When it comes to prospecting, the simplest misstep can lead to disaster. Which channels should you use? Should you focus solely on email or on cold calls? How many times should you contact someone before they become annoyed? At which stage should you make your pitch? Successful prospecting in sales can be tough. If you don’t already have solid answers to these questions, that’s OK. We do.
In this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl speaks with another founder of the incredibly popular OutBound Conference, international speaker and bestselling author Anthony Iannarino. Darryl and Anthony discuss the 5 enormous mistakes you need to avoid when prospecting, such as ways to offer content before even thinking about going into your pitch. They also share the right formula for outreach, and offer ways to be persistent without being annoying. Don’t take a run at it and hope for the best, learn some solid prospecting tips on this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales!
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Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Anthony Iannarino, TheSalesBlog.com
The 5 Prospecting Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Darryl Praill: My goodness, folks, another week has gone by. I’m still here, you’re still there, we’re still listening, life is good. Life is good, is it not? How you been keeping? You doing okay? Everything fine, how’s your mindset?
Darryl Praill: Have you worked on your personal branding? because you know I’m just all in on personal branding. And most of all, what have you read lately? Have you read any good books lately? because I’m reading some good books. Right now, I’m reading Jeb Blount’s “Inked“.
Darryl Praill: Jeb Blount, of course, of OutBound Conference coming up in May. I just finished reading “#SalesTruth” by Mike, Michael Weinberg, again, another original founder of the OutBound posse. And that was cool. One of the things I always like when you’re reading a book, like this one, and there’s lots of nuggets where you’re just self-identifying.
Darryl Praill: You’re going, holy, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me. That’s us, that’s so-and-so, that’s my colleague or whatever. I bet ya, I took more screenshots from my living room, my den if you will, my little reading room, with my phone on various pages and sent them to my peers, my CEO, my VP of Sales, et cetera, on Slack. And I would mark it all up and I’d say we need to do this, and we talked about that.
Darryl Praill: That’s the power of the book. So, if you haven’t read anything, guys, learning is earning, make a point of doing that. In fact, we had a blog post recently on VanillaSoft.com where we actually took all of the guests that were on the podcast in 2019 and we chronicled all of their books and it’s an incredible who’s who, because, again, Weinberg, Blount, Iannarino, Hunter, Bertuzzi, the list goes on all the legends, right?
Darryl Praill: But then it was even more cool about that one was we actually took all the books that they said influenced them and we put it out there, which I always find almost more interesting. If you take somebody who’s really successful and you look at the books that affected them, that’s cool, there’s the proof in the pudding.
Darryl Praill: Anyway, why do I share that? I share that because that’s how I learn. I learn that way. And then ironically, believe it or not, I learn from you guys. When you call me, I learn, and I adapt? So, I learned about your products and your services, so I’m one of those few people who likes getting sales calls.
Darryl Praill: But I also like actually picking your brain. So, I’m typically the guy who’s secretly saying, what are you saying? What’s your approach to hook me? Would that work, would I approach that? So, I’m actually totally, totally analyzing your approach to sell me, full disclosure.
Darryl Praill: But the other part that’s really interesting is watching how you guys try to sell me. In other words, the tactics you use. So, I get a variety. Let me explain to you what I get. I get a phone call and/or the voicemail, but usually it’s just the phone call, phone call, phone call, maybe a voicemail, but it’s relentless, I get that, that’s fine, that’s cool, that’s my channel.
Darryl Praill: I get a gazillion emails, like you wouldn’t believe. It’s hilarious. By the way, if your subject line isn’t engaging at all or if I can’t skim it on my phone, cause that’s where I read most of my emails, I don’t even read it. I just go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Darryl Praill: That’s me. It’s nothing personal, I do it to all of you. I’m an equal opportunist deleter of emails. But if your subject line is interesting and it resonates with me, it’s personalized to me, and I go, oh, oh, then you’ve got my attention. Because remember, I like to learn.
Darryl Praill: So, if I can learn from you, then I open the email. What I think is most fun, this is a true story, is how few of you actually come at me in social media. Let me qualify that. I get a gazillion connection requests, personalized notes, every single day from all of you.
