If you are new to outbound sales, you may be making some common sales mistakes that can be shockingly detrimental to your numbers.
This week on INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl welcomes Dana Lindahl, the rockstar author and Founder of Legendary Leadgen. Darryl and Dana discuss the 7 biggest mistakes you can make in outbound sales, such as using convoluted messaging, being too spammy, or blaming your prospects for not replying fast enough. They also offer advice on how to counter these blunders and develop new strategies to increase your success rates. Learn how you can avoid and overcome these pitfalls on this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales!
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Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Dana Lindahl, Legendary Leadgen
Darryl Praill: Welcome back folks. How are you doing? I am thrilled to see you again. It’s been another week, eh? See what I just did there? It wasn’t even intentional: It’s been another week, eh? My Canadian comes out sometimes, I cannot help it, I apologize. And this is actually gonna be a really good episode because our guest today, I love this, he’s currently in Mexico City. So we’re spanning multiple continents and multiple countries here today. It’s a real cosmopolitan show.
Darryl Praill: You’re gonna meet him shortly. I got to think, and I was on a LinkedIn live, recently, the individual who was interviewing me asked me a question, which was, “Darryl, how did you get into sales?” Now, for those of you who listened to the show on a regular basis, you know that my story was my first job out of school, I went to school to be a computer programmer, but my first job was selling photocopiers door to door. And I did that for six months before I said, this sucks, I don’t wanna do it again, and I went back to coding. And eventually, I did get back into sales and eventually was a VP of sales and all that wonderful stuff. But the point being for this story was that’s my first touch of sales. Which led to another conversation around What were the mistakes you made when you were doing that? As you look back.
Darryl Praill: Or, said another way. What were the tricks and tips that you learned? So I love that because we’ve all been there. I mean, you sit back and look where you’re at now, if someone were to ask you that question, I bet you, without batting an eye, there’s two or three things that just popped in your head about what mistakes you made or what things you’ve learned. So for me in my era, because I was doing door to door copier sales, it was all about literally going door to door. You park the vehicle, you get your binder out, your presentations, your price list, your order forms, all that kind of stuff. You’re at the end of the street, and your job is to go all the way down one street, hit every single business, cross the road, and come all the way back to the next one.
Darryl Praill: You might do this, maybe you’re at an intersection, so you can do all four roads. And that’s what I did. And I learned quickly a couple of things. The mistake I made was I would often go into these places and I didn’t have my pitch down pat. I didn’t understand what my unique selling proposition is. I talked a lot about my product and I rarely talked about them. Cause I went to what I knew. And that was because that’s what I’ve been trained on. It was funny, as I look back upon the training I had, I don’t think I had literally any sales training, what I had was product training. Now different era, I get it. But I think what I needed was sales training and the product would have followed itself. I really feel confident in that as I look back. So that was a mistake that they made.
Darryl Praill: What I did learn quickly was when I went into an environment was to look around. You’ve probably heard of this before, it’s the whole wall concept, what’s on the wall? What’s hanging on the wall? And eventually, you do this now in your Zoom meetings, what’s on the walls? I was on a Zoom meeting the other day, and this individual said, “Oh my gosh, I love the kids artwork hanging on your wall behind you.” Which led to a story that allowed us to really establish a rapport out of the gates, over something that was personal to me. And it’s all about that personal aspect. So what I learned is to look at what’s on the wall.
Darryl Praill: Am I seeing, are they boating? Are they fishing? Is there a family? Do I see grandkids? What’s on the wall? And for me, I learned to use that as a vehicle to say, “Oh, are you a fisherperson? You love that, oh, yeah, I love fishing too.” And it was amazing, no matter what it was, I loved it too. “Oh, I love boating too. Oh, I can hardly wait till I’m a grandparent.” Whatever it might be, that’s what it was. And it was a way to establish a rapport. I learned that, I also realized I didn’t have my value proposition down pat and I talked a lot about me. And that got me to thinking, what are the mistakes that we’re making? What are the mistakes that people make when they’re brand new to selling like I was back then? And I thought, well, you know what? I can tell you my story, which I kind of just did. But I’m not an expert, let’s find us an expert. And like I like to do every single week, I did just that.
