Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
If you're running outbound. If you're using SDRs. Or planning to. You've got to listen to this episode.
We got Morgan Ingram on the show, and he broke down his LinkedIn playbook to get replies at scale.
This episode is brought to you by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
We got Morgan Ingram on the show, and he broke down his LinkedIn playbook to get replies at scale.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (03:18) - Outbound Marketing and Career Choices
- (06:16) - Optimizing LinkedIn Profiles
- (07:45) - Common Mistakes in Outbound Messaging
- (11:34) - Effective LinkedIn Connection Strategies
- (17:58) - Using Videos and Voice Notes in Outreach
- (19:41) - Humanizing Your Outreach
- (22:35) - The Challenges of SDRing Outbound
- (23:00) - Essential Tools for Effective Sales
- (26:33) - Creative Sales Tactics: The Alley Oop Play
- (31:35) - Pipeline Development Strategies
- (36:04) - The Role of LinkedIn in Modern Sales
- (40:03) - The Future of Email in Sales
This episode is brought to you by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
You can go to https://www.everstage.com/revenue-formula to check out Everstage and mention Revenue Formula to unlock a personalized Sales Compensation Strategy Session with Everstage’s RevOps experts—crafted for enterprise teams to maximize performance.
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
Creators and Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Mikkel: what are some of the key mistakes you see happening out
[00:00:02] Morgan: I might hurt some people's feelings going into these three. So my intention is not to hurt your feelings. But if it hurt you a little bit, it means you probably should change
[00:00:10] Every person in every single workshop that I do. Every keynote that I do, they always ask me, Morgan, how do I automate this?
[00:00:18] That is the worst question to actually ask. And I'm going to tell you why, because how can you automate something when you don't have success anyways? What are you an art? What are you automating? More garbage. If you're automating more garbage, that means you're going to get, you're going to burn the market more and you're not going to go anywhere.
[00:00:38] Toni: Today's episode is brought to you by ever stage, the top writer platform to automate sales commissions. You can create a single hub for your reps to track all their deals, earnings, and performance history thanks to EverStage's seamless integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Slack, and MS Teams.
[00:00:56] Reps can also know exactly how much they could earn with Crystal, EverStage's one of a kind commission forecasting module. Visit everstage. com to learn more and help your sales teams ace 2025.
[00:01:10] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:01:11] We were already there, Mikkel. I mean, you, you just killed
[00:01:14] it
[00:01:14] now, you
[00:01:15] Mikkel: thing is I did the whole inverse thing. I should have said the thing about Morgan set up at home. Like this is looking really sweet. Do you
[00:01:21] even have like, you have a neon sign
[00:01:23] in the
[00:01:23] background? Jesus.
[00:01:26] Toni: tell a professional,
[00:01:26] Morgan: it's actually one of the. Y'all know when like you go online and you're like all this get this is gonna be sick and then you get it and It's terrible. You're like this isn't yeah, like I Didn't know cuz I got my friend was like, hey, I got this neon sign I was like, all right, dude, like yours looks good.
[00:01:43] But like you could I don't know It's up to my quality of what I want. I got this sign. I was Thrilled I was like, this is actually better than what I thought the way that they did it the detail I asked for They nailed it. So yeah, shout out to the neon sign
[00:01:58] Mikkel: I mean, funny story. We, I, I got one, we had a studio and it was like a. Two by three meter rooms. It was
[00:02:04] tiny and it was right next to the lunch area. So it could get noisy. And I was like, I'm going to get a neon sign that, and then we can flick the switch and it says on air, people know to be quiet, that neon sign.
[00:02:14] It was like the size of an iPhone. Ain't nobody gonna see, ain't nobody gonna see that sign. And I was like, dang it. Should have checked the specs when I got this one.
[00:02:24] Morgan: Hey, to be fair, I did that. So speaking of specs, I wanted another blanket for my living room. I just like blankets. Shout out to, I just love blankets. Right? So I was like, cool. I need like a bigger blanket. Tell me why I got like. The, the hand blanket. It's like, it literally, it doesn't, it doesn't even cover your body.
[00:02:45] It covers like your arm. And I'm like, what? How did I, I was so heated. I was so heated. And then my friend was like, wait, hold up. You didn't order the full size blanket. You ordered the hand blanket. And I was like, who's, who's buying hand
[00:02:59] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:02:59] Toni: for cats maybe. Maybe it's for cats. There's a cat, like a
[00:03:02] dinner.
[00:03:03] Morgan: not,
[00:03:03] Mikkel: that to I see you're playing picket pickleball. You should bring it there and just pull it out and like, you know, in between sets
[00:03:08] Toni: Maybe. Maybe it's a towel also, I dunno, I, I'm just guessing at
[00:03:12] this
[00:03:12] Morgan: That's probably the only use for it at this point. Yeah, it was absolutely outrageous. It
[00:03:17] Mikkel: Yeah, but that's cool. I
[00:03:18] mean, today we're going to talk about the use of outbound because this is a thing I mean, secretly, I guess you're still hoping to be a marketer actually.
[00:03:26] And I was wondering if the right offer falls into your lap. Are you going to take it? If so, if, if Tony here is going to be like Morgan, really love what you said about outbound in today's episode and that LinkedIn game, but actually I could use a marketing person. Would you kind of switch over? Can we lure you or no?
[00:03:42] Morgan: Could never go back anywhere full time as someone working that that would never happen to be honest I won't say never say never I don't like absolutes but like it's like 99 percent 99 percent It would probably not happen But if someone were to want me to come in and consult on marketing stuff, oh, I'm all in That's why I started creating the content so I could do that.
[00:04:02] So it's still in my blood. It's just
[00:04:03] Mikkel: yeah, yeah.
[00:04:05] Toni: But actually tell us a little bit more. So why, why not go back to full-time? Not that, not that we wanna hire something like this, but, but like, I would love to hear how you're kind of piecing this together.
[00:04:14] Morgan: It to me, it's truly autonomy. If I have to go back someone full time, then that ultimately means that I have to report to somebody. And then the ideas that I want to execute on, I have to show a use case on like a business case on why I want to do it. I just want to do stuff. So like, I don't want to be restricted and I don't have to explain it.
