Best Of Sales Skills Podcast
The Best of Sales Skills. Sales Tactics for Today's Sellers. If you want the latest tactics and strategies that you can use to be more effective in your sales and outreach? Then this is for you. Sales Development and Prospecting is hard whether you prospect via social, video, phone or carrier pigeon. We bring you a broad range of strategies all salespeople can employ to start more conversations with their ideal clients. Designed to help Business Development teams, Sales Development Reps, Account Executives, Sales Enablement Professionals, Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Business Owners and Sales Leaders. Hosted by, Mark McInnes - Author, B2B Sales Trainer.
Best Of Sales Skills Podcast
Effective LinkedIn messaging with Jason Bay:
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Mark McInnes/Jason Bay
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Season 1
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Episode 19
Let’s face facts, some guests are simply better than others. And, I’ve really been looking forward to talking to Jason. Luckily, Jason certainly didn’t let me down. He has delivered in spades with this conversation.
Think I’m exaggerating? Here are just some of the things he shares ‘how to do’ in this episode.
· Connection requests
· Follow up messages
· Video use as a LinkedIn message tool
· How to become an expert in your industry
· How to create content from a narrow business offering
· What his content strategy is for LinkedIn
· Why you shouldn’t pitch stuff up front (Unless it’s a Lamborghini)
· How to follow up with someone who likes your post on social
· A great tip to get prospects smoothly off social and into email
· Why you should be ‘question stacking’ and
· Teach don’t take.
I’ve been following Jason for about 8months and during that time, I have seen his profile rise and his name being mentioned by more and more people, people I hold in high regard.
So naturally, I took notice.
The thing I really love about Jason is that he is just SO tactical with his content. He goes ‘all in’ with his strategies and his technics. He shares everything upfront whether it be on a social post, a podcast or anywhere else.
Now, this is a hard thing to do because there is always someone who says “that won’t work for me” or you’re wrong’ being so transparent with his strategies, like he is, takes commitment and courage. Well done Jason.
Jason Bay is the Chief Prospecting Officer of Blissful prospecting, an Outbound Sales Coach & Trainer and the host of the Think Outside the Script Tour, it was a blast having him on the Best Of Social Selling Podcast.
Make sure you have something to take notes with – there is plenty in this episode for everyone.
Enjoy.
Jason Bay
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondbay/
Think Outside The Script Tour
https://tour.blissfulprospecting.com/
Blissful prospecting
https://blissfulprospecting.com/
Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/
Mark McInnes - Sales Training
www.Markmc.co
www.Bonjoro.com
Coupon – BOSS20
Tactical Pipeline Growth
www.markmc.co/tpg
Catch all versions of me here.
https://linktr.ee/markmcinnes
LinkedIn profile
VIP sales mailer
Tactical Pipeline Growth
BOSS Podcast
1 on 1 Consulting
Outbound take down LinkedIn messaging with Jason Bay
Mark McInnes: [00:00:00] Welcome to theBOSS podcast. This week, we have Jason by the outbound at guru let's face facts. Some guests are simply better than others, and I've really been looking forward to talking to Jason. Luckily, Jason didn't let me down. He is delivered in spades in this conversation. Now you might think I'm exaggerating, but here are just some of the things he shares how to do in this particular episode of the boss podcast, connection requests, follow up messages, video use as a LinkedIn message tool, how to become an expert in your industry, how to create content from a narrow business offering what his content strategy is.
For LinkedIn, why you shouldn't pick stuff up front, unless it's a Lamborghini, had a follow up with somebody who likes your post on social, a great tip to get prospects smoothly off social and into your email and why you should be questioned stacking and why you should be taking, not taking. I've been following Jason.
And during that time of saying his profile rise and he's nine being made by more and more people, people I hold in high regard. So naturally I took notice. The thing I really love about Jason is that he's just so tactical with his content. He goes all in with his strategies and his techniques. He shares everything upfront, whether it be on a social post, a podcast like ours or anywhere else now.
This might sound easy, but it's actually a hard thing to do because there's always somebody on social or some way that says no, that won't work for me or no, you're wrong. So being transparent with these strategies and putting it all out there and Marcie does that takes both commitment and courage. Well done.
Jason, Jason, by is the chief prospecting officer CPR of blissful. Prospecting is an outbound sales coach in China and the host of think outside the script. It was a blast, having him on the best of social selling podcast. My cure. You have something to take notes with for these episodes. There's plenty in here for everybody.
Enjoy
welcome to the boss podcast this week. I'm very delighted to have Jason by all the way from USI CPO of blissful prospecting. Jason, welcome to the podcast.
Jason Bay: [00:02:21] I always like talking to Australians, man. So this is a delight.
Mark McInnes: [00:02:25] Thank you very much. I love that man. What's CPO stand for
Jason Bay: [00:02:30] chief prospecting officer.
Mark McInnes: [00:02:32] Okay. So you're an absolute expert in the outbound space. You know, I think that's really exciting. I've been keeping an eye on you. I recently figured you as somebody to watch and follow in a newsletter in my fortnightly newsletter that I sent out. So hopefully you've got a few more Australian followers off the back of that.
Sorry to have you on. I've been looking forward to hearing your story today. I've noticed you growing your following on social. And I don't know whether that's because you've just come into my sphere or whether you've been growing really well over the last 18 months or two years. And I'll be looking forward to digging into that.
But professionally is going to be developing a really nice strong nation in the outbound spice. So I don't think you don't want to grind job of getting your message out there, but at the same time, you're bringing really terrific value to your audience and your clients. So on behalf of all, though, there must be tens of thousands of people that are following you on and watching all of your activity.
Right. Can I just say thanks very much. I think you're doing a great job in getting some real value.
Jason Bay: [00:03:27] No, I appreciate it, man. I mean, that's, that's why we do it. You know, you create content too. It's a lot of work to great content and it takes months and sometimes years to get into a good group of who am I talking to?
Am I talking about things that they care about? Right. Am I established establishing, excuse me, a, um, a sort of niche, you know, for what I talk about. And it just takes a long time. I mean, we started. No back in 2017 is when we formally started blissful prospecting, but I was doing consulting and stuff before that.
And it was a while, you know, for me to figure out, Hey, this is prospecting and outbound. The thing that I'm going to talk about, do we talk to SMBs mid market enterprise? Do we talk specifically to the rep, to the business? You know what I mean? It's just all those kinds of, sort of things that you just do it and pivot and change as you go and you start to sharpen the knife, so to speak.
So, yeah, I appreciate the kind words, man.
Mark McInnes: [00:04:23] No, no problem at all. And the thing that I'm really impressed with is your, one of your latest projects, think outside the script. So do you want to tell the listeners a little bit about that? Cause I think it's super valuable.
Jason Bay: [00:04:34] Yeah. I wanted to look when COVID happens.
One of the things that we weren't doing at that time was serving the individual rep know we always worked directly with the company and our deal pipeline kind of froze up for six, eight weeks or so this is back in March. And a lot of people are just kind of hesitant to spend money, especially on that outside trainers.
So I had a lot of reps coming to us and asking about, Hey, do you guys have courses, membership, community, that sort of stuff. And we didn't at the time, worked like six weekends, just straight creating all this content, getting all of it, training up that we do for companies up into our membership platform.
And what I realized from there, it was like, Hey, this is a huge market that wants to get help in this area. And. In order to like really grow our audience of individual reps. You know, virtual summits are a way that you can do that. Cause it leverages, you know, social proof of, you know, positioning yourself with other credible people in the space.
But really it's like a co marketing strategy almost, which I think is really smart with content creation. It's like, how do you help each other? And look for other people you can team up with. And the reason why we wanted to create a tour was with virtual summits. It's kind of already been done in the sales game.
You know what I mean? Like, and I'm competing with huge companies that have big marketing departments and I wanted to do something different. So instead of a virtual tour with like 20 events in one day, and they're all like replays of recorded staff, I wanted to do it live. And instead of focusing just on sales or an industry, I wanted to focus a hundred percent on outbound prospecting.
And then the other thing I wanted to do was really try to make it it as interactive as possible and give people a reward for showing up live. So having Q and a, that happens throughout the presentation, not just at the end, you know, actually kind of creating the content in the webinar as we go and answering people's questions and involving them and just making it fun, you know?
So that's, that's why we created it. It's just, I wanted to do something different. It's just what I heard a lot of people asking for. And. Yeah, selfishly, it was a great way to build our list and continue to build our following too. So they're kind of checked off all the boxes. You know, this would be something would be really valuable for the people attending really valuable for the speakers.
And they're really valuable for us. Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:06:48] it looks like a massive piece of work. I've got to say, when I first saw that come up at the start, I was like, Oh man, this is going to be some serious work for somebody. And of course you're offering it to everyone. So thank you that didn't go on notice, but you know, it's free to enter.
Isn't it? So it's still going, so you're running it until October.
Jason Bay: [00:07:07] Is that right? Yeah, I think October 8th is our last event. So first part of October and. Yeah, it's free. We wanted to get this content out for people for free and, and really make it accessible to folks that, you know, might be getting laid off, or it might be having budgets cut or either income might be impacted, you know, so they get paid a ton of money for courses or whatever.
So we wouldn't make it free. It's going to talk Tobar and it's at tour it's T O U R D blissful prospecting.com. That's where you can go and sign up and watch the replays of the ones that have already happened.
Mark McInnes: [00:07:40] Okay. And I will definitely put a link in the show notes so that people can chase that much easier if they get to the end.
Cool. Thanks very much. You can get across that listeners. That's a really cool project running now. I love it. Absolutely love it. So tonight, Jason, I wanted to talk a little bit about. Not only learn a little bit more about you, but you know, let's get a handle on what you're doing on social, because I think you're doing a really great job can learn from that.
And one of the, one of your keys pieces that you talk about is the reply method email. So you've got a really neat way of talking about how to design a great outbound email, but, you know, I thought to help our social listeners let's have a chat around what your thoughts are in relation to. To might be some, some social outbreaks as well.
Is that cool with you?
Jason Bay: [00:08:20] Yeah, absolutely man.