Darryl Praill: And they all start off with one of two approaches, “Hey Darryl, I really love what you’re doing “and because we’re in the same industry, “I’d love to connect with you.” So, in other words, they have no idea what I’m doing. That is a complete bullshit, made up statement. It’s generic as hell.
Darryl Praill: And I go delete. Or they say, “Hey Darryl, my company does A, B, C, D, and E “and I think we can help you out.” So, it’s a pitch, not a connection request, and it’s a generic pitch. You’re just, you have no idea if I need that or not. You’ve done no research on me.
Darryl Praill: So, I go delete. Now, the best ones that get me, now this is just me, this is just Darryl speaking, is when I get the ones that say, “Hey Darryl, “I’ve tried phone, I’ve tried email, you have not returned “any of my calls, but I know you’re super active here “on LinkedIn, so this is my attempt to reach you now “using this medium.” I love those.
Darryl Praill: I’m like connect, I’m replying, I love you, I’m giggling. I’ve got your emails, I saw your phone calls, okay, fine, they stalk me. So why? If they would’ve just gone to LinkedIn alone, I never would’ve responded, but because they went multi-channel, I saw them over and over again, that’s the first part, the second part was they made it contextual to me.
Darryl Praill: They actually almost made fun of the situation that I was ignoring them. And they didn’t back off from the challenge. I respect that. I know you’ve got a deal to do here, I know you’ve got to sell.
Darryl Praill: Every buyer knows that. So, why you wasting time with bad cadences, bad sequences, bad playbooks, it’s bad messaging, not personalized, when it’s so easy to fix. That’s me. But again, I keep on saying to you, I’m just one guy. So, who should I talk to?
Welcome Anthony Iannarino
Darryl Praill: I mentioned OutBound at the conference. OutBound is coming up. Who’s one of the four founders of OutBound? You may know him. He’s been on the show before. Anthony Iannarino. He, my friends, of multiple books, in fact, he’s due cause if I do my history right, he had a book, “The Only Sales Guide You Ever Need” in 2016, he had “The Lost Art of Closing” in 2017, he had “Eat their Lunch” in 2018.
Darryl Praill: All freaking best sellers, annoying as hell. He is a podcast machine in the arena. He’s a blogging machine, he gets up early all the time, cranks his stuff out. And this isn’t a 500-word blogs, guys, these are substantial stuff, that’s thesalesblog.com
Anthony Iannarino: A thousand.
Darryl Praill: A thousand, there you go, a thousand. See, I’m telling you, I noticed, I didn’t count. Apparently, he does. So, that’s my point. I’m learning from him because I like to learn. You should be, too. But I went to him and I saw a blog post recently and I said, “This is what he and I may talk about.” His blog post was on the five enormous mistakes in your prospecting sequence and that, kids, is what we’re talking about, but first, let’s meet the cat himself. Anthony, welcome to the show.
Anthony Iannarino: Now you know how to get Darryl’s attention. You write a blog post about prospecting sequences. That’ll get you invited on right away, won’t it? My favorite is, “Ian, I’m an enormous fan.” And I’m like, well, no, you’re not, because you think my name is Ian.
Darryl Praill: Ian.
Anthony Iannarino: Narino, yeah. That kind of gets in the way from the beginning. You should at least know the person’s name and get that right. Good starting point.
Darryl Praill: I had one the other day, I actually posted on this on LinkedIn, did a screen capture, I was nice enough I blurred out their name and picture. And it was a connection request, hey, parenthesis, first name, parenthesis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, oh my gosh, guys. Enough with the bots already, just stop it. We get it, stop it.
Anthony Iannarino: No kidding.
The OutBound Conference: It’s inception & more
Darryl Praill: It’s just bad, it’s bad. Anyway, before we get into the topic around the five enormous mistakes, not just mistakes, enormous mistakes that you’re making in your prospecting sequence, which is something we’ve never talked about before on the show, I want to talk a little bit about.
Anthony Iannarino: Really?
Darryl Praill: Yeah, no, we really haven’t, which is funny. Because VanillaSoft is a sales engagement vendor. It’s all about sequences and cadences and playbooks, that’s literally the essence of our platform.