[00:04:35] I just want to be like. This is it. This is what we're going to do and go out and doing it, which is why I prefer to be on for my own where I am right now. That would probably honestly be the main blocker. This is the only caveat. Unless it was going to work with someone that I had a very close relationship with and I wouldn't run into that barrier.
[00:04:52] Then that's a different conversation. But if it's someone I don't inherently know, then yeah, the likelihood of that happening is going to be small because I have to have that creativity in what I do.
[00:05:01] Mikkel: So it's really like being able to buy that tiny blanket
[00:05:05] Morgan: That's really what it is,
[00:05:06] actually.
[00:05:07] Yeah, Yeah.
[00:05:07] Mikkel: yeah.
[00:05:08] Toni: really. Yeah.
[00:05:09] Morgan: That's the only
[00:05:10] Mikkel: then you're not, you're not going to get a scolding for it. You're not going to get a scolding for that either.
[00:05:14] So, one of the things I really, we really wanted to talk with you about, obviously
[00:05:18] our audience, I think many of them, they're doing outbound.
[00:05:21] If I'm being totally honest, I think a lot of them are also just. A bunch of the previous founders we've had on this show, guess what they did for takeoff outbound. It's like, it's such a big discipline still today. And part of that is also LinkedIn as well where
[00:05:37] people are reaching out. So I really wonder with. The teams you've worked with, advised, let's start by some of the biggest mistakes they're making right now, especially because it's, it's, it's so difficult out there to succeed. It's so much has changed. So maybe if it would be great for, for us to hear, what are some of the key mistakes you see happening out
[00:05:56] Morgan: Okay, so caveat. I might hurt some people's feelings going into these three. So my intention is not to hurt your feelings. But if it hurt you a little bit, it means you probably should change. and also to be clear, I've also made these mistakes myself. So this is also something I've had to learn too. So these are, there's a lot, but I'm just going to stick to three.
[00:06:16] So the first one is you're not treating your LinkedIn profile as a landing page. And again, you might be like, wait, Morgan, we're not talking about marketing anymore. But like, this actually is important because. When you do an outbound message through your sales team or your sales reps or AEs or whoever it is, 62%, this is LinkedIn data, 62 percent of people check out your profile before they agree to respond to that message, right?
[00:06:42] They're going to see what your company about. They're going to check out the website. So when you're sending that message, if you don't have it optimized, you are losing out on opportunities across the board. And so what I tell people is you need to look at your profile and make sure is your headline appropriate.
[00:06:57] So my framework for headlines is what value can you offer to that potential client? So basically what pain point do you solve? Like what are some things that you're working on? What industries do you work in? If you just have like SDR or AE at X company, think about how that doesn't do anything for you because most people aren't, I mean, unless y'all are, that'd be weird, but you're probably not waking up in the morning being like, let me go talk to some SDRs today.
[00:07:21] Like I really want to have get pitched. Like nobody's doing that. . So you have to optimize your headline to S to like see that you solve the problem so that people actually are willing to accept you, otherwise that actually won't happen. And then the other thing that you need to be doing is what in your future section, which is, do you have case studies, use cases that your team can also dive into and see what's going on there as well.
[00:07:42] So that's number one, is you need to optimize your profile.
[00:07:45] Number two is every yo i I every, you probably heard this a lot and I know that people listening in, I know you wanna do this. Every person in every single workshop that I do. Every keynote that I do, they always ask me, Morgan, how do I automate this?
[00:07:59] That is the worst question to actually ask. And I'm going to tell you why, because how can you automate something when you don't have success anyways? What are you an art? What are you automating? More garbage. If you're automating more garbage, that means you're going to get, you're going to burn the market more and you're not going to go anywhere.
[00:08:20] So the question isn't, how do I automate? That's the wrong question because everyone's asking that question. Everyone's trying to figure out. How can I get an AI agent to automate and get responses? The question you should be asking yourself is how can I do something that is more human? Something that's unscalable something that's different and unique and then once we figure out what that's different and unique then we can figure out maybe there are ways to automate that but you need to figure out what your responses are first before you even get to that point and The third thing that I see is people are treating LinkedIn outbound messaging as email instead of as a social conversation.
[00:08:57] So most people will be like, Hey how are we going to get responses on LinkedIn? Oh, let's just copy and paste the emails that aren't already getting responses by the way. And let's put them in a LinkedIn messenger to get responses. That doesn't make sense. You need to think about LinkedIn as how do I get one to two sentences that I could send to somebody to start a conversation or get them to respond and go from there.
[00:09:16] You have to think of social as a conversation starter and it's very similar to circa Facebook now meta when you would sell on there, that's how you would do it. I used to sell on Facebook, so it's the same thing. It's just a different platform with more high quality prospects. So those are the three mistakes that I see.
[00:09:34] Toni: I also feel at least kind of on the, on the LinkedIn side, right. Kind of the, the more structured a message is the less likely I'm to read it
[00:09:43] Morgan: Yes. And because of AI
[00:09:44] now
[00:09:45] Toni: be, yeah, it needs to almost be like, Oh yeah, no, this is like a WhatsApp message from a friend. You know, that needs to be the formatting.
[00:09:51] Otherwise it's like already kind of the. The, the defense basically kind of goes up. And I think that kind of fits very well with the last point, like kind of treating LinkedIn, like they're treating email right now, right. Kind of a completely different, completely different setup there.
[00:10:02] But
[00:10:05] Morgan: not think of it as email or what you were doing or running a sequencer campaign. You have to think about what are, I like to call them spark questions or spark thing, a spark to get the conversation going that eventually will convert. Now, I like to recommend people videos and voice notes, but, and I know also if we're going outside of the United States.
[00:10:24] In certain regions, like that just wouldn't fly, but that's another thing you could do.
[00:10:28] Mikkel: was, I was for sure expecting we're going to say one of the mistakes was you connect and then second after you copy paste that message to the other person, because just having been on the receiving end of like, Oh, dang, should not have accepted that message. Now I got like the,
[00:10:43] Morgan: Yeah, I, I book it. That is an I book it as like the other mistake, right. That I talk about, which is like, are you just copy and pasting that email? I see it as the same thing as the connect and
[00:10:53] pitch for
[00:10:53] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:10:53] I got it. Got it. It's also like, to be honest, it's also, it feels very lacy. And I've seen from awesome companies, by the way, Stella logos, where it is just that copy pasted email you receive. And you know what? I just don't feel very special.
