. We know WHY we're doing it but just to ensure these are the prevailing whys. You are in sales to solve problems for your customers. You are a quota carrying rep (new or existing) to exceed your quota, not meet it, not hit 75% of it.

Why on Earth, would you put yourself through the self-flagellation to do this sales job without massive upside?

Sales is a thankless, rejection dense slog and if you're leading a team, even more so. Or you're doing it wrong and running a lifestyle business. Usain Bolt didn't train less as the fastest man in the world. Mayweather isn't feet up, reclining in the sand with a Corona.

The higher you rise, the less complacent you must become – the harder and fiercer you must train.

So it’s just like crash diets. Your discipline isn’t necessarily failing. Sure there are lazy reps but there are also ones who possess a really high work ethic; they read like fiends, run tight sales processes and still fail. What is it that drives failure? Anemic pipeline... caused by lack of doing the right activity in the right way. Spurts of guilt-driven activity won't deliver. The crash dieter has good intent and is trying good stuff. You’re putting your body through South Beach, Keto, Atkins, Paleo but there’s no consistency and you don't know why it works, what will work and how to do it consistently, daily. It’s throwing your body into confusion and suddenly weight is gained almost as a defense mechanism clamoring for self-preservation. The irony and the agony! 

The cumulative impact of choosing the most powerfully effective strategy only, and applying ONLY that every day, is staggering. This isn't a Napoleonic warfare scenario where the ground game is changing. Sure, deeper in the cycle, it does. But on the top funnel, it's about 'kill or be killed'. Go interrupt a stranger. Pick the right one. Right message, right time, right channel. That's the game, rinse repeat – thousands of times.

Breakthrough.

Let me give you a concrete example. If you ran 5 miles a day or cycled 40 miles per day, 7 days a week, for a 120 days? Complete physical revolution. Renaissance of fitness.

Fitness is one of the best analogies ever for sales because it includes cumulative impact, hygiene, discipline and organized systems within a finite system that we can’t necessarily control: our inherent biological limitations as humans. Life expectancy, genetics, environment, aging. Let me give you an example. Who gets a result? Someone that runs a marathon one Sunday, or runs a mile every day for 1 year? Obvious. The latter!

These metaphors are so true for sales because your time is limited. Your time is the constraint in the system. How can you possibly optimize it? Pareto it!

First rule of Fight Club. There is no Fight Club. First rule of selling. There really is no magic bullet. Do not delude yourself that selling is changed or Social Selling has solved this. South Beach diet has not decreased obesity. Pundits conclusively proved the only recipe is burning more calories than you ingest. Binary logic. Scientific accuracy.

You’ll get results proportional to what you do every day. Your success will directly reflect what you put into each day. I’m going to make it stupid simple for you in this article and break it down to the ridiculous. Literally, I open source to the world one technique called COMBO (core) that if applied every day of your life, even just every business day, will put you into that top 5% of sales performance. If your role touches revenue in any possible way, read on…

If you are deadly serious about making millions in business or sales, prospect every day, 7 days a week, 365. Yep. What about work/life balance? Step one, strive. Step two, we’ll worry about luxuries like days off later. If you read this far, you're hungrier than that to truly succeed.

On weekends and in the spaces between, build lists but fire off emails, InMails, and even leave messages. ABP: Always be prospecting. In airports, in transit, between meetings, on a walk, it doesn’t matter. On a box, with a fox, eating bagels and lox! 

I based my entire COMBO method off of a similar paradigm to how elite athletes train. They train almost every day, maybe they rest on the 7th or have a cheat eating day. Professional athletes do endurance training, cardio, strength (weights), plyometrics, nutrition analysis, stretching and are methodical in working all parts of their body separately, concurrently, and in every conceivable isolated way.