Welcome Dana Lindahl
Darryl Praill: Let me introduce you to this fine friend currently in Mexico City, this is Dana Lindahl, and he is the founder of Legendary Leadgen, he’s a rockstar, he helps companies set sales appointments with ideal prospects, as well as establishing them as an authority within the industry. He’s the author of “LinkedIn Sales Success: B2B Lead Generation and Sales“, on the world’s largest professional network. And when I was talking to him, I said, dude, can you talk to me about the seven biggest mistakes people make when they try to sell, when they try outbound sales, when they try sales development? Emphasis on the word try, You’re brand new, just like I was in my story. Dana, welcome to the show, my friend, how you doing sir?
Dana Lindahl: Good, I’m really glad to be here, Darryl, I’m excited to share with your audience some tips and tricks that should help to make the outbound process a bit more responsible and appreciated by both sides of the coin.
Darryl Praill: So let’s do this together. I got to ask though, you’ve given this conversation before. So I always like to find out the genesis, what led you to actually talk about this? What’s more of the catalyst?
Dana Lindahl: Honestly, I’ve seen the way that the outbound industry, the way it’s been going for the past couple of years is not one that I’m a fan of. My company, Legendary Leadgen, has been running outbound campaigns for people since 2014. And this whole thing, especially with social selling and automated tools for LinkedIn, have made things a lot easier for people to get out there and put their message out there to more people, and at an affordable price to do so. But that hasn’t actually made the industry better, it’s made it a lot worse. So I see a lot of poor campaigns running, just generally poor behavior going around on LinkedIn and through email these days. And I think it benefits everybody, companies like mine, your prospects, the people who are running campaigns to be doing this better. The less that we have of these just sort of spammy behaviors, the more effective we all can be in our outreach.
Darryl Praill: I love that, a lot of us have these spammy behaviors. How many people listening right now think that you do spammy behaviors? I know as I look back on my stuff, I didn’t think I was at the time. In fact, I was doing stuff that I was told I should do, but upon reflecting and seeing what best practices now look like a few years later, yeah, what I was doing was spammy.
The importance of targeting
Darryl Praill: All right, let’s get right into it. One of the things you talk about and I’ll let you control the conversation here, Dana. You talk about one of the first mistakes you see the people making is not targeting. And this, I got to tell you, is something we see over and over again. For example, we see people buying lists, crappy lists. We see people just calling anybody and trying to pray and spray with their message. Talk to me specifically about the point you wanna make about one of these seven mistakes is not targeting.
Dana Lindahl: Yeah, so I see this as honestly, the biggest mistake that people make because there’s so many databases out there these days, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it easy to spin up a list with some filters and then just blast people with it. And I always come back to my golden rule, is that you can say the wrong things to the right people and still make sales some of the times, but you can never say the right thing or the wrong thing to the wrong people and still expect that to work out. And so many tools are just focused on getting this automated to a point where it’s completely hands-off, and I think that that’s wrong. I think that people need to actually be focused on who they’re targeting as the main point of their campaigns because if they can get the right people into there, you can fumble the ball, and you can say the wrong thing, and your value proposition still speaks for itself.
Dana Lindahl: But if you’re starting off on the wrong foot, by simply targeting the wrong people, your campaigns are not only gonna fall flat on your face, you are going to annoy people, you might get your email account blocked, you might get your LinkedIn account suspended, and you’re gonna damage your reputation in the process. I would say three to five times a day, I have companies reaching out to me to see if I need help with lead generation and setting sales appointments because they haven’t targeted things properly. And they’re reaching out to me and asking if they can sell their own service to me. And that’s just one example of people not doing their homework and researching things properly.