[00:11:07] Toni: I'm actually, I'm actually wondering, so let's just say you are like an, like an SDR, junior SDR, BDR. You have the LinkedIn navigator license, you know, you're kind of fully equipped but. You kind of know that in mails don't really actually work. So it's much better to do the connection requests and then send something.
[00:11:26] Right. But you don't have a massive network, but you know, in this industry, when kind of you, you enter this maybe out of college or, you know, how should you go about this actually?
[00:11:34] You know, should you just connect to someone and then, then wait for a month and then write something kind of what, what, what is the best way to scale this for like an individual SDR?
[00:11:44] Yeah,
[00:11:49] Morgan: there's a two step process here. So the first thing is what I'm going to say here. This is also controversial. Everyone always wants to fight me on this for some reason, but this is just, this is just what it is. Like, I wish it was different, but this is just the game.
[00:12:05] So if you want a higher acceptance rate, send invitations with zero notes. So you don't add anything to it. You just send a blank connection request. And then, then the follow up question that everyone has is, well, LinkedIn tells us to personalize. Well, the reason that LinkedIn tells you to personalize a note is because it wasn't built as a sales platform.
[00:12:23] It was built as a talent and HR and recruiting platform. So the reason that they say personalize the connection request is because they are rooted in baked into their talent. And they want you to personalize because they're like, Oh, well you met the person or you met them networking or you're trying to personalize to get a job.
[00:12:40] None of the things that I just said are what you're trying to do and accomplish and why you're listening to this episode. So ignore that advice and listen to what I have to say here, which is blank connection requests will have higher acceptance rates, which will allow you to have a more personalized message, which then fits you into a 30, 000 criteria.
[00:12:57] What is 30, 000 criteria mean? LinkedIn only has. At maximum, you can only have 30, 000 connections. I know that because I've hit that limit a lot of times. So that means that you can only have, they only could have 30, 000 messages to them. That could be a one to one that actually could be video or voice notes versus email where it's open field.
[00:13:20] Right? So that should get everyone really excited. So how do you get more higher acceptance rates? You may be asking, well, I described that earlier when I said you need a good profile. That's why I said it's a mistake. Cause you're not going to actually get a high conversion. Then now that we have that in order, then let's get to the actual sales staff.
[00:13:35] So let's say I have zero network. Let's say you stripped all my network away. Nobody knows who I am.
[00:13:40] Toni: yeah. Apollo right
[00:13:41] now.
[00:13:41] Morgan: Oh, oh, gosh. Well, that's worse.
[00:13:45] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Morgan: might not even want to talk to me. But okay, let's say, let's say it's that, right? So there's five filters I recommend people to look at.
[00:13:53] One is viewed your profile recently. Now your profile views might not be as high, but you will have some if you've been doing some level of outbound. So I just like seeing that because it's a level of interest because if they're coming and viewing my profile, think about it. There's a billion users on the platform.
[00:14:10] If they're coming to view my profile, that's an indicator. And I want to, and I want to dive into that. Number two is posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days. So the reason that we're looking into this one is because if they posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, That means that they're active on the platform.
[00:14:26] If they're active on the platform, that means my connection requests will have a higher acceptance rate. If my connection requests have a higher acceptance rate, that means I'll have higher mutual connections in my industry. If I have higher mutual connections in the industry, then I'm going to get more people to accept my connection requests.
[00:14:39] That's just how it works. So I'm going to anyone who's posted last 30 days, like as a rep, I would basically max out my connection requests every single week, which is 250. So you can send out a thousand connection requests per month. I would look to max that out every single month, every single week and every single month because that's how you're going to build that network.
[00:14:59] So that's number two. Number three is you want to look at years at company. You want to look at less than one year and then more granularly you want to look at people who, and I kind of broke this down as like two to three months, someone in their role. That means they are now getting an understanding of the lay of the land.
[00:15:17] They're like, okay, this is kind of what I want to learn. This is what I want to impact. I've, I've talked to the people already. I know it needs to be done. Do, and I'll tell you what to not do. Do not reach out to people who say one month enrolled. That's terrible. Do not do this because they probably don't, if they are working in office, they probably don't know where the bathroom is.
[00:15:35] They've just got their card. They just logged into their email. They're just onboarding. They don't know anything yet. They don't know who, how to get decision making done. So don't reach out to these people because everyone else is going to do that. It's a huge mistake that people make. So if it says one month enroll, I know y'all are tempted to do this.
[00:15:50] Do not do this. And if you do it, you didn't get this advice from me. You got it from some other person who, who from another place, right? Do
[00:15:57] Toni: didn't get it from
[00:15:57] this
[00:15:58] Morgan: No, not this episode, not this podcast. It was the, it was another one, right? Not us. So then you want to look at six to 10 months. And the reason I'm granularly saying that is because now they have two quarters where they've been able to see what's going on and they may be looking to readjust strategies based on that role as well.
[00:16:16] Last two filters I'll mention. Past company. So leverage the company you're at, look at what companies you have on your logo lists and where they have worked. If they've worked with a company in the past, it's one of your case studies and they've moved to a new company, you want to take advantage of that.
[00:16:31] And then the last one is like, kind of like the obvious one I put here, which is like connections. Like I want to see what first or second degree connections I have. And you kind of could say five B here is like your job titles essentially. So that, yeah, that's a lot I just covered, but that's essentially what I would do if I started from scratch.
[00:16:47] Toni: So, I mean, so I asked you a small question and that obviously, you know, you kind of took this apart and all the different steps here, but now you have the connection request, you're, you're, you're tweaking up your your acceptance rates and all of that is going in the, in the right direction. Should you wait before you send them something or should you do it immediately?
[00:17:05] Kind of, how do you, how do you then get the next step done off of, of pinging them and sparking this, this engagement?
[00:17:11] Morgan: Okay. So this is where I also disagree with most people. Most people will be like, Hey, connect with people, comment on their stuff, wait five months. Do y'all got five months to wait to hit your number? I don't think so. This is a, from what I understand, you don't have five months to just hang out. Right? So from what I've learned and talking to other sellers and doing this a ton and coaching a lot of people is we are not going to wait.
