Pipeline Problems? Innovative Strategies to Discover Clients

Joe Ducarreaux: Hello and welcome to this B2B Sales Playbook podcast brought to you as ever by Lead Forensics. I am your host, Joe Ducarreaux. This episode of the B2B Sales Playbook podcast is the audio of a webinar we ran recently called Problem Prospecting. For this I was joined by Mark Ackers, author of the number one bestseller Problem Prospecting. Mark was a delightful guest on the B2B Sales Playbook and he offers up some excellent advice for people struggling with their pipeline. There is absolutely loads to takeaway from this one so without further ado here is Mark Ackers with the Problem Prospecting Playbook.

Joe Ducarreaux: So we’ll jump straight into it shall we. How can you identify and prioritise your target prospects during a slow market.

Mark Ackers: So I think the important thing there is, first of all, mindset. People still buy in a slow market, they might just be a little slower to buy. It just needs to be an easy decision. It needs to be that the pain and the problem are so great that they want to solve it and that’s where we need to focus our time. We need to focus our time on people that have the pain and the motivation to solve it because they will still buy.
I’ve been in sales for 15 years or so and never have I ever spoken to anyone on the first call and they’ve told me they’ve got a budget that’s sat there for what I’m selling. But lo and behold, if they have the pain and the motivation to solve it and there’s a solid business case, then the budget becomes available. In terms of how we prioritize, we’ve got to work out who’s got the need, who’s maybe interested in speaking with us, who’s engaging with our stuff. One of the key things for me over the last…. I’m going to say five years has been….. this sounds really, I don’t know what the right word is politely but you’ll see what I mean – Egotistical, perhaps! ……. is talk about personal brand. But everyone’s got a personal brand. It just depends how big or small that personal brand is. What I mean by personal brand is when people see you, it’s how you make them feel, their perception of you. I’ve invested a lot in my own personal brand, which I look to be seen as someone that my ICP (ideal customer profile), looks to for advice, guidance, tips, tricks, consultative ideas, etc.

So I spent a lot of my time writing content, sharing content on LinkedIn. I’m trying to be convinced to join TikTok but I don’t really know much about it. But I believe it could work, I’m just not quite ready to make that jump. But anyway, I spent a lot of my time putting content on LinkedIn from my ICPs ie. sales leaders and off the back of that, people come to me because they see what I’m posting. It resonates with them and a lot of the time it takes a while. They’re like lurkers. They just follow. Eventually they’ll start to eventually start to comment. Eventually they PM my inbox. But who’s engaging with your stuff is a great place to start. But not just you, what about your company? One of the things that sales reps never seem to do is look at who’s following their company on social media. They’re following you for a reason. People don’t like to really follow companies. People like to follow people. So if they’re following your company, there is a level of interest there. What about your competitors? Maybe they’re following your competitors because they put out great content but they haven’t bought from them. Have a look at that. There’s intent data out there, so there’s loads of platforms out there that give you intent data. There’s Lead Forensics that will tell you who’s been on your website and who’s obviously interested.

I think the other thing is familiarity. Familiarity always helps. So personal brand does that, you pick up the phone and people are like, yes, I’ve seen you on LinkedIn, I follow your stuff or whatever. But familiarity in terms of …..go to marketing, ask who signed up for the newsletter. Again, people don’t do that unless they’re interested at some point in time. Trade shows, who had their name badge scanned at trade shows. Don’t turn your nose up at old leads. People that have shown interest in your brand at some point in the past, reach out to them. Sales reps turn their nose up at old leads and it’s just crazy. They’d rather go find someone in the wilderness that knows nothing about their business than call someone who signed up for their newsletter because it was eight months ago.