Darryl Praill: I get that all the time. I do myself, where I’m getting people targeting me, saying, hey, we’re the leaders in offshore R&D. Hey, we’re the leaders in outsource support, et cetera. And every single time I’m like, did you look on LinkedIn? Did you look on the website? Did you look at my own personal website? I don’t control R&D, I don’t control support, I do marketing, that’s what I do. Why the hell are you messaging me? But I mean, I’m savvy enough to know that they just bought a list, it’s all they did. And especially for me, and folks, you should be aware of this as well. You know, I have multiple email addresses. So in my role as a marketer, I have a public email address that I use for all our email blasts, and then I have a professional email address I use for all my daily business correspondence.
Darryl Praill: When I check my email account and I see you’re sending it to my marketing email address, that’s even a bigger sign, that not only are you not targeting but like you did zero work. Cause you can probably go to Zoominfo or anything else, you would get the right email address. So you did zero data cleansing, you’re just praying and spraying. What that tells me it’s not only I’m the wrong fit, but even if I was the right fit, I would not respond to your outreach because you’re misrepresenting. I know it’s just part of a blast and you’re hoping somebody reacts. So the targeting thing is huge. All right, so we need better target, got it. And part of that is knowing your ideal customer profile and your target personas. I mean, do you have any advice on the targeting side there, Dana?
Dana Lindahl: Yeah, so if you don’t know who exactly is your ideal customer profile, this is a great opportunity to actually just go a little bit broader and ask questions. Don’t sell to people, but ask them, what is going on in your industry? What are you struggling with right now? Try to provide value in the process, but that’s a great way to just get an initial customer feedback to figure out who your ideal customer is. Beyond that, I always recommend using either an assistant or an outsource company, or even if you have the time to do it yourself, before you go to town with a list that you’ve just bought or made with sales navigator, go through it by hand and actually confirm that these people are a good fit.
Dana Lindahl: A lot of salespeople think that this is just a complete waste of their time because they think that they’re just playing a numbers game. But when you play a numbers game with your own reputation, you tend to lose that game more times than you win, and when you can get a better hit rate on the people that you’re reaching out to you, things just work out so much better for you. You make more sales, you get in touch with more people, you get referred to more people rather than just, hey, let’s blast this list and see what happens.
Getting your messaging right
Darryl Praill: All right, so not targeting, mistake number one. What’s mistake number two, sir?
Dana Lindahl: The number two mistake that I see all the time is people making their messaging all about themselves. And it’s really actually hard not to do this, especially, I find it most difficult for business owners to not make the messaging about themselves, but it happens with salespeople as well. They’re so in the product, they’re so in the day-to-day of it all that they only speak from their own perspective. So I always recommend for people to take a look at their messaging that they’re sending out to people. If you have more Is’ and wes’ than you have yous’, you’re doing something wrong right off the bat. People don’t really resonate with messages about someone that they’ve never met before, that they don’t know who this person is. But people always like to hear things about themselves.
Dana Lindahl: So I always recommend for people to go in-depth and find out more information about their prospects, things that they can mention in their outreach messages. And if they’re not gonna customize everything, actually make it about the prospect’s industry, rather than, hey, we’re a great company, we do this, we have these awards, we got our clients this result last year, and we’re the best, you should hire us. Nobody resonates with that at all. And I find that it’s just so difficult to get people to take themselves out of that line of thinking because that’s how we all think about the product that we’re selling. To go even further on that point, I always recommend for people to describe their product or service in the words and language that their prospects would use to describe it.
Dana Lindahl: And that’s not how people tend to actually talk about the things that they’re selling, they talk about it from the way that they understand the product. But try to get into your customer’s head, use the language that they use when looking for your product, and try to have everything be results-focused when you reach out. So rather than reaching out and saying things like, hey, we do SEO, or we do PPC, that’s very tactical, that’s about what you are going to do for them. Reach out and talk about increasing click-through rates, or getting them more traffic to their website through increased rankings on Google. Things like that are how your customers actually look for things. People don’t really go out looking for a specific service, they go out looking for a specific result.
