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June 14, 2021
5 min read + 3 min watch
Welcome back to The Weekly Pitch! Our mission is to cover news, stories, and insights that matter most to the sales, marketing, and revenue growth community. We want our newsletter to be a once-a-week dose of fun and inspiration.
Our Feature Story – another reader-requested topic – asks how do we break through the noise? Well, we've got you covered with a baker's dozen of ideas to experiment with and reach that decision-maker. Your outreach is guaranteed to stand out and book more meetings.
In Pitch Perfect, we meet Kyle Whetstone, an inside senior sales rep for Enphase Energy. His day-to-day is intense! So is his competition. Watch his 3-minute video to learn his secrets for beating Elon Musk, all day, every day.
Two updates. First, we're replacing the "Weekly Forecast" section with the Weekly Chart. We heard your feedback loud and clear (thank you!). How reps and leaders are trending toward hitting goals is enjoyable once in a while, but good grief, can you spice it up with other benchmarks and insights? Absolutely.
Second, we're moving the weekly "attention grabbers" from the opener to the last section – The Closer.
Alright, let's get into it!
As a lead-in to our Feature Story, this chart from HubSpot's 100,000+ customers shows sales reps are dialing for dollars like never before. Sales calls are up 81% (!) over the January 2020 benchmark.
At least we know one thing is true – our competitors are cold calling and talking to the same prospects just as much as we are, if not more. So read below for ways to break through the noise and land that meeting.
In the B2B sales world, almost every “closed-won” deal requires a meeting. Sometimes it’s below the “power line,” and you book time with someone on the frontline. Perhaps this person would use your product. Other times, it’s above the power line, and you set an appointment with the decision-maker and the one who controls the purse strings. Either way, booking a meeting is arguably the most challenging task in sales (especially if it’s cold outreach).
According to MIT research, executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings. And time spent in email is just as alarming. The average worker gets 121 emails and sends 40 each day. Add in the scores of account reps targeting similar contacts, often sending similar messages, and one starts to wonder if it's possible to stand out in a crowd.
To say our window is paper-thin to reach prospects and book a meeting would be an understatement.
With the intense competition and so little time left for decision-makers and influencers to see, much less respond to our outreach, how are we supposed to break through the noise?
On the one hand, we know we shouldn’t spam, template, or “cut and paste” our way to success in sales; however, tell that to our manager barking at us about our activity metrics. These tactics balance personalization and scale. To book more appointments in today's sales environment, you need both.
Labeling video and gifting as "outside the box" is probably a stretch in 2021, but reps are still giving up too early (or not using them at all). That would be a mistake. SalesLoft reports that 20% of personal gifts sent by reps result in new qualified opportunities.
Try any of the following to grab your prospect's attention:
Think about tightening up your LinkedIn game. Asking a prospect (or anyone) to connect without a personalized, non-solicitation invite is a party foul these days. Once you connect:
Arguably the noisiest of channels, it's too easy to build and blast. There's room here to scale, but in more imaginative ways:
Hit us up, and we'll send you a proven template that gets a 90% response rate.
Cold calling is not dead (yet), but there's room to do more with the phones. Use a to-the-point script that shares a) what problems you solve for businesses or b) specific customer stories with proven ROI.
Get out of your inbox and away from the auto-dialer and hang with your prospects. Ideas to consider:
Send a letter, or, even better, crumple it up. As corny as it sounds, the effectiveness of it comes in the follow-up call or email where you can share, “I’m the one who sent the crumpled letter.”
Fist bump to Kyle Whetstone for being our Pitch Perfect winner this week! He's an inside senior sales rep (and sales trainer at heart) at publicly traded Enphase Energy, a company with a 150 person sales team.
Kyle shows us how to use emotional framing when he goes toe-to-toe with Enphase's top competitor – Tesla's Powerwall product. He also tells us about his fun side hustle.
Click the image or hit the button below to watch!
Before we say goodbye until next week, here are a few good clicks to help us challenge the status quo and sell smarter:
Have fun booking meetings, closing deals, and making customers happy :)
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Start your week with the stories and insights that matter most to the sales community.