Podcast 137: Making Prospecting A Math Game With Ryan Reisert

We’re pleased to have Ryan Reisert on the podcast this week.

JOHN BARROWS

We’re pleased to have Ryan Reisert on the podcast this week. Ryan’s strength is turning prospecting into a math game so you can reverse engineer the activities you need to generate the outcome you need. If you think about it, why would you not want to find out how many prospecting activities you need to perform before you book a meeting, divided by your meeting to opportunity rate and finally your close rate? It’s time to make sales simpler…

In This Podcast You’ll Learn:

  • Cold Call Connect Rates
  • Making Prospecting a Science
  • Specializing In Your Art Form

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Cold Call Connect Rates

Ryan Reisert: But the data that you’re seeing right now is way better than what we’ve seen. I mean, we see around a 4% connect rate. So you’re going to get a connect. But the difference is, I think in a lot of these reported stats is that people identify connect with like a gatekeeper or an admin or something of that nature.

We’re talking about a connect with the actual name and title the person you actually want to engage with. So around three to 4, maybe 5%, depending on, you know, industry and segment connects to sell, stat shows you’ll get a conversation every 23 dials. Then have those conversations. You’re doing a pretty good job if you can flip as you around 5% into a meeting. If you take into consideration all channels, phone is still very effective when it comes to the success rate, right?

5 to 10% success rate is really good. When you think about what’s the response rate on email, but really good response rate on email is lower. Then in terms of the conversation though, a real meaningful conversation over the phone is way more powerful than a response over email or LinkedIn. So there’s a huge shift in the market right now of trying to figure out, you know, how do you earn more conversations? And getting back to what you mentioned earlier and this idea of redefining the rules and the metrics and how do you put the more senior person in front of leads faster.

That’s the KPI we should be really caring about. It’s not a booked meeting or a demo and then you have this hand-off process. It’s how do we get a conversation started? A real meaningful conversation started with our intended target account title that is going to get us the information to build awareness and get the information we need. That’s what we need to be focused on

Making Prospecting a Science

Ryan Reisert:  I think, so this is a little controversial as well. When you think about the modern sales development function, the data we have, it’s more science than before. It’s a lot less selling than it ever has been before, right? I mean, it’s much more marketing. We’re there to get some attention. We’re trying to get that initial interest and get some attention and get a little bit of time. So the only selling is to persuade someone to spend their time.

It’s very numbers driven and if you do a great job of understanding your math in sales, you’re good. You can take a look at your total addressable market and you can use data to reverse engineer exactly how many activities in general do you need to drive to earn conversations. How many of those conversations in general,  if you have a slight bit of product market fit, will drive to next conversations and ultimately get into real pipeline and drive through how many opportunities need to be forecasted and ultimately down through to close. And if you know your average deal value, you can reverse engineer that into are you going to make your number or not.

Specializing In Your Art Form

John Barrows: You can’t just show up in discovery with a list of questions anymore, right?

Ryan Reisert: You can’t just show up with a list of questions. And I think this is that transition nicely into where that art comes in and, and the importance of, yes, there’s a huge part of science and selling today and there’s a numbers game, but you know, if you don’t have that, um, ability to, uh, to have conversations with people, um, to understand the flow of a discussion, you can’t script that. Um, that piece. It has to flow.

There’s an art form here, um, where that, that’s where you can separate, you know, uh, I mean, I think data today, science behind stuff, I can get you to 85, 90%, but if you want to be a top 10 performer, you really want to get it, you know, be the winner in more sophisticated, complex sales environments. Um, you know, that, that’s so important today. And there’s a loss. I think there’s a, there’s a big gap in terms of skill set because of that challenge of specialization and who runs discovery. Historically it was the SDR, the AE and I mean shoot, there’s a, there’s a big gap in the market right now.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

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