Dana Lindahl: So when you can speak about that in your customer’s language, I find that that makes things a whole lot easier. And I’ll jump ahead a few points that I have here because one of my other points is on messaging as well. One of the big things that I see people doing wrong is they make message hard to digest, they’ll send you a big, long block of text. There will be seven to eight paragraphs in here and even worse at the end, there’s three different calls to action. Like, would you like to get on a call? If not, you can download our PDF, and if that’s not okay with you, why don’t you just head to our website and see what we’re all about? This confuses the prospect.
Dana Lindahl: They don’t know what to do, even if they are interested, they might wanna take action, but in the meantime, they’ve lost your message and they’ve gone over to somewhere else on the internet. They’ve clicked to a different tab or gone through a different email, and they might never come back again. My golden rule of thumb here is your message needs to be digestible and they need to be able to take action from their smartphone, every single time. So I recommend absolute maximum three paragraphs for a message, but even that’s incredibly long. I like short paragraphs, short punchy paragraphs, my background personally is in copywriting, so I may do a little bit better at this, but I like to make everything easily digestible.
Dana Lindahl: If you can’t take action from this, from a smartphone, then you’re doing it wrong. So test it out, send messages to yourself, send yourself an email, look at the message that you’re sending to people on your own smartphone, and try to look at it from your customer’s perspective. Can you easily take action on this just by navigating from your smartphone? If not, make it simpler.
Darryl Praill: I cannot emphasize enough what Dana is saying there. If I can’t consume that on my smartphone, because the vast majority of people are actually consuming your email on their smartphone, then I’m not gonna read it. You know the whole, I, we, conversation goes hand in hand with the length of the message you’re sending. So if it’s I do this or we do this, and this is what our product is all about, my product has this features or my service has this benefits, you’re actually asking the recipient to kind of map out what you claim to do to the pains they have, and that’s a lot work, and I’m really busy and I don’t have time for that, so I’m just gonna delete it. Cause that’s the path of least resistance for me. The first thing, and I’m speaking as a buyer, you know that I’ve had this conversation with you folks too many times in this show.
Darryl Praill: I am a buyer, I’ve got the budget, I get your calls all the time. So the first thing I do, I get up every single morning, is I go, oh my gosh, I got another 100 emails. And I just go on my phone, first thing, swipe, delete, swipe, delete. So in other words, Dana talked about copywriting, the importance of it. The importance of the subject line is massive, one to five words max, two to three is actually the ideal. So you got to focus on that. If you do want some more content on this, we’ve got a white paper on the vanillaSoft.com website, it’s called, Stop Writing Shitty Emails. We have a webinar and a podcast on that too, that we did with Jason Bay, and Jason Bay talks about his Reply Method, R-E-P-L-Y, so check it out, it’s really worth the time.
Darryl Praill: We need to go to commercial break. We’re way late for that one. We’re gonna do that and when we come back, we still have four more mistakes you’re making, we’re gonna cover. Don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right back.
Finding a good reason to connect
Darryl Praill: All right, so I wanna hit up one of the points that you’ve got here, Dana. Because it actually ties into what we left off talking about, which was the email and the brevity, but it’s also the formula and the format and the importance of the subject line, and the importance of you said three paragraphs, so brevity. You talked about me, not about you, so to speak. Talked about your buyer, not you the seller. That speaks to one of your bullet points, and I don’t wanna get this wrong, but the biggest mistake I see, and I found it funny that was on your list, was too many people trying to sell me don’t give me a compelling reason to connect, and I don’t have time to figure it out. Is that a mistake? And if so, give some examples or how can we fix that?
