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1/ If you’re an early stage tech founder focused who’s trying to build out an outbound sales/cold calling operation, here’s what I’d recommend.
2/ Figure out your connect rate. Get a list of say, 200 phone numbers of people you’re targeting and just work your way through the list. Doesn’t matter what your pitch is, your goal is to see how many actually pick up the phone.
3/ Figure out your conversion rate. Talk to as many people as possible and ask them for an appointment. Let them reject you. Don’t worry about what you’re actually saying. The goal is to see how many appointments you can get with a bad pitch.
4/ Now that you have your base rates figured out, you can start iterating. Let’s say based on your data, you connect on 10% of calls and convert 10% of connects. Now you know that to get 1 appointment, you just need to make 100 calls. Or 1000 calls if you want 10 appts, etc.
5/ Don’t create your pitch in a vacuum. Come up with 3-5 different approaches and mix and match your value props. Let the audience decide what’s compelling. You might not always get the appointment, but you’ll learn a lot. Some of it will be surprising.
6/ Don’t skip steps. I highly recommend that a senior person (or founder) run through this exercise themselves. You can outsource later, but at this stage you want to be involved because you’re optimizing for learning quickly.
7/ When you have a good sense of the calling metrics/math, and have a basic script put together, it’s time to outsource. Your first hire/contractor should be an appointment setter (ie. SDR) and not a closer (AE) and DEFINITELY not an enterprise seller.
8/ I strongly recommend hiring an experienced caller. Bc if an inexperienced caller fails to produce similar results, you don’t know if your system was the problem or if the caller was the problem. Pay a premium for someone who has successfully cold called for years.
9/ Do not skip steps! Most experienced sales reps have not done cold calls in years or decades, even. They may talk a good game during the interview, but unless they’ve been making a high volume of calls in the last 12-24 months, it’s too much of a risk.
10/ By the end of this process, you should have an appointment setter who is filling up your calendar with sales calls. Now it’s time to hire that closer (AE) to handle the overflow. Doing things in this order ensures they'll be busy and have a chance at success.
11/ There’s more but I’ll stop here. Btw this thread is based on exactly what I did after joining Evisort during its seed stage as its first head of sales. Like this tweet if you’d like to read more of this type of content.
