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In lesson #5, **"Sales Calls and Lead Qualification"**, we are going to discuss and give best practices on how to conduct sales calls and do lead qualification. We are going to start with the best way to open your calls, then we will discuss the lead qualification process followed by the handling of objections and the best way to close sales calls. <br/> #### Call Opener According to the popular saying *"You never get a second chance to make a good first impression"*. In the case of sales calls, the call opener is your chance to create a good first impression. In order to nail it be sure to talk slowly, be polite and create context. Here are the simple guidelines that we use: 1. Acknowledge and thank your prospects for their time 2. Introduce yourself and your company 3. Mention previous emails/conversations to provide context Make sure your prospects are engaged in the conversation before you start asking questions or pitching your product/service. Some examples of good call openers are: - "Thank you for taking the time to chat today..." - "Is this a good time?" - "Do you have a moment now?" **How NOT to open a call**: Don't start with a pitch or feature description. The prospect will not care and will try to get off the phone as quickly as possible. > Best practices: Be polite! Use your prospects first name and make it brief. <br/> #### Lead Qualification Use your first sales calls to do lead qualification. The goal is to get to know your prospects, learn about their problems and understand their main goals for the near future. Prepare a call script with a set of qualifying questions that you would like to ask in order to qualify your leads. Some examples of qualifying questions are: - "How are you currently doing XYZ?" - "What is your biggest challenge with XYZ?" - "If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for XYZ today?" - "What do you like about your current solution?" - "What are your main goals in XYZ for the next quarter?" The most important part of the qualification process is to remain silent and to listen to what your prospects have to say. Let them do the talking and you will learn a lot about their problems and expectations. Take notes of the things they mention, and bring them up later in the conversation, this will show that you are paying attention and really care about their problems. > Best practices: Listen! Let them do the talking. Ideally, you would want them to talk ⅔ of the time while you talk ⅓ of the time. <br/> #### Pitch and Handle Objections The questions you ask in the lead qualification process will help you transition into pitch mode. You know their main problems and their main goals, now you can adapt your pitch to their particular situation. Deliver a short, concise and adapted pitch. Do not talk for too long! You don't need to mention all the features, instead, leave some easy questions open that you will be able to answer later. A prospect almost never bites on the pitch with no questions or concerns, so you need to be ready to answer your prospects questions. The easiest way to prepare for this is to create a common objections document, where you and the members of your sales team write down the answers to the most common questions/concerns your prospects have. > Best practices: Be prepared. Maneuver around them, and ask more questions. <br/> #### Closing for Next Steps A good sales call should always finish with a clear call to action. The next steps should be clear to you and to your prospect. Make sure to agree to the next step before you hang up, be it scheduling a follow-up call, sending a proposal, sharing a link for a free trial, etc. Some examples of good closings: - "Thank you! The ball is in my court to send you a summary of our conversation and a calendar invite for our follow-up call. Look forward to speaking soon!" - "Great I would be happy to send that out to you. When is the best time to speak again to review your thoughts on XYZ? Does either 3 or 4 PM work for you next Wednesday?" > Best practices: Never finish a call without agreeing to a clear next step with your prospects. <br/> <br/> In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: **Closing!** Here is the outline of this series: 1. [The Sales Process](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process) 2. [Lead Generation, Prospecting](http://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting) 3. [Outreach, Cold emailing](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outreach-cold-emailing) 4. [Follow-up, Always Follow-up!](http://blog.amplemarket.com/follow-up-always-follow-up) 5. Sales Calls and Lead Qualification 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! [Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket/?ref=blog) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/17940980/?ref=blog).* *[Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.*

In the fourth lesson of our **“Outbound Sales for Beginners”**, we are going to focus on one of the most important steps of cold emailing - **following up!** A follow-up is a kind reminder email sent to a prospect that did not reply to your previous email. Persistence is one of the most important characteristics of successful sales reps. Following up with prospects will greatly increase the open rates and reply rates of cold email campaigns. Nowadays our inboxes are cluttered with unwanted emails, think about the number of emails one gets daily and how difficult it is to maintain a clean inbox. In order to be successful in sales you need to be persistent, personal and original. **Follow-up, always follow-up!** Sales is a process and following up is what you need to do to move your prospects along the funnel.  Here are some of the most important guidelines to follow-ups: * **Be personal** - Include personal information about your prospects, i.e. their name, job information, or any recent news. Personalisation will signal that you care and will help your emails stand out. * **Be concise and transparent** - Don't spam your prospects! Keep your emails short, straight to the point and don't overpromise. Provide value with every touchpoint. It's a good practice to use the same subject line in one email cadence in order to give context to the conversation. * **Choose the right time** - You want your prospects to read and reply so you should contact them when they are more likely to be looking at their inboxes. Early in the morning or late in the afternoon tend to work well. * **Do it often, up to 5-7 times** - There is a strong correlation between your open/reply rates and the number of times you follow-up. It's acceptable to do 5-7 follow-ups within a 30-day window. * **Don't take rejection personally** - When doing sales you will be confronted with a lot of NO's. Don't take them personally and persevere, a lot of prospects will thank you for following up. Persistence pays off. * **Add a clear