Rep Shadowing & Ridealongs Done Right (Paul Canty, Pulley)

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1. 7:54

   Could we start with the first part of the workflow? So oftentimes the first part of the workflow is I need to find a list of five accounts that I can reach out to. Talk to me about some of the common mistakes you'll see SDRs or AEs make when they're reaching out to or pulling a list of five accounts. “They don't know why they're reaching out.” That's the biggest problem I see is folks are reaching out and I ask them why they're working a certain account and they don't have a good answer. And I think that, you know, that can start from a place of not deeply understanding your ICP or who you really sell to. But it can also mean that like you don't have a full grasp on like what challenges your ICP or your buyer has

   In Account research checklist

2. 9:54

   What do you usually see go wrong in that part of the workflow? I think this is the second part of the same problem, right? Which is understanding your ideal customer profile from an account sense, but then understanding it from a buyer sense. Meaning like, who are the people that we sell to? What are the challenges that they have that our product, “our company can help them solve specifically?” And to your point, I think a lot of what I see is, yes, this is a target account. So I'm just going to kind of select five people that I think, you know, maybe have the right titles, right? And I'm not going to do a ton of research on LinkedIn as to their role, responsibility, seniority. And I'm not going to really think too critically about like, is this actually the

   In Problem and use-case fit

3. 10:14

   And to your point, I think a lot of what I see is, yes, this is a target account. So I'm just going to kind of select five people that I think, you know, maybe have the right titles, right? And I'm not going to do a ton of research on LinkedIn as to their role, responsibility, seniority. And I'm not going to really think too critically about like, is this actually the “person who'd be using the product, who would be paying for the product, or would be involved in” the selection of something like this? And so again, it's like, yeah, you have this list full of accounts and this sequence full of people, and you're kind of targeting everybody and you're targeting nobody, you know? If we keep running this train here, a lot of times to your point,

   In Buyer and user personas

4. 12:16

   even something she was thinking about. And so I think it was a helpful illustrative example for folks to just understand that even in organizations that aren't relatively big, the scope and the things people are thinking about and the context in which they're thinking about them can be very “different. And so like the messaging and the way you target folks might look very different. The” value propositions might be very different. The messaging might sound different, even if it's a 500 person organization and they're only a couple levels removed. Yeah. One exercise that I found really, really helpful to that point is you can't just throw the org tree up and a bunch of titles and say, you want to reach out to the chief people officer, the director of HR operations,

   In Account-based personalization

5. 14:33

   might do that. And the other one is a content map where we would then take those personas on the X-axis and on the Y-axis, we would put like above the line people and below the line people. And then that would show us what content we needed to build for that persona above the line or below the line. And that also then created us a connect the dots situation. So if I know I need “to do this job and the title and persona is this at this company, this is the content that I'm going” to be putting them into. And it just made it very simple for our SDRs at outreach in the beginning to not think. You don't want a 21-year-old thinking a lot. You want them doing a lot and you want them learning as they're doing. And what you're doing is you're teaching them how to think through the problem, figure out what the job is, figure out what the

   In Persona-based personalization

6. 16:42

   of times they're thinking more immediate impact and things that might affect them personally. Right? The projects that they have to get done, the initiatives they're responsible for, the things that they need to report back up to their VP, they might not always be thinking in terms of, like, broader business outcome and results, but more it's sort of immediate impact to them and their role and their reputation. “And so I think the messaging should reflect that, right?” Which is that if you're going to the executive level, you should be talking in terms of the broader business. And if you're going to the mid or junior level folks, you should be talking about how we can help them specifically succeed in their role or with their project. I still remember, Armand, when at Outreach, we had a volume play in the beginning because nobody was doing what we were doing.

   In Role-based messaging

7. 17:30

   And everybody has, like, the two curly braces with company name or two curly braces first name. So what we created was two curly braces with an exclamation point and a comment. And what it does is it allows you to put into the template, the specific type of personalization that you want, along with instructions of how to do it. “And then you can even get it complicated and do if then statements inside of that personalization” to help a rep figure out how to do the personalization. I would say when you're teaching a rep to do personalization, there's the conceptually how it works. But then there's the specific mechanics in that individual email that you're about to write.

   In Scalable personalization

8. 18:16

   that does this. We found that to be super beneficial for a lot of companies that we worked with and for our own company to have that specific variable in use inside of templates. The first level to that point that I usually see of personalization is no personalization, “which is just use the persona based sequences or use above the line, this sequence for this” CFO. And that's like giving your kid an action figure where you cannot remove the parts whatsoever. This is the toy, go play with the toy, that's it. The next one is like giving your kid sort of like a Mr. Potato Head, which is you can use trigger templates.

   In Persona-based personalization