[00:17:38] But we're going to also not a meet like you just said earlier that we're not going to immediately pitch. Don't connect with someone that immediately messes them unless you met them or you have really good context. Wait at least like two to three days before you decide to make this decision. And then what we're doing here is actually three different things.
[00:17:58] One, we're going to send them a video. You want to keep your videos like 35 to 45 seconds. Voice notes. Same thing or three, you're going to ask some question to get the conversation going. Those are the three things that you're going to do. The bonus here is if you can find content, for example, or an interview.
[00:18:17] I also like saying, Hey, saw you in this interview. And then I asked a question on that. But my goal is to ask people questions or to get the conversation started in the DMs. And then it just can go from there. That's, that's how I see it.
[00:18:28] Toni: Okay. You know, so Michael has like this whole like agenda for us.
[00:18:33] I'm just
[00:18:33] Mikkel: it's also
[00:18:33] Toni: asking. Like, I love this
[00:18:35] super
[00:18:36] Mikkel: you're going to ask all the questions because you know nothing about Alpine. You're a marketing person. And what is he doing? He's like, you know what? I'm just going to, I'm going to take this episode
[00:18:43] Toni: just
[00:18:43] taking
[00:18:44] Mikkel: Go. No, no, go,
[00:18:45] Toni: it's like, you know, screw whoever's listening. I'm learning something right now. You know, it's like,
[00:18:49] Mikkel: true. That's true.
[00:18:50] Toni: no. So, why would you send why would you send a video by the way? Why would you that, you know, but why would that be the first step? Wouldn't it be easier to write something first and then based on something else, kind of do something that takes more work, like creating a video.
[00:19:04] Morgan: It is easier to do the text and I know some people don't like videos and I 100 percent get that, but there are two reasons why I would start with the video. Number one, nobody does it.
[00:19:15] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:19:15] Toni: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Morgan: No one's doing it. So I'm, I'm going to do it. That's what I always look for. People. I always look for, I try to find the things that people don't like doing. So if someone, if everyone was like, I hate video, I'm like, I love video now because that means you aren't doing it. So I'm going to do it. So I now have an advantage over you. And that's the way I think about it. So that's number one. Number two is this prevents you from being another AI message.
[00:19:40] See, we're getting in this weird world right now where And I'm building a cloud project right now where I can create some really good messaging to the point where like it might not even be like written by me, right?
[00:19:54] So most people, I'm not saying it's gonna happen right now, but I think in the future, some people might be like, everything written is AI. I don't trust anything.
[00:20:01] Toni: Yeah.
[00:20:03] Morgan: I think we might get there. So my take on this as of right now, and so the videos get better, which they are getting better by the day, but they're not there yet.
[00:20:11] I'm gonna send you a video to let you know I'm a real person like I'm not automated. I am real So that's the reason I do it there
[00:20:19] Toni: So, so this is pretty, so it's, it's funny actually. So the last time I did outbound kind of for, for the previous company I was building you know, I built up this LinkedIn brand and then kind of leveraged this in order to outbound and be actually videos. We used SendSpark to automate parts of that and parts of that was canned and we kind of, you know, stitched this together and stuff like this.
[00:20:37] And I think it was great to actually, it worked out really nicely. But you know, the, the guiding light for us was always, we need to prove that we are human. That, that had to be kind of, that, that is almost the thing that, you know, whatever you say, it's almost doesn't matter. It's like the first test you need to kind of jump over whether or not this is like a message that is drafted in a way where it's like, Oh, that was probably like a lazy human being, or like a video that almost like, Oh, wow, that, you know, we're probably not at this level yet that AI can do this also to your point, probably not so far away from that.
[00:21:09] But kind of this, this proof of being not automated, I think that's a, that's a major first step in order for someone to, to give you, you know, almost more of their time than you invested in, in, in reaching out to them. Right. So, and really, really cool that you're, that you're pointing this out like
[00:21:25] this.
[00:21:26] Morgan: Yep, exactly. And that's what everyone should be thinking about is How do I make this as human as possible? I'm trying to figure that on text. How do you do that? And this was an interesting, I don't recommend what I'm about to say, I just thought it was just an interesting take if you want to do it yourself.
[00:21:41] There were people, when I was at this roundtable last week, that were like, we're misspelling things.
[00:21:48] Toni: Yep.
[00:21:48] Morgan: so people think that we're not AI. That's where we're at right now. And again, I haven't tested that to A, B test it. I'm probably going to mess around with it just to see. But like, that's what's happening.
[00:21:59] Mikkel: yeah, it is crazy. It is great. Like I found myself being subconscious because I found out that if you do a long hyphen between lines, that's very common for AI to do.
[00:22:08] And now I'm like, I want to use it. I've always used it. Now I can't, this
[00:22:12] is, I have to
[00:22:12] Toni: use it twice in a row. Then they were like, okay, no, that
[00:22:15] was a
[00:22:16] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:22:16] Morgan: do like the squiggly line. I don't even know what it's called, but you gotta do
[00:22:18] the
[00:22:19] Mikkel: yeah, yeah,
[00:22:19] Morgan: the next one. That's the
[00:22:20] next
[00:22:21] Mikkel: that's exactly, That's exactly it.
[00:22:22] Morgan: what you have to do. I solved your problem.
[00:22:24] Mikkel: no, perfect. So I was also thinking like. So now you have on it, Morgan, I'm going to hire you. You're going to be in charge of 20 SDRs
[00:22:31] over here. They're going to connect with, what was it? 250 folks every
[00:22:35] week.
[00:22:35] a week, like, man, tough. Right. But that's the game.
[00:22:38] That's SDRing outbound right there. do you like. I know what's working, what's not working. How do you bring some structure into
[00:22:47] this? I mean, it can get super messy. That's a lot
[00:22:49] of potential leads every week. And you know, you want to make sure there's not someone really damaging the brand, et cetera.