They often workout, stretch, box, run, weight train, even pull heavy wheelbarrows through the snow or chase chickens with their bare hands multiple times per day and night. It all seems extreme but they keep buffeting the goal from all sides. We even triumph over adversity down to our own biology. It's such a magical metaphor. Put the body under the right stress, it strengthens and grows faster. Like Mike Tyson, power of fists, agility, speed, and explosive power from below. Hitting a 250 lb. bag at 19 and seeing it jump! He built that with 10x massive action and tens of thousands of hours. He optimized his own genetic aptitude. 

The simple truth is that the number of prospecting channels that actually contain enough B2B buyers to be relevant are actually deceptively finite. Here’s that list: 

CHANNELS: 

1. Phone (find me one prospect without a cell phone) - it’s impossible!
2. Email (find me one prospect without email) - it’s impossible!
3. LinkedIn (530MM active, up to CXO, totally represented in VP layer) - granted CEOs are not here as much, they don’t get it yet (and love to limit access / liability) 
4. Twitter (the people are now more prominent than the brands) - this is an intel bonanza and DMing (direct messaging) or @mentioning someone plays into ego/narcissism or just plain praise - Twitter is a cornucopia of trigger events and insight research opportunities. 
5. Facebook Messenger / Skype - fearlessly adding people on Facebook or Skyping them is bold and fortune favors it. I’ll get that digital door slammed in my face all day for that 1 or 2 prospect in 50 who is blown away that I added them and I now have their complete attention. Because no one else would have the chutzpah to do this! 
6. Video email: I have received just a few video emails in the last 2 years. It was shockingly differentiated, he even held up a sign. Another was from Marylou Tyler with a 'thank you' message... pure class. I don’t think anyone is doing this but companies like Vidyard and Bombbomb can help you become a pioneer of it. Anything novel, if COMBINED with the above, will spike overall response rate by at least 3X (according to extensive research I’ve conducted as well as Sales Hacker cites.) 

So why aren’t you constantly combining all these channels every day? In my book, the one caveat to this advice which is literally like sales axiom or law at this point, is the human voice contains all the power. You are wasting precious cycles if you are not adding a voicemail component into your daily prospecting cadence. If you fire hard enough on a finite list of prospects (frequency) you will start to get live humans.

Executive Assistants are a proxy to the CXOs and VPs they support, so sell to them as if they were that exact executive. They’ll know their bio, their LinkedIn background, and the cast in the buying committee. They’ll refer you, they’ll give you cell phones, they’ll understand your unique value proposition. Honestly, EAs are a gold mine and one of the secrets to Steve Hall’s ability to reach C-Levels is leveraging their goodwill by knowing how to foster it. Steve’s a world champion at making phone-based prospecting to F1000 C-Levels still viable in this age of the silent sales floor and Spotify killing business. 

YOU will get back millions of dollars from the COMBO method and your company will make 10X the money they invest in you. You need to have the best possible tooling so taking your sales stack very seriously and even selecting a company that will support you in building this out is key. If you can rally your fellow sellers and sales leaders around these toolsets that could work too. Shiny object syndrome - “Look, a squirrel!” - is the risk here but for the elite athlete you are, your edge is in the following paragraph: 

TOOLING: 