Mark McInnes: [00:08:22] So man, I'd love to hear, you know, what got you quoting the outbound in the first place? Like what was, what got you saw?
Jason Bay: [00:08:27] So I'm 31 years old. My first sales job was when I was 18 and I was selling house painting services, going door to door. So my very first sales experience was like prospecting and going door to door, doing stuff that was really hard.
So I've been sort of used to. You know, having to go find business. And I never really understood the people that kind of just sat around and waited for stuff. So I worked with that company for six or seven years became their marketing director. And one thing I did, and then there were some BTC, but one thing I did with them is we launched an outbound call center.
So from scratch, this is like a $35 million house painting company with one of the largest of its kind in the United States. And it never really had a formalized marketing department. So I had to figure out call centers and software that you use for dialing and all this other stuff. And we ended up having 15 reps.
I hired a call center manager. That's kinda got me interested in like, you know, formalized outbound in terms of like phones and like doing this stuff at scale. And when I left that company maybe came my first consulting client and I started noticing that other clients, especially BTBY yeah, I figured out it was like, Oh, wow.
Yeah, BDB is so much more cooler cause I can get people's information and I can research them. It's not a complete cold call. So this is in like 2014. And what I started doing was your grant. How, what I did was doing in the BDC land translated into B2B and it turns out BB, in my opinion is a lot easier than B to C cold calling, where you can actually have context and research people and get email addresses and get phone numbers and that sort of stuff.
And I just started doing it to find clients. And then the B2B clients that I would get were like, Hey, that was a cool email. You sent, could you do that for us? And we started out in blissful prospecting doing the prospecting for people and appointment setting. And that's a really hard thing to do also because you got to learn about people's businesses and, you know, that was just, we would really kill it for certain clients and certain other clients didn't have some of the pieces in place for outbound to be successful.
You know, they, I think you have to have a really strong inbound engine. To, to make outbound work. Well, you've got to have content, gotta have thought leadership. You got to have done enough work to where, you know, what the true big problems are that your product or service solves and you know, the language that your prospects use and all of that stuff.
So what we've gravitated more towards in the last year, year and a half is more training and people on how to do outbound, but that's really where it came from. And just my fascination. Even back in running the house, painting business days, I always ask people, why did you book with me? Because the 18 year old college kid with braces, you know, and they could have hired someone that was in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, that have been doing it for decades, but they chose to hire me at a higher price actually.
Cause when I was working in a franchise and bottles, so the prices were actually higher than doing it locally. So since then, I've always been curious about what makes people decide to, to work with you. And that same approach, I think works extremely well in the work that we're doing now, especially as you know, why do people decide to work with you?
What motivates a prospect to take a meeting? What are the problems that you solve and having that foundation in place, you can then move to social or email or phone or whatever it might be like once you have that language and that sort of intimacy with your prospects in
Mark McInnes: [00:11:48] place. Yeah. Okay. I think that's cool.
And I love the way that you said there, you know, B2B, outbound. You say easier than B to C you probably upset a few B2B sellers, I think, but, but I think you're absolutely right. So blissful started out as a prospecting, as a service. Is that, would that be a nice way to describe that? Are you still doing that?
Or if you moved just to coaching and to focus more strongly on coaching,
Jason Bay: [00:12:13] if one, like kind of legacy client that we've been doing it for for a while where we just run cold email campaigns for them, but the rest of it is training and coaching.
Mark McInnes: [00:12:22] Okay. So as of today, blissful prospecting, if you want it to engage you guys, it's more about training and coaching, but you've got a membership program.
I think it's valuable. If you can tell people about that real quick.
Jason Bay: [00:12:32] Yeah. And that's like, if you're wanting more like a self paced on demand kind of experience, one of the things I'm really big on is I feel like there's too many courses out there, like, you know, shitty courses, especially, hopefully it can use profanity on here that are super expensive and they just kind of fall short in terms of how actionable they are.
And a complaint that I would hear a lot as a salesperson. You know, I spent a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks on a course and I can't apply this stuff right away. And that's what we wanted to do. And the membership was like, for example, we have a course in there called prospecting place and it's like snippets from podcast interviews from other interviews, I've done training calls, coaching calls, et cetera, where someone could watch like a five to 15 minute soundbite on cold call openers.
And they'll be able to actually use it and try a different opener that day. Didn't have to watch hours of content standpoint. We have stuff on LinkedIn, right? Connection requests, sending videos to people after they connect with you. It's just like really actual things that within 10 or 15 minutes, someone can learn and try right away and see if it works for them.
And that's the type of stuff that we're, I'm really passionate about. At least in the people in there I'm in the membership about getting really actionable stuff that doesn't require hours to
Mark McInnes: [00:13:42] implement it. And I think that's probably why I gravitate towards your content so much spending, you know, I'm a big fan of something being technical and you've got to actually be able to put it in apply.
So I think that's a great way to go. I'm not a fan of these sales training programs at all the talk very much about, you know, leading with insights or, and they don't tell you how to do that, you know, bring value. What does that even mean? Like how do you do that as a sales rep today? So the fact that you break that down and say, here's what you can do and he say, you can sign it.
I think he's, he's re I think that's awesome. Let's take a quick break, do a little bit of business and we'll be brought back.
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Mark McInnes: [00:15:00] The social piece. What's your social activity. Generally look like, you know, you've got a lot of content out there.
Jason Bay: [00:15:05] Yeah. So there's a couple of different pieces to this. So the way that I look at social is it's 100% LinkedIn. You don't mess around with Facebook or Instagram or run paid ads or any of that kind of stuff.
It's, it's all LinkedIn. That's where our audience is. And it allows me to like really focus on one thing. There's been a couple of really key elements this year that we've implemented that have just been game-changer on his daily posting. So every weekday I post goes up without fail Monday through Friday.
I've been committing to that since sometime in January. I can't remember the exact day. But what I noticed right away in doing that within two months, the overall engagement on the posts, the average was lower, but overall, the number of engagements in total and views, and then also leads some marketing qualified leads that came in through our site from people that I actually was able to take a sales call with doubled.
And yeah, it was probably putting in more than double the effort, but I just noticed like that consistency, what it really forces you to do with daily posting. Is, I don't wanna put up a shitty post. I don't want to put up something that someone's going to read and have the reaction that we just talked about.
Oh, that's a really great idea, but Jason never shares any actionable things. I want to be like, Jason's bringing the fire every time he's posting that. That's what I want people to see. So committed some sort of regimen. It doesn't have to be daily, but something that kind of pushes you outside of your comfort zone to really think about this stuff in a different way.
So if I'm writing a post every day, Like my options of stuff to talk about are pretty limited when it comes to prospecting. Right? I mean, there's like a mindset piece, I guess, to doing it. There's like email, phone, social there's objections potentially. Right. There's like stuff like that. And it seems kind of limited at the surface.
And if you just like put a post out about cold email, you're not going to be able to get very much mileage out of that, but really what it forced me to do is okay, cool. What are the components of like the things that I do and like, what are interesting analogies that could use to teach it? And it really forces me to go from, Hey, instead of like writing a post about cold email and why you should do it.
It's well, hair hero, doesn't subject lines. So you could use that we're using right now that have 30 to 60% open rates. Here's a framework that you can apply to the personalization piece of your emails. Here's how to send a connection, or you can get really micro with this stuff. So I think that's the first part of it.
It's like, you need to commit to some sort of posting a regimen and I do daily posting the other part of this too. With daily posting is really looking at how you can repurpose stuff. I think one of the big mistakes people make when they create content in general is they create content without thinking about how they're going to get mileage out of it.
So every LinkedIn I posted, right, it goes on our blog. And if it was a good LinkedIn post I'll pick out the two or three that did really well, it goes into our drip system. You know, our nurtures in our email list. You get these emails. And it's literally copied and pasted. So I write the LinkedIn post.
Like I would an email, not a newsletter kind of email, but I write it like a LinkedIn post, you know, it's super casual, it's super conversational. It's got an actual bite into it. And now I'm getting like every single person that signs up for email list is going to get that LinkedIn posts now. So I'm getting tons of mileage out of that content.
I think that's really big to think about your content strategy and the stuff you're posting on LinkedIn commit to some sort of regimen and think about what are the big core things. That people want to hear about in this area where they're having problems. So that's part of it. There's a couple other pieces here that I get help with actually from my virtual assistants and what they do is they aren't responding on my behalf, but they're like really helping me prioritize the inbox.
Cause it's, it's fucking crazy dude in my LinkedIn inbox. Like, and I don't even, I have around 20,000 followers, I can't imagine like, that's like a decent amount. There's some people that it's probably just insane, but what I have in there is. I recommend you have someone except like, depending on, you know, the amount of volume that you're getting, obviously, but I have someone actually go through and look at, who's connecting with me.
Who's sending connection requests, who's messaging me and do these people fit my ICP in my ideal client profile and the persona. So I have some sort of filtering mechanism where I know, Hey, this person that sent me a connection request, this is just someone I'm just going to connect with. And let's say, it's good to have them follow me, or is this like a VP of sales at a company?
And I really want to work with. Right. So being able to filter out and look at those opportunities based on your ideal client profile and your ideal personas and saying, Hey, who do I want to do more with? And just have a conversation back and forth on LinkedIn, who do I actually want to see if it makes sense to engage in a sales conversation?
So I think this filtering mechanism, like some sort of way that you can identify who you want to continue talking with versus who would just be good to follow you. That's like the second component of this. And then I would say the third thing is really thinking about what are like, what am I trying to accomplish longterm with this in terms of like, what kind of people am I looking to, to like proactively connect with and build a following with.
And there's lots of different ways that you can do that, but some sort of mechanism again, where you either have a virtual assistant help you with it, or you do it yourself. Well, you've identified that ideal client profile and that ideal persona. And then you are now proactively connecting with those people and sending them connection requests and building up an audience of those types of folks.
I've just been doing that for like the last three years. So like, what you see on my LinkedIn profile right now is the product of like three years worth of work and like trials and tribulations and like testing and all that kind of stuff. Those are like the three big core functions. I would say that I'm like doing actively on a daily basis.
