Three reasons why your new account-based initiative is going to fail: How to solve plate spinning

Post 3 of an 8 part series 
on solving the 3 biggest reasons ABS fails. 

Part 2 here | Full post here

Plate spinning will derail any ABS initiative because a high volume of contacts needs to be engaged and managed within a single account. You need to solve this blocker with automation.

If prospects are like plates being spun up on a stick by a magician, imagine that every plate actually had an engine at its base. That engine just keeps the plate spinning. You can spin up as many plates/prospects as you need to but you only need to revisit a plate if the engine starts running out of gas. You can spin more plates. You can spin them faster. Less of them drop. Automation is like a little engine attached to every contact you engage in an account. It keeps you at the top of the inbox, front of mind, and in the game in a way no human could do on their own. 

Right now my team averages about 600 contacts that they are able to stay in touch with at a time because of the automation that we do – we use our own product (Outreach.io) for this.

We define automation as the ability to leverage customized, personalized communication at scale. Some want to cast automation like a machine killing the personalized touch and that’s not true at all. At Outreach, we actually send thousands of manual, personalized emails and we very much believe in the personal touch. As a matter of fact, it is at the core of our sales philosophy, and our customers’ (like Lars Nilsson – grandfather of the ABS sales stack – and Jerry Emmert – huge contributor to CenturyLink’s new account “hunter” mentality). 

For example, we have a methodology called “3 for 1” which says that email 1 is a personalized, handwritten email and emails 2 and 3 are very short automated bumps/replies of the initial message, saying something like “Not sure if you were able to review the message below, but I am hopeful you can relate to the problems we are hearing others in your industry are having. Love to take 5 minutes to see if we can be a solution” with the original email appended to the conversation at the bottom.

I recently read a blog post by a well-known and respected sales guru disparaging these “bumper” messages, be we’ve found, across hundreds of thousands of emails, bumps get higher reply rates than the original message! This shows the effectiveness of automation leveraging customization. This principle of 3 for 1 basically says you can get 3 touches for the price of 1. i.e. write 1 email but 3 get sent. Each subsequent touch will be more effective than the previous. What we did find, if you get lazy and bump too much, you get a reduced response. Your 4th email needs to be another handwritten, manual email…which, of course, can be bumped in an automated way, too!

Secondly, automation allows you to group similar tasks together. Grouping tasks together (batching) and executing them in short blocks of time (time blocking) greatly increases productivity.

So because Outreach's automation shows my team when, how many, and which phone calls need to be made, we have phone call block. Then, we have a LinkedIn block and an email block. When you do an activity over and over again and that’s all you do for that block, you become better because you’re more focused on it and get into a rhythm. It also allows you to practice whatever you’re doing so you continually improve.-

Part 4 will be posted on Thursday:  The Sine Wave of Sales