My LinkedIn Inbox

Let's look at my LinkedIn inbox.

Dear Jake Fisher, I see that you are a human. I too am a human. Let's have a Zoom call at 2:00 PM your time.

Dear Jake, I came to know about your company Bridges Revenue Growth Agency and I must say it's impressive. What a profile. Amazing work, kudos.

Hey, thanks for that.

Let's have a Zoom call at 2:00 PM your time.

Hi Jake, did you receive my message from yesterday? I'm trying to get to know my connections better. I'd like to schedule a meeting with you so we can open a dialogue and discuss things.

And we're discussing what?

Let's have a Zoom call at 2:00 PM your time.

If you sell high value big ticket products or services and you or some outreach service that you've hired is sending messages like this, then we need to talk.

Please have a seat. I'm not saying that cold outreach doesn't have a place. I mean, cold calling has been with us for a long time. Legend has it that John H. Patterson, the founder of National Cash Register Corporation wrote about cold calling in a publication from 1873, which is three years before the invention of the telephone. That means that cold calls have been with us since before telephone calls.

So first let's define a few words for those that may not know. In many modern business to business sales organizations, cold outreach is done by someone that carries the title business development representative or maybe sales development representative. That's BDR or SDR for short. I'm going to say BDR in this video. And if like old John H. Patterson, your old school, you might know this role as an appointment setter.

In larger organizations, BDRs are often entry level sales positions. Many smaller organizations outsource BDR functions to outside companies with mixed results. I think this phrase mixed results is a fancy pants way of saying that it's mixed results. We say mixed results. And this is because while not every BDR outsourcing firm does it, a lot of them do exceedingly low value outreach.

BDRs work off of a cadence, which includes a series of phone calls, emails and LinkedIn messages over finite amount of time at varying frequency, normally weeks, sometimes longer. It's a kind of drip campaign.

Drip, drip, drip.

So what are the bare minimums required to do such low value BDR outreach?

Drip.

I mean, what do you need to do such a campaign?

Drip.

An email account.

Drip.

A LinkedIn account.

Drip.

And a phone.

Drip.

There are roughly four billion email accounts, 810 million LinkedIn accounts and 5.31 billion people with mobile phones. That's a lot of people and every one of them are in my inbox right now sending me the same message that they're sending to every other business that is remotely related to what my business does.

So does this have high value? Of course not. It's spam. B2B organizations that sell high value services and or products to high value clients are using low value outreach. If you're doing this in your company you're probably not alone. I mean, many organizations are trying to sell high value services and products to high value prospects using low value outreach. And if you've used these kinds of services, please let me know in the comments. Let me know how that went.

Many sales and marketing people try it at some point. I mean, it seems so easy and cheap and sometimes it works for a little while to limited effect. I'm going to show you something better.

Let me explain in the form of a question. If you're trying to sell high value products and services to high value prospects, then what kind of outreach should we use? This is hard. This is a hard one, but I think I know it. I think it's high value outreach. Final answer. Ding, ding, ding. High value products and services, high value prospects, high value outreach.

So what are the characteristics of something that is high value? Well, I can think of three of them right off the top of my head. Number one is, it meets not only our needs, but our desires. If we need to get ourselves across town, any old car that runs can meet that need, but not every car can give us the conveniences that we desire such as air conditioning, heated steering wheel, adaptive cruise control, ejector seat. The important thing is that we're not just offering the bare minimum, covering only the needs. We're including desires too. Including ejector seats. Cool dude.

The second quality of something that is high value is that it's available exactly when we want it and need it. So back to our automobile example. A high value automobile works when we need it to. It's not constantly breaking down because it's well made. And with many luxury automobiles, you get concierge service. They come to your home or office, they pick up the car, they take it to their service center, they change the oil, rotate the tires, do all that. They detail it and have it back to you the same day. And if it does break down, they'll bring a loaner car.

The third characteristic of a high value thing is that it serves our specific needs. I mean, luxury automobiles come with a ton of options. They can be personalized down to fine details like the color of the stitching on the leather upholstery. Our outreach needs to meet not only the needs of our prospects, but also their desires. It needs to be available when our prospects want it 24/7 just like that roadside assistance. And it needs to be personalized to the prospect based on their specific identity and their situation and their needs. That sounds expensive. But probably not as much as you think. Technology can help us do it.

Forward thinking businesses add value to their cold outreach by doing these three things. They appeal to desires by making the sales process easy and convenient. They make it easy for prospects to find all the information that they need in order to make their buying decision. I mean, the information is spread out or on like 20 emails. It's put together in an easy to access and easy to understand manner which of course makes it easier for them to buy.

Some people including me, call this buyer enablement. And you can learn more about my favorite buyer enablement platform at anyfriendofjake.com.

So the second thing is that they're available at the right time. Intelligent prioritization of leads to get the right outreach message in front of the right person at the right time. This is often done using tools like buyer intent data to understand who is actively looking for what we sell, anonymous lead identification to see what prospects are visiting our website. It's like caller ID for your website. See what companies are visiting your site and what they're looking at. You can even see what your competitors are doing on your website.

looking at you...

Behavior tracking on our own marketing assets which lets us know who is opening and clicking links on our marketing emails or who's visiting our website in a way that indicates they might be curious about what it is we do. We use these behavioral based triggers to prioritize the prospects that we're reaching out to and also it can help us craft our outreach message. We know what they want because we see what webpages they're reading and what emails they're clicking on and reading.

The third high value action that we take is that we cater to each individual prospect by sending them personalized messages. And I know that sounds tedious, it's not. We don't have the attention span for that. What we do is use technology tools to personalize at scale via smart automation. We make personalized assets that cater to the individual prospect's needs and their desires.

So there it is. If you wanna learn about how you can implement high value outreach in your own business, reach out to me and my team at bridgerev.com/Jake. Feel free to hit subscribe or follow or ring the bell. And thanks for watching. Take two. Hit subscribe or follow or ring the bell or whatever's on the screen that, you know, looks like it would be good to do, do that. Rich Corinthian leather upholstery.

Drip