This is the first lesson in the Enterprise Software Sales Process Class. In this lesson, Domenico Ortiz goes over the difference between inbound and outbound prospecting, what tools to use when cold calling, and some secret tips he uses to ensure he lands the first meeting. This is a great introduction to what goes into being a successful Sales Development Representative.
Domenico Ortiz is a Sales Development Representative at Abnormal Security. Prior to Abnormal, Domenico worked at Lastline, Rector Motors, and Comtel Systems in various sales roles. In his free time, Domenico enjoys working on cars, running, and playing the acoustic guitar.
Domenico 'Dom' Ortiz: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this lesson on finding and qualifying leads as a part of the Enterprise Sales Process. My name is Domenico Ortiz and I'm a senior SDR here at abnormal security, and I will be your teacher for this lesson.
So to kick us off, I will be covering less than one finding and qualifying leads. Uh, lesson two will be covered by Austin Barr From Prospect to Customer, and then lesson three Prioritizing Customer Outcomes will be covered by Jenny, our Customer Success Manager.
So what we'll be talking about when it comes to finding and qualifying leads: So we'll be touching on two main topics. The first one will be how to find a qualified prospect. So we'll dive into the differences between inbound, outbound, what tools to use, et cetera. Second point we'll be touching on will be how to further the sales process. So just best practices when it comes to doing a smooth hand off to your account.
Finding and qualifying leads: So what is an MQL? Marketing qualified lead is pretty much take, for example, someone who doesn't know your organization at all, and your marketing team reached out to them. They invite them to events, they downloaded white papers from our website and they showed significant interest. So this means that this individual is ready for you to reach out to them and they are a marketing qualified lead. I think the most important thing when it comes to marketing qualified leads is qualifying them. Understanding the data that you're receiving and how to check off certain boxes to make sure that they belong to that account that you're being told, making sure that their email is correct, making sure that they're still working with the company. So certain things need to be checked off so that you can verify that this is correct information. So remember you're the last line of defense when it comes to all this data. Automation and how to leverage a sequence is super important because time is your enemy when it comes to reaching out to MQLAs. You gotta get in there fast, you gotta be eloquent, you gotta be able to speak to whatever it was that they engaged with: whether it was a partner event, a virtual event, or they downloaded a white paper. Just kind of customize that email and build it into a sequence so that you have email templates and call sequences already automated for you so that you can, you know, reach out to a lot of people without having to do one off. Sequences are your best friends when it comes to reaching out to MQLs.
How to convert an MQL, right? So you take someone that knows a little bit about your company, and then you just kind of go in there and you try to find information as far as what they're looking for, what challenges are they trying to solve? Once you find the needs for all of those, then you follow 'em into a sales process and then you create an opportunity.
This next step would be outbound and cold prospecting. I think this is probably one of my favorites. So what is cold prospecting, right? So it's, the ability to be able to generate interest where there is none. Some of the best strategies to be able to do this is taking, let's say for example, one account. So you reach out to a couple people, you kind of ping them, you see what their interests are, you see what kind of challenges their organization needs, and you start generating interest by approaching 'em in three different ways. So the first one, which is probably my favorite, is cold calling. Just picking up the phone, trying to catch 'em at their desk and be able to start a live conversation.
You wanna have a lot of energy, you wanna have a consistent tone of voice, and you wanna be able to deliver a message and lead the conversation so that you can ask them to book the meeting for you right then at the time. Typically a conversion within a cold call takes about five minutes. Email campaigns are excellent to be able to try to paint an overall picture when you're doing cold prospecting, right? You can leverage an email to be able to send a certain message or, you know, you you're attending or you're you have a webinar, or you have certain things that are coming up that you can send a prospect to kind of create a painting so that when you cold call them, you know, you can mention that you sent them certain information.
Social media prospecting is also a really great way to connect on a personal basis with one of your prospects. In doing so you can reach out to them, create a really nice LinkedIn profile where it has a ton of personal data. So you can kind of represent your organization in a really positive way and reach out to people and see if you can connect with them and generate interest in that way as well.
What tools to use? The number one tool to use when it comes to prospecting, I have to say, hands down is Salesforce. It should be the whole backbone of your entire sales stack. Everything will feed into sales - or actually Salesforce will feed to everything, everything won't feed to Salesforce. So this should be used as your backbone when it comes to prospecting. You'll see your activity, you know, past history on the account, you know, the whole story of that prospect. There's so much rich data that you can leverage from Salesforce.