Between myself and my team on LinkedIn. I love
Mark McInnes: [00:20:46] that you're using what we call an ICP to build your social profile. And your social following your network. So many people connect with anybody that sends them a connection request and treat everybody the same. It's a bit like that old cliche of styles. You know what anyone that rings the doorbell will send you an email.
You treat the market, you're going to be world's best prospect. And we know that we've only got a certain amount of time. The same thing's true on social, right? Yep. You've got to break it down and know where to spend your time. It's great to see that you've got so many followers that are inside your niche, or we call it a niche.
You'd call it a we're ahead of you pronounce it needs. We say niche. Yeah.
Jason Bay: [00:21:23] People say niche in the, in the U S if someone says niche, we kind of like, Oh, you fancy.
Mark McInnes: [00:21:31] I can tell you, but you know, it's good that you've built that following because it takes a lot of, it takes extra work. It's not a lot of work. It's just extra. And I get disappointed when people just accept heaps of connection requests, they've got 12,000 connections and they come to me and I say, Mark, I'm posting on LinkedIn.
I'm getting nothing. I'm like, yeah. Cause you connect it to a whole bunch of people that I care about what you're talking about, man. Yeah. Sorry, you know, it's your own fault. Sorry to be harsh, but it's great to hear that you've been able to find the way to do that. So you must be getting some pretty good results.
Businesswise on LinkedIn. Can you share something around that without being, you know, spilling the beans?
Jason Bay: [00:22:06] I'm happy to spill the beans. I mean, we've had 5,300 people sign up for our tour and that's all organic. None of that's paid traffic. So that's from LinkedIn posts. Okay, so, and
Mark McInnes: [00:22:17] they're all going to be in your target market, right?
Jason Bay: [00:22:21] I mean, most of them, I would imagine if they're signing up for content on how to prospect, most of them fit our target market. I would assume there might be a couple, I would say, yeah, maybe there's 10% noise in there, but most of these are sales reps that we want in our community or doing bootcamps with, or they are sales leaders that want to be working with their teams.
Mark McInnes: [00:22:41] Yeah, lovely. 5,300 people. That's a lot of people. And you started in January,
Jason Bay: [00:22:46] right? The virtual tour. I think we officially started promoting an inch, like third week of
Mark McInnes: [00:22:51] gym, my, that scribe. So that's a good example of just how, how quickly you can grow an audience. Well, okay. Anything else that you want to share results wise?
Jason Bay: [00:23:01] Well, caveats with that, the reason why. And I think we'll probably by the end of October when this thing is over, I believe that we'll have around nine or 10,000 people signed up for it. That doesn't just happen. Like Badgley. That's a shit ton of work. And a lot of it has to do with a couple of things. So I talked about like teaming up with people.
I think this is such a big concept. And even if you're an individual rep thinking about this, or you're a sales leader, thinking about how do I, how does my team do this? Like, how do you find other companies that serve similar audiences or other reps or other people in your niche that serve similar audiences and how can you create content together with an eye?
Can you create content together with your prospects or with your clients? The more people you can create content together with a lot of these sheriffs came from, or a lot of these signups came from, we have 42 speakers on here, and some of them are pretty big name, but you know, a lot of them are just big, you know, on LinkedIn.
And some of them are not big on LinkedIn. But what I did is I created these like highlight videos. And what I would do is ask a question like in 2030 cold email will be dot, dot, dot, and I'd have all these people answer the question. And I created a little highlight clip. It was like a minute and a half of like everyone's answers.
And then I share that video on LinkedIn. So like how can you create content that incorporates other people, especially in the industry. So if you're selling to. You know, insurance professionals or nonprofits or whatever, it's like, how can you take other experts in those industries and like create content together with them.
I mean, that's a big part of this. The other big part too, like actually making that happen is I have really intimate knowledge over the people in our audience and like what their problems are. And that's because. I mean, like when I first started blissful, prospecting was my life. One of the things that I did is I was doing like 15 to 20 sales calls per week.
And like three quarters of them were absolute garbage. I was just testing. I was reaching out to a lot of people. I thought that would be good to serve as asking what their problems were and all of this stuff. And I still have documents right now where I have literally word for word. SDRs BDRs people in SAS, what problems are they having right now?
What's the exact language that they use. What content would they resonate with? So I have all of those things, this event, and this content is created to address those specific things. And that's the most overlooked part of content creation is I think people just create content and put it out there. You gotta be creating this for specific people.
In fact, you should have a specific person in mind that you're writing this post for, or that you're creating this event for. Because if they resonate with it, odds are, there's going to be thousands of other people that resonate with it as well. So that's, that's a really big part of it. And I think that the email subscribers is kind of, it's kind of a vanity metric, right?
If you're not selling products to people. So a more practical way of looking at this, I mean, almost all of our business, our sales calls comes from LinkedIn as well. And usually we'll get five to seven inbound requests from qualified people that I want to have a sales conversation with. And most of those come from LinkedIn or from guest podcasts.
Like this, which I then share on LinkedIn. Yep. So I think that's, that's just another really big thing to look at is like the quality of the content has to be there and it takes a long time to figure these things out. But these are questions you should be asking your prospects and your customers.
Mark McInnes: [00:26:14] One of the things I'll say that stops people from doing these collaboration pieces, like your thinking outside of the script project is that people are worried that they're going to introduce their customers or their potential customers to their competitors.
Right. So, if you look at the people that are on your program, on your virtual tour, you could argue that those people provide a very similar service here, right? John BAREIS or JV training as it's called these days, you got Morgan. There you go. A bunch of people that do basically prospecting or outbound that's in some way, potentially competitive.
How do you justify that?
Jason Bay: [00:26:48] This part drives me crazy. This is like dating. Great being single as a guy and then not going out with your guy friends because the women you come across could be more interested in your friends.
Mark McInnes: [00:26:57] Oh, that's a good answer.
Jason Bay: [00:26:58] Like, come on, dude. You know what I mean? Come on actually elevates your social proof to be surrounded by quality guys in this case.
Right? Like women are going to be like, Oh, he has quality friends. He's not some freak. That's gonna like, try to follow me home or something. You know what I mean? So, yeah. That's a really key element here. And by creating content with, you know, you mentioned John Barrows or Morgan Ingram or Mark Hunter, or whoever else you want to throw in there that does add social proof to me and what I'm doing.
There's so many people that are, have signed up for this event that didn't know about me beforehand. And I'm a of those people in their eyes and that's. Been an unintended result from this that like I knew social proof was important. I mean, that's, that's why we hop on podcasts really is for social proof.
And I made a huge effort at the beginning of 2018 where I was like, Hey, our business needs more social proof. Like I don't think people are looking at us in the same light as some of these other folks. And that's why we decided to get on podcasts. So the social proof element is very, very important. And that's exactly how I look at it as if I align myself with the top dogs.
In our industry and actually have something valuable to contribute and help them with as well. Then other people are going to look at me as peers and that, and that elevates my brand.
Mark McInnes: [00:28:16] Well, obviously I agree because I'll run a podcast and ask I'm on a tour, but you would be surprised how many people I've reached out to, Oh, I think our offerings too similar and you're like, wow.
Jason Bay: [00:28:27] Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:28:29] it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It was good to hear that I love the way you described that. That might be a little audio grab there, man. Let's take a quick break, do a little bit of business and we'll be brought back.
Jason Bay: [00:28:41] If you need more conversations with your ideal buyers or to simply sharpen your prospecting skills, check out Mark's latest book, tactical pipeline growth.
Is a complete prospecting guide. It outlines step by step of process to build a strong and healthy pipeline. Bark is included a huge amount of valuable stills material, such just templates, call an email script, the best cadence plans as well as social selling template for you to use and start prospecting straight away.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:14] Tactical
Jason Bay: [00:29:14] pipeline growth is available from Amazon or direct directly from www dot Mark M S D dot D O slash TPG.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:25] Can we talk a little bit about let's get your expertise on the show. I think you've already shown a bunch of it. Let's talk about quickly outbound on LinkedIn. What's your theory. What's your strategy around reaching out?
Let's pretend we've got some listeners online that want to reach out to the prospective client, whether they're connected or whether they're called what's your thoughts around how you do that.
Jason Bay: [00:29:44] This is a couple elements here. So one LinkedIn. As part of a multichannel strategy. Yep. So don't expect to be a successful, just sending LinkedIn connection requests and doing the DM game as if you're going to combine phone and email with that.
So it's really a part of a larger cadence, larger sequence, whatever you want to call it. So with LinkedIn, I look at like a couple different things here in terms of how and when you would use it. So it could be as part of your outreach sequence. So I'll give you one play that works really well. It's called triple touch.
And I would say 80% of the reps that we interview on our podcast that crush quota use this technique combo prospecting. Tony Hughes talks about, I think, is where it may have originated from, but it's, I researched a prospect on LinkedIn. I called him and then I get to the voicemail. So I leave a voicemail that says, Hey, I'm about to send you an email.
And the subject line is going to be, Hey, Mark, just left you a voicemail and then they get an email and then you send a LinkedIn connection request from there. So what you've done there is like, you've hit this prospect on three different channels, like immediately. And I always think about things in terms of user experience.
What's it like to be on the receiving end of your prospecting? Well, that person just got like three or four notifications right there. And then the LinkedIn connection requests that way there's a little bit more familiarity there. So from there, there's a couple of different things that could happen.
Right. And there's other situations where. Know, maybe the prospect reaches out to connect with you, or maybe you reached out to connect with them cold because you like their content or something. Right. So it really comes down into three parts. So you can try that triple play. Like I talked about the triple touch, or you can use like LinkedIn as like kind of the first touch, which is how I actually like to do it because I don't do as much.
Yeah, cold calling. I these days, I really like to focus the calling on the people that I connect with on LinkedIn that looked like they were a good fit. So there's three parts. There's the connect, there's the followup. And then there's the offer. So when you send a connection request, so I'm going to assume that you actually know who your ICP is and then who you want to connect with.
And you've identified this as a good person with a connection request. There's different schools of thought on whether it should be customized. I say 100%. It should be customized. Like you should absolutely take the time to customize it. No blink connection requests. So it needs to be personalized, conversational, and non pitchy.