call-to-action to your emails** - A call-to-action at the end of every email will show the prospect what to do next. Make it as easy as possible for them to reply to your email. For instance, if the next step is scheduling a call, suggest possible dates. * **Always add some value** - Every touchpoint is a good opportunity to add something new to your value proposition. Give an overview of your most relevant clients, share case studies. If you have a freemium model don't forget to mention it, it's a good way to improve the engagement rates. * **Be original, use humor** - Humour is always a good way to engage with your prospects. People appreciate a good laugh, and you might break through the noise and get the reply you wanted. You can use a pun, a nice joke or a GIF that the prospect relates to and understands, but avoid being too sarcastic and use business-friendly images and GIFs. Follow-ups are really important for the success of your email campaigns and can be sent up to seven times within a 30-day window after you send the first email. An efficient follow-up process will have a great impact in your conversion rates. In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: **Sales Calls and Lead Qualification** Here is the outline of this series: 1. [The Sales Process](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process/) 2. [Lead Generation, Prospecting](http://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting///) 3. [Outreach, Cold emailing](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outreach-cold-emailing) 4. Follow-up, Always Follow-up! 5. Sales Calls and Lead Qualification 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! [Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket/?ref=blog) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/17940980/?ref=blog).* *[Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.*

For the third lesson of the series **“Outbound Sales for Beginners”**, we are going to focus on the **specifics of cold emailing**. Cold emailing is an emergent and effective outbound sales tactic, that consists in emailing prospects that match your ideal customer profile. It is a scalable and repeatable process that B2B companies use to increase revenue. This lesson will be structured as follows: 1. Importance of personalization 2. Structure of your email 3. Follow-up 4. Be data-driven, run A/B tests 5. What is success when it comes to cold emailing? ###1. Importance of personalization When you cold email someone, there are two important things that you should keep in mind: the people you are reaching out to might (probably) not be familiar with your company, and they did not request your emails. Make your prospects feel special, show them that you took time to research them and their company. Use first and last names as well as company-related information and you’ll increase your reply rates. Personalize the body of your message, as well as your subject line. ###2. Structure of your email ###### Subject line The subject line will have a significant impact in the open rates of your email campaigns, it should be short and concise. Be upfront, don’t deceive or overpromise because it will hurt your credibility. It’s important to avoid spam words that could trigger spam filters. ###### Body of your email Your message should be adapted to the person you are reaching out to, i.e. you should have a different approach for C-level vs. Managers. Keep it personal, short and straight to the point. Here is a list of best practices: * **Introduce yourself:** Introduce yourself and your company. * **Why are you reaching out:** Inform your prospects about how you found them and why you are reaching out to them. * **Value proposition:** Provide the crucial information to capture the attention and interest of the prospect. You should present a solution to a pain point they’re struggling with. * **Credibility points:** If you have relevant clients, you should make it known here as a way to entice the customer to purchase the product you are selling. * **Call-to-action:** Cold emails should have a clear action. Examples of calls to action include: asking a product related question, finding a time to chat, a signup on your website, pointing to a free trial, etc... It’s important to include a simple call to action in order to make the prospect feel that the ball is in their court. ###3. Follow-up A very important aspect of cold emailing is to always follow-up on your emails. Persistence always pays off, you can do 7 to 8 touch points within a 24-day window. Keep this in mind every time you are following up with a prospect: * People have busy schedules, and sometimes your email may slip through the cracks, so a kind reminder about your offer will most of the time be appreciated. * Wait 2 to 3 days between follow-up emails. If you start sending emails daily, people will perceive your email as spam and won’t take you seriously. * Provide value with every touch point. Every time you send a follow-up email, seize that opportunity and give another example of how you could solve a problem for your prospects. * Be original and use humor, this is a real key to success and will increase your reply rates! If your prospects are opening your emails, but not replying, ping them again with a funny image or GIF. You’ll be surprised with the impact of a good laugh in a sales conversation. ###4. Be data-driven, run A/B tests There is no silver bullet when it comes to cold emailing. You need to test every assumption you bump into, measure the results and repeat the process. Every hypothesis is valid until you cross it off your list when it fails. And every variable is on the table: test the best time as well as the best day to send emails, write different approaches and send them to small batches of leads. Test only one variable at a time, in order to get more accurate results. ###5. What is success when it comes to cold emailing? When you start an email campaign, you need to keep an eye on the following metrics: open rate, reply rate and conversion rate. These metrics will help you distinguish between the good/bad email campaigns. * **Open rate**: The open rate is the percentage of emails that have been opened, and It’s calculated by the number of emails opened, divided by the emails delivered. * **Reply rate**: The reply rate is the percentage of people who replied to your email. You can determine it by dividing the number of people who replied by the number of people that received the email. * **Conversion rate**: The conversion rate is the percentage of people who converted into new opportunities. It corresponds to the number of sales qualified leads that go one step further in your sales channel. The main purpose of cold emails is to warm up your cold prospects. When you’re sending cold emails, your main goal should be to take the prospect to the next level. Don’t overwhelm your prospects with feature enumerations and unnecessary details about your product. You should them relate with the pain point you’ll be solving for them.  In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: **Follow-up, Always Follow-up!** Here is the outline of this series: 1. [The Sales Process](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process) 2. [Lead Generation, Prospecting](http://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting) 3. [Outreach, Cold emailing](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outreach-cold-emailing) 4. Follow-up, Always Follow-Up! 5. Sales Calls and Lead Qualification 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! [Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket/?ref=amplemarket-blog) and on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/17940980/?ref=blog).* *[Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.*

