PG/Your Sales Playbook
How to build your own pipeline
Last year, my team had an offsite with the rest of the APAC team.
Everyone’s in a happy mood. It’s our last night. We start chanting.
What do you do when you are bored? PG!
You know why we are so successful? PG!
When we return to our hotels , what are we going to do? PG!
How do we spend our weekends? PG!
CHEERS GUYS TO PG!!
Yes, PG culture is very strong, and for good reason.
Every sales rep needs to know PG.
Being able to generate pipeline out of nothing is an invaluable skill.
If you’t create software, you can create pipeline.
When I tell folks that I’m in sales, the first question I get is: how do you find leads?
I break it down here in this quickstart guide.
This guide is great for the following personas:
First time founders who are trying to figure out sales
First time sales rep at early stage startup going after uncharted territory
Curious individual thinking of breaking into BDR role
Sales rep at large established company who’s assigned named accounts or specific territory
Traditional B2C sales rep thinking of incorporating tech - enabled practices
For this exercise, let’s imagine that you just started your startup, you sell a single product that helps sales leaders with forecasting.
Company : Cleopatra
Product: One stop shop for sales forecasting
Problem: Instead of using spreadsheets, visualise pipeline goals
Value Drivers: Save time
This is the 3step framework - identify-research-outreach to generate leads from nothing.
Identify
Identify ideal customer profile - this is the typical characteristics of your ‘sweet spot’ company to target. Not too early that they don’t need you, but also not too late that they are already using incumbents.
Which segment are you targeting?
Startups, SMB, Digital Natives or Enterprise?
Which geography are you selling to?
APAC, ANZ, China, North America
What company headcount might use you?
1-10, 11-50, 51-200, 201-500, 500-1000, > 1000
What industries do you sell to?
Internet, Healthcare
Which department do you sell to?
Sales, Marketing, Finance
Which job titles are interested?
Sales Operations, Sales Enablement, Head of Sales, VP Sales, Founder
What series of funding do they typically have?
Venture backed, Private funding, Bootstrapped, Listed
Example of Cleopatra’s ICP:
Segment: Startups, Digital Natives
Geography: Singapore, Australia
Headcount: 51-200, 201-500
Industries: Cloud native, internet, marketplaces, financial services
Department: Sales, Sales Operations, Finance Operations, Finance
Job Titles: VP Sales, GTM Strategy & Ops, Sales Operations
Funding: Series B-C , raised around $10 - $50 million of funding
Unique to Cleopatra’s ICP
How many sales people does forecasting become a problem?
Generally, they have > 10 sales people
They have a VP Sales, CRO
They also usually hire a sales operations person
Sales maturity?
They are using other sales enablement software such as Outreach, Zoominfo → indicates higher sales maturity, and readiness to purchase 3rd party tools
Which CRM are they using?
They are using CRM like Salesforce, Hubspot as we only have integrations with them for now
Based on Cleopatra’s ICP, start tiering target accounts into 3 segments
Tier 1: accounts that meet all above requirements
Tier 2: accounts that meet most requirements
These accounts are slightly earlier stage of buying journey, they have yet to hire a VP of sales, only have 5 sales reps now
Tier 3: all other accounts that I can sell Cleopatra
Excluding tier 1/2 accounts AND have Salesforce/Hubspot
Research
Once you’ve found your ICP, build out your database. Start using LinkedIn / Crunchbase / Google to scrape out 100-200 companies that you can target.
Based on our above info, here’s an easy way I can find Cleopatra’s target accounts using LinkedIn Sales Navigator account filters
Populate database to a google spreadsheet with a list of target companies. Make sure to have the following details of all the relevant features:
Geography
Funding
Number of sales people
Once done, start finding contact info using Zoominfo, Lusha, LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Emails
Numbers
Finding emails is a must-have - a lot of emails can be guessed, so you will need a email verifier tool to ensure your emails don’t bounce.
Common email formats:
jake@cleopatra.com
jake.tan@cleopetra.com
jaket@cleopetra.com
Free email verifier tools
LinkedIn is sufficient to start, most basic info can be found there if don’t want to make the investment in sales nav (~$150/mo)
Sales Navigator offers more advanced searches / query - more on that in future posts
Ping me for a free 2 months LinkedIn Sales Navigator trial if you want to give it a shot
Bonus: If possible, do outsource this data mining / manual research work to interns, freelancers on upwork.
