Podcast 136: How SDRs Can Hit 225% of Quota With Armand Farrokh

Armand Farrokh has a winning formula that is allowing him to crush quota repeatedly.

JOHN BARROWS

Armand Farrokh has a winning formula that is allowing him to crush quota repeatedly. Hitting 100% of quota is one thing but getting above 200% is a whole new ball game. Before you get into this episode, you’re probably thinking about some special tactics and crazy work-ethics that are going to get SDRs to 225% of quota, but that’s not what Armand is thinking about. He’s using very practical processes and trying to simplify the whole ball game of sales to make it easier. Here’s his take…

In This Podcast You’ll Learn:

  • Tunnel Vision Time Block the Admin
  • Book 1/4 People Who Pick Up Your Cold Call
  • Being Disarmingly Blunt On Objections

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Tunnel Vision Time Block the Admin

Armand Farrokh: You know the famous quote, everybody has a game plan until they get punched in the face. I 100% agree with that. What that means for most sales reps or AEs or SDRs or whatever it might be is you have a wide open week. And then you get to three discovery calls thrown on your calendar and then you got a ton of followups, and then you’ve got to do this and that you to respond, reply to your inbox, and then your boss blows you up with forecasts.

All of a sudden everybody says, I’m just managing so many deals that I don’t have the time to prospect. For me it was, look, I have a finite number of hours in the day, but what I can absolutely control is the transition lag between every single thing that I do.

What most reps would do is they would take a sales call and they would leave a little bit of buffer time to send a followup email, right? Then they would go to the next sales call and they would send another one. I actually did the exact opposite thing where I tried to remove decision fatigue and I took notes in form of my recap email template and then I wind up my calls back to back to back to back, to back to back.

If at any single day got too ugly, I would block two hours minimum for prospecting only. Then at 4:00 PM at the end of the day, outside of the golden hours, every single followup email would go out because they’re not thinking about me through the whole day. They have calendars that look like yours and they’re doing the rest of their job throughout the day. And at the end of the day, they’re checking their inbox. And that’s the mentality behind it is bucket all the nonsense together and get momentum behind that.

Book 1/4 People Who Pick Up Your Cold Call

Armand Farrokh: You’ve got to get good phone numbers, you’ve got to call the right people. And that tends to float around the tens to 20% for us. Right? But when I do get somebody on the phone, so of that 10 to 20%, one in four, I can book the meeting. I used to suck on the phone, John. I sold insurance and I was 18 years old at the time and I would be calling on partners, a law firms and they would just bail me out. And so I break it down into a couple of different pieces.

So the first piece is the tone and the mindset. I used to sell into low levels and work up to the higher positions. When I reached the higher people they would talk slower and maybe because they just became older and older. It sounds weird but that’s just what I found.

There is no way that the CEO or the CFO or the president of the division will know what’s going on at the ground level or have a good grasp of what you’re telling them. They can slow it way down and do real time processing with you. And so that’s the same mindset on a cold call when you get an objection. And so the first thing is when someone slams you with, Hey John, I’m not interested the first, or I’m busy, I’m running into a meeting.

The first thing SDRs or every junior rep tries to do is they try to speed up, they say, can I just get 30 seconds to tell you why I’m calling you to tell me if we’re fit? Blah, blah, blah, blah. You lose credibility. And so the first thing you’ve got to do is when you get a tough objection, slow it way down and laugh. And so John, if you say, OK, shocker that when I picked up the phone you don’t have a bunch of time open on your calendar. Could you give me a sense of why are not interested or are you working on X? How are you guys doing stuff today?  I assume you’re going to take a meeting with me and so I’m going to be surprised or laugh when you give me a top objection.

Being Disarmingly Blunt On Objections

Armand Farrokh: Yeah, so being disarmingly blunt is powerful. 1 thing that throws off new reps all the time is the prospect asks where’d you get my phone number? Or the insert X, very surprising objection. Hey, is this a cold call or what are you trying to sell me? And so when people say, is this a cold call? I say yes, it’s an extremely well-researched cold call.

And so I’m not going to lie. Am I going to try to like trick them into saying that I’m selling them? I’m not going to do that. Where’d you get a number? I Googled your first and last name on the internet and your company and you’re a pretty popular guy. I can actually show you but, can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I’m calling and then you can tell me if we’re a fit. And so just pattern break.

John Barrows: I do that too. If I get asked the phone number thing I literally tell them which tool I use. Or, I like this one. Is this a cold call? My answer to that one is, it depends on what your definition of cold is.

Is this a sales call? The nuances matter, right. Cause if somebody asks if this is a sales call, my answer is I have no idea. And they’re like, excuse me, how do you know not know if it is or not. I’m like, I don’t know. If you have something that my solution can solve then sure it becomes a sales call. But right now I have no idea whether you need what I have. So I just want 10 minutes of your time so I could ask you a few quick questions and then yeah, maybe it’ll turn into a sales call. 

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