So again, I always go back to what's the receiving experience, like for most prospects. Well, someone came up with this term called connect and pitch. I don't even know who to give credit, but that's most of what happens right now, people connect and then they get pitched or they get pitched in the connection requests
Mark McInnes: [00:32:16] better still.
Huh?
Jason Bay: [00:32:18] Yeah, it's crazy. The way that I was looking at prospecting is don't prospect to make a sale prospect to start a conversation. So you're starting conversations here. Like a conversation has to take place in order for a meeting to take place in order for a sale to take place. So I'll give you some examples.
And these are like ones that like been sent. So this guy, Nicholas sent one that I thought was kind of cool. Yeah. And it was essentially something along the lines. You can actually have it open. So he said, Hey, Jason, really enjoying your sales training content. The meetings and catering industry has been really impacted right now.
And this is super great advice. Love it, like he just saw something that I posted on. LinkedIn mentioned it commented, reached out with something personalized. I had another person that reached out and they sell a solution. So he was trying to sell me something later on, but it was like call recording software.
Right? So for a sales coach, it's kind of nice to have that. Cause I can like if the client doesn't have a way to record their calls, I can listen in on their cold calls, et cetera. Well, he reached out and he said something along the lines of, Hey, Jason, I saw that you guys work with you, SAS companies, it looks like you do virtual coaching, by the way.
I'm a big fan of the UFC as well. What do you think about so-and-so fight? You know, Matt and UFC, I put that on my LinkedIn profile. Right? It's something I self identified with that I like. Right. So those are good examples of things like, so you need to find something. That you can relate with on the person's LinkedIn profile, it could just be commenting on their experience or companies that they've worked with or recommendation that they got our piece of content hosted.
So that's where it starts. Connection requests got to be conversationalize personalized, excuse me, conversational in a, do not pitch in that connection requests. Second part that follow up again. So when the person accepts your connection request, we do not pitch when the person accepts the connection request, but we want to do instead.
Is asking engaging question. So what I like to do is like, really think about, like, think about the challenge that the person is having or the challenges and problems in the areas that you help solve. So for example, Mark, if you accepted my connection request, I might send something back and say, Hey Mark, thanks for accepting my connection request.
What I'm hearing. From a lot of sales teams right now is a really trying to prospect in a way that has empathy for what their prospects are going through. So they're not insensitive, but still get sales conversations started at the same time. How's prospecting going. So like using a, uh, a technique, I call question stacking.
So I'm stacking context into the question. I'm not just saying how's prospecting going for you. Yeah. Like I'm giving context into problems that people have said, so you can insert whatever problems that you help solve. Like, insert that into the question and just ask people like, Hey, how is it going in that area?
Or how are you guys solving for this? Or, Hey, one thing I'm hearing for people like you, is this, how are you guys solving for that? How are you dealing with it? That's where to start.
Mark McInnes: [00:35:14] That's a great way to start a conversation. I see lots of people try that, but they stuff it up because they didn't put a link to, Hey, you know, if you'd like to book to talk about that, go to my automatic calendar and grab 15 minutes, and I think you lose all of that credibility.
They built up in the first part of the conversation or the first part of the message. If you bang that stuff on and I get it that it's a shortcut for that. Person reaching out. I get it. That's what you want to try to achieve. Ultimately is a conversation. He just going there too, too early in my mind,
Jason Bay: [00:35:41] you just go into early like that.
It makes the person feel like the whole interaction was really disingenuine. Yeah. So at the same time though, like here's some examples of messages that I've gotten. I'm just looking at here on my LinkedIn. Hello. How are you doing today or, Hey Jason, how are you? How has it been during these difficult times?
Like that doesn't really offer me any value or give me any context into like who you are or why you're asking it. So it has to be contextual. I'll give you another. And I just, I have these open cause I prepared for this. So here's that example of a bad one. Hey Jason, thanks for connecting. I'm reaching out to offer an automation audit.
We will create an overview of your current automation architecture and where there is the most potential to automate. So you can focus on your core service, yada yada yada, and he links to a free audit. I see this a lot too. So people are offering like free audits and things like that, just because what you're offering is free.
Doesn't mean that the prospect looks at that I was going to get super excited because it's not like you're coming in and saying, Hey, I have a Lamborghini. Do you want it? Like for free? Like what you're trying to give them comes with an attachment their time. Like they have to spend time with you and they have to learn like what it is and then there's change.
Right? Like if I accept this from you, that means I'm going to have to go away from this current solution I'm using. And that like requires me to change and there's risk involved with that. There's like headache involved with that. So don't just pitch stuff, even if it's free. So I'll give you another example of one.
This is a meeting. I sat with the chief revenue officer a couple of weeks ago. I'm just looking at here to get more context from the message. So when you post something, this is another tactic that works extremely well. That I, and again, I have my team help out with a lot of this stuff and put it on a spreadsheet for me.
So if I write a post to cold calling. And then someone likes or comments on it. If they fit my ICP and persona, I want to connect with them if we're not connections yet. So this chief revenue officer liked a post that I put up on cold calling, and I said, Hey, so-and-so thanks for checking out my posts and opening cold calls.
I'm curious, how's everything going for you and your team? What are you guys hearing from your prospects right now? And then he said, Hey, thanks for reaching out. I really enjoyed your posts. My team follows you at a couple of VPs. Like, yeah, I just went on and on and on. And this is part of that follow up process.
That I talked about before is it's like, Hey, follow up and have some sort of intelligent question, right. To ask related to the posts that they commented on related to a challenge they had, whatever it might be. And another way that you can do that too, is through a video. I don't send a lot of videos. He was honestly through LinkedIn, but a lot of the reps we work with love sending videos, instead of writing that message.
Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:38:12] I'm a big video fan on Turo or video supply. They're a supporter of this podcast. In fact, the episode that we did around using video in prospecting, he reminds the number one downloaded episode. Oh, yeah.
Jason Bay: [00:38:27] Yeah. That's a great platform. It definitely
Mark McInnes: [00:38:29] works. It works well. Are you guys using that any differently to the way you're using texts, other than just putting your, you know, your face and the audio and video component?
Jason Bay: [00:38:37] One of the things like Kayla Citron, there she's a rep that I interviewed. She just crushed it. She gets like 25 to 35% response rates and her cold outreach. One thing she does is she sends the video through a place like a bunch or BombBomb. I think she might use drift, but when you send it, you use the screen share function and she'll go to the person's profile.
So the video is like the thumbnail of the video is a screenshot of the person's profile. That's kind of a way to show the person that you customize. The video has the hardest part, what your thoughts are on Mark with this. But I love video, especially in emails. The hardest part is getting the person to freaking click it and watch it.
That's the hardest part. So, so showing them that you customize it, it's really big.
Mark McInnes: [00:39:19] It's pretty hard to not open it. If it's got your LinkedIn profile right there in the email. Right.
Jason Bay: [00:39:24] So exactly.
Mark McInnes: [00:39:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty hard to ignore. That's a great strategy.
Jason Bay: [00:39:28] So once we've done this followup step, which is step number two, step number three is offer.
So I'll give you that example again with a chief revenue officer. So he commented back saying, Hey, yeah, we listened to your podcast or something like that. So maybe they just say, Hey, yeah, we liked your post. And. And all this stuff I might ask if they don't really divulge a lot, I might say, well, Hey, how's your team doing in this area right now?
Or how has this been for you? Like, I really want to like figure out like, Hey, how are things going? And with this guy, you had mentioned some challenges and stuff and what they're working on and they haven't yeah. IPO coming up. And I just said, Hey, thanks man. Sounds like you guys are shaking and moving on the inside.
I'm happy to hop on a call. Do you or someone on your team to share some insights of what's working well for other companies like yours? Is there anything I can do to help at this time? So, again, I'm not just dropping in a meeting link or anything like that. I'm saying that I want to hop on a call before purpose.
So it's not to do a discovery call or an intro call or do a demo or anything like that. I want to share insights. So, uh, the other thing that you could do too, so let's say that you don't have a podcast like me, and you're a rep. You can say, Hey, I'd love to share how ABC companies are solving for this problem right now.
And it could be companies that you're working with and the big problem that they're solving, would you be open to hopping on a call? So this embodies the philosophy of mine called teach. Don't take, so don't just take someone's time. Like you need to teach them something and then he just responded with, Hey, thanks.
Yeah. There's probably something you could do email me and we'll, we'll figure it out. And the trick here is when you take a conversation from LinkedIn to email, I say, Hey Mark, this is a subject line. Hey Mark. Continuing our LinkedIn convo. The email is, Hey, Mark. Reaching out to, uh, to continue our LinkedIn combo.
And I take a screenshot of them responding, saying, I want to chat, or here's my email address. Shout out to me that way they don't have to, like, again, I'm thinking about user experience, like how much of a pain pain in the ass is it? If I get an email and someone says I'm continuing our LinkedIn combo, and then I have to like, copy and paste their name into LinkedIn.
There's a lot the steps involved that if I just put a screenshot, I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah, Mark. I talked to that guy. And then I just put some quick context since the email. So I don't want to create any extra work for them to have to go to LinkedIn. And that's it. You're just going to use the same call to action that you would in a cold email.
Or if you're talking to someone over the phone, you want to make an offer to. Hop on a call to talk about how other companies like them are solving for a particular problem,
Mark McInnes: [00:41:52] raw gold. Jason, love it. Thank you very much for sharing that and in such detail too, so people will be able to go away and, you know, make their version of that.
Yeah. That's really valuable. And this is what I was talking about at the start. Right. So, you know, you haven't come on to the podcast and just. Talked about strategy. You've actually shared tactical advice that things people can go and do. So, Mike, thank you very much. I think that's really valuable for so many people.
Jason Bay: [00:42:14] No, absolutely. Man,
Mark McInnes: [00:42:15] this sales reps, listening to this all over the world. If they go and do one thing off the back, and they're listening to this conversation today, what would you like that one thing to be,
Jason Bay: [00:42:22] have more conversations with your current customers and prospects about their problems and like how those problems are impacting their job or their business and document it.
