How to Sell Podcast: Make How You Sell, Why You Win

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:00:00]:
In this episode, you're gonna learn how to increase conversions from your inbound and outbound campaigns, how to build an effective sales cadence, and why your sales cadence is key to success. Welcome back to what is a very exciting day for growth forum listeners. David, even though the Italians didn't win the European Cup, there's nothing better than seeing the English lose. Actually, should we should we actually say that? What about all our English listeners?

David Fastuca [00:00:30]:
Oh, they'll they'll definitely be crying right now because they

David Fastuca [00:00:31]:
hang on. Let's reframe it. They actually did win something.

David Fastuca [00:00:32]:
They're the first team to lose the Euro Cup consecutively. So Well done. Well, that's fantastic. Alright.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:00:42]:
Let's let's let's give him a round of applause. Evans was happy this morning. He was nodding his head going bananas. But, anyway, folks, you're not here to tune in to a football episode. I'll do some I'll do some stuff on LinkedIn today, and I'm sure I'll lose a lot of followers by putting comments on it's not coming home. But anyway, let's get into it. It's been a while, Dave. I've been traveling.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:01:04]:
I've been out and about, doing what we do best, and I think that's why I wanted to talk to you today. And for you listening, we wanted to really chat about cadence. And I know it's a topic that we've talked about many times, but it's actually becoming more and more important now. More than ever, especially with the world of AI, automation, people are really leveraging these tools to drive outreach and even for inbound. You know? Responding to inbound at scale with these automation tools, and this is where this episode will really help you, stand out in the sea of sameness and also increase your conversion. So let's just dive straight into it, Dave.

David Fastuca [00:01:49]:
Let's do it. We talk cadence all the time, and I think the key point is that a good cadence will set you free, so long as you stick to it, which is, you know, the important point there. So let let us in, Louis.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:02:02]:
And I'm not you know, this is an interesting copyright because this is not about going, hey. Let's just bang on the same thing, write up a cadence, execute. It's interesting. I worked with the team last week, and I went in there, and and they've done an incredible job. Right? They built out HubSpot. Amazing. Like, I was actually really impressed with the way they've built out their HubSpot instance. And they've got massive, a huge volume of leads coming into their demand gen function is working really well.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:02:28]:
Right? They're classifying different leads depending on kind of where they're at in the buying cycle. So, you know, depending on the type of lead, then they know which where they're at from an intent perspective, and they're responding to it accordingly. But as we were looking at the performance of some of their sequences, I asked the question. I said, hey. You know, having a look at these messages, are we kinda tailoring the message depending on the type of campaign that you're running? And the answer was no. We're kind of treating all of our inbound leads with a very similar message and cadence. Yeah. And what we then did, we spent a bit of time kinda just breaking down that message a bit further, and we ended up having a specific cadence for a particular campaign set.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:03:16]:
And this is the first takeaway for you listening today. Again, if you're managing inbound, and we'll talk about outbound as well because it's critical, but if you are managing inbound, your cadence needs to match that particular audience. And it shouldn't be a one size fits all. So it takes more time because depending on how many campaigns you're running, if there's a webinar campaign, if there's an ebook campaign, if there's a whatever campaign, if they're filling out something on a bot on your site. But there should be a level of contextualization for every single cadence. The message should be tailored for the for that audience that you're engaging with. Right?

David Fastuca [00:03:58]:
I guess the question there is is, Louis, how much? Like, what I mean by that is how much contextualization do you need to do? How much customization do you need to do?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:04:07]:
Well, again, it just there's a few very variables on it, right, depending on the value of your product. So if you're selling a a product that, you know, the the the value is 50, 100,000,000, because, you know, when I was in Germany, some of their deals are like 20, $30,000,000. Right? So significant sized deals. You would really go down a path of getting as customized and contextualized as possible. If it's 2, 5, 10 grand product set that's more transactional, you'd still do it, but not to the level that you would with something worth, you know, a serious amount of money. However, there is a caveat to this, Dave. Again, if you can, depending on the type of information you're capturing top of funnel for those inbound leads, there's a couple of things you can try to determine. If you can determine their role profile, if you can turn can determine sort of what's peaked their interest, then that should send you like a think about of a tree.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:05:02]:
Right? Your content should change depending on the persona and depending on the action that they're taking. Because what really drives conversion is when that person that sits in that cadence feels like it's a message that's only delivered to me. Right? Our buyers are getting quite clever because they're getting so many emails and so much outreach sent to them. They're starting to determine what's real and what's not. Right? So when you do start to go deeper in it and you start to contextualize it further, you're actually you're making it harder for the individual that's receiving it to feel like it's a one to many message.

David Fastuca [00:05:47]:
Yeah? All this takes is that one mistake, that one word in an email when someone references your company, and it's, we wanna work with Grow Forum LLC or people out there. You're like, yeah.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:05:57]:
Black Bay. Like, that sort of stuff for me, that's not personalization.

