how to scale sales development with two and a half reps

How to ScaleSales Development

w/ Two and a Half Reps

By Mark Birch @marksbirchCRO of Enhatch

@ENHATCH

Key Points

• Big results with little investment• Go broad and narrow down as you

analyze results• Do first, learn how to improve, then

outsource or delegate• Scale the process before you scale

the team• It’s a team effort – much thanks to

Peter, Sasha, Glenn & Zahid of Enhatch

@MARKSBIRCH - HTTP://BIRCH.CO 2

About Me

• Co-founder & head of sales for Enhatch

• Enhatch – early stage SaaS startup with mobile field sales productivity apps for enterprises involved in complex sales

• Been doing sales for over fifteen years at places like Siebel and Oracle

• Complete noob about lead gen or sales development before Enhatch


http://www.enhatch.com/

Our Challenge• We have no sales “team” – just myself, one

full-time rep, and a sales contractor (the “half”)

• We are bootstrapped but revenue generating

• We are in a crowded market (CRM / sales enablement) with plenty of competitors

• No one was knocking down the door begging us to use our product

• Not entirely sure we had product / market fit


Need to generate enough leads in order to get deals

in the pipe

The Fundamental Sales Problem

The intersection between your product & prospect need is small


Your Prospects

YourProduct

Possible Solutions

• Hire an outsourcing firm• Hire an appointment setting firm• Hire an SDR team

…all potentially large upfront commitments


Requires both investment in capital and time without much certainty in

results

Our Solution…Scale the Process

• Five repeatable steps• Works with minimal people• Requires minimal investment• Immediate and actionable results


Before you scale the team, scale how you do

things

The Scalable Prospecting Stack

• Source• Scrub• Hook• Sequence• Cycle


Finding Your SourceQuestion: Why did Willie Sutton rob banks?


Because that is where the leads are!

Places for Leads

• Find large groupings of prospects that fit your target market and congregate– Professional networks - LinkedIn,

AngelList– Tradeshows & events– Sales intelligence tools– Paid industry lists– Inbound traffic


The cheapest sources can often turn out to be the best

sources

Our Lead Acquisition• Use LinkedIn and Sales Navigator

– Easy to use search on multiple parameters such as industry, title, company size…

– Provides number of people that fall within each search – are you targeting too wide (over >5000) or too narrow (<500)

– Sales Navigator allows you to view 3rd level connections

• Harvest prospects via Salesloft– Provides key data points about prospects

(company, title, location, phone, etc.)– Fills-in best guess for email address– Extract into spreadsheet for processing


Scrub the Leads Clean

• Whatever the lead source, some % are going to be wrong– Tools that provide email addresses are

simply guessing at the proper formats– Some people do not update online

profiles often e.g. current job / company is outdated

– Information grows stale quickly


You can recover many of these bad contacts through quick

cleanup

Scrubbing “Hacks”

• Kickbox.io to weed out bad emails– Protects you from getting lots of bounced

emails which hurts your email “deliverability”

– Provides helpful explanations as to why email addresses will bounce

• Data.com to get proper email or email domain– Recover bad emails by uncovering the

correct domain & email pattern– Get “free” credits by uploading a portion of

your contacts into Data.com @MARKSBIRCH - HTTP://BIRCH.CO 13

Hook Your Audience• Find one thing that grabs the attention of prospects that

matters to them– Big upcoming event, topical news item, major industry

report are useful starting points– Think relevant and applies broadly to market

• Write very short, very direct message - many emails read on the phone

• Personalize, but limit to just a few fields like name, company, and attention grabber

• Personalizing subject line is a big winner when it comes to opens - Personalized > 40% opens


Ask yourself, is the message relevant, to the point &

personal

Example of Target Email• Subject:

Bob, catch you at Hack-a-mania 2015

• Body:Hi Bob,I am attending Hack-a-mania next week and wondered if you were also going as well. The reason is that I was hoping to chat about sales hacker tools and was curious what Big Enterprise Co. is using today.

My company EnHacken offers a mobile hacker tool focused on helping hackers code faster and we work with lots of folks in the forestry industry.

When would be a good time to meet for a quick chat?Mark


Hook

Build Your Sequencing Engine• Many sales tools for operationalizing the SDR process…

Outreach.io works best for us• Focus on email only

– Inbox is still where business gets done– Calls are not as effective a channel early on

• Start with shorter sequences of 4 – 6 steps– Each step is an email based on personalized template– Noticed open / reply rates improved deeper within the

sequence– Now moving to longer 12 step campaigns

• Consider tying your email to an email infrastructure to improve deliverability and avoid spam catchers


The more touches, the better the results (within reason of

course)

Rinse and Repeat• At scale, it is easier to see what works i.e. is it the prospects or the

messaging• A/B test for the things that have most impact

– Important for big things such as subject lines, compelling hook, industry focus, lead source

– Not as critical for smaller things like message body, hyper personalization

• Through the process, we learned:– More touches matter and email is more effective than calls– Certain industries were not a great fit while others were

surprisingly fruitful– Found ways to scale even further through targeted outsourcing

providers for time consuming tasks like list building & data cleansing


Experiment often, view results, understand results,

iterate

Our Results• In six months, we were able to:– Increased prospecting throughput from 800

to 10,000 leads per month– Improved open and reply rates to over 50%

and 20% respectively– Generated 315 qualified sales deals up

from 8 total deals six months prior (note that these are enterprise class deals)


Most importantly, we confirmed strong need for our product

Let’s Talk

• Learn more about Enhatch http://www.enhatch.com/• Read my blog Strong Opinions on sales topics

http://birch.co• Tweet at me, I generally reply if you are nice

@marksbirch• Connect over LinkedIn and mention that we met at

Sales Hacker https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch• If you sell to enterprises, join us for the NYC

Enterprise Sales Meetup http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/


http://www.enhatch.com/

http://birch.co/

https://twitter.com/marksbirch

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch

http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/

http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/

Q & A

• Questions about the presentation or on general practices in scaling sales development? Please question away…


THANKS AGAIN FOR LISTENING!

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