Like get a word, doc, get a Google doc, something going and start just, you should have a list of all of these problems and like what they're trying to accomplish and in areas where they've tried to fix where these problems have been unsuccessful and that document. Yeah. You're gonna find themes. You're gonna find like three or four themes in there.
And that becomes the content that you create, whether it be a LinkedIn post, the problem you say that you could solve for when you're prospecting through LinkedIn, through email or phone, like that document and that language. It's going to be like the fast track to prospecting success. Once you get it put together and get it rolling.
And I treat it like a living breathing document where I'm always adding things to it. Absolutely
Mark McInnes: [00:43:11] right advice. So, Jason, what if people want to get in contact with you? How can they do that? Are you interested in more connections on LinkedIn? For example, I do want people to, I'm sure you want them to sign up for something.
What would you like people to do that thinking? Hey, J Bay is pretty cool that I get more of this.
Jason Bay: [00:43:28] Yeah, definitely like the tour. Yeah, tore it up. Let's full prospect and.com. That's the best place to get like access to like some free, really good content. Definitely want to connect with people on LinkedIn.
It's just Jason Bay, blissful prospecting. I think it's Jason, D as in David Bay. So linkedin.com/in/jason D Bay. I post content every day there and that's kind of like a hub for everything. Yeah, I would say those are the two places where, where I would suggest checking out herself.
Mark McInnes: [00:43:55] Okay. So listeners chase up Jason, on those two locations, hopefully you've had a pen and paper and you've taken down some of those fantastic strategies that Jason shared with you.
Jason, thank you so much for coming on the boss podcast, the best of social selling and sharing your LinkedIn and the bigger blissful prospecting story. I really appreciate it.
Jason Bay: [00:44:13] Absolutely. Thanks for having me on man.
Mark McInnes: [00:44:14] Cheers,
Jason Bay: [00:44:20] please help others. Just like you find this podcast by spreading the word. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and rate us wherever you source your podcast. Thank you for listening to the boss podcast. Join us next time for even more tactics discussion. In ideas to help you improve your social outreach.
Mark McInnes: [00:00:00] Welcome to theBOSS podcast. This week, we have Jason by the outbound at guru let's face facts. Some guests are simply better than others, and I've really been looking forward to talking to Jason. Luckily, Jason didn't let me down. He is delivered in spades in this conversation. Now you might think I'm exaggerating, but here are just some of the things he shares how to do in this particular episode of the boss podcast, connection requests, follow up messages, video use as a LinkedIn message tool, how to become an expert in your industry, how to create content from a narrow business offering what his content strategy is.
For LinkedIn, why you shouldn't pick stuff up front, unless it's a Lamborghini, had a follow up with somebody who likes your post on social, a great tip to get prospects smoothly off social and into your email and why you should be questioned stacking and why you should be taking, not taking. I've been following Jason.
And during that time of saying his profile rise and he's nine being made by more and more people, people I hold in high regard. So naturally I took notice. The thing I really love about Jason is that he's just so tactical with his content. He goes all in with his strategies and his techniques. He shares everything upfront, whether it be on a social post, a podcast like ours or anywhere else now.
This might sound easy, but it's actually a hard thing to do because there's always somebody on social or some way that says no, that won't work for me or no, you're wrong. So being transparent with these strategies and putting it all out there and Marcie does that takes both commitment and courage. Well done.
Jason, Jason, by is the chief prospecting officer CPR of blissful. Prospecting is an outbound sales coach in China and the host of think outside the script. It was a blast, having him on the best of social selling podcast. My cure. You have something to take notes with for these episodes. There's plenty in here for everybody.
Enjoy
welcome to the boss podcast this week. I'm very delighted to have Jason by all the way from USI CPO of blissful prospecting. Jason, welcome to the podcast.
Jason Bay: [00:02:21] I always like talking to Australians, man. So this is a delight.
Mark McInnes: [00:02:25] Thank you very much. I love that man. What's CPO stand for
Jason Bay: [00:02:30] chief prospecting officer.
Mark McInnes: [00:02:32] Okay. So you're an absolute expert in the outbound space. You know, I think that's really exciting. I've been keeping an eye on you. I recently figured you as somebody to watch and follow in a newsletter in my fortnightly newsletter that I sent out. So hopefully you've got a few more Australian followers off the back of that.
Sorry to have you on. I've been looking forward to hearing your story today. I've noticed you growing your following on social. And I don't know whether that's because you've just come into my sphere or whether you've been growing really well over the last 18 months or two years. And I'll be looking forward to digging into that.
But professionally is going to be developing a really nice strong nation in the outbound spice. So I don't think you don't want to grind job of getting your message out there, but at the same time, you're bringing really terrific value to your audience and your clients. So on behalf of all, though, there must be tens of thousands of people that are following you on and watching all of your activity.
Right. Can I just say thanks very much. I think you're doing a great job in getting some real value.
Jason Bay: [00:03:27] No, I appreciate it, man. I mean, that's, that's why we do it. You know, you create content too. It's a lot of work to great content and it takes months and sometimes years to get into a good group of who am I talking to?
Am I talking about things that they care about? Right. Am I established establishing, excuse me, a, um, a sort of niche, you know, for what I talk about. And it just takes a long time. I mean, we started. No back in 2017 is when we formally started blissful prospecting, but I was doing consulting and stuff before that.
And it was a while, you know, for me to figure out, Hey, this is prospecting and outbound. The thing that I'm going to talk about, do we talk to SMBs mid market enterprise? Do we talk specifically to the rep, to the business? You know what I mean? It's just all those kinds of, sort of things that you just do it and pivot and change as you go and you start to sharpen the knife, so to speak.
So, yeah, I appreciate the kind words, man.
Mark McInnes: [00:04:23] No, no problem at all. And the thing that I'm really impressed with is your, one of your latest projects, think outside the script. So do you want to tell the listeners a little bit about that? Cause I think it's super valuable.
Jason Bay: [00:04:34] Yeah. I wanted to look when COVID happens.
One of the things that we weren't doing at that time was serving the individual rep know we always worked directly with the company and our deal pipeline kind of froze up for six, eight weeks or so this is back in March. And a lot of people are just kind of hesitant to spend money, especially on that outside trainers.
So I had a lot of reps coming to us and asking about, Hey, do you guys have courses, membership, community, that sort of stuff. And we didn't at the time, worked like six weekends, just straight creating all this content, getting all of it, training up that we do for companies up into our membership platform.
And what I realized from there, it was like, Hey, this is a huge market that wants to get help in this area. And. In order to like really grow our audience of individual reps. You know, virtual summits are a way that you can do that. Cause it leverages, you know, social proof of, you know, positioning yourself with other credible people in the space.
But really it's like a co marketing strategy almost, which I think is really smart with content creation. It's like, how do you help each other? And look for other people you can team up with. And the reason why we wanted to create a tour was with virtual summits. It's kind of already been done in the sales game.
You know what I mean? Like, and I'm competing with huge companies that have big marketing departments and I wanted to do something different. So instead of a virtual tour with like 20 events in one day, and they're all like replays of recorded staff, I wanted to do it live. And instead of focusing just on sales or an industry, I wanted to focus a hundred percent on outbound prospecting.
And then the other thing I wanted to do was really try to make it it as interactive as possible and give people a reward for showing up live. So having Q and a, that happens throughout the presentation, not just at the end, you know, actually kind of creating the content in the webinar as we go and answering people's questions and involving them and just making it fun, you know?
So that's, that's why we created it. It's just, I wanted to do something different. It's just what I heard a lot of people asking for. And. Yeah, selfishly, it was a great way to build our list and continue to build our following too. So they're kind of checked off all the boxes. You know, this would be something would be really valuable for the people attending really valuable for the speakers.
And they're really valuable for us. Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:06:48] it looks like a massive piece of work. I've got to say, when I first saw that come up at the start, I was like, Oh man, this is going to be some serious work for somebody. And of course you're offering it to everyone. So thank you that didn't go on notice, but you know, it's free to enter.
Isn't it? So it's still going, so you're running it until October.
Jason Bay: [00:07:07] Is that right? Yeah, I think October 8th is our last event. So first part of October and. Yeah, it's free. We wanted to get this content out for people for free and, and really make it accessible to folks that, you know, might be getting laid off, or it might be having budgets cut or either income might be impacted, you know, so they get paid a ton of money for courses or whatever.
So we wouldn't make it free. It's going to talk Tobar and it's at tour it's T O U R D blissful prospecting.com. That's where you can go and sign up and watch the replays of the ones that have already happened.
Mark McInnes: [00:07:40] Okay. And I will definitely put a link in the show notes so that people can chase that much easier if they get to the end.
Cool. Thanks very much. You can get across that listeners. That's a really cool project running now. I love it. Absolutely love it. So tonight, Jason, I wanted to talk a little bit about. Not only learn a little bit more about you, but you know, let's get a handle on what you're doing on social, because I think you're doing a really great job can learn from that.
And one of the, one of your keys pieces that you talk about is the reply method email. So you've got a really neat way of talking about how to design a great outbound email, but, you know, I thought to help our social listeners let's have a chat around what your thoughts are in relation to. To might be some, some social outbreaks as well.
Is that cool with you?
Jason Bay: [00:08:20] Yeah, absolutely man.
Mark McInnes: [00:08:22] So man, I'd love to hear, you know, what got you quoting the outbound in the first place? Like what was, what got you saw?
Jason Bay: [00:08:27] So I'm 31 years old. My first sales job was when I was 18 and I was selling house painting services, going door to door. So my very first sales experience was like prospecting and going door to door, doing stuff that was really hard.
So I've been sort of used to. You know, having to go find business. And I never really understood the people that kind of just sat around and waited for stuff. So I worked with that company for six or seven years became their marketing director. And one thing I did, and then there were some BTC, but one thing I did with them is we launched an outbound call center.
So from scratch, this is like a $35 million house painting company with one of the largest of its kind in the United States. And it never really had a formalized marketing department. So I had to figure out call centers and software that you use for dialing and all this other stuff. And we ended up having 15 reps.
I hired a call center manager. That's kinda got me interested in like, you know, formalized outbound in terms of like phones and like doing this stuff at scale. And when I left that company maybe came my first consulting client and I started noticing that other clients, especially BTBY yeah, I figured out it was like, Oh, wow.