You can go on the CRM, I put a LinkedIn post about yesterday actually. An example of me practicing what I preach. The LinkedIn post was all about actionable tips and tricks to create more pipeline and I put go to CRM, create a closed loss list. This time call them up from QA (Quality Assurance) and ask them the reasons they didn’t go ahead. I guarantee most of the reasons given by the prospect to QA will be the truth and it will vary wildly to the box ticked in the CRM. Because in the CRM, the rep will often tick not interested, ghosted, went with a competitor, couldn’t afford it. But those are just the reasons that are given to the rep to select. What they don’t do is pick, I was rubbish on a discovery call. I failed to uncover this need. I didn’t appreciate who the DM was. I didn’t uncover this feature or widget that was really important to them. When you call up from QA, they might say to you we didn’t go ahead because you didn’t have this feature. Maybe now you do. They might say, we couldn’t afford the annual upfront agreement. Maybe now in a slower market, you’ll take quarterly or monthly payments. You will uncover the truth from QA and when you know the truth, you can often fix it. You can also create CRM lists, no-shows. People didn’t show up well, they had an interest… phone up, try and get them back on. So there’s lots you can do in a slow market. It’s just about going above and beyond, thinking outside the box and actually digging in places that perhaps other people aren’t digging. I’ve thrown a lot at you there Joe, but I’m assuming people can listen back to this and write down some ideas.

Joe Ducarreaux: Absolutely. We do promise value with all of our podcasts and webinars that we do, Mark and what you’ve done expertly is condensed so much into your first answer, so that’s incredible. You started off talking about the social media side of things and I think it’s a really valuable tool if you are offering out that value, like you say your tips and tricks and bits and pieces like that, you start to be seen as an authority on this sort of thing. So it builds that credibility for your buyers, doesn’t it? If they can instantly see your face and go, ah, this guy knows what he’s talking about. It breaks down so many different barriers, doesn’t it? You mentioned you make content with that subject in mind. What types of content are you making?

Mark Ackers: Yeah, so that’s a really good question. Here’s the headline for anybody and I’m not trying to downplay my skillset, if you will, or expertise, so to speak. I’m just trying to bring a little bit of realism to this. I’m nothing special. I’m just someone that’s been in sales for 15 years and I’ve learned lots of things…..mostly the hard way through mistakes.

Here’s the difference. What I’m doing is I’m sharing my knowledge that has been gained from experience and mistakes. It’s been learned from coaches and mentors. It’s been learned through life and I’m sharing it in a way on LinkedIn that captures attention. People are interested and they enjoy reading that content. I noticed that’s what a lot of the successful people do and I spend time talking to them. I’ve gone to sales conferences where it’s just sales coaches and trainers and thought leaders and they’re all the same. They’re all, they all wear pants and socks like you and I but because they put stuff out there, they get seen as an expert. It’s a little bit like, if you are a producer at, let’s say the BBC and you put someone on TV, they become a celebrity even though they’re not. Because we see them out there, we feel like we know them, there’s familiarity. We feel like they’re celebrities.

With LinkedIn, simply by me sharing content that is carefully designed content for…… I share it for a few people. So I share it for the people that my history is their future. What I mean by that is I’ve been that sales rep that started out too scared to pick up the phone, not a clue how to write an email, my calendar invite sucked, my demos were just presentations. I’ve been that rep and no one showed me what to do. So I write content to help try and speed up their development because I wish someone did that for me. I write content for people that are in the same part of their lives as me right now and they’re still figuring this out. And I write content for my ICP, which is sales leaders and what I mean there are the people that are going to buy.

So I have a mix of content. I actually looked this morning because I thought you might ask me a similar type question. So I launched MySalesCoach at the start of January. It’s been a little bit busier than what it would’ve been “just a sales rep”….. and I used air quotes, just (inaudible) because it’s been a bloody hard job. But obviously I’m a co-founder of a business now. I’ve got a lot more going on. I’ve definitely slacked on LinkedIn. I’ve struggled for time, but I’ve posted just about 50 LinkedIn posts since about the 10th January and I would say three, maybe four of them have been adverts, so to speak, for what MySalesCoach does. The rest have been lessons I’ve learned, actionable tips and tricks, how to do something, frameworks, personal stories that link to sales, the odd funny meme, encouragement about mindset and productivity telling people they’re not alone. I’ve advertised podcasts that I’ve listened to or that I’ve taken inspiration from far or that I’ve been on and then the odd personal promo for the book or for the video series are just released. But as I say, three, maybe four have been adverts for MySalesCoach and I would say two of those…… One was, look what I’m doing, I’ve just started a new business and the other was why. I feel like you can really discount those because you don’t post them anymore. So about 5% of my posts are about buy my stuff.
The rest are designed to make people want to read more and follow me on this journey and feel like they know me. So when I do reach out to them, they want to speak to me. Bearing in mind, again, I use the air quote of “just a sales rep”, because I’m doing so many other things. I don’t get much prospecting time. I really think 15% is generous. I reckon I’ve spent less than 15% of my time prospecting, but I’ve booked over 120 meetings since January just because when I reach out to people, they feel like they know me. There’s familiarity. They followed me. They want to talk to me. I’m nothing special. I just put myself out there and anyone can do that. It’s just learning to do it well because a lot of people try and do it poorly, in my opinion.

