Improve Sales Cadences and KPIs: 5 Key Findings From 570 Million Sales Interactions

Hot off the press. We’re exploring some fresh research and what’s working in the world of sales emails and what’s not. It’s a year of data, including more than 570 million interactions, and you’re going to get some great takeaways right here and Closing Time. Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders. I’m Chip House CMO at Insightly CRM and I’m joined by Derek Grant, SVP of Market Strategy at Salesloft. Derek, thanks so much for joining us. Chip, It’s exciting to be here today, so thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, super great to have you. And it was kind of a treat to kind of realize that we actually know each other. We go back a ways from the email marketing space, back in my ExactTarget, your Pardot days. So kind of cool to make the reconnection. Yes, we go back like Cadillac seats and so yes it’s super good to reconnect in different roles and different lives but still doing tech, still doing marketing, still doing sales. So it’s great to make that reconnection. Yeah, for sure. And we love Salesloft and you know, we actually had Albert on from your team a few months back and he had some really cool data snippets to share. But the recent report that your team just came out with I thought was great. And I just I read it with a ton of interest because sales emails are such a big part of our SDR and AE engagement, and that’s likely true for most of the high growth companies that are joining us on the show here. And so what was the impetus behind your team developing this report this year? So we’ve released a benchmark report, and it really was a labor of love. And what I mean by that is, is it took a lot of people across many different departments in the organization, but we knew we needed to do it. So our number one value is customers first. And we have customers who ask us every day, Derek, what does good look like? I’m seeing this rate. I’m running this play. I want to figure out, is this optimal? Is there opportunity to do more or less? And so this was really an opportunity for us to help our customers out. And we thought about it in a few different ways. The report is wonderful, but looking at it by role, you know, there are some things that are role specific nuances. You know, I think of an AE, one of the things we talk about is. AEs and SDRs sourcing, and it’s like AEs should be better at sourcing ops. They’re more seasoned, you know, So it’s like when you see those sorts of things, it’s good to get a look at it per role also by GEO, also by industry. And so when you get in, you’ll have the ability to really sort of drill down and say, Well, I would love for my CSMs to have better talk to listen ratio. What does it look like for my industry? And so we’re, we’re very, very excited about the output and it’s something our data science team put a lot of work into it and the scope of it is pretty incredible. 570 million sales interactions across 380,000 sellers, and this was done over a year’s time and it takes in 155 million calls. And we talk about email. We also want to talk about calls too, because it is part of a holistic communication strategy, 3.2 million meetings and 8 million opportunities. And so it is something that we think of as being extremely exhaustive and something that we think will really add a lot of insight to our customers as they’re wanting to do more, do more, better. Yeah, I guess that’s why we wanted to talk about it, you know, just because I thought as I went through the report,. I found it super compelling. And there are a number of different potential takeaways. You know, for SDRs, AEs, CSMs, even, right, from all the data that you’ve gathered. And so there are some interesting takeaways that you point out as you’re summarizing the data. And there’s probably we’re going to cover five and there might be ten or 15 or 25 in this report. But so one of the first tips and kind of takeaways that you talk about for this report is that we might be doing personalization wrong. So you’ve got great data, again, showing the different personalization rates, the different reply rates, comparing SDRs, AEs, and CSMs. And so if I’m reading it right, a higher percent of personalization can actually drive up to 130% increase in replies. And you can correct me if that’s wrong. And you know, there’s an element of that that seems obvious right? But I’d love to learn more about that. But what kind of personalization also works? It’s more than just mentioning somebody’s alma mater or sports team, right? That’s right. You know, and when I get the emails that, Hi Derek, I understand you’re a person at company, it’s like, that’s not personalization. That’s not even relevancy. It just proves they can read and regurgitate. And that’s not. But I see a lot of reps do this right. And what we found is we took a look was that we are doing personalization wrong and that’s a very bold statement. But here’s why we say this. We’re looking at all selling roles, doing personalization. SDR is doing the most personalization across these 570 million interactions, 13% personalization. So you’re like,. All right, they’re doing something, they’re going out, they’re finding something on LinkedIn or somewhere that they’re trying to infuse personalization into. But here’s the spoiler alert. They spend time 13% to personalize and they get a paltry 2% reply rate. And then as you dig into that 2%, what you find is that only seven of that 2% are what our AI would identify as being a positive engagement. And so if you think about it, for every hundred emails you send, 2.8 are going to reply and a percentage of those may claim that your mom and dad were not married whenever you were conceived or tell you to jump off a very high spot or whatever the case may be. And you know, it’s