There are lots of ways companies can get new customers. In this blog post, we are going to build a simple model for customer growth and analyze the properties of the different growth channels. We are going to focus on companies with a subscription business model - a customer pays the company on a recurring basis. For simplicity, we are also going to consider that there’s only one pricing plan and all the customers pay the same so that the number of customers is directly proportional to revenue. What we are going to do next is identify the contributions of the several channels to the variation of the number of customers \\(C(t)\\), which is the same as calculating the total derivative \\(\frac{dC(t)}{dt}\\). Knowing the derivative, \\(C(t)\\) can be calculated in the following way: \\(C(t) = \int\_{t\_0}^{t} \frac{dC(t)}{dt} + C(t_0)\\) There are several channels that can be used to acquire new customers such as press, outbound sales, inbound sales, ads, referrals, partnerships etc. We should start by defining 2 types of growth channels: 1. Predictable Growth Channels 2. Unpredictable Growth Channels In a Predictable Growth Channel, it's easier to influence the return you get from it by putting more work/money/time, whereas with an Unpredictable Growth Channel that’s more difficult to achieve. An example of a Predictable Growth Channel is outbound sales or ads. In these 2 situations if you spend more money on ads or hire more sales reps you know that you are likely to get more customers. It’s basically possible to say that you want to grow your customer base that comes from outbound sales by 20% month over month for instance. On the other hand, an example of a somehow more unpredictable growth channel is being featured on a big news website. It’s harder to say that you want to grow customers that come from being featured on Forbes by 20% month over month. Let’s call the functions responsible for these 2 growth channels: 1. \\( g\_p(C,t) \\) - models the Predictable Growth Channels 2. \\( g\_u(C,t) \\) - models the Unpredictable Growth Channels \\( g\_p(C,t) \\) is a function that you can define based on your investment (time/work/money) in a predictable growth channel. For \\( g\_u(C,t) \\) you might have some influence on the shape of this function but it’s way harder to control. For instance, going back to the previous example, if you are featured in a big news outlet in a certain month \\( g\_u(C,t) \\) will have a big spike that goes back to zero on the following month. To keep the model simple we are going to assume that \\( g\_u(C,t) \\) is constant: \\( g\_u(C,t)=k\_u \\). Another important growth channel is referrals. In this case, you are not directly selling the product but your customers are. In order to model this channel, we should assume that a percentage of customers will randomly refer the product and bring additional customers. As a result, it makes sense that the function for this channel should be proportional to the number of customers: \\( g\_r(C,t)=k\_rC \\) where the proportionality constant \\( k\_r\\) is related to the percentage of customers that will recommend the product. In a way, \\(k\_r\\) is one of the best indicators that you are making something people really want, since they care enough to talk about the product to others in the industry. So far all the functions mentioned \\( g\_p(C,t),g\_u(C,t),g\_r(C,t) \\) are \\(\geq 0 \\); they bring more customers or in the worst case the number of customers stays the same. However, to have a realistic model we have to consider a very important channel of negative growth: customer churn. In our model, since there’s only one pricing plan there’s no way for customers to downgrade their plan and pay less and so there are only 2 states: customer or non-customer. In the case of churn, we are going to assume that there’s a random chance that on a given interval \\(\Delta t\\) a customer churns. As a consequence, the churn function is simply proportional to the number of customers: \\( g\_c(C,t)= k\_cC \\). Joining all the channels together we end up with the following differential equation: \\(\frac{dC}{dt} = g\_p(C,t) + g\_u(C,t) + g\_r(C,t) - g\_c(C,t) = g\_p(C,t) + k\_u + (k\_r-k\_c)C\\) It's not easy to find a general solution to this differential equation, in particular since we still don't know how \\(g\_p(C,t)\\) looks like. However, we can solve it for some particular situations. If, for instance, the ads and outbound sales channels don't exist \\( g\_p(C,t)=0 \\) and so \\(\frac{dC}{dt} = k\_u + (k\_r-k\_c)C \\) The solution to this differential equation is \\(C(t) = \left[C(t\_0) + \frac{k\_u}{k\_r-k\_c}\right]e^{(k\_r-k\_c)t} - \frac{k\_u}{k\_r-k\_c}\\)  We see that \\(C(t)\\) grows exponentially as long as \\(k\_r>k\_c\\) (the lost due to churn is lower than the growth coming from referrals). If we start doing outbound sales and want it to contribute to exponential growth, \\( g\_p(C,t)\\) has to be proportional to the number of customers: \\( g\_p(C,t)= k\_pC \\). In this case, the solution becomes \\(C(t) = \left[C(t\_0) + \frac{k\_u}{k\_p+k\_r-k\_c}\right]e^{(k\_p+k\_r-k\_c)t} - \frac{k\_u}{k\_p+k\_r-k\_c}\\) It's interesting to note that in order for outbound sales to contribute to exponential growth the sales efforts (emails sent out, calls made etc) have to increase proportionally to the number of customers. Of course maintaining exponential growth just with outbound sales is very difficult and that's why referrals are so important. ###In Summary: In this simple model, it can be seen how the several growth channels affect the customers/revenue curves. Things like outbound sales, ads or other Predictable Sales Channels can lead to very good growth rates but without a good referral dynamic and low churn are very hard to sustain. In conclusion, if you want to grow exponentially: - Optimize and scale on your outbound sales process - Build a successful Customer Success Process to reduce churn - Set up a referral program to incentivize your customers to referrer friends **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.