Yeah, BDB is so much more cooler cause I can get people's information and I can research them. It's not a complete cold call. So this is in like 2014. And what I started doing was your grant. How, what I did was doing in the BDC land translated into B2B and it turns out BB, in my opinion is a lot easier than B to C cold calling, where you can actually have context and research people and get email addresses and get phone numbers and that sort of stuff.
And I just started doing it to find clients. And then the B2B clients that I would get were like, Hey, that was a cool email. You sent, could you do that for us? And we started out in blissful prospecting doing the prospecting for people and appointment setting. And that's a really hard thing to do also because you got to learn about people's businesses and, you know, that was just, we would really kill it for certain clients and certain other clients didn't have some of the pieces in place for outbound to be successful.
You know, they, I think you have to have a really strong inbound engine. To, to make outbound work. Well, you've got to have content, gotta have thought leadership. You got to have done enough work to where, you know, what the true big problems are that your product or service solves and you know, the language that your prospects use and all of that stuff.
So what we've gravitated more towards in the last year, year and a half is more training and people on how to do outbound, but that's really where it came from. And just my fascination. Even back in running the house, painting business days, I always ask people, why did you book with me? Because the 18 year old college kid with braces, you know, and they could have hired someone that was in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, that have been doing it for decades, but they chose to hire me at a higher price actually.
Cause when I was working in a franchise and bottles, so the prices were actually higher than doing it locally. So since then, I've always been curious about what makes people decide to, to work with you. And that same approach, I think works extremely well in the work that we're doing now, especially as you know, why do people decide to work with you?
What motivates a prospect to take a meeting? What are the problems that you solve and having that foundation in place, you can then move to social or email or phone or whatever it might be like once you have that language and that sort of intimacy with your prospects in
Mark McInnes: [00:11:48] place. Yeah. Okay. I think that's cool.
And I love the way that you said there, you know, B2B, outbound. You say easier than B to C you probably upset a few B2B sellers, I think, but, but I think you're absolutely right. So blissful started out as a prospecting, as a service. Is that, would that be a nice way to describe that? Are you still doing that?
Or if you moved just to coaching and to focus more strongly on coaching,
Jason Bay: [00:12:13] if one, like kind of legacy client that we've been doing it for for a while where we just run cold email campaigns for them, but the rest of it is training and coaching.
Mark McInnes: [00:12:22] Okay. So as of today, blissful prospecting, if you want it to engage you guys, it's more about training and coaching, but you've got a membership program.
I think it's valuable. If you can tell people about that real quick.
Jason Bay: [00:12:32] Yeah. And that's like, if you're wanting more like a self paced on demand kind of experience, one of the things I'm really big on is I feel like there's too many courses out there, like, you know, shitty courses, especially, hopefully it can use profanity on here that are super expensive and they just kind of fall short in terms of how actionable they are.
And a complaint that I would hear a lot as a salesperson. You know, I spent a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks on a course and I can't apply this stuff right away. And that's what we wanted to do. And the membership was like, for example, we have a course in there called prospecting place and it's like snippets from podcast interviews from other interviews, I've done training calls, coaching calls, et cetera, where someone could watch like a five to 15 minute soundbite on cold call openers.
And they'll be able to actually use it and try a different opener that day. Didn't have to watch hours of content standpoint. We have stuff on LinkedIn, right? Connection requests, sending videos to people after they connect with you. It's just like really actual things that within 10 or 15 minutes, someone can learn and try right away and see if it works for them.
And that's the type of stuff that we're, I'm really passionate about. At least in the people in there I'm in the membership about getting really actionable stuff that doesn't require hours to
Mark McInnes: [00:13:42] implement it. And I think that's probably why I gravitate towards your content so much spending, you know, I'm a big fan of something being technical and you've got to actually be able to put it in apply.
So I think that's a great way to go. I'm not a fan of these sales training programs at all the talk very much about, you know, leading with insights or, and they don't tell you how to do that, you know, bring value. What does that even mean? Like how do you do that as a sales rep today? So the fact that you break that down and say, here's what you can do and he say, you can sign it.
I think he's, he's re I think that's awesome. Let's take a quick break, do a little bit of business and we'll be brought back.
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Mark McInnes: [00:15:00] The social piece. What's your social activity. Generally look like, you know, you've got a lot of content out there.
Jason Bay: [00:15:05] Yeah. So there's a couple of different pieces to this. So the way that I look at social is it's 100% LinkedIn. You don't mess around with Facebook or Instagram or run paid ads or any of that kind of stuff.
It's, it's all LinkedIn. That's where our audience is. And it allows me to like really focus on one thing. There's been a couple of really key elements this year that we've implemented that have just been game-changer on his daily posting. So every weekday I post goes up without fail Monday through Friday.
I've been committing to that since sometime in January. I can't remember the exact day. But what I noticed right away in doing that within two months, the overall engagement on the posts, the average was lower, but overall, the number of engagements in total and views, and then also leads some marketing qualified leads that came in through our site from people that I actually was able to take a sales call with doubled.
And yeah, it was probably putting in more than double the effort, but I just noticed like that consistency, what it really forces you to do with daily posting. Is, I don't wanna put up a shitty post. I don't want to put up something that someone's going to read and have the reaction that we just talked about.
Oh, that's a really great idea, but Jason never shares any actionable things. I want to be like, Jason's bringing the fire every time he's posting that. That's what I want people to see. So committed some sort of regimen. It doesn't have to be daily, but something that kind of pushes you outside of your comfort zone to really think about this stuff in a different way.
So if I'm writing a post every day, Like my options of stuff to talk about are pretty limited when it comes to prospecting. Right? I mean, there's like a mindset piece, I guess, to doing it. There's like email, phone, social there's objections potentially. Right. There's like stuff like that. And it seems kind of limited at the surface.
And if you just like put a post out about cold email, you're not going to be able to get very much mileage out of that, but really what it forced me to do is okay, cool. What are the components of like the things that I do and like, what are interesting analogies that could use to teach it? And it really forces me to go from, Hey, instead of like writing a post about cold email and why you should do it.
It's well, hair hero, doesn't subject lines. So you could use that we're using right now that have 30 to 60% open rates. Here's a framework that you can apply to the personalization piece of your emails. Here's how to send a connection, or you can get really micro with this stuff. So I think that's the first part of it.
It's like, you need to commit to some sort of posting a regimen and I do daily posting the other part of this too. With daily posting is really looking at how you can repurpose stuff. I think one of the big mistakes people make when they create content in general is they create content without thinking about how they're going to get mileage out of it.
So every LinkedIn I posted, right, it goes on our blog. And if it was a good LinkedIn post I'll pick out the two or three that did really well, it goes into our drip system. You know, our nurtures in our email list. You get these emails. And it's literally copied and pasted. So I write the LinkedIn post.
Like I would an email, not a newsletter kind of email, but I write it like a LinkedIn post, you know, it's super casual, it's super conversational. It's got an actual bite into it. And now I'm getting like every single person that signs up for email list is going to get that LinkedIn posts now. So I'm getting tons of mileage out of that content.
I think that's really big to think about your content strategy and the stuff you're posting on LinkedIn commit to some sort of regimen and think about what are the big core things. That people want to hear about in this area where they're having problems. So that's part of it. There's a couple other pieces here that I get help with actually from my virtual assistants and what they do is they aren't responding on my behalf, but they're like really helping me prioritize the inbox.
Cause it's, it's fucking crazy dude in my LinkedIn inbox. Like, and I don't even, I have around 20,000 followers, I can't imagine like, that's like a decent amount. There's some people that it's probably just insane, but what I have in there is. I recommend you have someone except like, depending on, you know, the amount of volume that you're getting, obviously, but I have someone actually go through and look at, who's connecting with me.
Who's sending connection requests, who's messaging me and do these people fit my ICP in my ideal client profile and the persona. So I have some sort of filtering mechanism where I know, Hey, this person that sent me a connection request, this is just someone I'm just going to connect with. And let's say, it's good to have them follow me, or is this like a VP of sales at a company?
And I really want to work with. Right. So being able to filter out and look at those opportunities based on your ideal client profile and your ideal personas and saying, Hey, who do I want to do more with? And just have a conversation back and forth on LinkedIn, who do I actually want to see if it makes sense to engage in a sales conversation?
So I think this filtering mechanism, like some sort of way that you can identify who you want to continue talking with versus who would just be good to follow you. That's like the second component of this. And then I would say the third thing is really thinking about what are like, what am I trying to accomplish longterm with this in terms of like, what kind of people am I looking to, to like proactively connect with and build a following with.
And there's lots of different ways that you can do that, but some sort of mechanism again, where you either have a virtual assistant help you with it, or you do it yourself. Well, you've identified that ideal client profile and that ideal persona. And then you are now proactively connecting with those people and sending them connection requests and building up an audience of those types of folks.
I've just been doing that for like the last three years. So like, what you see on my LinkedIn profile right now is the product of like three years worth of work and like trials and tribulations and like testing and all that kind of stuff. Those are like the three big core functions. I would say that I'm like doing actively on a daily basis.
Between myself and my team on LinkedIn. I love
Mark McInnes: [00:20:46] that you're using what we call an ICP to build your social profile. And your social following your network. So many people connect with anybody that sends them a connection request and treat everybody the same. It's a bit like that old cliche of styles. You know what anyone that rings the doorbell will send you an email.
You treat the market, you're going to be world's best prospect. And we know that we've only got a certain amount of time. The same thing's true on social, right? Yep. You've got to break it down and know where to spend your time. It's great to see that you've got so many followers that are inside your niche, or we call it a niche.
You'd call it a we're ahead of you pronounce it needs. We say niche. Yeah.
Jason Bay: [00:21:23] People say niche in the, in the U S if someone says niche, we kind of like, Oh, you fancy.
Mark McInnes: [00:21:31] I can tell you, but you know, it's good that you've built that following because it takes a lot of, it takes extra work. It's not a lot of work. It's just extra. And I get disappointed when people just accept heaps of connection requests, they've got 12,000 connections and they come to me and I say, Mark, I'm posting on LinkedIn.