Outreach and HubSpot are excellent prospecting tools because you can build sequences. You can automate call tasks. You can automate templates to go out a specific time, so you can, you know, get really granular when you have a sequence and be able to, you know, target prospects on a more specific way than just, you know, doing one off tasks. Zoom info, and Seamless AI are excellent data enrichment tools. Essentially what they do is they help you verify that the information that you have in Salesforce is correct and it's the most up to date data.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you do prospecting on a more grander scale. So you can do mass volumes of prospecting and do so accurately.
Orum is one of my favorite tools out there. If you're an SDR out there and you've struggled with cold calling, you know, that, you know, a hundred calls could take you about an eight hour day, right? So by leveraging an auto dialer, you can put up, you know, a couple hundred calls, up to 300, with just a couple hours.
Okay so, how to note if the prospect is qualified. A lot of SDR teams use a strategy called BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. So how does that help you, right? So essentially you're funneling someone to be able to understand number one, what they do at the organization that you're reaching out to, how do they help solve a challenge that they currently have and what sort of influence do they have to be able to, you know, either champion or, you know, have a decision, or be able to buy that tool that you're reaching out to. So all these sort of things will come together in really leveraging budget, authority, need, and timing will help you understand if an individual is qualified or not.
How to land the meeting? So, I wanna say this speaks to everything when it comes to a sales process. It's not what you say, it's how you say it that makes a huge difference in how information is received on the other end. You can reach out to someone in a, say, very low tone of voice and not very confident. And the person on the line might be like “Ah, no, you're just like every other person calling me.” and they'll hang up. But if you deliver a message with extreme confidence, they are more likely to want to give you their time. To wanna have a personal connection with you and to even, you know, schedule some time with you. I think it goes to say this whole process: It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
So if, say, for example, I'm trying to book a meeting with you and I say “Hey prospect. Um, do you think maybe in the next couple of weeks you would be open to, you know, take a meeting with me?” or versus saying “Hey prospect, you know, we've identified the pain. We know that you're dealing with this and that we can solve for it by doing X, Y, and Z for you. How does next week sound? I'm open on Wednesday or Thursday. Perfect. Are you available before or after lunch?” So making this whole process extremely easy; that makes a big difference when you're doing, you know, prospecting.
Objection handlings - also something really big because you can get to a certain point, but they still have that one thing. And now we're bringing it down to that one thing. Sometimes they'll tell you “You know what, hey Dom, you know right now is not the right timing.”. But if you dive into that and you say, “Why is it not the right timing?” If we could narrow it down to one or two things why it's not the right timing. Maybe, you know, you don't know, maybe they have something personal going on or maybe something that's, you know, booked for two weeks. But if you could narrow that down to, you know, what are the two things that, you know, are kind of in a time crunch where you can't meet this week or next week. And overcoming that and understanding their needs and provide them with the options is definitely the way to go because you're making this whole process as easy as possible for them.
How to further the sales process? So how to further the sales process, I believe goes hand in hand with working with your Account Executive and having a great relationship. What does having a great relationship look like, right? Where you're able to communicate, strategize, meet weekly and have a really smooth process when it comes to being able to understand what you're doing, who you're going after, and really have a well planned out strategy to be most effective. Certain things that you can do to be able to hand off an opportunity to your Account Executive would be, you know, obviously creating the opportunity, but including a ton of rich notes. What did you find? What's their pain? How did you help solve for that? Did you use use-cases to be able to generate the interest? Also, being able to send them like, say for example, a LinkedIn profile. I think just having attention to detail so that when you give them all this information they can just take it and run with it versus having them go back and ask you a lot of questions before meeting with the prospect. You wanna give them everything up front and make their process as easy as possible. Anything that will help them close that sales cycle as small as possible will benefit you, your account executive, and ultimately the company you work for.
Okay, now as a quick recap, what we went over today: how to find a qualified prospect. So we took a little bit of a deeper dive into inbound versus outbound prospecting. What tools to use, how to know if they're qualified, and how to land the meeting. How to further the sales process was also another topic and some of the best practices when it comes to handing an opportunity off to your Account Executive.
And this concludes our lesson. Thank you for attending this lesson on finding and qualifying leads here at Abnormal Business School. Hopefully you learned something today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