really easy as a seller to send a bunch of emails. Our technology has made it that way and it’s sort of a consequence free zone. I can send these emails. You know what? I don’t feel bad if the person just rejects the email. It’s so sort of it’s asynchronous and it’s so at arm’s length that you feel like you get a bunch out there like good days work. But the truth is the results that you’re getting are significantly lower than we’d like to see. And so one of the things that. I was thinking about is something we do here is really thinking about incorporating a model of personalization into your workflow, particularly around cold approach. And that may be SDR or that may be AE sourcing pipeline. But you know, you can do at a very high level trigger events. You know, if you’re looking, if you say, well, Derek, I don’t want them spending all this time looking, you know, turning over every stone to find something relevant to talk about. I get it. Hey, congrats on the new job. That’s a really good one, right? I mean, everyone loves to hear, you know, that people are celebrating me or congrats on the new company or,. Hey, I see you’re hiring. And you can think about how these work for your different industries, but just some really simple things that you can use that just show that you’re not a machine who is doing this right now. And so a model for that, it can be super, super helpful. And then something I think we are doing wrong is we’re putting the personalization in the mid or even the footer. I remember the days of the P.S. line, but I got a news flash where no one ever reads the line if they don’t actually open the email. And so one of the things that our data science team recommends is they looked at millions and millions of email interactions is that you’re going to take the personalization, you’re only about 20% and you’re going to push it up to the very top of the email. There’s a really smart lady who I like. Her name is Liz Kane. She’s over at OpenView, I believe, and she used to work for NetSuite and she said, our emails all started with I’m Liz with NetSuite and we provide cloud based financials. But she said if anyone ever sent it that way, I would throw my laptop at them because what they would say is, Hey, congrats on getting the new role of CFO. Hey, I’m Liz with NetSuite and we provide cloud based financials for people like you. And so it really was taking the message that you’re trying to get home and it seems hard, but you’re making that subservient to this, it really is is almost an advertisement to read the rest of the email. You think about a mobile device and we’re all you know, I can tell you mine is literally right here literally right beside me. If you consider that your recipient of the email may be viewing that on a mobile device, look at your preview pane. Look at what shows up on your lockscreen and realize there’s very little copy. And what is that? That’s the advertisement to read the rest of the email. And so we need to get really good at putting it up front. And so that’s a really important thing. And then do strive for 20%. What we’ve seen is every percentage point closer to 20% increases outcomes. And so the more we can push personalization up front and the more we can tell them that we know about them and why we think this is important, that they take this call or respond to this email, the more likely it is that we’re going to be able to get them to engage. What our data science team finds is that you want to have your email under 100 words. Think about that. Because if you go back and if you just in your mind think about the email you just sent or you saw someone sent or the one you just got, it is voluminous. You have a hundred words, no more. You want to write in an elementary school level, you want to get rid of the bullet points and you want the first 20 words of it. If we’re talking about 20% personalization, to be something relevant to them, their company, if you can’t find anything relevant on them or something that maybe is changing in the industry. Yeah, that’s great. So I mean, you have to connect personally before you can connect professionally and you just have to keep it brief. And actually you clarified something I was wondering about Derek, because I think you had data for showing 10% was the AE personalization rate, 12%. CSM, 13% SDR, which sounds super anemic. But what you really talking about is not they’re personalizing 13 out of 100 emails, they’re personalizing 13 words out of an average of 100 words hypothetically, right? That’s right. It is a percentage of the total copy of the email. But I think we’re still sending too much. I think we need to just slim it down. Yeah, well, there’s so much there and I want to move on to kind of the second takeaway. And as you know, I mean getting the ICP, your ideal customer profile ironed out between marketing and sales that kind of guides your go to market is like critical, right? But one of the one of the takeaways you highlighted here was your ICP is potentially bigger than we think it is. So what, what do you mean by that? Chip I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people on this call are in tech and tech has technology that solves a big problem. And so who does tech sell to? Well they don’t usually start with laggard industries. They generally start with tech. And I don’t know if anybody’s paying attention. We’re in a little bit of a crisis mode, particularly in technology from an economy perspective. And so if you’re going to continue to try and sell to tech know that that is going to be hard, you know, tough skiing, you know, VCs are harder to get now, interest rates have gone up. Everyone is thinking more about efficiency metrics than sort of top line revenue growth. And so one of the things that we think about is being able to move outside of tech to some