1. DiscoverOrg / ZoomInfo - These are the most accurate, manually curated direct dial and email data sources in the world. I don’t know the secret sauce behind how they built this – and it’s often 70% accurate – but they’ve gotta be getting an intoxicating mix of email signature line data and manually calling on enterprise and mid-market companies to verify name, title, role, direct dial, and email. DiscoverOrg often has trigger events because RainKing and DO are now one - they call these "scoops." When you do hit a direct phone number it’s many times the cell and I’m even talking about the Chief Customer Officer level. Impressively powerful in direct outreach. The phone could never dial itself, so you’ll have to be brave. 
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator (NAV) - The power play here is to compare and contrast the DiscoverOrg, color-coded organization chart with what the NAV algorithm is exposing about the power base, org structure, and reporting layer. Cross-pollinating and cross-referencing these two data sources is extremely powerful and it’s rare that people are doing it effectively. ZoomInfo has a Chrome Extension called “Reach Out” that literally sits overlayed in the browser as you’re cruising around in LinkedIn to make this even more of a no-brainer. Yes, it sucks to pay for what was once a free social network and managers gripe about the cost of accessing data now but think of it this way: What if you were able to directly call that one impossible to reach executive because you found a warm referral that only LinkedIn’s relationship data could surface? This technology is worth its weight in gold for this reason. I can’t tell you how many times I identified someone close to a CXO in the upper menu on LinkedIn, used ZoomInfo to call their cell, and then got a warm introduction. “Use my name, here’s their cell, write me a quick email and I’ll forward.” POWER!
3. CRM and Drip Automation: Salesforce is a great choice here to record everything and use for account-based sales targeting and lead nurture / follow-up. You could use a shared spreadsheet to simply line up your top 50 accounts in the quarter and list the 5-7 stakeholders a piece (including C-Level crucial!), with last touch date but ultimately you’ll need a CRM as the sole source of truth. I recommend doing some drip marketing, lead scoring, and walking your best prospects automatedly up a ladder of engagement behind the scenes. The reason being is Blount’s familiarity law. The more times they see and interact with your brand and contact, the less touches it will take to break through. I think he calculates it takes 20 touches to get a response from a complete stranger. So drip reduces this substantially. 
4. Groove, SalesLoft, Outreach.io – To keep your COMBOs organized, build CADENCES as follows: Day 1 (call, vmail, email), Day 2 Custom LinkedIn Invite, InMail message (tailored), Day 3: Triple, Day 5 - Quad, Day 10: Triple. These systems allow you to organize all your prospecting touches and then nudge you to make the next move. Back in the day, I did this all in Salesforce with Tasks but that can get bulky, opening the file and seeing 12 alerts - Salesforce has improved this system too and synced it with Google Calendar. So Groove, Outreach, and SalesLoft keeps your prospecting organized, It can store templates. It can auto-send or bulk send a template to 50 targets at a time with personalization parameters like {first name}. The other killer app in here is the email tracking piece. Being able to watch who’s opening your emails is critical – "wow factor" for prospects – so I’d put Yesware in this bucket, too. Data-driven responses are elegant not creepy – you'd be surprised. If someone opens your email once, that’s a delete. If they open it over 2 times and forward it around to 5 cities, send them a follow up right then and there. Actually pick up the phone and call again! Send the next message in your sequence. I’ve seen some sizable deals get opened this way and close in under 90 days. 

The really tempting thing about all this is doing every piece of it but the calling. Add in the phone and your response rates go up 3X immediately without even improving the messaging. That’s how powerful a confident human voice on the line is. Prospects will preference the few that try and humanize the new sales process over brilliantly insight laden copy attempts in email alone. 

To take the analogy back to fitness, wouldn’t it be lovely to get exceptional results with just 12 minutes of light elliptical. Not going to happen! You actually need to break a full sweat and if you add weights to the cardio, look out. Explosively better results. Spending all the business day researching on LinkedIn, pinging around Twitter, tweeting, liking stuff, commenting, adding people with custom LinkedIn invites, writing blogs and posting LinkedIn Publish is ALL totally supplemental stuff that should happen outside of 8 to 5. 

The rep that only has a phone, pen and pad will slay the Social Selling rep because the sincerity, authenticity and ability for the receiver’s brain to be triggered is almost infinitely stronger than reading text on a screen. I liken this to the psychological, visceral impact of seeing a baby. Human brains literally have a reaction to seeing a baby that is hardwired in the brain. 

Now there are plenty of bad voicemails and bad attempts when you get a prospect live. 49% of voicemails sound shaky and uncertain (deer in headlights, heavy breathing, needy, and weak). 49% are the movie phone voice (used car salesman), cruise director. 2% are cool, calm, collected, confident and trusted advisor sounding. TONE is everything on the phone so you should record yourself and play it back. Practice taking one deep breath and leaving an entire 45-second message (w/ your cell phone at the front and back) in one breath. This is not free diving for pearls my friends, it’s 45 seconds. 