I'm getting nothing. I'm like, yeah. Cause you connect it to a whole bunch of people that I care about what you're talking about, man. Yeah. Sorry, you know, it's your own fault. Sorry to be harsh, but it's great to hear that you've been able to find the way to do that. So you must be getting some pretty good results.
Businesswise on LinkedIn. Can you share something around that without being, you know, spilling the beans?
Jason Bay: [00:22:06] I'm happy to spill the beans. I mean, we've had 5,300 people sign up for our tour and that's all organic. None of that's paid traffic. So that's from LinkedIn posts. Okay, so, and
Mark McInnes: [00:22:17] they're all going to be in your target market, right?
Jason Bay: [00:22:21] I mean, most of them, I would imagine if they're signing up for content on how to prospect, most of them fit our target market. I would assume there might be a couple, I would say, yeah, maybe there's 10% noise in there, but most of these are sales reps that we want in our community or doing bootcamps with, or they are sales leaders that want to be working with their teams.
Mark McInnes: [00:22:41] Yeah, lovely. 5,300 people. That's a lot of people. And you started in January,
Jason Bay: [00:22:46] right? The virtual tour. I think we officially started promoting an inch, like third week of
Mark McInnes: [00:22:51] gym, my, that scribe. So that's a good example of just how, how quickly you can grow an audience. Well, okay. Anything else that you want to share results wise?
Jason Bay: [00:23:01] Well, caveats with that, the reason why. And I think we'll probably by the end of October when this thing is over, I believe that we'll have around nine or 10,000 people signed up for it. That doesn't just happen. Like Badgley. That's a shit ton of work. And a lot of it has to do with a couple of things. So I talked about like teaming up with people.
I think this is such a big concept. And even if you're an individual rep thinking about this, or you're a sales leader, thinking about how do I, how does my team do this? Like, how do you find other companies that serve similar audiences or other reps or other people in your niche that serve similar audiences and how can you create content together with an eye?
Can you create content together with your prospects or with your clients? The more people you can create content together with a lot of these sheriffs came from, or a lot of these signups came from, we have 42 speakers on here, and some of them are pretty big name, but you know, a lot of them are just big, you know, on LinkedIn.
And some of them are not big on LinkedIn. But what I did is I created these like highlight videos. And what I would do is ask a question like in 2030 cold email will be dot, dot, dot, and I'd have all these people answer the question. And I created a little highlight clip. It was like a minute and a half of like everyone's answers.
And then I share that video on LinkedIn. So like how can you create content that incorporates other people, especially in the industry. So if you're selling to. You know, insurance professionals or nonprofits or whatever, it's like, how can you take other experts in those industries and like create content together with them.
I mean, that's a big part of this. The other big part too, like actually making that happen is I have really intimate knowledge over the people in our audience and like what their problems are. And that's because. I mean, like when I first started blissful, prospecting was my life. One of the things that I did is I was doing like 15 to 20 sales calls per week.
And like three quarters of them were absolute garbage. I was just testing. I was reaching out to a lot of people. I thought that would be good to serve as asking what their problems were and all of this stuff. And I still have documents right now where I have literally word for word. SDRs BDRs people in SAS, what problems are they having right now?
What's the exact language that they use. What content would they resonate with? So I have all of those things, this event, and this content is created to address those specific things. And that's the most overlooked part of content creation is I think people just create content and put it out there. You gotta be creating this for specific people.
In fact, you should have a specific person in mind that you're writing this post for, or that you're creating this event for. Because if they resonate with it, odds are, there's going to be thousands of other people that resonate with it as well. So that's, that's a really big part of it. And I think that the email subscribers is kind of, it's kind of a vanity metric, right?
If you're not selling products to people. So a more practical way of looking at this, I mean, almost all of our business, our sales calls comes from LinkedIn as well. And usually we'll get five to seven inbound requests from qualified people that I want to have a sales conversation with. And most of those come from LinkedIn or from guest podcasts.
Like this, which I then share on LinkedIn. Yep. So I think that's, that's just another really big thing to look at is like the quality of the content has to be there and it takes a long time to figure these things out. But these are questions you should be asking your prospects and your customers.
Mark McInnes: [00:26:14] One of the things I'll say that stops people from doing these collaboration pieces, like your thinking outside of the script project is that people are worried that they're going to introduce their customers or their potential customers to their competitors.
Right. So, if you look at the people that are on your program, on your virtual tour, you could argue that those people provide a very similar service here, right? John BAREIS or JV training as it's called these days, you got Morgan. There you go. A bunch of people that do basically prospecting or outbound that's in some way, potentially competitive.
How do you justify that?
Jason Bay: [00:26:48] This part drives me crazy. This is like dating. Great being single as a guy and then not going out with your guy friends because the women you come across could be more interested in your friends.
Mark McInnes: [00:26:57] Oh, that's a good answer.
Jason Bay: [00:26:58] Like, come on, dude. You know what I mean? Come on actually elevates your social proof to be surrounded by quality guys in this case.
Right? Like women are going to be like, Oh, he has quality friends. He's not some freak. That's gonna like, try to follow me home or something. You know what I mean? So, yeah. That's a really key element here. And by creating content with, you know, you mentioned John Barrows or Morgan Ingram or Mark Hunter, or whoever else you want to throw in there that does add social proof to me and what I'm doing.
There's so many people that are, have signed up for this event that didn't know about me beforehand. And I'm a of those people in their eyes and that's. Been an unintended result from this that like I knew social proof was important. I mean, that's, that's why we hop on podcasts really is for social proof.
And I made a huge effort at the beginning of 2018 where I was like, Hey, our business needs more social proof. Like I don't think people are looking at us in the same light as some of these other folks. And that's why we decided to get on podcasts. So the social proof element is very, very important. And that's exactly how I look at it as if I align myself with the top dogs.
In our industry and actually have something valuable to contribute and help them with as well. Then other people are going to look at me as peers and that, and that elevates my brand.
Mark McInnes: [00:28:16] Well, obviously I agree because I'll run a podcast and ask I'm on a tour, but you would be surprised how many people I've reached out to, Oh, I think our offerings too similar and you're like, wow.
Jason Bay: [00:28:27] Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:28:29] it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It was good to hear that I love the way you described that. That might be a little audio grab there, man. Let's take a quick break, do a little bit of business and we'll be brought back.
Jason Bay: [00:28:41] If you need more conversations with your ideal buyers or to simply sharpen your prospecting skills, check out Mark's latest book, tactical pipeline growth.
Is a complete prospecting guide. It outlines step by step of process to build a strong and healthy pipeline. Bark is included a huge amount of valuable stills material, such just templates, call an email script, the best cadence plans as well as social selling template for you to use and start prospecting straight away.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:14] Tactical
Jason Bay: [00:29:14] pipeline growth is available from Amazon or direct directly from www dot Mark M S D dot D O slash TPG.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:25] Can we talk a little bit about let's get your expertise on the show. I think you've already shown a bunch of it. Let's talk about quickly outbound on LinkedIn. What's your theory. What's your strategy around reaching out?
Let's pretend we've got some listeners online that want to reach out to the prospective client, whether they're connected or whether they're called what's your thoughts around how you do that.
Jason Bay: [00:29:44] This is a couple elements here. So one LinkedIn. As part of a multichannel strategy. Yep. So don't expect to be a successful, just sending LinkedIn connection requests and doing the DM game as if you're going to combine phone and email with that.
So it's really a part of a larger cadence, larger sequence, whatever you want to call it. So with LinkedIn, I look at like a couple different things here in terms of how and when you would use it. So it could be as part of your outreach sequence. So I'll give you one play that works really well. It's called triple touch.
And I would say 80% of the reps that we interview on our podcast that crush quota use this technique combo prospecting. Tony Hughes talks about, I think, is where it may have originated from, but it's, I researched a prospect on LinkedIn. I called him and then I get to the voicemail. So I leave a voicemail that says, Hey, I'm about to send you an email.
And the subject line is going to be, Hey, Mark, just left you a voicemail and then they get an email and then you send a LinkedIn connection request from there. So what you've done there is like, you've hit this prospect on three different channels, like immediately. And I always think about things in terms of user experience.
What's it like to be on the receiving end of your prospecting? Well, that person just got like three or four notifications right there. And then the LinkedIn connection requests that way there's a little bit more familiarity there. So from there, there's a couple of different things that could happen.
Right. And there's other situations where. Know, maybe the prospect reaches out to connect with you, or maybe you reached out to connect with them cold because you like their content or something. Right. So it really comes down into three parts. So you can try that triple play. Like I talked about the triple touch, or you can use like LinkedIn as like kind of the first touch, which is how I actually like to do it because I don't do as much.
Yeah, cold calling. I these days, I really like to focus the calling on the people that I connect with on LinkedIn that looked like they were a good fit. So there's three parts. There's the connect, there's the followup. And then there's the offer. So when you send a connection request, so I'm going to assume that you actually know who your ICP is and then who you want to connect with.
And you've identified this as a good person with a connection request. There's different schools of thought on whether it should be customized. I say 100%. It should be customized. Like you should absolutely take the time to customize it. No blink connection requests. So it needs to be personalized, conversational, and non pitchy.
So again, I always go back to what's the receiving experience, like for most prospects. Well, someone came up with this term called connect and pitch. I don't even know who to give credit, but that's most of what happens right now, people connect and then they get pitched or they get pitched in the connection requests
Mark McInnes: [00:32:16] better still.
Huh?
Jason Bay: [00:32:18] Yeah, it's crazy. The way that I was looking at prospecting is don't prospect to make a sale prospect to start a conversation. So you're starting conversations here. Like a conversation has to take place in order for a meeting to take place in order for a sale to take place. So I'll give you some examples.
And these are like ones that like been sent. So this guy, Nicholas sent one that I thought was kind of cool. Yeah. And it was essentially something along the lines. You can actually have it open. So he said, Hey, Jason, really enjoying your sales training content. The meetings and catering industry has been really impacted right now.
And this is super great advice. Love it, like he just saw something that I posted on. LinkedIn mentioned it commented, reached out with something personalized. I had another person that reached out and they sell a solution. So he was trying to sell me something later on, but it was like call recording software.