David Fastuca [00:06:00]:
Right? Yeah.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:06:01]:
And and, again, I think it's it's really important to to, to familiarize yourself with some of the fundamentals when it comes to writing, for example, these emails when it comes to an email sequence. Even even in inbound, the follow-up response email should still follow the same principles. It shouldn't be, you know, 100, 200, 300 words. It should be mobile friendly. Right? It should talk to the outcome that you think, or that you've hypothesized that's important to the person that's inquiring. Yeah? It should have a clear action as a next step. Right? And it should also be followed up with an omnichannel approach, whether it's whether it's phone, text message, LinkedIn, depending on if it's if it's a b to c or or b to b product set that you're selling. But it should absolutely be followed up with a LinkedIn note if you're selling in the b to b environment.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:06:50]:
Right? So you really gotta leverage the omnichannel approach. Now let's flip it over to outbound. It's the same concept with outbound. Right? The outbound, it's actually even more important to get your list segmentation refined as much as possible. So a good campaign, instead of going, I'm gonna get, you know, 500 people, get it down to 20, 30 people. Get a particular trigger for that those 20, 30 people. Make it very, very contextualized, and run that play to a smaller, list size. And your open rate from emails will be higher.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:07:24]:
The when you talk to them on your phone on the phone, the hypothesis or the point of view that you're leveraging will be a lot more aligned to the person that you're talking to, and there's a greater chance that you're gonna convert that conversation into some form of meeting or even an understanding if that problem is something that's relevant to them. Right? So again, we've gotta think about this whole process. It's not a volume game. Even for inbound, the more you can create lanes in your cadences, the better. And yes, it's more work. I had this chat with an IT guy the other day who was questioning everything about the cadence. You know? Why are we doing this and why are you doing that? And blah blah blah. It's all this extra work.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:08:05]:
And I'm like, well, you know what? You cannot argue with the conversion. The conversion for those campaigns overall was sitting at 39% in comparison to industry average, which is about 20%. So the conversion itself, Dave, justifies the investment of time at the front end. Right? Because your return on investment from a marketing spend is greater. So, yes, it might take more time at the start to set it up. Yes. It might take you, you know, if you if you are building it in a HubSpot or sequencing tool, it might take you a little bit more work. But you're gonna get an improved outcome in the long term.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:08:41]:
Okay? So just wanna reiterate a couple of the key steps that we've spoken about today. Try to for an inbound campaign, try to determine as much as you possibly can around the person that's engaging in the process. Right? Engaging in a form or engaging in some of your content, just so that way you can kinda lay them out. Now if you can't lay them out based on the form, then the call conversation that you're having with them is critical that your your kind of your question tree, I call it, determines the what's motivated you to reach out, how long have you considered this, and why have you taken action today? Because that will essentially give you an indication of where they're gonna go next. So your playbook for your call framework needs to kind of follow a particular process, and then once you define the persona, then you'd ask persona specific questions. Right? So you can absolutely contextualize the phone call that you're having which sits within the cadence. So again, that's if you cannot determine some of those key attributes in your form. Outbound.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:09:43]:
Outbound, you can be it's it's a much more targeted process. Refine your list. Think about the problem statement that would be relevant to them. Talk about the insight that you can share and how others are tackling that problem, and then, again, leverage as many channels as you possibly can, right, so that when you are reaching out to that prospect, it's it's it's not a message that the person that's receiving it feels like it's a one to many message. They feel like, you know what? Luigi's reached out to me and only me. That is the art of selling Dave. When the other person feels like nobody else in the world matters, just me. Yeah? And if we if you follow these principles for both your inbound and outbound cadences, you will find your conversion will increase.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:10:35]:
It's not a matter of if. It's just a matter of you might have to tweak it, but you will see a greater return on investment from your cadences and your marketing spend.

David Fastuca [00:10:44]:
Just a quick interruption to let you know about a free resource that and I wanna hand over to you. This resource has helped lift close won rates to over 73% on average. Plus, you'll get our b2b sales newsletter that drops weekly where you can learn what it takes to build a repeatable sales process and creating a pipeline full of qualified deals. To get this resource, just go to grow forum dot I o forward slash news letter or click the link in this episode and sign up today.