Anthony Iannarino: Is that what you guys do?
Darryl Praill: That’s what we do, I don’t know if you know that. Yeah, yeah, did I mention we’re the title sponsor? And Anthony’s going what the hell do you do? I love that. And we’ve never talked about it, so I’m looking forward to that conversation.
Darryl Praill: But I want to stop, because I was telling a story about you earlier today, we did another podcast recording and I was sharing the story about how OutBound began and, if I recall right, it was you, it was you as a response to the whole, you got an email invite or something to attend InBound, which of course is put on by the folks at HubSpot, and you said there’s no OutBound, is that right?
Anthony Iannarino: That’s right. I was waiting for my turn to speak at a conference and I was just catching up on stuff and I was watching stuff go by in the Inbound thinking and I thought, InBound, I mean, and I get it, I’m a HubSpot customer. I mean, I use them as a CRM, so I like what they do and it’s important.
Anthony Iannarino: But there was so much going on for so long about it all has to be inbound, there’s no more cold outreach, you can’t pick up the phone and call people. And there was so much of it that I had a visceral reaction to getting this and I was literally sitting there, and I thought, I got to do something about this.
Anthony Iannarino: So, literally I went out to hover.com where I buy domain names and I bought outboundconference.com. I bought OutBound Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, I bought every major city in America. I bought years. I bought Outbound Conference 2016, 17, 18, all the way up to 25.
Anthony Iannarino: I don’t know how many domain names I own, but I own a whole bunch of them. And I did that without ever talking to anybody. Then I called Jeb later on that night and I said, “We’re going to start a conference called OutBound “and it’s all going to be the exact opposite of InBound.
Anthony Iannarino: “It’s all going to be just outbound prospecting” and building a pipeline and being productive” and taking control of your destiny and what you want “as a salesperson.” And he said, “That’s the single best idea you’ve ever had “in your life.” And I was like, “Wow. “I don’t know what that says about all my other ideas. “But you apparently like it.”
Anthony Iannarino: Then I called Mark Hunter, cause Mark Hunter’s the solid yes. If I said, “Mark we’re going to do a conference in Mars “next year, we might die.” He’ll be like, “Okay, make sure I know how to get there.” He would be in immediately. And then we got Weinberg to do it. And from there, we only had maybe 10 weeks from the start to getting the conference going. And we were about 400 people, next year 600, last year, well, we sold 1000 tickets, but there were 1100 people there, so I don’t know how that happened, but we had enough seats for everybody and then we had to put seats around the back wall and the side walls.
Anthony Iannarino: It looked like we had wings on the end of it. And it turns out that people want to know how to do this. They want to know how to be better at prospecting. They want to know how to be able to build their pipeline without waiting for marketing to do something for them.
Anthony Iannarino: So, it ends up being a big success. We’re thrilled to have you as a sponsor, because what you do is just very, very much aligned with what we believe, so thank you, we appreciate you being there.
How Do You Define OutBound Sales?
Darryl Praill: No problem. Hey, the money was just sitting in the bank, so this way now it’s an investment, right? So, there we go. I have a question for you on just, so OutBound was a reaction to InBound and I get all that, my question is, how do you define outbound?
Darryl Praill: That’s the one question I’ve been wanting to ask you specifically as it relates to this conference, because I guess I ask the question is social selling? We won’t explore what that means, but is that outbound? What’s outbound, is it just a phone? You tell me.
Anthony Iannarino: No, I don’t think it’s just a phone. I think it’s because you guys do what you do you know, LinkedIn is an important tool and we’ve never, as the people who started OutBound, you will never hear me and you will never hear Jeb Blount, you’ll never hear Mark Hunter say, “Don’t use all the tools.” We’ll never say that.
Anthony Iannarino: We’re all bound. I want inbound, I want outbound, I want to make relationships with people in every single venue and every single medium I can possibly find. If you show up at a networking event, that’s great, if you network online, that’s great.