Dana Lindahl: Yeah, so many people reach out to others and say something like, hey, I realize we’re in the same industry. Well, I’d love to connect with you here on LinkedIn. This to me just screams I’m gonna get a pitch in my inbox from this person. Probably within the next hour. Because really us being in the same industry is not really a compelling reason for us to connect, so many people are in my industry and I just don’t have time to connect with all of them. So I always recommend, and this is more probably specific to LinkedIn, rather than email, but when you’re connecting with somebody, try to include something. So some people try to get a little bit sly and say, hey, I see we’re both connected with this mutual connection. Which is okay, it’s getting closer.
Dana Lindahl: But I prefer something more along the lines of like, hey, I realize we have 82 connections in common, how are the two of us not even connected yet? Like, how do we not know each other? This goes a lot farther to create some interest with people, but even more saying something about their company. I noticed what you’re doing in your company, I would actually love to collaborate with you on something in the future. I think that there’s a lot of room for us to do a joint venture or something like that. It needs to be compelling, people are more guarded these days, especially after COVID hit and people got a little bit desperate and just started blasting everyone on their LinkedIn network, trying to get business.
Dana Lindahl: People are much more guarded these days on who they connect with, because not only do they need to take the time to connect with you, but they need to take the time to process the spam they’re probably about to receive if they do. So being upfront and saying that you have an actual compelling reason to connect with the other person, makes it a whole lot easier, one, for them to accept that connection, and two, to be open to everything that you have to say after that.
Darryl Praill: Okay, so my reaction when I get your connection requests that, hey, we are in the same industry, is that it’s a generic template you’re using, in combination with some kind of third party, LinkedIn, CRM software, I hope they brand themselves, they’re not CRM, which is really just a bot, that you’re trying to build your connections. Interesting enough, they say, oh, that’s plausible, we’re in the same industry. Yeah, I can see that. Okay, I’ll connect, you have cool stuff.
Darryl Praill: But the reality is, it’s so bland and generic that I think I suspect you’re a bot, and I don’t wanna be pitched to, pyramid sold to, affiliate marketed to, and that’s what they’re gonna do. So I just play it safe. I don’t connect just in case. So you actually might be legit, I won’t connect. When you go the extra mile to personalize it and tell me why I should care, then I’m cool, I’m your best friend, so just FYI.
There’s no one to blame but yourself
Darryl Praill: All right, that is four down, three to go. What’s next up on our hit list, sir?
Dana Lindahl: So I don’t understand why people do this, and I think it’s just really not understanding how their message comes across. But I oftentimes will take a look at people’s templates and things that they’re sending out, and they’re literally blaming the other person for not responding back to them. So they’re saying things in their messaging like, hey, I sent you a message the other day, and you didn’t respond back. And it’s just so arrogant. No one owes you a response for anything. And I see people doing this all the time, I sent you a message, you haven’t gotten back to me yet. And it just puts the other person on the defensive, and they don’t wanna engage with someone like that. If you’re going to follow up with someone, I always like to use things like, hey, I just wanted to check in, I sent a few things, but I realized I forgot something.
Dana Lindahl: Or, I realized that the way that I approached you might not have been the way that I meant to, because I should have included this other piece of material. Or even just very simply, I thought I would follow up again. But when you start off by blaming the other person for not getting back to a message where they don’t owe you anything, to begin with, they tend to just disengage and not wanna hear anything else that you have to say. And my whole philosophy with outbound marketing is that if you have a good product, you have a good service, and it helps your target market, then you actually do owe it to them to get in touch and let them know that you have something that can help them. It can help them either save money or make more money, they want that.
Dana Lindahl: So the problem isn’t getting in touch with people and reaching out and talking about your product, it’s about doing it in a way that makes them not even want to hear that next message that you have coming for them, which is with all the noise and things that are happening that are not dishonest, but just irresponsible on the platform, you need to stand out from everyone else who are just doing the same things over and over again, and make yourself stand out from the pack as a real differentiator.