In this blogpost we describe our quest to automate our sales process as much as possible, including both our inbound and outbound sales channels. This is not our v.0. and it’s definitely a work in progress but at this stage it already allows us to go through hundreds of leads per month without any SDRs (sales development reps) :). Here’s a diagram of what the process looks like:  Although it might seem complicated it’s actually fairly simple. It all starts with a web request to our website… #### 1) De-anonymize traffic First we map the IP address of the request to a domain (we have a dataset that goes beyond reverse DNS lookups). If we find a business domain, we enrich it with more information via our [Fetch API](http://fetch.amplemarket.com/) (industry, location, number of employees). We use this information to adapt/tweak the website and add/remove value props according to the characteristics of the business browsing amplemarket.com. #### 2) Leverage lost traffic There are two possible outcomes, either the information on the website is compelling enough for the person to sign up (~6.4% of the traffic) or they end up bouncing (~93.6% of the traffic). For people that bounce, we set up retargeting with Adroll. On top of retargeting we use the business domains, to find decision makers at that company and send them email cadences saying that someone from their company was browsing our website and see if they want to talk. This might seem like a shot in the dark, since the likelihood that we contact the exact same person that was looking at the website is very small, but we actually get a really good reply rate to these email cadences. Our assumption is that a lot of teams discuss new software internally before starting their search so every member has some context about what others might be researching. We know the decision makers for Amplemarket so it’s a matter of contacting the right team/department and even if they are not the decision maker they are still very likely to point us to the right person. We automate these email cadences (thanks to Amplemarket :) and some of them will result in calls scheduled with our Account Executives. Note that since there’s an enormous percentage of traffic that leaves without converting these email cadences are a crucial way to leverage all the lost traffic and turn it into new customers. #### 3) Prioritize valuable prospects For every new signup, the email is immediately enriched to get more information about that person and more importantly about the company the person works for. We then feed that information into a lead scoring function and rank the lead. If the lead scores above a certain threshold the signup form adapts to ask for a phone number which will be sent via email and Slack to an Account Executive who will call that customer as soon as possible. #### 4) Learn from your customer base Every time we get a new paying customer the information is fed into a function that is always trying to find lookalike customers based on our existing customer base. When a new potential customer is found we automatically try to find the email addresses of the decision makers and set them in email cadences in order to get a meeting with them. #### 5) A "No" doesn't last forever If a prospect seems like a good fit but doesn’t turn into a customer we save their information along with the company’s information in a “Save for Later” folder in our internal CRM. We wait 8 months until we recontact these prospects. In the meantime, we track their LinkedIn profiles, and if one of these gatekeepers leaves the company we will try to reconnect with the new decision maker (e.g. we tried to sell to a VP of Sales who left the company, then in that case we reach out to the new one). Ultimately this system only works if we get people going to our website, but at the same time it gives us confidence that all the efforts to get traffic (marketing, SEO, PR) have a maximum utility. **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.