Anthony Iannarino: If you can get referrals through LinkedIn, get referrals through LinkedIn. Whatever works for you. I’ve had people who have hired me to speak over Twitter, so I’m certainly not unaware of the power of the tools. But when we were reacting to this and I was, between me and Jeb and Mike Weinberg and Mark, we took a lot of the flak from this for being out of touch, but we never said no inbound, we never said don’t use the social tools.
Anthony Iannarino: We said, “Stop saying no more cold outreach. “Stop saying that you’re not allowed to cold call. “Stop saying that when you interrupt people, “they’re never going to buy from you, because it’s not true.” And we had a whole bunch of people, young bucks mostly, just arguing with us that no one will ever make a cold call again now that there’s LinkedIn and Twitter.
Anthony Iannarino: And the fact of the matter is it’s not true. And so, we were more concerned with the truth. And you just, you mentioned in your intro, that you read Mike Weinberg’s book, I wrote the forward for that book and I’ll argue it’s the best part of the book. And he’ll argue that it’s not.
Darryl Praill: It was a good part, I did enjoy it.
Anthony Iannarino: We set it up and it was an argument that we were having with the loud voices on LinkedIn at that time. And I think everyone knows now, first off, I don’t hear very many people talk about social selling at all. I mean, I never hear it anymore. And I knew it was a fad when it started. It’s a medium.
Anthony Iannarino: And you’re going to use every medium. You’re going to use every medium. So, outbound to me means I’m going to reach out and I’m going to ask somebody for a meeting in a place where I have a reasonable shot of getting that. Twitter is not that place. Twitter is not that place, it’s not where you do this.
Anthony Iannarino: What’s the first rule of social selling? Don’t sell. Okay, well, it’s a little bit of a dichotomy there, right? Social selling but don’t sell. And I get it. Because they were right about that. But it’s not a place for you to make an ask.
[bctt tweet=”What’s the first rule of social selling? Don’t sell. 🎧 Listen as @Iannarino spills some beans on how to avoid mistakes in #Prospecting. #B2BSales #SalesTips” username=”VanillaSoft”]
Anthony Iannarino: It’s a place for you to start to develop a relationship and be known, just like the story that you told. You’ve tried me on the phone, you’ve tried me on email, you’ve left me voicemails, you’ve showed up on LinkedIn, you keep showing up in different places. That’s a really important thing to do.
Anthony Iannarino: And one of the reasons I’m so happy that you’re the sponsor is because the technology allows us to do this in a much more sophisticated way, with much more greater clarity as to what we’re trying to get done. And with a much better approach that gives people, what I would call, a professional persistence.
Anthony Iannarino: And not the sporadic thing that we used to do, like I’m going to call Darryl and then I’ll try him again in 90 days, but what I just taught Darryl was if I ignore this person, they’ll go away for 90 days and I don’t have to think about them anymore, and I accept that offer every time it’s offered to me.
Anthony Iannarino: If you’re just going to disappear, great. But if you can be persistent and you can share value and you can explain the value proposition of a meeting, you can do a lot better. And the technology here will enable that.
Darryl Praill: Cool, I love it. Thank you for that. It was just my own personal exploration. Everybody else, if I bored you or Anthony was boring, which he wasn’t by the way, sorry for that, but now you know. Outbound, all bound, it’s all the same. All right, we said we’re going to cover the five enormous mistakes you make in your prospecting sequence. I know you want to know.
Darryl Praill: So, if you could wait about 30 seconds more, we’re going to go to commercial break and we’re going to get into it. And it’s going to be rapid fire, so stay tuned. Hold on, we’ll be right back. Okay, so now we’re in rapid fire mode, Mr. I’ll just call you Ian, is that what you prefer me just to call you Ian, is that it?
Anthony Iannarino: You can. As the title sponsor, I guess you have the right.
Darryl Praill: I have the right to call you Ian.
Anthony Iannarino: That I’m an Ian from now on.
5 Tips For Successful Prospecting In Sales
Darryl Praill: All right, rapid fire, now you want to get the whole post, go read it you guys, it’s on thesalesblog.com, it’s called “The Five Enormous Mistakes in Your Prospecting Sequence.” But you have five points. I’m going to give you two minutes per point. Let’s see if you can nail through this. Number one, you said, less human than human. Talk to me.