Outreach
Outreach - LinkedIn, Phone, Email are your 3 main channels of outreach.
Some sales folks exclusively use email because they don’t like ‘cold calling’. You’re definitely missing out on a huge segment of customers you can monetise.
Some sales folks use all 3 channels the same way, and complain about ineffective results. If you’re going to copy paste your email to inmail, you are still using 1 channel.
Knowing when and how to use each channel in a relevant manner will help you stand out from the audience.
Email - most common form
Hard to stand out from the noise
Execs always check their emails, you have about 2-5 seconds before they decide it goes to trash
Neutral subject lines > salesy , emotionally charged one
Neutral tone: Your forecast reports
Emotional: Stop wasting time on inaccurate forecasts / 33% better forecasting
Keep subject lines short → 1 - 4 words
Email body should be concise
Easy to read, 5th grader language
No niceties , or ‘hope you are well’, don’t waste email real estate on filler words
Phone - one call is equivalent to 10 emails
Be direct , don’t beat around the bush
Make the ask
Be prepared to objection handle
Follow up with email post call
Example:
Hi Jake, this is Cass here from Cleo. [Intro]
I wanted to reach out to schedule a call to evaluate your current sales forecasting systems [Ask]
Instead of manually updating numbers on spreadsheets, we help salesops team automate their reports through out of the box dashboards and CRM integrations [Value Proposition]
Ah, yes you are using another competitor. Yes, I hear that a lot. Last month, 3 of our current customers switched over, I have a few case studies, and would love to share them over a zoom call. Worth exploring? [Objection handling]
Yes, I understand your schedule is busy. Think I can send over an email instead? Follow up in 3 weeks and see if it’s still relevant? [Close + next steps]
Thanks, what’s your email? Great speaking Jake. Absolutely, I’ll call you soon. [Get relevant contact info, and follow up immediately]
LinkedIn - use it in a more casual setting, it is, after all, a social network.
Common mistake: Don’t use LinkedIn like email
Write like you text
Sharp, snappy copy
Question: Should you first connect with personalised note?
Some research says that connecting without a note has a high acceptance rate
Avoid connecting with long salesy pitch that signals to buyers it’s a ‘sales call’
C-Suite or executives generally check their Linkedin a lot, may occasionally post or comment, use that as info for personalisation & additional channel of outreach
Lower level employees may not post as much, but they tend to see LinkedIn as job hunting and may post their CV or list their role & job scope
If no recent activity, reference anything they mentioned in their profile
Keep following up, even though you might not get a reply initially
LinkedIn - connect with your target persona, once they have accepted, start a genuine conversation with them - anything that you wouldn’t cringe at when you say it in real life
Hey Ben, congrats on your new role. How’s settling in?
Provide value when possible and follow up message with:
Hey Ben, great to connect.
I noticed you previously worked at Apollo, were you also using Cleopatra for forecasting?
I work with a lot of VP Sales, and familiar with 1-3 challenges they might be thinking about when starting. Open to hearing more?
Here’s an example of how I was able to break into this account by using LinkedIn as a channel.
I had previously reached out to the engineer but he declined my meeting
I noticed that the company was recently listed as one of the fastest growing companies
I used that as my personalisation line to connect to the CEO.
I gave a short intro of what we can do and asked for a connect to the CTO.
He gave me the contact info and I reached out to the CTO, making sure to mention that CEO has referred me.
We were able to schedule a meeting
Closing thoughts:
Use all 3 channels in tandem - call, email, email, linkedin, call - more on cadencing in future posts
Sell the meeting, not the product
There are more creative methods of outreach, video prospecting, linkedin voice recording
Pipeline generation is a muscle you will build, and gets better over time
Note the buying triggers: job changes, new product launches, market expansion
The first 2 parts mentioned above (identify, research) can most likely be outsourced, but outreach cannot be outsourced to be effective
I’m curious to know who’s effectively leveraging AI to automate PG - thoughts anyone?
In any personalised outreach message, think of ‘Why you, why now’ framework to be most relevant
Remember, sales is the only non-technical role that is paid at the same level as software engineers.
It is your ticket to financial freedom, and it helps to equalise the playing field especially for extroverts (like me that hate staring at lines of code and just like to talk.)
I may not be a prospecting god yet but I sure as hell am going to work on Pipeline Generation.
Now, back to the PG.