Sales can be a challenging process, particularly when it comes to decoding all the expressions and words involved in a sales conversation. That's why we created a glossary with the most used terms by sales reps. Hope this glossary can help you grow and improve your sales performance! ## **A** **ABC -** Always Be Closing. It is a term used in aggressive sales which leads to believe that the sole purpose is to be able to close a deal in the end, and if the sales rep does not achieve that, then the process is seen as a failure. **Account -** It’s normally a customer. Each sales rep is responsible for a number of accounts. **Active Listening -** It’s part of the customer integration, make your customers feel heard and part of the process. Knowing their concerns, theirs fears and doubts, and be available to change what is necessary to get better results and leave the customer satisfied. ## **B** **B2B -** Business-to-business. It’s a company that sells it’s products/services to other companies instead of selling to regular individuals. **B2C -** Business-to-customer. A regular exchange of products/services between a company and a customer. **Back-out -** A customer that tried or canceled an order/service. **BANT -** Budget (if the prospect has a budget for the product/service you’re selling), Authority (if the prospect is the decision-maker/buyer), Need (if the prospect has a need for your product/service) and Timeline (the time for implementation). BANT is used as criteria for lead qualification. **BDR -** Business Development Representative. Most of the time BDRs do not close deals, they just qualify the leads and pass them to a Sales Rep. It's usually a job to salespeople with 1-3 years of experience. **Buyer -** A purchasing person in a business, but not a decision-maker. They close the deal based on the orders of the decision-makers. ## **C** **Calls -** It’s the contact with Lead and Prospect. It can be a phone call, in a meeting, at a trade show. **Call-to-action -** An instruction to provoke an immediate response. **Close -** Is a sales term which generally means achievement of the goal, for example selling a product/service for money, a renewal, acquiring a signature. **Cold Lead -** A Potential customer that is not aware of the product you are selling. **Commission -** A payment/compensation that a sales rep gets for closing a deal, normally based on the profit margin of the sale. **CRM -** Customer Relationship Management. It’s a software that helps companies keep track of all the information they have about their existing and potential customers. CRM software also helps business relationships to grow through the analysis of the customer's data, and can also track email, phone calls and deals, send personalized emails, among other things. **Current Customer -** A customer who has ordered in the last 12 to 18 months on average. Current Customer Referrals - It’s the act of trying to get referrals of other possible prospects from your current customer. **Current Customer Upselling -** It’s the act of trying to sell different products/services to a current customer. Customer - Before the sales is called a prospect, and after the sale, the purchaser/organization becomes the customer. **Cycle Of Sales -** A 7 step cycle to describe the ideal sale. ## **D** **Decision-makers -** The person with authority to agree to a sale. **Demo -** It’s the act of presenting your product/service to a prospect. ## **E** **Email Campaign -** A sequence of emails that are sent to a Lead. ## **F** **First Touch email -** The first email in a sequence of emails. **Follow-up -** An email that is sent when a lead does not reply. **Funnel (Sales) -** A process that a salesperson lead customers through when purchasing products. (4 stages: Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action) ## **G** **Gatekeeper -** A gatekeeper is the person responsible for scanning the information before sending it to a decision maker. The gatekeeper screens emails calls and visitors, before forwarding them to the decision makers. ## **I** **ICP -** Ideal Customer Profile, defines a set of characteristics that are unique to your buyer persona or ideal customer. **Inside Sales -** A sales rep that sells from inside the company, normally via phone or online rather than on the field. ## **K** **Key Accounts -** A big account, bringing an important amount of revenue. These accounts are a priority to a sales rep because losing him would be an enormous loss to the company. ## **L** **Lead -** A person or company that is potential customer. **Lead Generation -** Researching the most probable customers given specific characteristics (job title, industry, company size, geolocation) and creating a list of leads to approach. ## **M** **Margin -** The difference between the selling price and the cost of production of a product/service, resulting in the profit. ## **N** **Negotiation -** The process of trading between the sales rep and the customer. Includes pricing, terms of the contract or other items that can be adjusted. ## **O** **Objections -** A concern/problem of a prospect that can stop you from closing the deal. **Outside Sales -** Opposite of Inside Sales. A sales rep that sells on the field, or in meetings. ## **P** **Package Sale -** It’s the act of selling multiple products/services at one meeting/demo. **Past Customer -** It’s a customer who has not ordered in the last 12-18 month, on average. **Pipeline -** The step-by-step process sales reps go through to convert a prospect into a customer. **Prospect -** A potential customer that showed interest in purchasing. ## **Q** **Quota -** The minimum volume a sales person should produce in a specific time. ## **R** **Rapport -** Having a good and healthy relationship with the customers, listening to their needs and concerns and making them feel part of the process. **Referrals -** Obtaining information about possible prospects from a current customer or prospect. **Retention of Customers -** Keeping your customers happy with your service/product so they keep purchasing from you. It’s better to renewal a customer than finding new ones. ## **S** **SaaS -** Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. **Sales Report -** A document containing important information about results, trends and target sales that allow you to keep track of your quota achievement. **SDR -** Sales Development Representative. Is a type of inside sales rep that only focuses on outbound prospecting. Unlike quota-carrying salespeople. Sales Development Reps don’t focus on closing business, they focus on moving leads through the pipeline. **SMB -** Small and medium-sized business. A company between 0-100 employees it’s a small-sized business, and between 100-999 employees, it’s a medium-size business. ## **T** **Targeting -** Researching the market and choosing the right companies/customers that suit your product/service. ## **U** **Unique Selling Proposition (USP) -** The feature/characteristic of your product (price, style, delivery, warrant) that makes it competitively strong and without direct comparison. **Up Selling -** It’s a technique when a salesperson tries to induce the customer into buying more expensive products, to make a more profitable sale. ## **V** **Value Proposition -** A statement about a product that makes it attractive to potential customers. ## **W** **Warm Lead -** A potential customer that is interested in buying your product. **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.