[00:22:56] So how, how would
[00:22:57] Toni: Or, or, or 20 people reaching out to the same person. You know,
[00:23:00] Morgan: So you would need, yeah, you're going to need four tools here in order for this to be effective. Right. So the obvious one is like sales nav. I think that every sales team should have it unless your buyer persona and industry is just not there I find that most people when they say that we're not getting the most out of sales nav.
[00:23:19] It's because they're not using it like Of course you're not gonna get something out of you're not using
[00:23:26] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Morgan: And also like you have to learn about it too and a lot of people may be like I don't want to learn that well It's like that's how you're gonna get the most out of it. I promise you every org can do that Straightforward, right?
[00:23:37] It's just learning it. So anyways, that's what, that's a part of it. Data. I know I mentioned Apollo, but like you do need data though. Like, so I recommend people to get two data sources. If at minimum, like I'm not going to tell you which one to use. Cause everyone's region and what you're looking for is different, but like you do need two of them.
[00:23:52] Cause that's going to allow you to like filter all the stuff that's happening. And then three, you need some type of sales engagement tool because like. If you don't have the sales engagement tool, it's going to be hard for you to track all the stuff that I just said, right? And what we're talking about here is just like not going to work.
[00:24:06] And then the other component is some type of video. If you, if you want to get in there and do it as well. Right. And you just mentioned since spark a huge fan of what they do. So that's like an example, but pick whatever you want. So the way that you would want to do this is on the CRM, right? That's kind of like, I'm assuming you should have a CRM.
[00:24:24] And if you don't like. It's probably important, but like, yeah, that's going to allow you to like track everything. So you pick your CRM, pick whatever you want. I use like HubSpot, but whatever. So then the next thing that you want to do is you have to allocate your sales engagement tool to the LinkedIn touches so that those APIs can go back to the CRM and how you set that up is going to be different for everyone, but you do need to do that.
[00:24:48] Then if I had 20 SDRs, probably at that point we're probably being broken down by. Yeah, we're probably being broken down by segments. So I probably have like mid market enterprise maybe strategic sdrs So I would have marketing probably filter out a list for them so that they don't reach out to the same people I probably wouldn't be it depends on where we're at But like if I was doing greenfield at that point Then I would just have to be hyper focused on like a probably a 60 day touch rule But that's me being super granular.
[00:25:15] But like that's how you would avoid that and then the last thing that i'll add here is It this is actually I don't know why LinkedIn doesn't talk about this more. I found this on accident, but I shouldn't, I'm not, I found this on accident. So if you go to sales nav and build a lead list, so if you don't know what a lead list is, it's like right above Lee, it's like on leads, you click leads, and then it builds out these lists for you based on people you're trying to target.
[00:25:42] Right? So if you create a lead list, and this is why I said target accounts of your target accounts inside of that lead list, it tracks your LinkedIn activity. Like your outreach activity. It tells you the last time that you sent the message, and it even tells you if they replied or not. So, that's something most people don't know.
[00:26:03] But like, that's how you can build and track all this stuff across the board. So, a couple things.
[00:26:09] Mikkel: No, I think that's, that's pretty critical. At least when you're running at scale. So, I mean, we've you shared some of the mistakes which is also inverse, you know, some things you just got to fix, to be honest.
[00:26:19] What are some of the tricks? I mean, you also obviously mentioned video a bit here.
[00:26:22] Are there some tricks you're seeing right now in merge that are just like, Hey, really, you need to, you need to play with these elements right now. Is there anything you're seeing there? We haven't gone into yet.
[00:26:32] Morgan: Yeah, these are two.
[00:26:33] One of them is super fun, so I'll start with the super fun one. So, I call this the Alley Oop Play. This is, this is like one of my favorite place. So if let's just do SDR, AE, and then I'll give an example. If you don't have SDRs. So if you're an SDR, the target accounts, you might be working in pod.
[00:26:50] You might be working on one to one with your AE or whatever it is. So what you do is you send the message to the client, but then you CC your AE. So then the AE follows up with a different message. And now it's not annoying because it's not you.
[00:27:08] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:27:09] Morgan: And now it's a different conversation. So it's like, I sent my message, no response.
[00:27:14] AE comes in with something different. So now it's like 2v1 there. And that actually leads to some pretty cool responses. If you do that appropriately, if you don't have an SDR, it could be AE manager, do the same play. So that's a creative play that I like to run a lot.
[00:27:28] Toni: also like on this one, it's also a little bit of a pattern interrupt, right? Because suddenly you have those three logos there in your messaging thing. And, and also like, who's this other person in here? Is it, is it, is it a colleague of mine or kind of who is that? And kind of, you kind of force a little bit of engagement, right?
[00:27:44] It's actually pretty cool. So, and you know, I'm just, I'm just additionally sharing here, but we did, I think 10 years ago in a previous company that actually Mikkel and I worked at as well. We sent cold emails was still a thing. I mean, still the thing now, but kind of very much that was kind of the start there.
[00:28:00] We, we sent cold emails with a colleague in CC actually kind of, we, we did a similar play actually. And now that you mentioned this, it's like, why did we ever stop doing this? But anyway, I think that's a, it's a, it's a really
[00:28:12] Mikkel: it goes
[00:28:13] Toni: really cool play. It's a really cool play.
[00:28:14] Yeah.
[00:28:15] Morgan: it goes in cycles. So no, but thanks for sharing that. And then I'm going to go back to something I mentioned earlier, but give people a tactical messaging piece on it because the filters are great. But what I've realized is if you don't have messaging for each filter, it actually doesn't matter.
[00:28:29] At the end of the day, like it's just a filter. So one of the things I want to call out is profile views and what I coach people on is actually messaging those people. Again, most people that you may follow will tell you, Oh, don't message the person who views your profile. I'm like, yeah, we're messaging these people.
[00:28:48] Like, I don't know what y'all are doing. So what I do is I just say, let's just say it's, you know, John or whatever. I might be like, hi John, saw you view my profile. What caught your eye? That's all we say. That starts a conversation that leads into book meetings. I've given it to multiple people and they come back saying, I booked a meeting from it.
[00:29:07] So that's the goal, right? If people view your profile, something's going on, I'm going to ask you what caught your eye. And here's the cool thing. Like I got super fired about this the other day. I was like, LinkedIn actually starting to cook for once. So if you go to profile views under the profile, under the person, it tells you how they found you.