of these industries that are doing great. I mean, take a look at manufacturing, they are doing wonderful. And so if you have applications that can solve for some of these prior laggard industries, and I would consider manufacturing generally to be laggard, then you need to start trying to fish in that that pond as well. You don’t want to continue to throw yourself on the rocks of tech. What we found is we take a look at the level of effort to be able to get a software opportunity generated. It’s over 50 and so 50 unique touches across phone, email, social like all these different activities to be able to get there. Did you know that in median industries it’s 7.3? you think about it, tech is inundate.. I mean we’re talking about literally a significantly easier path if we just don’t try and sell exclusively to tech. I can tell you that in our space, one of the things that we found there was a Forrester, it was a tech tide. And so it had some some ideas around how technology companies are thinking. And it said 91% of companies are either have or are looking at this technology in 2023, our technology. And when you hear 91%, it sort of makes the music stop. Like, wait a minute, is this a brownfield market? Is this a replacement market that we’re in? In tech, it generally is, but in non tech industries, Main Street, not Silicon Valley, but Main Street, there’s a great opportunity to go and apply your technology to solve problems with companies that aren’t necessarily VC backed. And so I would definitely challenge all of us to think about opening the umbrella a little bit wider and getting more industries under it, because what you may find is a honeypot. But certainly what we know is if you continue to throw yourselves on the rock of tech while tech is really struggling, you can expect your engagement to be significantly less. Yeah,. I mean, that resonates with me a ton. We sell to pretty much every industry, which I think is probably a strength of ours, frankly. And you know, it’s manufacturing, financial services, professional services, health care, solar, you know, and a lot of those spaces, I think our experience is probably are fewer touch is right It’s easier to stand out and believe it or not, In some of those industries, you have 20, 30% that are still not using CRMs and are using a spreadsheet to manage their customer data. Yes, it’s kind of shocking. Yep. So moving on. So this one. I thought was super interesting because the pandemic has pulled us all out of the office. A lot of us are just on home phones now. Or probably just our mobile device. My folks still have a landline, but I think anybody that’s under 60 years old, most of us don’t have a land line anymore. That’s right. There’s a desk phone sitting on a home employee’s desk. That doesn’t happen anymore. Yeah, it doesn’t happen. And so and with caller I.D., you know people are less likely to pick up the phone maybe than they were. But your data showed that there is some value as a rep to pick up the phone and make the call because the phone is just not dead. So the demise of phone has been wildly overstated. One of the things that I would challenge you all, everyone who’s in the reach of our voice is don’t think of cadences as being a particular channel. Evaluate cadence performance as an aggregate. That’s a really important piece because what you’ll see is that when you add phone in, things actually go significantly better. Let’s go back to that SDR reply rate idea that we had a little earlier. So for every hundred sends 2.8 of them are going to reply not positively but reply. And of that only 7% of the 2.8 is like, yeah, I do want to have a conversation. I would love to talk, great timing.. And so that means that there’s a ton of inefficiency there. When you look at that compared to connect rates. And so phone connect rates, particularly for SDR at this point are 10% plus. So think about it. For every hundred emails you get, 2.8 replies, not all are positive. For every 100 calls, you get ten conversations. And so phone avoidance is still a very real thing. And this is, we’re beyond the days of like refractive or powered hours where we’re just going to call the person into submission. That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. But what I am suggesting is that we begin to use phone. And remember that phone when used really, really well, actually points them back to another channel. So John Barrows, who used to sell copiers, he was an amazing sales trainer, but used to sell copiers. He said that he used to give this long voicemail and he said he finally figured it out one day. It’s like, Hey, this is John.. I just sent you an email. I would love to talk. Feel free to reply to the email. So it isn’t even that we’re necessarily optimizing for the conversation. But when those happen, there’s an enablement opportunity. And that enablement opportunity, as far as I’m concerned, is that we have reps call in and we don’t coach them to have a very narrow set of considerations that they’re going to uncover. You know, the reason reps are afraid of calls is they call and the answer could be anything. You know, it’s like it could be something really technical, something really business related. It could be something, all these different things. And so what you want to do on a cold call, particularly as you’re thinking about entry level reps, is give them a script. I know script is something that has a little bit of a negative connotation. But hear me out. Give them a script that walks the person into choke points where there’s only a couple of options, right? Instead of there being a universe or a constellation of options, just put them in a place where you’re getting them so that they can be really confident across the board. One of the things that we used to do in the Pardot days, way back when, is we