For the second lesson of the series **“Outbound Sales for Beginners”** we are going to focus on **lead generation also known as prospecting**. As mentioned in the [first lesson](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process/), lead generation, refers to the first step of an outbound sales process and consists of sourcing contact information of potential new clients. Before you jump into prospecting it is important to have a very well defined idea of your target customer profile, also known as **Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)**. To achieve this you should have good answers to the following questions: What types of companies are you targeting? Who is the buyer of your product at these companies? Lead generation can be broken down into various steps. First, it involves defining your ICP, then searching sites like LinkedIn, Angelist, and Crunchbase or crawling the web in search of customer information, and finally testing and measuring the outreach to refine your process. This lesson will be structured as follows: 1. Build your ideal customer profile 2. Build lists of leads and enrich your data 3. Measure and refine your lead generation Read on to have a better grasp of each one of these phases. > Before you jump into prospecting it is important to have a very well defined idea of your target customer profile, also known as Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) #### 1. Build your ideal customer profile Before you start building lists of leads it is important that you define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). **What types of companies are you targeting?** In order to define the types of companies you are targeting you should consider the following filters: - Revenue or Funding - # of employees - Location - Industry, Market - Budget - Technologies they might be using **Who is the decision maker you are trying to reach out to?** Define your buyer/decision maker taking into account the following criteria: - Job Title (Marketing vs. Sales departments) - Seniority (Vice Presidents vs. Directors or Managers) - Location (USA vs. Asia) **A good way to find out about your ICP is to talk to your best customers.** What separates your best and worst customers? What industries are they in? What is the job title and seniority of your decision makers? You should reach out to your current ideal customers and ask. Here is a good set of questions that you should ask your current customers: - How did you originally find our company before contacting us? - Why did you originally buy from our company? - Why do you continue to buy from our company? - How has working with our company helped your business? - Would you refer our company to other people? Who and why? Run these interviews gather the information and use it to find prospects that are similar to your best customers as you will have a better chance of closing. These interviews will also help you refine your value propositions and the messaging that you will later use for your outreach. Once you have found the companies as well as the individuals you want as customers, you should focus your energy on these leads. > A good way to find out about your ICP is to talk to your best customers. What separates your best and worst customers? What industries are they in? What is the job title and seniority of your current decision maker? #### 2. Build lists of leads and enrich your data Now that you know your ICP you need to find prospects that are just like them. Prospecting involves online research for people and company information. **Finding the right contacts:** You can find company information on sites like LinkedIn, Angelist or Crunchbase. If you want to be more granular and filter companies based on software they are using (for example e-commerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce) you can use BuiltWith or Datanyze. LinkedIn is the best source for people information. You can use LinkedIn's **Advanced People Search** with the right keywords (i.e. title, industry, location etc) to get a list of prospects that match your criteria. Once you find the right prospects you should gather as much information as you can about them and the companies they work for. This will allow you to craft very targeted and personalized emails later on. You should make sure your list fits your ideal customer profile. **Getting their Email:** Now that you created a list of prospects you just need to find their email. Given their full name (first\_name and last\_name) and the domain of the company they work for you can try several combinations. Here are popular combinations using the first\_name, last\_name and initials of the prospect: ``` last_name@domain.com first_name@domain.com first_name+last_name@domain.com first_initial+last_name@domain.com first_initial+last_initial@domain.com first_initial+last_name@domain.com first_initial.lastname@domain.com first_initial@domain.com ``` It is important that you test your combination guesses otherwise, your emails will bounce and will never be delivered. A simple tool that you can use to check whether the combination you are trying is correct and the email address exists is [MailTester.com](http://www.mailtester.com/). Other great tools that will help you guess the email of a prospect given their full name and their company domain are FullContact and Clearbit. #### 3. Measure and refine your lead generation > Segment your leads depending on industry, company size, job titles and other types of relevant information. Always measure your conversion rates to meetings and customers and refine your lead generation accordingly. Small improvements will have a big impact on your revenue down the road. You should always be looking to refine your lead generation process. You will have different conversion rates depending on the companies (size, industry, etc...) and people (title, seniority, etc...) you are reaching out to. For example, imagine that you are selling marketing software to companies with a different number of employees and you are contacting CMOs, Directors of Marketing, and Marketing Managers at the same time. You can create a results matrix (see image below) that will help you get a better understanding of your conversion rates depending on title and company size. In this example, we see that for companies with 25-50 employees you should be reaching ou to CMOs whereas for companies with 101-200 employees it seems that you would get a better conversion rate if you contact the Marketing Manager.  *Figure: Example of a Conversion Matrix with Prospect title vs. Company size to help you better define your buyer persona depending on the size of the company in order to refine your initial prospecting.* Segment your leads depending on industry, company size, job titles and other types of relevant information. Always measure your conversion rates to meetings and customers and refine your lead generation accordingly. Small improvements will have a big impact on your revenue down the road. In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: Outreach, Cold emailing ##### Here is the outline of this series: 1. [The Sales Process](http://blog.amplemarket.com/outbound-sales-process/) 2. [Lead Generation, Prospecting](http://blog.amplemarket.com/lead-generation-prospecting/) 3. Outreach, Cold emailing 4. Follow-up, Always Follow-up! 5. Sales Calls and Lead Qualification 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.