Darryl Praill: That is so huge, cause you’re 100% spot on. The blame game doesn’t work. Here’s what I value. If there was a mistake if you dropped the ball for example, or you didn’t have value, you didn’t add value, it’s your mistake, just own it. I’ll give you an example. The other day, I actually got an email from a vendor who’s pitching me and he said, “Hey, I see that email I sent you has been opened by nine different people across four different countries. Either that means my email was really good and impactful, and you shared it, or it means it was really bad. I’m choosing to believe it was really bad, so let me try this again.” And away he went. What I loved about that, there was no blame.
Darryl Praill: But that was an example of being proactive and owning it, because now all of a sudden I’m going, wow, this cat’s involved, this cat’s engaged, this cat recognizes where the process might’ve broken down. Ironically in that situation, it was because this email was so fricking amazing that we shared it amongst ourselves to say, why aren’t our emails this amazing? Which brings us back to one of the earlier points that Dana was talking about was, it’s all about the email and the message, and make sure it’s brief and on-brand. And it’s about the buyer, not about the seller. So that is brilliant.
Choosing the right content
Darryl Praill: Okay, sir, next one, where are we on now?
Dana Lindahl: We’re on number six, I believe. And this is one of my favorite ones actually, most people ask for too much before they’ve given anything upfront. So even asking for a phone call before you’ve received a response from someone, I’m not a fan of this. People often like to put their Calendly link right directly in their outreach message, and I’m not one of these people who finds Calendly to be rude, but I do find it a bit presumptuous to just send it along to people before there’s been any establishment of interest whatsoever. So ways that I like to do this are by sending along helpful materials to people to confirm that there’s actually an interest in what we do, and you can track these materials. And I always say that case studies are not generally valuable to the end-user, case studies are valuable to the company sending them.
Dana Lindahl: Everyone picks their best case study that they can send, no one ever does a case study on the mediocre work that they did for a client last year, and that they just parted ways amicably after. Everyone used the case study where they did exceptional work, that’s not usually their standard, and that’s what they use for the case study. So I don’t prefer case studies, I prefer helpful content, things that can help the people in the industry that you serve, solve a problem that they’re having. It can be a problem that you solve too, for them, but most people do not want to actually go and learn the process and do the work. So being able to send them something that’s going to help them.
Dana Lindahl: Here’s 10 ways that we solve this programming problem, or here’s five ways we solve this problem that’s endemic within your industry. I thought you’d find value in it, let me know. And one thing that works really well is saying, hey, as an expert in your field, I really like to know, do you have any feedback for me on this piece of content that I wrote? People love that, they love to be made to feel respected and as an authority. And they’d be more than willing to share their feedback with you. And if it’s actually a problem that they’re struggling with and you’re at the solution for it, you’ve just started a very organic conversation with someone with no pretense about just trying to sell them or whatever. And it almost becomes the prospect’s idea to hire them. And your job as a salesperson is so much easier when you’re not actually trying to sell a product, but you’re now just trying to qualify the prospect who wants to buy your product or service.
Darryl Praill: I love the point that Dana is making here. So first off, if you’re sending a case study early on, you’re getting it wrong. Case studies are middle of the funnel to the bottom of funnel. That’s when you’re actually saying, okay, I’m really, really interested, I like what you’re saying, I think you can help me out here, but how have others done? Let me send you a case study, it’s not a top of the funnel thing. Get your content right, I would tell you that’s the first part. Everything he just said about add value to talking to me, content, eBooks, white papers, whatever, how-to infographics, things I could quickly consume, brilliant. So your first touch in your cadence should be, hey, it’s Darryl here from VanillaSoft, I saw the other day that people in your industry, for example, the biggest lament I hear is that they’re not making enough touches.
Darryl Praill: Based on that, thought you might like this infographic on the top three cadences to use for most success. Check it out. Boom, no ask, no saying I do this, are you buying? No nothing, you’re adding value. Then the follow up is, hey, I saw you opened it. What’d you think of that? Was there one particular that jumped out or all three or what? And then shut up, silence is golden. And they will say, well, it’s funny, they’re gonna say, I didn’t read it. Or, I did and this is what I like. Okay, you didn’t read it, great. Then let me highlight the one that I like best and would love your take on that. Either way, when you do that, they’re gonna open up and give you a commentary. And that’s now the start of the discovery process, it all began with adding value, and they think they’re in control. You give up control to get control, that’s how it works folks.