Joe Ducarreaux: What you’ve hit upon there, Mark is almost the motto of the B2B Sales Playbook and the Essential B2B podcast webinars that we do….. is that people buy from people. What you are demonstrating, demonstrably is you’ve built a rapport, you’ve built a relationship. People know you, so then they will come to buy from you. I guess…. is that harder or easier during a dry spell? This is something that often I hear people struggling with…. is the fact that they hear so much people buy from people, build relationships with them but at the same time they have sales quotas to hit. When you are looking in, not necessarily well trodden avenues for prospects and that sort of thing, does that sort of thing make it easier or is it much the same?

Mark Ackers: Totally makes it easier. To expand upon people buy from people, I think we need to be really clear. People don’t buy from people they like. I’ve had loads of people say to me…. again it’s been over 15 years….People say to me, “oh, I liked you the most” or “oh, you did the best job”…..but they’ve gone for the product that is best for them or the price that is best. People don’t buy from people they like. It might be harder to give that bad news, but it doesn’t help. What people do is, they buy from people that they trust and I have definitely won deals because people trust me when they might have picked a different product that might have even been cheaper. But they trust me because of how I portray myself and put myself across and what I share and the fact that I make myself a student of sales and the market and whatnot. But yeah, so there’s that and I think it definitely makes it easier.

Here’s the bad news. If you’re having a slow spell now, you’re not going to do this to save yourself. Because you can’t do it overnight. But know this, dry patches are coming again in the future. I’ve gone through, I think this is my third difficult economic backdrop in my career. See, I have one every five years, so it’s coming again. I think what you do now will only serve you well in the future. It’s about dedicating the time to it and I think that’s the thing a lot of people don’t appreciate. Last night…… so I’m away on a little family weekend down in…. I don’t even know where I am, it’s raining. It’s in the Bristol area, seeing my wife’s sister. I’m in the AirBnB while they’re having a day out….. but last night when my wife was putting my kids to bed at 8.30pm, that’s when I wrote my LinkedIn post that went out this morning. You’ve got to dedicate and make time to it but the rewards are there. Let’s say you don’t just have to do that though. I gave you at the start all those other things that you can do because it’s all that familiarity. People knowing your brand or knowing your messaging or the problems that you solve, can trump knowing the sales rep as well.

Joe Ducarreaux: Let’s stick with the building trust angle of it, then. How can you leverage customer referrals to generate leads during a drought?

Mark Ackers: I would say, and I think many people listen to this would go, yeah, me too. It’s one of the things I’m weakest at. I can’t explain it. We all know listening to this, that asking for referrals is a great way of getting hot opportunities. We all know that, but it’s one of the things that I’m the worst at. I have made more of a conscious effort last quarter, though and it’s so easy. You’ve just got to do it and there’s no reason you don’t do it. I wish I could look you in the eye and tell you why I don’t do it. But here’s one of the questions I like to ask people. So you get towards the end of the call and regardless of how it’s going, you say,”can I ask you some advice, Joe?” Noone ever says no to that. Everyone wants to give advice because they feel like they’ve been lifted up. “You want advice from me? Yeah, absolutely. What?” And you go, “if you were me and you had to go and do a call blitz, who are the first three people you pick up the phone to?” People love to go. Ooh?….. That’s three people and then (inaudible). And from there you go, let’s just say they said a woman called Tracy. “Okay. Tracy, that’s, that sounds like a really good lead. what’s the best way to get a hold of Tracy if you know her?” “ Why don’t I just introduce you?”. Really, I wasn’t thinking of that. People like to help people, human beings like to help. They just don’t like to be helped. They just don’t like to help when they’re asked to do it. Do you know what I mean? People like to do it and feel like they’re good about themselves. So asking that, who are the first three people you’d pick to phone if you were me?