In a call block of 30 call attempts, you’ll likely get some live fire 3-5 prospects picking up. When you get someone on the phone you have a count to three before they reject and hang up. That’s why the classically promoted scripts like “The reason I am calling because…” ____ Click! can backfire. You need to use a fast pattern interrupt from the top script of the call. “Bob, it’s Tony – who’s in charge your customer experience?” Best question you could ever ask to a VP of Customer Experience. They must take ownership. It’s like calling Bob and saying, “Is your name Bob?” I always identify myself and company and then ask for authority. The formula I’ve developed is called Route, Ruin, Multiply. 

1. Laser focus on ROUTING (who’s the appropriate/best person, who’s in charge of, who handles) – get to the right name. gives them an immediate out to just refer you. “Oh, I don’t handle CRM - that’s Jane.” – Try to get their number or ask if it’s OK to drop their name. 
2. If they are the right person, RUIN. 99% of the time they have your system already from a much bigger incumbent vendor. “We use 800 lb. Gorilla Corp, we’re not interested.” Rebuttal: “Well how’s that working out for you?” 9 times out of 10 they’ll start to open up about the issues with the current scenario. Remember per Steve Richards, 3% of any market is actively looking to switch and 40% will entertain it. 
3. MULTIPLY: If you are selling SaaS into a mid-market or enterprise customer base it’s unlikely you’re going to perfectly hit buying windows so your best bet is to slot in as a “multiplier effect” and “multi-vendor” approach to their current stack. “Keep what you have in place, what if we could multiply the effectiveness of your current CX system by plugging in our solution?” 

The prevailing wind at your back is brevity. Keep everything extremely concise. Ruthlessly discipline yourself to ask open SPIN questions and provoke response: you need interactivity. Even on prospecting call, you should be talking 20% of the time. This means 80% of any/all interactions with a prospect or customer is your own active listening. If you only followed this paragraph, it would revolutionize your life, business, and interpersonal relationships. 

So let’s recap what we’ve learned in this article: 

• It’s possible to make millions in sales in a few years. 
• This is possible if you’ll pick up the phone and make at least 30 calls per day. That’s 7,200 per year excluding Sat/Sun (true champion move!) - Recently, one of the leading motivational gurus in the world ever, after 30 years of private seminars released his secret sauce of the top 3 richest graduates of his program. It looks like this. The first made 1800 calls year, the second 1500. (Less than 5 calls per day!) It simply came down to interrupting strangers, any industry. 
• You’d be fitter running a mile a day, every day of your life then sporadically competing in marathons. This analogy is identical to success as a hunter in new business sales. 
• A fool with a tool is still a tool. Tools will do nothing for you without a strategy. However, I’d like to see Serena Williams using a Billie Jean King tennis racquet. There is an edge by having the right sales stack. You need all the pieces if you’re seeking a force multiplier. 1) PHONE 2) Email 3) Sales Intelligence (direct dials/email) ZoomInfo/DiscoverOrg 4) Prospecting Productivity (SalesLoft, Groove, Outreach.io) 5) CRM & MKT Automation (to stay organized on meetings/oppts you set) and keep a drip going to stay top of mind.

In COMBO Prospecting (my new book) I got even more granular down to a simple basic equation which is the meaning of life, secret to survival in sales. The research that informed it appeared over and over again with every top rep I interviewed and then in the work of Craig Rosenberg (Triple Touch) and Jeb Blount (Triple Threat). The world’s best and brightest SDRs and full cycle sellers use the TRIPLE: 

COMBO CORE or TRIPLE: call, vmail, email (under 2 minutes flat)

30 triples a day, keeps the PIP away (performance improvement plan). 