Doing your research
Darryl Praill: Number seven, what is it, my friend?
Dana Lindahl: Number seven is really unfortunate because I see people dropping the ball right when they’re about to actually get some interest here, is not doing research into their prospects when they’re actually following up. And I recommend people do research into their prospects before reaching out. But I recommend a deeper level of research after there’s already been a response made because you’re not gonna get responses from everybody. There’s no need to go super, super, super deep before you’ve actually received a response. But I’ll go in and I’ll audit people’s campaigns and I’ll check out their LinkedIn accounts and their sales reps, and their email accounts, and I’ll see they’re reaching out to people, they’ve got the founder on the line, and they’re asking them, do you have salespeople in your organization?
Dana Lindahl: Why would you ask a question like that? There are so many ways that you could go out and find out this information on your own. You just look like a fool when you’re asking them questions about things that are publicly available, and are so relevant to your product, and you’re making him jump through hoops to qualify him or herself. And that’s just such a crazy thing to me. Once you get that initial interest, this now becomes a real prospect for you. Go in, resist the urge to just fire off a response because you want to get that three-minute window of response or something like that. Go in and do a little bit more work, people will appreciate your extra effort for not costing them their time, for not literally stealing their attention away to help you do your job better. And it’s so unfortunate because so many people don’t actually do this, and they can have so many more sales coming through by not turning their prospects off right after the first industry response comes in.
Darryl Praill: So let’s bring that back to the first point that we began on, which is targeting. So Dana said a couple of things there. He said, first off, he said no research, but you don’t want to waste cycles doing that upfront every single one. But just what he said, you don’t need to do it right away, but you don’t wanna ask stupid questions either, like, hey, Mr. CEO, do you have a sales team? Of course, he has a sales team, there is lots of ways you can figure that out. But if you hyper-target, that’s how we began, that was your mistake, then a lot of this goes away initially. In other words, imagine me going so small, my list is only maybe 100 people. I’m looking at jugglers who work in traveling circuses, who travel Europe during the summer months, and they’re less than six feet tall and more than four and a half feet tall.
Darryl Praill: And I’m hyper-targeting. And I go and I call them all up. And I say, people like you in our experience have a problem with either they have slippery items that they juggle, or their pants keep falling down whilst they juggle, or they’re too tall to reach the drink container up on the top shelf to refresh themselves. Are these problems that you have? I said those three, cause I know my solution can solve those three. Well, no situation one and two, I don’t have, situation three, yes I do have, and I’m very thirsty because of it. Okay, now I’ve got enough information to start having a conversation adding value, cause I’ve just qualified them, and it’s all because I hyper-targeted. If that leads to a follow on conversation, then I can research that one to go much deeper as part of my discovery process. So research is critical, targeting can help you on the research. My friend, we are out of time, completely out of time. So, if they wanna learn more about you, where should they go to find you?
Dana Lindahl: The best way to find me is just head to LinkedIn, type my name in, you might have to copy and paste it from the show, I do have a Swedish last name, that’s difficult for most people to spell. Be sure to include just something in the connection requests so I know where you’re coming from. Otherwise, I tend to not accept connection requests from people who just leave a blank or don’t do anything compelling to make me wanna connect with them.
Darryl Praill: There you go. He’s gonna have you practice the very things he taught you today, to get you to connect with him. I think you need to do that and try to sell him what you’ve got, and see if he could be a buyer, practice on him. My friends that is Dana Lindahl, you can reach him on LinkedIn, he is a rock star, he’s the founder of Legendary Leadgen. You can tell, he understands his craft, reach out connect. My name is Darryl Praill, this my friends is another episode in the book of INSIDE Inside Sales. You take care, we’ll talk to you soon.