[00:29:27] It'll be like from the feed. But this is something I'm just now starting to play with because I just saw it like a couple of weeks ago, so I'm still playing with it, but I think it will be one of the best ways to schedule meetings because if you're seeing like where they're coming from, you can be like, Hey, so you've viewed my profile from a LinkedIn search, what caught your eye?
[00:29:50] What were you searching for? Right? You can start getting really granular. But this is something I'm just now starting to play with. Cause I just saw it like a couple of weeks ago, so I'm still playing with it.
[00:29:58] Toni: So you, I mean, you're, you're obviously a creator and we talked about this in the beginning, do you, do you use this to I don't know, you know, get, get people checking out to your, to email list. I'm not sure if you have something like this, but like, is, is that a tactic that you use yourself actually?
[00:30:13] Morgan: Everything I'm saying is what I use. So, inside of that, yes, I use it for those additional things. Like obviously a lot of people here are trying to do create pipeline and develop it for me personally. Yes. I use it to figure out like, where are these people coming from as a creator? I want to know, like, where did you find me?
[00:30:33] Was it through YouTube video that I have? Cause I'm growing that channel right now. Is it because someone like, Through something in a slack and it was like, yo Morgan, someone mentioned your content was good. That's how I found you. I'm just trying to figure out like where are people finding me so I could do more of that.
[00:30:47] Toni: Yeah.
[00:30:48] Morgan: Yeah.
[00:30:49] And then yes, I am following to the newsletter too.
[00:30:52] Mikkel: There's one thing I'm also thinking about, like, so you share a ton of great tactics now the thing is, what we're at least hearing, so we had Gal Aga on the show from Aligned, one of the things he talked about is, well, it's, it's not like you have someone out there who has the title decision maker or software buyer and, and it's also like, It's not just one person anymore.
[00:31:13] So if you have these if you're, if you're now back to the SDR game setting terminus or whatever software out
[00:31:18] Morgan: Yep.
[00:31:19] Mikkel: and you've gotten that initial person through, they've they're booked. It's like, yes. What can you do to continue? Because it's not just, you also want to get some of the other context in.
[00:31:29] Is that more of the, do you see that as the A's task or how could the SDR pitch in or how does social even play in
[00:31:35]
[00:31:35] Morgan: So what I've been, what we've been talking about for part of the past, like 20 ish minutes here, maybe 30 minutes here has been pipeline creation. Now what you're asking is pipeline development. This still plays and I have some advice on that. So when we're looking at pipeline development, so first and foremost for the SDR Yes, they should try to schedule meetings with multiple people but to be clear with everybody it depends on how you incentivize the rep If an SDR is incentivized to book a meeting and it's completed.
[00:32:06] I'm I'm just super real. I'm probably not gonna make more effort to go schedule more meetings I'm probably just not gonna do that. I'm being comped on
[00:32:14] the meeting getting completed Yeah. Like I'm not getting caught more for that. Like I'm going to go book a new meeting with a new account. So if you want multiple stakeholders, you should give people accelerants, accelerators for that.
[00:32:25] Hey, look, if you're going to go in an enterprise account above a thousand employees, if you schedule five decision makers in this account, we'll give you more money than the other ones. I guarantee you'll have more people schedules meetings. So the pipeline development from the STR is predicated on your incentives.
[00:32:42] You should not expect the SDRs to do that, unless they're an A player. But most CB players are not going to do that. They're just going to do the task at hand.
[00:32:54] Toni: You know, you, you have one slip up there as an SDR and then the AE comes and slaps, slaps your wrist. Right. So it's like, you, you, you know, this works, I think in a pairing setup or, or maybe in a kind of a smaller pod setup, it works where this is maybe in an enterprise setup or something like this is almost expected behavior, right?
[00:33:11] Kind of just because you booked one meeting with Nestle. It doesn't mean you can now kind of move on to the next account and we throw this one away. Right. Kind of, there's, there's many different entry points there potentially. Right. But I think it's it's like a, it's a specific spot there, but you know, maybe turning this around, maybe it's a more interesting question actually from an AE's perspective.
[00:33:29] Right. Kind of, and, and maybe, maybe kind of tell me a little bit and kind of how you, how you think about
[00:33:33] that.
[00:33:34] Morgan: 100%. Yeah, I wanted to get that clarity on the SDR side, but this is more so for the account executive. So these are three things that you should be doing as an account executive for pipeline development. Number one, this is something I share in my workshops and in my talks. And I'm still like, it's very surprising to me that most people don't do this, but it actually is the best way for you.
[00:33:55] Like if you complain about like prospecting and you don't want to do it, that's fine. But what I'm going to give you is how you don't ever have to do that. So what you want to do is as an account executive, you have your book of business that you've closed. So you create a lead list inside of sales navigator of all the people that you've ever worked with.
[00:34:15] Toni: Yeah.
[00:34:15] Morgan: Super simple. Like that will cover you because if you create a lead list, you then can go inside of that lead list and see who's changed jobs in the past 90 days. So any new company they go to. Just reach out to them, right? Then you also can see every single person who's posting, so you can stay on tabs with everyone and just like, comment, etc.
[00:34:35] You also can see who follows your company, so then if a new follower comes you can engage. So this is to me like, the number one thing every single sales leader should mandate their organization to do, if you don't do anything that I tell you moving forward, which are the other two things that are still important.
[00:34:50] But that is how you do that pipeline development. The other thing that you could do number two is when you finally get that, let's say you get a meeting handed off to you by the SDR. As soon as you get that meeting, you should be then pulling up the account, seeing who else follows your company from that account and connecting with them or if they worked at a previous company or check if they've used your profiles because now I'm connected with those people.
[00:35:17] That's something that you absolutely should be doing. As well. And then the third thing in terms of pipeline development that I like to look at a lot is when you are selling into the account. Yes, you can go see who's looked at who's worked at previous companies or whose user profile and all those great things.
[00:35:37] We also want to see who is posting on LinkedIn in the past 30 days. So those are people that I'm going to engage with. Those are people I'm going to connect with to see if I can get other info as I'm selling as well. So those are like, Main core things. You also can ask for referrals through there too, through LinkedIn.