Top areas you should be working on in 2018 are your phone skills. Practice leaving confident voicemails, stand up shoulders back, single breath. Practice your tone on the phone - cool, calm and collected. Would you trust you? Would you buy from you? From a tooling perspective get your sales stack in line. Also experiment with Video based email from Vidyard and Bombbomb and leveraging chat like Facebook Messenger or Skype to really stir the pot. Text messages are a very invasive and risky method too but if they’ve engaged at all, even lukewarm, don’t be afraid to move to text. 

Of course, all this being said, the way Reid Hoffman dominated all tech as an entrepreneur, founder, and gazillionaire investor was the strength of his referral networks, both strong and weak ties. Referrals are still and will always be the fastest path to trust and new business revenue. I’ve seldom met anyone doing a referral strategy by first finding the referrals on LinkedIn and then using the phone to CALL THE CONNECTION IN COMMON. If your colleague knows someone in the prospect company, call up your colleague or get coffee to strategize on how the intro can be best made. That’s the extra mile. Set calls with the referrer. Offer to ghostwrite the introduction. Do all the work for the referrer so they can simply hit forward and then send. 

After I released the book, I wondered to myself: is this stuff just so jacked up and honey badger hard to do, that only a few crazy, bold people will do it. But then I reminded myself, it’s what the top reps are already doing in any role based on net new or upset ACV revenue. I’ve finally just written down the series of combinations that actually worked. I’ve defined what the tactics and strategies are and codified the winning combinations maybe for the first time ever, any place in the world. It does live in the amazing authors works that I quote generously. I’ve simply amalgamated the blend into a scalable, repeatable methodology. 

People ask me, “Tony, what happens when the AI takes the SDRs jobs, and in 100 calls you only get voicemail?” What happens when literally not a single Millennial will answer the phone. I’d argue until they literally turn off voicemail as a capability on every cell phone, this channel stays gold. After that, you’d move that channel into a video based email, a Skype video message, a YouTube video that you tweet at them or send inside the email. The phone piece of the evolution of sales development is the humanized piece where something - not a robot - authentically speaks. There are services now where you can create one generic voicemail and then just automatically leave it on message machines. This would work but doing it yourself and sprinkling in some nuggets of wisdom or mentioning a common connection or trigger event (press, funding, innovation, risk) is still more powerful. 

The main idea here is lemmings off a cliff or salmon swimming down stream. If 999 people do it one way, ask yourself how you can be that 1 special person: signal in the noise. If you observe your own sales floor today, how quiet is it? Look around the room right now. How many people are not just on a call - internal meeting, existing client - but an actual attempt at a new customer connection. Who is actually picking up a phone over and over and leaving voicemails, connecting with executive assistants, and grinding? Is your culture so toxic that they force you to book a cubicle to do outbound calling because it’s so “disruptive?” Are they getting rid of phones at your desk, or keeping the noise down? That’s not a company that will be very successful. Salespeople who actively prospect are not necessarily running a boiler room. There’s been a mass confusion that if you allow a new business sales floor to be loud, it will sound like a call center or some type of Glengarry Glen Ross situation. Not so! 

Encourage your team to get in around 7:30am in the morning with a pre-built list. Everyone should be on the phone and dialing until 9, first hour, hour and a half of power. Then again, from 4:30 to 6:00pm. Everyone should be coffee-fueled, standing up, energetic, and making outbound calls. Log it in the CRM, fire off a template from the CRM. TRIPLE: Call from ZoomInfo, leave a relevant message related to a LinkedIn Profile scan, fire off a succinct email asking for time. Interrupt on purpose. Unabashedly seek their time knowing you have the value to help transform their business. 

I dive deeper into these concepts within "COMBO Prospecting," published by The American Management Association (AMACOM), and you canI talk about these things in COMBO Prospecting, published by The American Management Association (AMACOM), and you can purchase it here on Amazon. If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment. Please also follow my LinkedIn post page.