Plan your attack, then attack your plan (Liam Mulcahy, Go-to-Market @ Kleiner Perkins)

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1. 9:29

   before I do any outreach. So then when I'm actually in those discovery conversations, it's very organic for me to bring up questions about their business because I've already done all this homework. And then I'm weaving my discovery questions in through that. And prospects feel that effort. Like you can't fake it. If you really understand what's recent “news, recent hires, how their business is performing, acquisitions, expanding internationally.” And I used to do this at MongoDB. And my friends, if they ever listen to this, are going to remember making fun of me for it justifiably. Like I remember making a big deck of flashcards before every QBR. They would say like, all right, Liam, you're forecasting a deal with Envision. Tell me about it. The first thing I would do is I would explain how Envision

   In Account research checklist

2. 11:33

   Yeah, I think taking a stance of positive pessimism in sales is very important and you almost want to try to disqualify deals as early as possible. And if they make it through that filter, then they're qualified, right? As opposed to happier syndrome, just trying to assume any good conversation equals qualification, right? So what I'll try to do is I will go through LinkedIn “in a detailed way on like, say I'm selling to a security engineering team. If I can go find” something where somebody who's either called out a competitive product, or maybe they have like a LinkedIn and there's only two connections and they have no photo. I'm like, this person's probably a block. Like I'm going to take a wild guess here and guess that this woman or man is going to be a blocker to the sale. And then I get in touch with somebody on their team. I'll just start to ask because again, I've already done this research where I'm like,

   In Account research

3. 20:46

   And you said something earlier about if you're single-threaded, it's like climbing without a rope. And so let's say I'm on this call, the person's starting to allude to some of the other players on their team, you've already done some research into some of those people. How do you take that first conversation and get yourself multi-threaded, where you're talking to more people from that first conversation? “From the beginning, you want to prospect into multiple people, right?” So I think when you think about tools like any sequencing tool, whether it's sales loft or outreach, the best use case for automation to me is not to go blast 2,000 people and just hammer with volume. The best use case is try to break people out by sequence, by title.

   In Multi-threaded prospecting

4. 20:59

   where you're talking to more people from that first conversation? From the beginning, you want to prospect into multiple people, right? So I think when you think about tools like any sequencing tool, whether it's sales loft or outreach, the best use case for automation to me is not to go blast 2,000 people and just hammer with volume. “The best use case is try to break people out by sequence, by title.” So what I used to do is I'd have a C-suite sequence, a VP sequence, a director sequence, and an IC sequence. And they're all extremely different. And I put 80% of my effort into that first email. And some of them would just be pure learning conversations. And I'd just call it out. If I'm going after a bunch of ICs, but I know it's going to be a VP buyer, or a user even, I literally am just trying to learn.

   In Cold email sequencing platforms

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