The other thing you can have is, you can have it in your calendar. Once a week, make sure you contact someone, and ask for a referral. The other thing is when you find someone, so Joe, say I landed on your LinkedIn profile, we’ve probably got some mutual connections. The key is, let’s say our mutual connection is someone called Tony. I’d go to Tony, and say Tony, would you introduce me to Joe? It’s a lot easier for Tony now. What’s hard is when sometimes…… I know this goes against my first group of advice, you’ve got to try different things…… is when you say to someone “anyone you could introduce him to be really helpful” Because then they’ve got to think. But if you go, “look, Tony, I see we are connected to Joe here. If you were me, how would you get in front of Joe? You take away the thinking element and then they’ll do it. The next thing is like you just say, “look I’ll write what I need you to say”. Because again, people don’t know what to write. Oh, I don’t know what my sales coach does. What do I write? It’s really awkward. If I go, “Joe…Tony? how should I get in touch with him?” “Oh, I could introduce you”.”Brilliant. I’ll tell you what, I’ll write the email for you. You just need to edit it”. You’ve made their life really easy. Here’s another great one. Negotiate it. So when people are negotiating with you, give-get. Well if you are a happy customer, can we agree that once a month you will make an introduction to me. I’ll tell you who I want to be introduced to based on your LinkedIn network, but once a month. Yeah, sure happy to do that. Because they feel like it’s just something they can give for free and they get a discount. Then once a month you go to that person. It was part of our agreement. This is the person I like, you introduced me to this month. Or you do customer calls, once a month will you speak to a prospect of mine? Because we all get asked, can I speak to some of your customers? And it’s a really awkward thing to get asked. You want to protect your customers. But I’ve had that before where someone’s agreed to have three of those calls a month to get 5% off. That’s worth 5% of a contract value.. Obviously you can have a partnership program as well. Customer success should be playing ball here, they should be telling you who the warm and happy customers are. Just after they’ve renewed as well. They’ve just locked themselves in for another year. So there’s lots you should be doing there but here’s the reality. Most salespeople including myself are crap at it and we need to get better at it. And I’ve given you some ways to do that.

Joe Ducarreaux: Absolutely! I appreciate the honesty from you there, Mark, just saying look, this is just something I’m not so hot on at the minute. No, hugely appreciate that. Again, you’re getting a lot of value out of this webinar folks. So then, you touched earlier on looking at what your competitors are doing and that sort of thing. How can you stand out in a crowded market against those competitors, particularly in tricky times?

Mark Ackers: I think it depends who your competitors are. So in my previous company we had a competitor that was a true unicorn. I remember in the early stages we started to hear about them. Then all of a sudden they raised…. and I’ll get this number wrong…, It was saying like £200 million. It was like, whoa. Okay, this is a problem! And then a year later, they raised….. again. I’ll get the number wrong…. but it was like £70 million. There was £100 million and you’re like, who the hell are these guys? Here’s the thing. It was brilliant. It was brilliant for us. I always compare it to whenever I take my son to the aquarium there are sharks swimming round. Not everyone can be that, but do you notice the little fish that swim by the side of the shark? They just get free meals because the shark doesn’t want everything or can’t work everything. When you start to raise serious cash, you have to do a lot to impress your investors. You have to raise prices, you can’t discount, you have to be really aggressive with your terms and length for service. You don’t give much away. For prospects that want the shark, they’re like bloody hell it’s annual upfront. It’s a two year deal. There’s no discounts. I have to buy a license for everybody. I can’t afford that. Maybe one of the fish on the side is just as good. And that’s what we did. We gobbled up all the opportunities they couldn’t have. We let them genuinely put an advert on the Super Bowl and people that couldn’t afford them would come to us. We positioned ourselves as the alternative because not everyone needed that. So they’re standing out.