[![How to win friends and influence people][2]][1] [1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/1439167346/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= [2]: http://i.imgur.com/mETDdA6.png **Author:** Dale Carnegie **Average Customer Review:** ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ([5,485 ratings on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/1439167346/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)) **Category:** Self-Improvement, Communication, Social Skills, Management & Leadership, Motivation & Inspiration, Sales **Time to read book:** 7 hrs and 19 mins #####Summary If someone had a chance to ask all the successful business leaders a list of books that had shaped them “How to win Friends and Influence People” would certainly be on the top of that list. Written in 1936 by Dale Carnegie the book sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and it’s a masterpiece in the science of human interactions. According to Carnegie, financial success is due 15 percent to professional knowledge and 85 percent to "the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people." He teaches these skills in a very practical way through underlying principles of dealing with people so that they feel important and appreciated. He also emphasizes fundamental techniques for handling people without making them feel manipulated. This book is an absolutely must read for anyone that wants to excel at the art of selling to other people. #####About the author Dale Carnegie, born in 1888, was an accomplished salesman turned into best selling author. After ending a career in sales Carnegie spent a substantial part of his life teaching public speaking, earning up to $500 every week -- the equivalent of $11,800 today. Warren Buffet took Carnegie's course at age 20 and described it as a moment that “changed my life”. > Financial success is due 15 percent to professional knowledge and 85 percent to "the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people." The book is broken into four sections and each section has several lessons on how to interact with other people. We will summarize the lessons in each chapter and explore examples of how they can be applied in a sales context. ######Part One - Fundamental Techniques in Handling People - **Don't criticize, condemn or complain**. Criticism most of the time doesn't work and merely puts people on the defensive. Instead try to understand why people do what they do. ***In Sales:** If a prospect is using a competitor you should try to understand the reasons behind his decision instead of condemning his choice. Criticizing others doesn’t yield anything positive.* - **Give honest and sincere appreciation**. ***In Sales:** The only way we can get a person to do anything is by giving them what they want. What do most people want? Apart from food, sleep, health and money people have a deep desire to feel important. When selling something to a person make sure to be aligned with that person’s goals and success metrics (e.g. if you are selling to a Head of Sales you have to help him achieve his quota).* - **Arouse in the other person an eager want**. Henry Ford said that "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own." ***In Sales:** Give people what they want, not what you want. Sell value and not features, try to understand the real problems of your customers and make them want your solution.* > Criticism most of the time doesn't work and merely puts people on the defensive. Instead try to understand why people do what they do. ######Part Two - Six Ways to Make People Like You - **Become genuinely interested in other people**. Listen to other people and care about their problems and interests. ***In Sales:** When someone is interested in your product but is not a good fit, point them to the right solution even if it’s not your company. People will appreciate the effort and will remember you in case they see the need for your product in the future.* - **Smile**. ***In Sales:** Humans can differentiate vocal intonation between a smile and a non-smile. Also, according to several studies 84% of the message over a phone is your tone of voice, so make sure you put yourself in a happy mood before an important call as it increases the likelihood of success.* - **Be a good listener and encourage others to talk about themselves**. A young boy once said to his mother, "Mom, I know you love me very much because whenever I talk to you about something you stop whatever you are doing and listen to me." Wow, that hits home! ***In Sales:** Listening is the ultimate act of caring. Good salespeople listen to customers and uncover their pains so they can provide a fitting solution.* - **Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely**. William James said, "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." Help someone feel appreciated and how could they not like you? ***In Sales:** When a customer calls you and complains about your product pay attention and make him feel important. Even if he has already agreed for a 2 year contract and he is the smallest of your 10.000 customers, they will appreciate your gesture and like you which has compounding effects in the future.* > Listening is the ultimate act of caring. Good salespeople listen to customers and uncover their pains so they can provide a fitting solution. ######Part Three - How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking - **The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it**. According to Carnegie, it’s impossible to win an argument. In case we lose the argument, we lose; if we win the argument, we have made the other person feel inferior and consequently made him resent us. In other words, we still lose. ***In Sales:** You might be sometimes tempted to argue with others, especially when you are absolutely convinced that they should be paying for your product instead of your competitors’. However, 9 times out of 10, arguing just results in the other person even more firmly convinced that he is right. Instead try to make the prospect conclude by himself that your product is better - don’t tell that your competitor’s car is worse, instead show people what makes your car 10x better!* - **If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically**. Any fool can try to defend his mistakes, but it raises one above the herd to admit one's mistakes. ***In Sales:** If your feature A is worse than your competitors simply admit it. You can even bring it up before your customer does. Work your way around your weaknesses and make sure you make them see what you’re good at.* - **Get the other person saying "Yes, yes" at the outset**...and keep your opponent, if possible, from saying "No." Use the "Socratic method" to garner trust and agreement. ***In Sales:** The sentiment of saying “no” is a very difficult sentiment to overcome. When negotiating a deal make sure you bring everything you agreed upon first to get the person saying “yes” as soon as possible. This starts the person moving in the affirmative direction where no withdrawal takes place.* - **Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires**. Disagreement doesn't necessarily mean there is a wrong and right side. You should be open to other people's point of view and learn from them. ***In Sales:** Put yourself in your customers’ shoes particularly if you don’t agree with their decisions. This will help you understand their acting patterns and navigate your way to a successful deal.* > If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Any fool can try to defend his mistakes, but it raises one above the herd to admit one's mistakes. ######Part Four - Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Rousing Resentment - **Ask questions instead of giving direct orders**. Humans hate taking orders from other humans, so give people the opportunity to think and do things by themselves. ***In Sales:** Although it might be tempting to repeatedly tell your prospects how good your product is, it is way more powerful if you ask them questions that will make them arrive the same conclusion. Before appreciating your solution they have to realize they have a problem. Keep asking!* - **Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to**. If you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics. ***In Sales:** If a customer wants to break a yearly contract after 3 months, instead of pointing to the contract and threaten with legal action appeal to the person’s reputation. Mention how you thought he was one of your most loyal customers and a man of his word. Most people will react in your favor if you make them feel honest and honorable.* - **Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest**. Always align what you want with what makes the other person happy while being sincere and thoughtful. ***In Sales:** A perfect situation to apply this principle is in getting referrals from current customers. Always offer incentives that will make people feel happy doing what you want them to do - from discounts to exposure, everything counts as long as people feel praised and happy.* > Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest. Always align what you want with what makes the other person happy while being sincere and thoughtful **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting, to outreach, follow-ups and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.