David Fastuca [00:11:17]:
Now that's all great. Right? Like, that's where you need to get to. I guess where sort of the counterargument comes into play is with the rise of AI and how, you know, how good it's getting and how personalized it's getting to the point where you can even clone your own voice for sales calls. Right? Not very ethical, but, it's ridiculous on how good it's getting. Where do you find or how do you leverage AI in in this sort of process now?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:11:48]:
Yeah. Well, you know, you've seen how we're writing some of the emails, Dave. We're actually creating our own, GPT around copywriting at the moment for some of these sequencing tools, and we're feeding it what what great looks like. So when you are building those emails, you can speed up the process. We use Lavender. Like, you know, Lavender's fantastic. We use Lavender for our cold emails, our follow-up emails. But there's a one again, there's one condition to all of this.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:12:12]:
It's not a tool that you simply feed and say and use exactly what it gives you. You've gotta give it the right framework parameters to build the right type of messaging framework. Yeah? And I've seen this all the time. You can tell an AI written email. I did it last week. We used Lavender, but I put the framework in Lavender. We got a score, will, you wouldn't be happy. We got a score of about 95.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:12:37]:
Right? But it was the framework that we fed it. So we already had the conditions that we knew was needed to create a really good cold email, right, and to create a really good email from an inbound, sequence. So you've gotta be able to feed the principles. This is not about a lot of people say it as I'll just cut corners. It's quicker. I can just get stuff done faster. But then the quality that you produce is lower, and then you don't get the outcome. It's like anything.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:13:02]:
You gotta put the work into it to get the outcome from it. So absolutely leverage AI. Pop, you know, if you wanna build your persona, use AI to say, what are the top 3 initiatives that a CFO is currently focused on? What are the 3 key problems that most c f o CFOs are struggling to tackle right now? It's gonna feed you so much info. Take that, use it in your message. Like, this is the this is the awesome part of having AI tools to help you build this content faster. Right? But, ultimately, it takes work. So it's not just a it's just not one of those things that's gonna cut 80% of the time from doing this. It's gonna take work.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:13:39]:
You're gonna have to refine it. Test it. Once you test it, have a look at the sequence. Go, okay. This is working okay. Let's widen it, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah?

David Fastuca [00:13:47]:
Yeah. That's perfect. And, look, AI is a great tool. Look, we use it day every day. We're even building our own feed in with our own content to help us speed up our own process, but it never takes away the the one to one human touch. A great another great way to leverage AI is to research the company, to get it to do the research leg work for you by feeding it a few, you know, the company URL, the individual LinkedIn URL of who you're reaching out to, and asking it to come up with a bit of a point of view. From then, there's your framework that you're then massaging into your own brand, your own tone, to develop a really pinpointed outreach message. Is there anything else, Louis, from this cadence process here that, you know, you've leveraged and what you've seen others, that we train within Grow Forum really apply to dominate their market?

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:14:36]:
From a cadence? Sorry. Just cutting out from a cadence

David Fastuca [00:14:38]:
score. Perspective.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:14:40]:
Yeah. The I think the key thing is it's it's each each email that's sent, it shouldn't you should try to avoid the bump email the bringing this back to the top of your inbox. Like, all that stuff, kill it. Just get rid of it. Right? Everything that you send should be thinking about the what problem is the other person trying to solve? How can you give insight around how they could tackle those problems? Are you leveraging any specific content or resources that talk to how others are tackling x problem? Remember, people don't buy what you do. They buy the outcome you help them achieve. Problems stop them from achieving outcomes. So don't be afraid as part of your cadence to say, hey.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:15:21]:
If it's step 3, if it's step 4, put a video. Put a 30 to 40 second video and say, hey, this is the particular topic that we think is important to you. Show them a bit of a diagram, and say, we wanna help you potentially. If this is a problem because you don't know if that problem's relevant for them until you have a conversation with them. Right? So remember, it's the unaware to aware process, Dave, especially for outbound. If it's inbound, they've they've signaled intent. So share some resources through that process to say, I know we haven't been able to connect, but look, you inquired about x. I think this might be valuable for you if you go and check this out.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:15:56]:
Right? Don't be afraid to drop value in each email, especially if inbounds, a lot easier to do this because they've signaled intent. So you've gotta go, how can I continue to create value in every step of the process? How can I continue to educate, nurture, and give? Right? And the key thing to anything to all of this stuff, where I see a lot of people go wrong, they get to the end of the cadence, they haven't actually got any engagement, any response from the prospect, and then they mark it as closed lost. That's not closed lost. It's you haven't been able to talk to them. So you haven't been able to validate the issue or potentially what you've been talking to them about isn't relevant. So you should recycle that because you don't just wanna keep burning through data. Right? If you've gone to the trouble of building a really good list, you've refined it, you've looked at certain attributes, you've filtered it, and you haven't been able to get onto them, that's okay. Give it a rest period and start again.

Luigi Prestinenzi [00:16:49]:
Right? That's a key thing to the for all of this as well. Right? This is about, you know, you've got a set target. This is not a spray and pray approach. You're using an account based marketing and account based prospecting methodology. You're getting very targeted with your outreach. Yeah? So that's probably the some of the key things that I would that I would, you know, want you listening to this, just transcribe the episode. If you wanna use AI, transcribe it. There's a couple of really key things in this, and then we'll make sure that we put a link to a cadence template that you can download and give it a go, but and ultimately test it and let us know how you go.

David Fastuca [00:17:25]:
Well, that's awesome, Louis. Thank you for another great episode. We're just gonna ask one favor. Look, we don't sell anything on our podcast. We don't, have any advertising, but if you can share this episode with a colleague, friend, or fellow founder that you know will get value from this, share the link to the episode with them, and we'll be forever grateful. See you next week.