Here’s the other thing, it comes back to that personal brand and that trust. I won my absolute fair share of deals against this juggernaut because I knew the market. Actually I never spent my time selling, I spent my time helping people to buy. I was very comfortable starting my conversations with, “look, tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll tell you out of us and that competitor who you should buy”. The number of times I’d have no problem going, I think you should buy them. Either they would agree with me and in which case, I don’t want to waste my time begging and convincing people to come with me. I want to focus my time on where I can win and that’s the people that when they told me they needed X, Y, and Z, I’d be like, you should come to me and here’s why. But the law of motion, if you push people away, they’ll come back. ……”why don’t you leave this six months?” “ No, I can’t do that. Let me tell you why.” “Why don’t you just go with them instead?” “yeah, but they’re too expensive”. Oh, okay. Now you are telling me why you can’t go with them. Standing out comes back down to making sure you truly understand where you win and why you win. Being able to convey that in a way to your prospects, to educate them, to help them decide what they want to buy and being comfortable pushing them away. Because you are not the shark but there’s still enough food in that tank for you to make all the money that you want to make. You don’t have to be number one in life to win.

Joe Ducarreaux: Yeah. You don’t have to be the shark. What, to change tack ever so slightly, what role would email marketing campaigns play in prospecting and how can you optimize those for better results?

Mark Ackers: So I think that’s probably the vulnerable bit for me, running email marketing campaigns in the sense of I don’t have a great deal of exposure running email marketing campaigns in truth. I struggle with email a little bit. and what I mean by that is I struggle with it as a concept. Again, I’m probably not explaining myself properly. Since you and I have been speaking I have had. 4 emails. 4 emails have come through. Myinbox is 3 months old. It’s had 2000 emails in it. My point being, it’s a premium space that people compete for and I do struggle therefore, with so many people focusing on email. I think there’s absolutely a need for it and you’ve got to use it as part of a cadence in the sequence. Where email can be really helpful is tracking. Tracking who opens it, what they look at, how long for, do they share it? And more importantly, when someone opens it, that’s when you act. The number of times I go, I was just thinking about you. No way, really?

Joe Duccareaux: It’s like magic.

Mark Ackers: Yeah. It’s like magic. So one of the most successful parts of my career is when I sold to the hospitality industry. I sold to HR managers. They had no idea what a sequence was. They had no idea about tracking, it would get to the fourth in the sequence and they’re “I’m so sorry, I’ve not replied to you. my God, you’ve been trying” and I actually sent four emails on a sequence. But it depends, now I sell the sales leaders, they see that before the second sequence has come. Again it’s that standing out. It was about that first email being hyper personalized, about being about them, not about you. It’s about being something that encourages and engages them. So email is definitely important but so many people talk about cold calling being dead or social selling not taking off, but no one really questions email being dead. I think in this day and age when there’s so many ways you can get a hold of people. You can even book meetings through WhatsApp. That’s the one that I think is the most difficult but if you do it right and that’s the key to everything. Then you track the journey and you track engagement and you split test and you optimize and then you follow up (inaudible), then email can be really powerful. I just feel like it’s the one that most people are on because it’s so easy as a sales rep to sit with your cup of tea and go, “yeah, I’ll send emails for this hour, I’m mint”. How many people are going to actually even open that?

Joe Ducarreaux: We had Aaron Evans from Flow State on a little while ago, and he was saying similar things. We got the telephone, we ruined the telephone, we got email, we ruined email, that sort of thing. So he’s setting his stock very much in video at the minute. So hence, if you did feel like starting on TikTok, Mark..there you go. In your very comprehensive answer to my first question, you mentioned probably my favorite word in this whole thing, which is mindset. So how can you stay motivated and positive during a dry spell?

Mark Ackers: Okay, so I wrote a LinkedIn post about this (inaudible). For anybody listening to this, if you are struggling for motivation, know this…. I get it. Nobody really wants to prospect or do cold outreach in a dry spell. And we can tell ourselves a lie that it’s impossible and it’s really hard and nobody wakes up excited to cold call or send emails…..nobody. I get people in interviews telling me, no, I do. I do. You’re a liar. No one wants to do that. It’s manual. It’s grubby. Society looks down on it. My mother-in-law thinks I’m a nuisance PPI caller cause I work in sales. Do you know what I mean? Because I’m not out digging holes in the road, she doesn’t respect what I do. But here’s the thing. It has to be done. You have to do this to be successful…..and here’s the thing, if you are sat there going, “yeah, but one day I’ll be motivated”…. as if by magic and I’ve got bad news, that’s not going to happen. You need to make the motivation happen. So before motivation, comes action. You literally have to force yourself to do the things that you don’t want to do. Cold calling, emailing, social selling. Once you get it going, once you start having success, that’s where motivation appears…. as if by magic. It’s like going to the gym. The hardest thing about going to the gym is going, that’s the hardest thing. Showing up, but you never regret walking out of the gym. You never leave the gym going. I bloody wish I hadn’t done that, unless you maybe injured yourself. You never regret that workout and it’s the same with prospecting, even if it’s a tough time. It’ll always be a tough time for someone, for some industry. The world’s just like that. But the hardest part of prospecting, iIs doing it right. But you never regret making the cold call where someone accepts a meeting. You never regret sending an email when someone replies back saying I’d love to chat. You never regret it, but I’ll say it again before motivation, comes action and you can control that, so make it happen. That would be what I’d say.