Anthony Iannarino: All right, fully automating everything and not having a human do this. I got an email. I ignored the email. I got another email with the email pasted below it. I got a third email with the two prior emails I ignored posted below those.
Anthony Iannarino: On the fourth one I sent a note saying, listen, this isn’t working for you. Read my friend, Jeb Blount’s book, “Fanatical Prospecting,” it will help you. And about a week later I got a note from the salesperson who was sending this saying I didn’t send you any of those, they all came from my chief marketing officer.
Anthony Iannarino: And had you not replied, I wouldn’t have known that you ever looked at them or not looked at them. And I thought, wow, he doesn’t even know he’s attempting to get a meeting with me. He’s not trying to sell me.
Anthony Iannarino: His chief marketing officer believes that he can automate the acquisition of meetings and the acquisition of opportunities without having to have a human do anything. So, what it says to me is that you don’t care about me, you don’t know me, and you could care less, you’re just going to use spam to see if you can get somebody to respond to these things.
Anthony Iannarino: And that’s less human than human. Listen, if you want a client, you reach out to that person. You figure out who they are. You find some theory about how you should be helping them, and you trade enough value to get that. You can’t automate this. You have to be a human being and people still buy from human beings.
[bctt tweet=”And that’s less human than human. Listen, if you want a client, you reach out to that person. 🎧 Listen as @Iannarino tells you all about the 5 mistakes to avoid in #B2BSales #Prospecting. #SalesTips #SalesSuccess” username=”VanillaSoft”]
Darryl Praill: All right, so every person.
Anthony Iannarino: Did I come in under time?
Darryl Praill: You did well, I’m actually watching it. Every single one of you who have a maybe a revenue ops, sales ops, marketing ops, CMO kind of person who’s involved in these decisions, just cut that clip and send it to them.
Darryl Praill: Okay, that’s the first thing, because I agree with everything he’s saying and I’m a CMO and I agree with what he’s saying. In fact, we have a rule here that if you come to us at VanillaSoft, and maybe you watch, you download some content, or you do a Webinar or something, yeah, we’re going to nurture you, it’s a high level nurture, but the minute that the sales rep even remotely touches you, we are out, we do no more nurturing at all, because the sales rep owns the relationship.
Darryl Praill: And we make it clear that that email or that touch is coming from usually me, my name is on it with my title. So, you know it’s not an account executive or an SDR, it’s me, the CMO, and here’s my email address, call me. Email me but make that distinction clear. So, I like your point there.
Anthony Iannarino: I didn’t know that, but I like that a lot.
Darryl Praill: Thank you.
Anthony Iannarino: I mean, it’s transparency.
Darryl Praill: Well, I had a conversation with someone the other day, actually, it might’ve been Victor Antonio, cause he was telling me about the name of his new book which is coming out before OutBound, which I won’t give away here. But he tells me how he was inspired by the show “Orange is the New Black.”
Darryl Praill: And I got to thinking about sales is the new marketing, because so much of sales reps are doing marketing now with their own nurtures and touches and social and everything else. So, that’s exactly why we do that. Okay, you say number two, the email alone approach, you say that is a big mistake, it’s an enormous mistake. What do you mean? Two minutes, go.
Anthony Iannarino: All right, if your sequence is just emails, then you’re not creating any real value. And especially the emails that show up. I tried to pull one up on LinkedIn that I got that was an in mail so I could read it to you. And it’s just a straight pitch.
Anthony Iannarino: And it’s like here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s why I’m so great at it, here’s why you should engage with me, and then another email that says the same thing, and there’s always a link to try to get you to click on something so that you can prove that this person is interested even though they’re not really interested.
Anthony Iannarino: So, if you are trying to get a meeting and you’re doing it over email and every ask that you make is over email, you’re just choosing a poor medium for an ask.
Anthony Iannarino: Because I don’t know you, number one. I don’t know what your theory is about why I should change, you’re just straight pitching me, and then you’re using a medium that gives me the very easiest way to say no just by hitting the delete key or ignoring your email. It’s just not effective. And I think I wrote something about the percentage is between zero and some number less than zero or something.