[00:35:52] That's another great way of doing it. But in terms of pipeline development, once you have the actual deal and you're trying to close it, those are things you should be doing.
[00:35:59] Toni: What I, and we're going a little bit away from the outbounding here, kind of an exploring this a little bit more.
[00:36:04] What I sometimes wonder is like, you and AE, you're talking to your main contact, maybe the champion, maybe not. And then you go on LinkedIn and try and figure out like, Hey, you know, how does the map look like, who else is here?
[00:36:16] I'm actually wondering, this is like a, like a genuine question, the like also viewed tab next to, next to kind of the profile,
[00:36:25] Morgan: Yep.
[00:36:26] Toni: would you recommend that? This is usually kind of a good way to go about like, Hey, these guys are probably working pretty closely to one another. So chances are these, you know, this might be the boss, or this might be someone that they're pulling into some conversation like this, but would you use this as a tactic in order to basically kind of try and find another contact into the organization?
[00:36:44] Morgan: Yes. 100%. I definitely would tap into that. Or another thing that I recommend people as well is just look at What you've been working on in the past 6 to 12 months, like in the CRM, I just say like, there's probably, yes, there are multiple people that you're selling to in a deal. I think it's like 8 to 11, I think it's more now, but I think the core is like 8 to 11 decision makers in a deal.
[00:37:06] But if you really drill down even deeper to a deal, it typically is like three core people you need in order for the deal to close, right? So I just call it the triangle. So at the top of the triangle is typically the executive buyer. So that could be the CMO, chief revenue officer, CISO, whatever. Then there's two people who support those claims.
[00:37:23] So it could be a head of sales enablement, a director of marketing, a director of CS, whatever it is, right? So I actually look for those three core people in every single account. I know if I talk to one of three of those people, In my sales cycle, I've already programmed it that I need to go talk to the other two people.
[00:37:40] I need an intro to the other two people to go talk to. And then if I get those three people, now we can build a whole support system to get the other people to support it and go from there. That's at least what I've seen. And so, that's another way of thinking about it. If the people also viewed, you're not getting those people.
[00:37:55] You could go find those, you could filter it in regular LinkedIn or you could use Sales Navigator.
[00:37:59] Mikkel: I mean, we've covered a bunch of things around LinkedIn. Do these folks who want to reach out on LinkedIn, do they need to be active on there?
[00:38:07] Do they need to be like almost a creator? Do they need to
[00:38:09] post anything or no, not at
[00:38:11] all?
[00:38:12] Morgan: You don't have to at all. And I mean, you could look at my profile and be like, you have to do what I do. Like, I don't recommend that at all. Cause like, unless you have the spirit for that, you don't have to, if you, if you were going to post, I say, Hey, once a week and you're great. But if you really are like, I don't even want to do that twice a month, curating posts is fine.
[00:38:30] You could literally just take information from an article or a blog post or whatever, or, or, or interview and just say, here are the three things I learned. At the end of the day, the core thing that you just really want is just some content that people can reference and just, they just see you're just doing something, but really the main thing you want to do is just make sure that you have the right messaging when you message these people to convert, that's what you really want at the day.
[00:38:51] And your, and again, your profiles optimized appropriately. That's like table stakes, everything else. Like it's just an add on.
[00:38:57] Toni: Would you, would you like, recommend leaders to recommend their, you know, bds s sts to do it, though? I
[00:39:04] mean, it's
[00:39:05] Morgan: I would,
[00:39:05] Toni: almost, there's almost a question that like, ah, you know, is this the right thing to do?
[00:39:09] Morgan: end of the day. We're just running into a trust economy right now. So the more content that you can have coming from your team, the better, right? Cause they're going to vet you out before they make any type of decision. So I recommend all leaders say, Hey, our team should be doing this.
[00:39:26] I would say 20, 30 percent of people are probably going to only post that our sales reps on the team. And if you have that, that's better than most people. Cause it's typically like nothing or zero, right? Yeah.
[00:39:37] Mikkel: coming from the marketing, I used to love salespeople because when we had something we wanted them to help promote on LinkedIn, they were like, thank God someone gave me something to post. So it's like, you know, the other reflection I had, like email, we talked a little bit about it. It used to be huge.
[00:39:50] That used to be the channel. I remember. What was it called? Yes. Where and
[00:39:55] mail merge, like all those good old days. Right. Is this like, you know, is the channel coming back? Is this something you would use in conjunction with with social as well?
[00:40:03] How do you see that Morgan?
[00:40:04] Morgan: I, I recommend using the channels all in conjunction together because you just don't know where you're going to reach someone or how you're going to connect with them, et cetera, right? Leveraging LinkedIn, the phone, email. In in person, direct mail like they all work if they're working in conjunction.
[00:40:22] I would not recommend it using it as your only channel, though, of email. Like, oh, we're going to email. I want to know about that. It's really a lot harder. And I'm not saying that email is not worth it. I just think it's a lot harder than it was years ago, right? Because of the updates to the domains and now what you have to do in there and that, like the DNS, all the things that I don't know about,
[00:40:45] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:40:46] Morgan: tell me I need to know.
[00:40:47] And I'm like, that's a lot, right? So I just think that for sellers, it's more information to do. Outbound email than it was back in the day. There are people out there that are doing great work around it to fix those problems and that's fantastic. But I would say email is a great complimentary to whatever you're doing.
[00:41:04] Mikkel: yeah. I was almost gonna say like, it feels like with that development, when you see folks starting to specialize in services that basically. Creates new domains on repeat for you. So you don't
[00:41:16] get burned. Something is not right. And I just wonder if, if we're seeing like the pendulum swing a little bit to maybe it's not this volume game in the same way anymore.
[00:41:26] I mean,
[00:41:27] It's your volume game, but it's just decreased heavily. Right.
[00:41:29] Morgan: just not because it's a, to me, like, it's an IT game. what email is right now. Like, if you're not good at DNS and understanding domains and everything you just said, I don't think a salesperson is going out to learn that, nor that they have the time to do that. So I just think that a lot of people are just going to revert their email outbound to IT.
[00:41:51] They're going to have a B2B sales copywriter. And I don't think the sales team is even going to touch it. That's like what I think is going to happen in the future. I don't think people are even going to deal with it. They're like, alright, I have an AI who can write this. They can analyze our customer data.