would ask someone what they were doing for nurturing and we knew we would get one of three options. I’m not, my reps do it, or I’m doing it. And then with all three, if they said they were not, we’d ask why and give them data that would indicate why it was a good idea. If they said the reps do, we actually instructed our reps to laugh. Are you kidding me? They’re trying to stay in front of an opportunity. It’s going to close in two years while they’re on a quarterly plan. Are you kidding me? And then if they are, we would inquire who, because now we might be able to uncover what competitor they’re using and we could differentiate. But so often we put them in these situations where they’re going to be so many options and no reps going to have confidence in that sort of a circumstance. Only your veterans are going to have confidence in that. I think we just need to do a better job of simplifying and then deeply coaching around the around the potential directions they’ll take. And I think that can help us break through call buoyancy, because phone is still super, super effective. And that’s a really important idea. It makes sense to me. I mean, if your ultimate goal is a conversation, you’re like, let’s go try to get a conversation. And we actually had a guest on from ConnectAndSell that talked about the data that they have that says you have like 7 seconds. And so having the structure for how am I going to use those 7 seconds on the phone and make it easier for the person that you just interrupted. Yep. To, you know, say yes to something, give them some something just to agree to by being compelling and doing it, doing it quick. So I’ll tell you one other thing on that. ConnectAndSell thing, that first 7 seconds don’t, How are you? How are you? God forbid they say, well,. I was in a car accident this morning. My wife’s leaving me.. I mean, things are really tough here. You don’t really want to know how they are. And it’s a throwaway question and it’s in the for hey, this is Derek from Salesloft, How are you? No one cares.. No one cares. Stop acting like you care. Take that out and get to some meat cook more quickly and just remove all the window dressing. It’s a fact. We could probably do a whole episode on optimizing the phone. So maybe that’s a future discussion we have there. But so get back to the data. So another takeaway you had from the data was that the deal is in the details. And so you talk about opening a relevant conversation, reducing what you call deal gaps and studying the sales cycle. That’s right. So can you drill into that a little bit more? I think there’s some good insight there. Yeah. Let’s all say that winning the winnable deals is more critical now than ever. You know, this is a time we’re in one of these countercyclical times where deals are harder to come by. They’re going to have more hair on them when you get them. And so we really need to be aware and proactively de-risk our pipeline. So in the study, we looked at about 8 million opportunities. And one thing and I teased this earlier, and this is not going to be a news flash, but when you hear it, I hope it changes the way that you think about rep sourcing.. AEs are significantly more effective at sourcing pipeline from an efficiency perspective than SDRs are. You’re looking at about 55 touches for an AE to generate an opportunity and you’re at 220 for an SDR. Why is that? Well, the AE is not going to waste their own time. They’re only going to call their. A accounts, right? That’s one. They’re a little bit more seasoned. You know, they have already dealt with some of the objections. And so they’re a little more savvy, maybe. And so that’s not any sort of a news flash like it makes such good, logical sense. But I think in many cases, we don’t lean on the AEs to source as well as get from the SDRs. SDRs have a hard job, but just the AE owning it and owning part of it is something that we find is really important. But then once you get into the opportunity, you’ve got your pipeline. And since deals are riskier now or hairier now and so we have a couple of different mechanisms in our application to help you identify deals that are sort of flailing. One is deal gaps and a deal gap might be you’ve got a post, you know, a close date that’s overdue and these are rule based. You don’t have enough contacts associated, when you’re single threaded, you know, you haven’t heard from them in a while. And so that can help you begin identifying deals. And then we need intentionality on the reps part to go out and actually resolve those things. And as we take a look globally, our customers have an average of 2.2 deal gaps per opportunity, and that’s not bad. I think the most important thing is you’re like,. Oh man, this opportunity is shot. No, not at all. This is an opportunity to get it right. Don’t have someone, you don’t know the paper process in Medpick, that’s going to flag a gap. And now we have the opportunity go and get this. And what it allows is it allows the reps to provide the leaders much better information as we’re thinking about forecasting, as we’re thinking about, you know, where we’re resourcing opportunities. And so we got to be willing to look at the risky deals. We need to be prescriptive about what it is that is risky in there and then go that last mile. And for the reps to be able to go out and identify this. And if the reps don’t do it, then the manager has the ability to say, Hey, I’m looking at the same data you are. Looks like this, this and this are things that need to get resolved. Let’s make an action plan to be able to get those resolved before our next one on one or our next pipeline review. Yeah, I mean, you talk about hairy deals or hairy opportunities. I mean, I think there’s, one of the things that we actually monitor for is stale opportunities, right? I mean, how effective are