Anthony Iannarino: It’s very hard to get somebody to say yes to a meeting and you just keep spamming them with email. You’ve got to mix it up. And I think we’re talking to, I didn’t know you were the CMO, I thought your title was just the Darryl. As the Darryl, you know you would never recommend, use VanillaSoft and just spam the hell out of everybody.
Darryl Praill: No.
Anthony Iannarino: Until they relent and give you a meeting. You would say, mix it up, you got to do some different things. You got to have some different looks and different places that you show up and different insights and good things to share. So, if you just go email alone, you’re making an enormous mistake. And you’re really a spammer at that point.
Darryl Praill: You are and a lot of guys will say, and women will say, well, it’s a numbers game. I know I’m spamming, but if I send enough out, I’ll have enough responses and I want to throttle them when they say that. But you laughed, why’d you laugh?
Anthony Iannarino: Because the idea of pissing off 98.9% of the people in your database might not be the best idea.
Darryl Praill: Thank you. I’ve said the same thing and they just ignore me. I’m like, oh man. So, the biggest thing is, many of you guys, you’re hiding behind the email. It’s not a sequence.
Anthony Iannarino: That’s true.
Darryl Praill: If it’s just email. It’s a spam, it’s all it is. Anthony’s 100% right. The second thing is, after your pitch is, this is who we are, and this is what we do. Yeah, why do I care? What does that mean to me?
Darryl Praill: You’re begging me to figure out your value prop and connect the dots to my pain. I don’t care, I don’t have time for that. Tell me why I should care, connect with me, alright. Personalize it. Okay, next up. This is controversial, too few phone calls is an enormous mistake. Talk to me about that.
Anthony Iannarino: Well, first off, we can argue about this and it’ll be a good argument. My sequence will go like this. Week one, phone call, followed by a voicemail, where I give you a commercial, but I never ask you to call me back, followed by an email saying I’m sorry I missed you, same thing I say on the voicemail.
Anthony Iannarino: I will try to catch you again this same time next week. And in the meantime, if you need anything, you have my email address. It’s got my phone number, too. Second week, I’m going to do the same thing. Stay with me here, Darryl. I wish I could see you when I’m on camera myself. Third week, another phone call. Fourth week, phone call.
Anthony Iannarino: Now I’m going to start mixing up the mediums. And here’s what I can tell you. The fact that you’re pursuing someone, and they feel that you’re pursuing them, and that you’re leaving a message and you’re telling them the value proposition. So, my proud value proposition is, “Darryl, I want to give you a 20-minute executive briefing “on the four trends that we think are going to “have the biggest impact on personal branding “over the next 18 to 24 months.
Anthony Iannarino: “One of the things that our research shows is that “wearing blue glasses is detrimental to your personal brand, “especially if you’re on LinkedIn quite frequently.” And so, I’m going to give you some pitch about what the value is in the meeting.
Anthony Iannarino: You can’t do that as easily in other mediums and have it be as effective as the phone. You’re going to try the phone and you’re going to trade some value to do that, so you should embrace the idea of using the phone, number one, and leaving messages.
Anthony Iannarino: And people tell me that no, you don’t want to leave a message. Do you knock on people’s doors and run? No. You’re asking them for their attention, leave a message, let them know you’re pursuing them. So, if you do that, the propensity to give you an answer one way or the other.
Anthony Iannarino: Now, I’m going to tell you my experience is about 40% of people get two-way with you if you have those four or so calls very close succession. Not everybody’s going to be happy or impressed with your persistence. There will be grouchy people that you run into who will say leave me alone.
Anthony Iannarino: But most of them sound more like, “I know you’ve been “trying to get a hold of me. “I’m sorry, we’ve been super busy. “What is it that you wanted to share with me?” And you’re at least in a conversation. After that, then I think you mix up the mediums. I think you should have a priority for phones early on. Because it produces a better result.
