Podcast episode
Relentless prospecting and dial tactics as the #1 all-time SDR (Ken Amar, SDR Manager @ Outreach.io)
30 Minutes to President's Club29 Jul 202025 min
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Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 Four Actionable Takeaways: Double tap the phones - people are more likely to think it’s a real call. The moment you see someone reply, call them instead of writing a long email reply. Use a sequence for everything. Replies, objections, open opportunities. If you see someone opening your emails, call it out! It gets the conversation going. Ken Amar’s Path to President’s Club: SDR Team Lead, Outreach.io #1 All Time SDR, Outreach.io RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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I'm sorting them by engagement. I'm actually calling through the activity feed. Anytime someone opened my email, like both as a rep, now as a manager, I always coach my team. Hey, drop whatever you're doing and call them. Just pick up the phone and call them. They're most likely opening that email up on their cell phone. They're in the bathroom. They're on a walk somewhere. They'll definitely pick up. “You got to strike when the iron's hot.” Well, Armand, this makes me think of the episode that we did with Ryan Reiser about going after the people who have shown engagement and like you can track things.
Awesome. Thank you. Armand's a tough customer. I would hate cold calling him. I love doing call teardowns. A couple things to point out is that you can hear the tenacity in your voice. You're not this timid, cold caller. The other thing is when you jumped into your value prop, you were just talking about me. You weren't saying, Outreach is a solution to do X, Y, and Z. “You say, Hey, I noticed that you're hiring SDRs and SMBAEs at Carta, and you did your research, and you basically just described a problem that I'm having.” And then you just said that you're going to solve that problem for me, which is exactly how it should be. One thing Ken did that it seems really basic, and I think a lot of reps know this, but there are some that don't, is he made it really easy for Armand to book some time. He said, How's tomorrow at 3? Instead of saying, Hey, when's the best time for you?
He said, How's tomorrow at 3? Instead of saying, Hey, when's the best time for you? You're giving him a softball. Tomorrow at 3? Sure. Okay, boom. I can get that on your calendar. What's the best email address for you? As opposed to forcing him to think and do more work, you're already an interruption. “So that's a basic tip, but offering that time slot is something that I think reduces some of the friction on the cold call.” If you were to offer someone a 3 o'clock tomorrow or a 4 o'clock tomorrow, they're going to think on both of those and not like, No, I don't want to meet tomorrow. Ken, I kind of want to dig into something here that you were talking about on the prep call, and it's sequencing 2.0. And it's this idea of – I think a lot of us talk about sequence and cadence related to net new prospecting.
He said, How's tomorrow at 3? Instead of saying, Hey, when's the best time for you? You're giving him a softball. Tomorrow at 3? Sure. Okay, boom. I can get that on your calendar. What's the best email address for you? As opposed to forcing him to think and do more work, you're already an interruption. So that's a basic tip, but offering that time slot is something that I think reduces some of the friction on the cold call. “If you were to offer someone a 3 o'clock tomorrow or a 4 o'clock tomorrow, they're going to think on both of those and not like, No, I don't want to meet tomorrow.” Ken, I kind of want to dig into something here that you were talking about on the prep call, and it's sequencing 2.0. And it's this idea of – I think a lot of us talk about sequence and cadence related to net new prospecting. But you're doing it for things like lost opportunities, rejections that you've gotten in the past, etc.
And what I've noticed across a lot of customers and a lot of other SCR teams, they'll get, Hey, I'm not interested. Hey, take me off your list. And then most SCRs will leave that be, and they won't take action on that. Here what we do at Outreach, we have a template for, Hey, I know I'm not interested. “We'll have a template to counteract that, and then we'll have what's called a reply follow-up sequence.” Over half of our meetings actually come from that sequence alone. Anytime someone takes the time to respond to you, you've kind of opened a dialogue, and you can work with that. Gotcha. And what are you saying? The actual cadence itself is just bumps of that original message. Because that original message where you put in the time and effort and the personalization.
And what I've noticed across a lot of customers and a lot of other SCR teams, they'll get, Hey, I'm not interested. Hey, take me off your list. And then most SCRs will leave that be, and they won't take action on that. Here what we do at Outreach, we have a template for, Hey, I know I'm not interested. “We'll have a template to counteract that, and then we'll have what's called a reply follow-up sequence.” Over half of our meetings actually come from that sequence alone. Anytime someone takes the time to respond to you, you've kind of opened a dialogue, and you can work with that. Gotcha. And what are you saying? The actual cadence itself is just bumps of that original message. Because that original message where you put in the time and effort and the personalization.
The first email is based off of the close loss reengagement instructions. Let's say, for example, I went after the Houston Rockets, which we're actively prospecting. It was bad timing last time we met because the NBA season got canceled. I could send them an email now and say, hey, Gretchen, thanks so much for taking my email. I actually noticed, you know, we're in talks with you guys about six months ago and the timing wasn't right. “I'd love to pick up that conversation. When we last met, you were interested in X, Y and Z.” And these are all coming from the opportunity notes from the account executive. I kind of like the thing where you're reiterating, hey, when we last spoke, this is what you were interested in. Because, frankly, Gretchen's probably got 40 different things that are on her plate. And, again, you're making it one step easier for her. You're doing the work for the customer and saying, here's the 30 seconds.
The first email is based off of the close loss reengagement instructions. Let's say, for example, I went after the Houston Rockets, which we're actively prospecting. It was bad timing last time we met because the NBA season got canceled. I could send them an email now and say, hey, Gretchen, thanks so much for taking my email. I actually noticed, you know, we're in talks with you guys about six months ago and the timing wasn't right. “I'd love to pick up that conversation. When we last met, you were interested in X, Y and Z.” And these are all coming from the opportunity notes from the account executive. I kind of like the thing where you're reiterating, hey, when we last spoke, this is what you were interested in. Because, frankly, Gretchen's probably got 40 different things that are on her plate. And, again, you're making it one step easier for her. You're doing the work for the customer and saying, here's the 30 seconds.
One thing that we haven't gone through in a lot of other interviews, Ken, is what does the actual email structure look like? So when you're having SDRs write cold emails, you often see like these massive, massive books that are being written. And then you see other ones that are like super short and unprofessional. How do you coach your team to write good emails? “We kind of base our emails off of this account research, right?” We have different plays to run, kind of like in football. You want to choose the best play for that best prospect, right? Like hiring for SDRs and account executives, that's like a bread and butter play of ours, right? Sometimes what we'll do, if we can't really get a ton of dirt for like the first email, we'll go in, we'll request a demo.
A lot of people will either lead with my company does X or they wait to hit the context button at the end. And the bottom line is at the beginning of a cold call, you have 15 seconds to get someone to sit up in their chair. Otherwise, you've lost them. And the same thing goes for a cold email is if you don't get them after that first line, it's done. “And so you've got to front load your context.” That's why the emails we structure, they're always context, value, ask. Context, value, ask. And you did that in your cold call too. Awesome. What about subject lines? What are you guys doing around subject lines, Ken? So our subject lines contain context, right? For example, like Armand, quick LinkedIn sales nav search, we'd see that Bob and Fred just joined his company as SCRs, right?