Morgan J. Ingram, Director of Sales Execution & Evolution at JBarrows Sales Training and the host of #TheSDRChronicles is well known in the sales community for elevating salespeople and turning sales teams into rockstars. We sat down with Morgan to chat about high leverage activities that a founder can undertake to improve their sales pipeline.
At GrowthGenius, we tend to work with a lot of founders who are inundated with various activities.
As a founder, there is a lot on your plate at any given time - marketing, sales, finances, culture e.t.c. All whilst building a product or a service that your clients will love to use. We can all agree that for a founder, time is their most valuable resource.
When you are an early stage founder, you most likely don't have the luxury of having a huge sales team but you still have to achieve your MRR goal to keep the lights on.
Here are some useful sales prospecting tips from Morgan Ingram that will help you achieve your sales goals a lot more effectively.
GrowthGenius: How can a founder get the most out of their day when it comes to generating leads while still needing to focus on other parts of their business?
Morgan Ingram: Most people don't know that I founded a company and ran it for about nine months.
We used to host video game tournaments on college campuses.
In order to host a tournament, I had to prospect for venues who could host us, raise sponsorships and pitch to various parties.
Activity breeds results but you have to focus on what is important.
I knew that as a solo person I couldn't get everything done unless I allocated my time effectively.
My advice to founders would be to do what I did. Start with a hyper targeted list and focus on reaching out to those contacts only.
GrowthGenius: What are some of the highest impact channels that a founder can use that will yield results? On top of that, what is the number one activity that they can outsource?
Morgan: I think one thing you could definitely outsource is finding data.
In terms of channels, if you are a founder, you probably have a really good LinkedIn network, so use that to get those real quick wins from an introduction perspective. Reach out to your network to connect you to prospects. This way, you can have sales conversations instead of continuously prospecting.
Reach out to your network on LinkedIn to connect you to prospects, a warm introduction goes a long way.
Comment and connect with prospects on the network of your choice.
Send at least a few hyper personalized emails every day.
Cold calling is always going to be beneficial, but you may not have the tools or the resources yet to make those efficient phone calls because you might have the wrong data set and then you're calling phone lines and wasting your time.
GrowthGenius: What about an early stage founder that is just getting started and does not have a huge network?
Morgan: It goes back to personalization.
If you're a founder and trying to connect with people on LinkedIn, folks are going to accept you anyways, but if you personalize your message to each persona that you're going after, your response rate is going to be much higher and your conversion rate is going to be higher.
Create value for prospects with your content, case studies and webinars. With prospecting you want to be able to tell a story and with the content that you read or produce, you're going to be able to tell that story.
I send a personalized LinkedIn invitation every single time. It is our first touch point and it leads to higher responses on emails and higher reception on calls because they remember who I am.
The personalization aspect is huge. It obviously helps that your title is a CEO or you are a founder or someone relatively high up at an established company. But at the end of the day, people are only willing to give you their time of day if they feel like you've done your research and that you can actually help them or provide some sort of business insight over a 15 minute conversation.
So whatever it is that you can do to generate that message, that's what it is that you have to do to get the end results.
GrowthGenius: What is a good prospecting cadence? How many touch points should a sales process have?
Morgan: I saw one article the other day that said you should follow up 24 times! I don't know about all that.
Mine is a 20 day sequence for emails, calls and social touches, but that's enough to figure it out if someone is interested or not. And then I can move on from there.
Want more sales tactics? Listen to our full podcast with Morgan Ingram - HERE -