[00:42:02] We buy domains. IT just handles it. Like, we don't have our time. We don't have Our team cannot do much more than what we're currently doing here. We'd rather invest our resources into calling into LinkedIn. That's like my bet on that.
[00:42:15] Toni: And to, so, and I think kind of we ran this math, but like, so first of all, I didn't know it's 250, the limit I thought it was like 150 connection requests or something like this, but it might differ between premium and LinkedIn navigators, et cetera. I don't know. But kind of, you were running the math, right?
[00:42:29] Kind of, you connected 250 new people. I don't know, 50, 60 percent of them actually kind of go for you. And then you send out your messages and you send out your, your, your videos, maybe. And, you know, basic kind of the thinking was like, can you make this work? Can, can you make this work only with a LinkedIn channel with LinkedIn as a channel?
[00:42:46] And then it's like, ah, shit, you know, I don't have that limitation with email. I have like a different limitation with email. Right. And then, then maybe you can, you know, play the, play the game you know, more on the volume side, maybe with email, maybe also attach the video we sent on the you know, on LinkedIn already.
[00:43:00] So this is, I think what, what pushes many people to not only. Not only see it as a multi channel thing but also see it just as a, Hey, we, you know, how, how do you, how do we get to the meetings that we need? And maybe there's numbers game, you know, with different restrictions on LinkedIn, it's just keeping us from, from making this math workout, unless obviously a conversion rate suddenly go through the roof because you do something like that.
[00:43:22] Right. So it's like, I think that's, that's what people are struggling with actually.
[00:43:27] Morgan: They're struggling with hitting those numbers because they feel restricted with LinkedIn.
[00:43:32] Toni: Like the limitations, you know, of the, okay, it's, you know, 150, 200, whatever, whatever it is, right. Then the conversion rate from that to accept that, then you kind of send, you can know something out and then you get to actually a, a meeting. I think some people kind of worry, kind of, is this, you know, am I hitting those limits too quickly in order to hit my targets?
[00:43:50] Right. And then the only solution is trying to get those conversion rates up, which is obviously difficult. Right. And then I can totally see people saying like, okay, this is not enough. I need to, you know, do some other stuff on the side as well. Yeah.
[00:44:03] Yeah.
[00:44:05] Morgan: obviously treats the platform, right? Moving forward and what they want to do. If you, once you have momentum on LinkedIn, you could have LinkedIn as your main source of pipeline, right? Because it gets to a point where if you are scheduling meetings on LinkedIn, people have good experiences with you.
[00:44:21] Now you're playing a pipeline creation game of like, I'm continuously adding new people. And then I'm playing a pipeline development game where I'm just asking for referrals. Or people are giving me referrals, right? And so I could just live on the channel, which I've done. So like you could do that, but that does take time to, to a point, right?
[00:44:37] So that's why I'm saying, Hey, the calling is still applicable. The emails are still applicable. Going to events are still applicable. All these things are happening and they matter. And yeah, whether it's, they reduce it to one 50, it's two 50. I know it's within that range. I think it was last time I saw it was two 50, but actually to fact check, it could be one 50 now because the limit is always changing, but.
[00:44:58] Nonetheless, if you are doing that and you're still getting, let's say if it was 150 a week and you're doing connection requests, let's just say every day, right? You still should be able to get what? 40, 50 people that come out of that. And if you can convert 10 percent of those people, that's five meetings, something of that nature.
[00:45:19] Kind of just
[00:45:20] doing rough
[00:45:20] Toni: That would be
[00:45:21] great.
[00:45:21] Morgan: yeah, so that would be awesome. But like, that's just like an example of what you can do there. But I believe that LinkedIn is. It's such a force of quality that you can still get those VDs and get those things set, is how I think about it
[00:45:33] Toni: No, I don't disagree. I don't disagree.
[00:45:35] Mikkel: There's one thing we forgot though, and it's such a rookie sales mistake. We didn't ask for the subscriber. We didn't do it. We didn't do it. We
[00:45:44] talk about it all the time. We talk about, Hey, it should be in the beginning. Because that's when people, but if you enjoyed this show, if you, if you genuinely
[00:45:50] enjoyed
[00:45:50] Toni: going to cut this out. Put it in
[00:45:51] the beginning.
[00:45:52] Mikkel: yeah, that's true.
[00:45:53] And we're going to lift
[00:45:54] Morgan: just an edit, it's just an edit.
[00:45:55] Mikkel: yeah, yeah. So number one, check out Morgan Ingram, awesome content. If you want to know more about different playbooks, check out his landing page. I mean, profile also hit subscribe.
[00:46:04] Subscribe to our show. It helps us grow the following. Really appreciate it, Morgan. Thanks so much for replying to my cold DM on LinkedIn and hopping on the show with
[00:46:13] Toni: Was it a video
[00:46:14] Mikkel?
[00:46:14] Or was
[00:46:14] Mikkel: No, no, it should have been,
[00:46:16] Morgan: No, no, it wasn't,
[00:46:17] it wasn't, it
[00:46:18] Toni: time.
[00:46:18] Mikkel: I was lazy, but I used, like, I, so the thing is, he didn't even accept my invite to connect, probably because he's capped already at a number of connections or something,
[00:46:26] Toni: No, he just doesn't
[00:46:27] like
[00:46:27] you.
[00:46:28] Mikkel: no, no, that's true,
[00:46:29] ha,
[00:46:29] Morgan: I was like, I don't know about this guy. Let's, let's vet him
[00:46:32] out. Let's vet him out
[00:46:33] Mikkel: thank god this episode is
[00:46:34] ending now, I can feel like two
[00:46:36] Morgan: Now we're going to
[00:46:37] question you to see if I should accept the connection request. It's actually why I hopped on.
[00:46:41] Mikkel: Sorry, my wifi is getting a bit sloppy right now.
[00:46:44] I can't really hear you guys.
[00:46:46] Toni: Okay. Morgan, thank you so much for spending the time, honestly. And everyone listening. I hope you learned something. I certainly did. And see you next time. Have a good one. Bye bye.
[00:46:54] Morgan: Cheers.