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

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1. 8:21

   in those 200 companies, I would think very specifically about like, how would I customize this to that type of a business? And that could be the next column, right? Whether it's a gaming company, a SaaS company, a logistics company, et cetera. It's going to sound a little bit different how I would communicate our value and my discovery questions. The next set of rows gets really into “the meat of prospecting, whereas I'm going to go find people that I should resonate with.” What's the title? Who is their boss? What's a day in their life typically like? What other ancillary products would they be using in the workflow that my product's going to slot into? And then I would try to find those people on LinkedIn. I'd usually find like five to eight people per account roughly, where it's like potential champion, potential buyer, potential

   In Personalization prioritization

2. 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

3. 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 sources

4. 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

5. 23:01

   And now you're asking for more team members. It's just like, we're going to cover this. You told me the security team would be the users. Let's invite them. And in 90 minutes, we're going to know if we're going to work together or not. Does that sound good? Like, is it something you think makes sense for next steps? And then you can have them pulled in. If they don't agree to that, I'm still already prospecting into their team. You're covering your bases on both sides. “Prospecting to the team concurrently.” And then when you have conversations, try to rally people if it's going well. Liam, what you're talking about is the essence of playing the longer game and not just trying to pitch off the bat. Because it always blew my mind. I've worked with a small book before.

   In Multi-threaded prospecting

6. 24:38

   So, okay, I have 20 accounts that are going to renew this year. I'm going to stack rank them red, yellow, green, or one through 20. I'm like where I think there's more propensity to buy. And then I need to go get data either in Salesforce or directly from my CS team and understand the current state of all of those companies. This is usually what reps don't do for what it's worth. “Like this upfront effort of going to uncover the history of an account” before you got there or how it's been going since your first deal. And then really coming up with a new hypothesis with more data before you go out to talk to them again. Right? So I would take an extremely similar approach. Now, I'm not going to go ask them, maybe tell me about how you came to this company if I've worked with them before. But what I would say is just like, let's talk about the use.

   In Not now and re-engagement