[bctt tweet=”I think you mix up the mediums. I think you should have a priority for phones early on. Because it produces a better result. 🎧 Listen as @Iannarino provides amazing tips on #Prospecting in #B2BSales. #SalesStrategy” username=”VanillaSoft”]
Persistence Is The Key To Success In Sales
Darryl Praill: So, what I love about what Anthony just said specifically, or resonated with me, was his cadence, his sequence, was much more extended. Many times, seven touches is seven days. He was pacing himself; he was playing the long game. So, he wasn’t annoying, but he was persistent.
Darryl Praill: Persistency is the real reason you do a sequence. The second thing that was really interesting is you talked about the voicemail. Voicemail’s really powerful. We actually had Art Sobczak on this podcast to talk about how to use a voicemail effectively, properly, consistently, repetitively.
Darryl Praill: And by the way, not only should listen to that, he’s going to be at OutBound, you should just go talk to him there. So, that’s a double plug, so, that’s really, really cool. Now we’re going to go into lightning, lightning, lightning round, cause we’re almost out of time. 30 seconds for the last two points each. You say, no no ask content. I have no idea what that means. But what does it mean? Because it’s an enormous mistake.
Anthony Iannarino: No no ask content. If every time you reach out and touch somebody you’re asking them, it’s ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. No give, stop and give them something. Share the insight. Darryl, the blue glasses, that was 2017 man. You should be looking at orange.
Anthony Iannarino: I should give you something of value without asking for anything, because if I tell you go look at this and you look, go look at this and you look, go look at this and you look and you read it. Then pretty soon, who’s shaping the way that you think about things? I don’t have to ask every time.
Anthony Iannarino: I can give the gift of here’s an insight, it’s useful to you whether you hire me, or you hire somebody else. So, you need to break it up. So, when you have no no ask content, then you’re making a mistake. Give them some content without asking.
Darryl Praill: So, if you haven’t heard the James Weir podcast we did, who will also be at OutBound, we talk a little bit exactly about this, about going into that meeting and you want to have an ask, you wanna know what that ask is going to be, what do you want that person to do as a result of this meeting?
Darryl Praill: Also, about adding value. If you don’t add value, it’s a waste of meeting. So, check that one out. Last one, 30 seconds, no more. I love this. For the love of all that is good and holy, go for it.
Anthony Iannarino: Don’t straight pitch people on LinkedIn over in mail. And listen, we know you’re a spammer. We know you hired somebody to do it. If I see the key words that say, “And the best part is “if you don’t get new clients, we don’t get paid.” No, the best part is the delete key.
Anthony Iannarino: That’s the best part. I can just eliminate this. I don’t have to look at it anymore. And I know that somebody’s feeling really good conning people into saying they can get appointments from them cause they all say this. I tried to find this for you Darryl, but one person sent me a note saying, “I have helped over 2,793 clients.”
Anthony Iannarino: And I’m like that’s 2,794. Why is it more than that number? And the best part is. I don’t need to know the best part, it’s just spam. It wasn’t even intended for me. The Darryl, the truth of the matter is, people try to sell me sales training.
Darryl Praill: Yes.
Anthony Iannarino: You’re pretty sure that they never looked at you if, if yeah.
Darryl Praill: Yes.
Anthony Iannarino: And you might be getting pitched by people who have software and you’re like, do you know who I am and what I do? Not really, they’re just taking a run at it.
Darryl Praill: My favorite, I get this all the time. I get the hey, we do multi-channel engagement and we can drive your business. Really? You do multi-channel engagement. That’s good idea. Or I got one today. Darryl, do you have a video plan for 2020? You clearly have never even looked at me at all. So, that’s that. Folks, we’re out of time.
Anthony Iannarino: We’re trying to get them to tone down the videos a little bit and they’re trying to get you to do more.
Darryl Praill: I know.
Anthony Iannarino: You seem pretty active to me.
Darryl Praill: I’m a little busy, but it’s because I’m insecure. We are out of time. This is Anthony, the Anthony Iannarino. But to friends and family, he’s just plain old Ian. You can check him out at thesalesblog.com. Go to outboundconference.com, register now. In the meantime, we’re done for this week, folks. You take care. We’ll see you soon. Bye-bye.