Joe Ducarreaux: Yeah absolutely. If you can’t control what you do or don’t have to do, you can control how you approach it, is the phrase there. Excellent stuff. Okay, so Mark you’ve offered up so much value and so many tips and tricks, which is exactly what we are after from you. So thank you very much for that today. If there was one golden rule you would love everybody to take away from this conversation today, one key piece of advice, what is that top tip?

Mark Ackers: Ultimately in sales you are the CEO of your own success. And here’s the hard knocks about that. Where you spend your time, where you choose to spend your time will 100% link to how successful you are because you can control it. Here’s some things I’d say to you.
Spend your time with people that want to buy. People that have the problem, the motivation to solve it. Too many of us in sales are hopeful salesmen. We just hope that they will buy because they’ve shown some level of interest. We’re afraid to ask the tough questions to get to where we need to be, to know if they’re worth our time. So spend your time with people that want to buy. Don’t spend your time in the land of hope because hope doesn’t sell. You are directly responsible for where you spend your time, spend it in the right areas. That is with people that want to buy but also on the things you can control. You can control how many pieces of outreach you do every day. You can control how many times you pick up the phone, how many emails you send. What you can’t control is if people don’t answer the phone, if they have a great conversation, if they’re in a good mood, if they’ve got a problem.

But here’s the thing, you’re do enough of it. You will have success. You’ve got to just figure out your numbers and again, that comes down to being disciplined. That comes down to action before motivation. Setting yourself up for success. Too often I look at calendars of SDRs and they’re empty. “What are you doing every day? They’re like, “oh, I’ll do some cold calling.”……. When? What time? Where’s your prep time? Where’s your cold calling time? How many calls are you going to make in that hour? Where’s your time for follow ups? Where’s your time for emails? How many emails are you going to send? “oh, I’ll just do it”. No, you don’t. Structure and where you spend your time will link to how successful you are. So spend your time making sure you do the activity you need to hit your metrics and when you’re having those conversations, don’t be afraid to push people away. One Of my favorite bits from when I do coaching with my sales coach, is talking about how I just push people away. I love telling people, why don’t you just wait six months? I can’t wait six months…..and they tell me why? Why don’t you just sack your sales team? I can’t sack my sales team. Let me tell you why. Why don’t you just do this yourself? I can’t do this myself. I haven’t got the answers, I need you ….. Okay it fills up with the answer then. I spend my time pushing people away, helping people to decide for themselves if what we need is what they want. And if it is, people love to buy it. If it’s not, no hard feelings. We are not for everybody and we move on. So there’s a lot there. I suppose, the high level is you are responsible where you spend your time. Make sure you set yourself up for success with the time that you’ve got and spend your time with people that want to buy. Don’t be a hopeful salesperson,

Joe Ducarreaux: Fantastic stuff. Mark Ackers, thank you so much for joining us for this B2B Sales Playbook webinar.
Well there we go, Mark Ackers on the Problem Prospecting Playbook. Our key takeaways then:-
Prioritise target prospects by identifying those who are interested in speaking, engaging with content and following your company on social media.
Invest time in creating content that resonates with your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
People buy from those they trust so focus on building trust through personal branding and by becoming a trusted authority in your field.
Generate leads during a drought by asking for referrals and making that a conscious effort. Reach out to mutual connections on Linkedin and ask for an introduction.
Remember you are the CEO of your own success and how you spend your time can determine your level of success.
Thank you so much to Mark for joining me and thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe to the B2B Sales Playbook podcast wherever you get your podcasts and give us a 5 star rating where possible.
We’ll be back next week with another brilliant B2B Sales Playbook podcast.