AEs at reengaging with people that have a conversation going? And I would say that it’s a bad offense if you have somebody that’s very interested in your product or service and they’re waiting for you to get back to them, right? You never want to put them in kind of a wait mode because you’re losing all your momentum. And, you know, you look at the research from Forrester, you know, reps are getting involved later and later in the process. Now it’s over 70% of the buying process has happened without the rep being involved. The rep’s job is to pull it into the driveway at this point and in a lot of cases. And so when the person’s asking for something, know that it’s not you and the person, it’s you and the person and the other vendor or vendors they’re talking to. And that being engaged is something that’s going to help you win deals. Yeah agree, it’s sort of the cardinal sin is not following up when someone’s begging to talk to you and you should prioritize that. Yeah. No, I have seen other research from Jay Baer, he talks a lot about, hey, being first is sometimes the number one most important thing that you need to do. You need to be the first, you need to be the most responsive, because not only are you more likely to win, they actually might buy you if you’re even more expensive than the next closest competitor. And so the final thing that we’re going to drill into is about listening skills. And it doesn’t seem that surprising to me that AEs with good listening skills, that kind of show that in the percentage of talk time, do better. Do you want to drill more into that data? Yeah. So as we look at our conversation intelligence data, one of the things that we find is that and by the way, I’m failing miserably on this today, Chip, but talk to us. Why I asked you to talk? But still, I’m just I’m a monologuing here. Geez Louise When we look at the data, one of the things that we find is that all of our roles globally are talking less than 40% of the call. And as you take a look, the highest percentage of talk time is your customer success managers. And I guess that makes sense. You know, they’re asking for questions or QBRs, they’re sharing information, but there needs to be a really important amount of give and take. You know, you think about it, sellers,. What do you hire for sellers? You hire if you’re looking at the DISC profile, you get your Ds, You can force them into buying, or get your Is they’re the ones that can make you, they’re the life of the party. And if we hire a bunch of Is, they’re going to dominate the conversation. And there’s nothing wrong with hiring Is, I think Is is a great profile. The influencer is a great profile for sales, but we just have to get them. You know, It’s like they don’t want to lose the limelight. It’s better when they talk. It’s better when they talk. And so just ask a question and shut up. And that’s really, really hard for a lot of sellers to go out and do. You know, we’re also seeing as we talk about sort of a little bit more of a scarcity of deals, look at trickier deals to go into. One of the things as we think about listening more, we were seeing reps go back and listen to prior calls. And why are they doing this? We’re seeing an average of five,. AEs reviewing five calls a week. SDRs are reviewing four, why are they doing this? What you really want to have the voice of the customer. You want to make sure you know exactly what they’re asking for and you’re going to, you haven’t missed an action item and and you want to make sure that you’re really differentiating because you know the competitor. And so one of the things we’re finding is that reps are now when maybe they have a little bit of a more open calendar, they’re going back to get really tight on on what it is that they’ve currently got in the pipeline to make sure that they are doing everything possible to obsess over this customer and to make sure that this customer has everything they need to pick us, of course. And so that’s a really important piece. So listening, keep the talk ratio to below 40% and then go back and hear what the customer actually said. You know, just let it wash through your your ears a couple of times so you can make sure that you’re not missing something. Good stuff. I mean, you’re not the star of the show, right? I mean, ultimately you’re trying to make them the hero, the star of the show, right? So if you monologue, you’re going to miss your cue. That’s right. That’s right. The on going sort of word salad is not something that is helping more deals forward. It’s buying now, It’s not selling. It really is the buying process when we talk about sellers are further through it like so us trying to dominate it, it’s really them with a need that they’ve discovered and now they’re trying to figure out which vendor they’re going to go with. And so yeah, to your point, don’t monologue, let them talk. Awesome. Derek. I think that’s all we have time for today. Any final thoughts for us? No. You know, I just I love that I’ve had the opportunity to interact with your audience. And if anyone would like to get the benchmark report, it’s available on Salesloft.com. And so do go out. And if you have questions, certainly I’d be glad to to jump in or any of the Lofters that are there. So if you’re a customer, ask your CSM, if you’re a prospect, grab it off the website. But you know, know that it is not Salesloft-specific. It really is global. No matter who you’re using in our category, know that it can help you be better at your job. Amazing. Derek, thanks for the discussion.. It was great. For sure. I really enjoyed it.. And have a wonderful rest of your day. Yeah, you too. And thanks to all of you for tuning in and remember to like this video. Subscribe to this channel. Ring the bell for notifications so you don’t miss any episodes and we’ll see you next time.