This is the first lesson in the series **“Outbound Sales for Beginners”**. These lessons are targeted to founders and sales people that want to learn how to create a repeatable and scalable sales process. Outbound sales is a sales process where the sales rep sources, contacts and closes a prospect that might have never heard about the product they are selling. More specifically we are going to focus on the outbound sales via email, we will not be discussing cold calling. The main focus of this first lesson is to define and briefly describe the **Sales Process**. A sales process is a specific, concrete set of actions that you need to follow to close a new customer. The various steps involved in an Outbound Sales Process are: 1. Lead Generation, Prospecting 2. Outreach, Cold emailing 3. Sales Call, Demo, Lead Qualification 4. Closing! Sign Contract! 5. Deliver, Nurture! Customer Success. ### 1. Lead Generation, Prospecting Prospecting, also known as Lead Generation, describes the process of sourcing contact information of potential new clients. Before prospecting it is important to have a clear idea of your target customer profile. You should have good answers to the following questions: What types of companies are you targeting? Who is the decision maker for your product at these companies? Prospecting involves online research on sites like LinkedIn or crawling the web in search of customer information. Ideally, you want to find accurate customer information like job title, email, location, Linkedin profile etc. This information can be used to filter leads as well as to personalize email campaigns later. ### 2. Outreach, Cold emailing Cold emailing is a very effective and popular outbound sales tactic. It consists of emailing prospects that you previously had no contact with. When writing cold emails you should focus on keeping them short, relevant and personalized to your prospects. It is not uncommon for a sales rep doing outbound cold emailing to follow up with a lead 7 times within a 30-day period. It is important to include one clear call to action in every email. ### 3. Sales Call, Demo, Lead Qualification You turn a cold prospect into an opportunity when, given information about your product, they accept to do a sales call. This is a typical stage of many sales processes in which the sales rep does a product demonstration and qualifies the opportunity. The first sales call is oftentimes the first live contact with the prospect, so it is important to be prepared and have the perfect demo for that buyer persona. Learning more about a prospect and their company as they progress through the sales process can help sales reps offer a more tailored experience, and improve the likelihood a deal will close. Ask about their problems and why they chose to talk with you, let them do the talking and understand what it would take for them to become a customer. It is important to have clearly defined next steps at the end of the call. ### 4. Closing! Sign Contract! This stage refers to any late stage activities that happen as a deal approaches closing and you are about to turn an opportunity into a new customer. This step of the sales process varies a lot from company to company and may include things like delivering a quote, negotiation a proposal, upgrading from Freemium to Premium etc. Remove any adoption barriers in this step. Give clear proposal and make it easy for prospects to sign a new contract or to upgrade their account. Be persistent! ### 5. Deliver and Support, Customer Success Congratulations! At this point, you have managed to close a new client. Now it is your turn to deliver on your promises, give your new customer the best possible experience and wow them. Once you have wowed your customer, ask them if they have friends or colleagues that should be doing business with you too. Have your customer convince the referral why they should meet with you. This is a great way of finding new opportunities. > Monitor, measure and tweak every step of this process. Small improvements in one part of the process can have a significant impact on the number of new clients you close at the end of each month.  These are the most important steps of a sales process. Monitor, measure and tweak every step of this process. Small improvements in one part of the process can have a significant impact on the number of new clients you close at the end of each month. Having a clearly defined, efficient, scalable and repeatable outbound sales process is one of the main recipes for success. Now you have a high-level picture of the sales process. The sales process can change slightly from company to company but it usually entails something like this. In the next lessons, we are going to dig into each step of the sales process. Stay tuned for the next lesson: Lead Generation, Prospecting! ##### Here is the outline of this series: 1. The Sales Process 2. Lead Generation, Prospecting 3. Outreach, Cold emailing 4. Follow-up, Always Follow-up! 5. Sales Calls and Lead Qualification 6. Closing! 7. Deliver and Support, Customer Success 8. Ask for Referrals! Referral Marketing! 9. Sales hacks! 10. Refine, Repeat, Scale! **[Amplemarket Team!](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog)** *If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to reach out to team@amplemarket.com. You can also [follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/amplemarket).* > [Amplemarket](http://amplemarket.com/?ref=amplemarket-blog) is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting, to outreach, follow-ups and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.