Right? So for a sales coach, it's kind of nice to have that. Cause I can like if the client doesn't have a way to record their calls, I can listen in on their cold calls, et cetera. Well, he reached out and he said something along the lines of, Hey, Jason, I saw that you guys work with you, SAS companies, it looks like you do virtual coaching, by the way.
I'm a big fan of the UFC as well. What do you think about so-and-so fight? You know, Matt and UFC, I put that on my LinkedIn profile. Right? It's something I self identified with that I like. Right. So those are good examples of things like, so you need to find something. That you can relate with on the person's LinkedIn profile, it could just be commenting on their experience or companies that they've worked with or recommendation that they got our piece of content hosted.
So that's where it starts. Connection requests got to be conversationalize personalized, excuse me, conversational in a, do not pitch in that connection requests. Second part that follow up again. So when the person accepts your connection request, we do not pitch when the person accepts the connection request, but we want to do instead.
Is asking engaging question. So what I like to do is like, really think about, like, think about the challenge that the person is having or the challenges and problems in the areas that you help solve. So for example, Mark, if you accepted my connection request, I might send something back and say, Hey Mark, thanks for accepting my connection request.
What I'm hearing. From a lot of sales teams right now is a really trying to prospect in a way that has empathy for what their prospects are going through. So they're not insensitive, but still get sales conversations started at the same time. How's prospecting going. So like using a, uh, a technique, I call question stacking.
So I'm stacking context into the question. I'm not just saying how's prospecting going for you. Yeah. Like I'm giving context into problems that people have said, so you can insert whatever problems that you help solve. Like, insert that into the question and just ask people like, Hey, how is it going in that area?
Or how are you guys solving for this? Or, Hey, one thing I'm hearing for people like you, is this, how are you guys solving for that? How are you dealing with it? That's where to start.
Mark McInnes: [00:35:14] That's a great way to start a conversation. I see lots of people try that, but they stuff it up because they didn't put a link to, Hey, you know, if you'd like to book to talk about that, go to my automatic calendar and grab 15 minutes, and I think you lose all of that credibility.
They built up in the first part of the conversation or the first part of the message. If you bang that stuff on and I get it that it's a shortcut for that. Person reaching out. I get it. That's what you want to try to achieve. Ultimately is a conversation. He just going there too, too early in my mind,
Jason Bay: [00:35:41] you just go into early like that.
It makes the person feel like the whole interaction was really disingenuine. Yeah. So at the same time though, like here's some examples of messages that I've gotten. I'm just looking at here on my LinkedIn. Hello. How are you doing today or, Hey Jason, how are you? How has it been during these difficult times?
Like that doesn't really offer me any value or give me any context into like who you are or why you're asking it. So it has to be contextual. I'll give you another. And I just, I have these open cause I prepared for this. So here's that example of a bad one. Hey Jason, thanks for connecting. I'm reaching out to offer an automation audit.
We will create an overview of your current automation architecture and where there is the most potential to automate. So you can focus on your core service, yada yada yada, and he links to a free audit. I see this a lot too. So people are offering like free audits and things like that, just because what you're offering is free.
Doesn't mean that the prospect looks at that I was going to get super excited because it's not like you're coming in and saying, Hey, I have a Lamborghini. Do you want it? Like for free? Like what you're trying to give them comes with an attachment their time. Like they have to spend time with you and they have to learn like what it is and then there's change.
Right? Like if I accept this from you, that means I'm going to have to go away from this current solution I'm using. And that like requires me to change and there's risk involved with that. There's like headache involved with that. So don't just pitch stuff, even if it's free. So I'll give you another example of one.
This is a meeting. I sat with the chief revenue officer a couple of weeks ago. I'm just looking at here to get more context from the message. So when you post something, this is another tactic that works extremely well. That I, and again, I have my team help out with a lot of this stuff and put it on a spreadsheet for me.
So if I write a post to cold calling. And then someone likes or comments on it. If they fit my ICP and persona, I want to connect with them if we're not connections yet. So this chief revenue officer liked a post that I put up on cold calling, and I said, Hey, so-and-so thanks for checking out my posts and opening cold calls.
I'm curious, how's everything going for you and your team? What are you guys hearing from your prospects right now? And then he said, Hey, thanks for reaching out. I really enjoyed your posts. My team follows you at a couple of VPs. Like, yeah, I just went on and on and on. And this is part of that follow up process.
That I talked about before is it's like, Hey, follow up and have some sort of intelligent question, right. To ask related to the posts that they commented on related to a challenge they had, whatever it might be. And another way that you can do that too, is through a video. I don't send a lot of videos. He was honestly through LinkedIn, but a lot of the reps we work with love sending videos, instead of writing that message.
Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:38:12] I'm a big video fan on Turo or video supply. They're a supporter of this podcast. In fact, the episode that we did around using video in prospecting, he reminds the number one downloaded episode. Oh, yeah.
Jason Bay: [00:38:27] Yeah. That's a great platform. It definitely
Mark McInnes: [00:38:29] works. It works well. Are you guys using that any differently to the way you're using texts, other than just putting your, you know, your face and the audio and video component?
Jason Bay: [00:38:37] One of the things like Kayla Citron, there she's a rep that I interviewed. She just crushed it. She gets like 25 to 35% response rates and her cold outreach. One thing she does is she sends the video through a place like a bunch or BombBomb. I think she might use drift, but when you send it, you use the screen share function and she'll go to the person's profile.
So the video is like the thumbnail of the video is a screenshot of the person's profile. That's kind of a way to show the person that you customize. The video has the hardest part, what your thoughts are on Mark with this. But I love video, especially in emails. The hardest part is getting the person to freaking click it and watch it.
That's the hardest part. So, so showing them that you customize it, it's really big.
Mark McInnes: [00:39:19] It's pretty hard to not open it. If it's got your LinkedIn profile right there in the email. Right.
Jason Bay: [00:39:24] So exactly.
Mark McInnes: [00:39:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty hard to ignore. That's a great strategy.
Jason Bay: [00:39:28] So once we've done this followup step, which is step number two, step number three is offer.
So I'll give you that example again with a chief revenue officer. So he commented back saying, Hey, yeah, we listened to your podcast or something like that. So maybe they just say, Hey, yeah, we liked your post. And. And all this stuff I might ask if they don't really divulge a lot, I might say, well, Hey, how's your team doing in this area right now?
Or how has this been for you? Like, I really want to like figure out like, Hey, how are things going? And with this guy, you had mentioned some challenges and stuff and what they're working on and they haven't yeah. IPO coming up. And I just said, Hey, thanks man. Sounds like you guys are shaking and moving on the inside.
I'm happy to hop on a call. Do you or someone on your team to share some insights of what's working well for other companies like yours? Is there anything I can do to help at this time? So, again, I'm not just dropping in a meeting link or anything like that. I'm saying that I want to hop on a call before purpose.
So it's not to do a discovery call or an intro call or do a demo or anything like that. I want to share insights. So, uh, the other thing that you could do too, so let's say that you don't have a podcast like me, and you're a rep. You can say, Hey, I'd love to share how ABC companies are solving for this problem right now.
And it could be companies that you're working with and the big problem that they're solving, would you be open to hopping on a call? So this embodies the philosophy of mine called teach. Don't take, so don't just take someone's time. Like you need to teach them something and then he just responded with, Hey, thanks.
Yeah. There's probably something you could do email me and we'll, we'll figure it out. And the trick here is when you take a conversation from LinkedIn to email, I say, Hey Mark, this is a subject line. Hey Mark. Continuing our LinkedIn convo. The email is, Hey, Mark. Reaching out to, uh, to continue our LinkedIn combo.
And I take a screenshot of them responding, saying, I want to chat, or here's my email address. Shout out to me that way they don't have to, like, again, I'm thinking about user experience, like how much of a pain pain in the ass is it? If I get an email and someone says I'm continuing our LinkedIn combo, and then I have to like, copy and paste their name into LinkedIn.
There's a lot the steps involved that if I just put a screenshot, I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah, Mark. I talked to that guy. And then I just put some quick context since the email. So I don't want to create any extra work for them to have to go to LinkedIn. And that's it. You're just going to use the same call to action that you would in a cold email.
Or if you're talking to someone over the phone, you want to make an offer to. Hop on a call to talk about how other companies like them are solving for a particular problem,
Mark McInnes: [00:41:52] raw gold. Jason, love it. Thank you very much for sharing that and in such detail too, so people will be able to go away and, you know, make their version of that.
Yeah. That's really valuable. And this is what I was talking about at the start. Right. So, you know, you haven't come on to the podcast and just. Talked about strategy. You've actually shared tactical advice that things people can go and do. So, Mike, thank you very much. I think that's really valuable for so many people.
Jason Bay: [00:42:14] No, absolutely. Man,
Mark McInnes: [00:42:15] this sales reps, listening to this all over the world. If they go and do one thing off the back, and they're listening to this conversation today, what would you like that one thing to be,
Jason Bay: [00:42:22] have more conversations with your current customers and prospects about their problems and like how those problems are impacting their job or their business and document it.
Like get a word, doc, get a Google doc, something going and start just, you should have a list of all of these problems and like what they're trying to accomplish and in areas where they've tried to fix where these problems have been unsuccessful and that document. Yeah. You're gonna find themes. You're gonna find like three or four themes in there.
And that becomes the content that you create, whether it be a LinkedIn post, the problem you say that you could solve for when you're prospecting through LinkedIn, through email or phone, like that document and that language. It's going to be like the fast track to prospecting success. Once you get it put together and get it rolling.
And I treat it like a living breathing document where I'm always adding things to it. Absolutely
Mark McInnes: [00:43:11] right advice. So, Jason, what if people want to get in contact with you? How can they do that? Are you interested in more connections on LinkedIn? For example, I do want people to, I'm sure you want them to sign up for something.
What would you like people to do that thinking? Hey, J Bay is pretty cool that I get more of this.
Jason Bay: [00:43:28] Yeah, definitely like the tour. Yeah, tore it up. Let's full prospect and.com. That's the best place to get like access to like some free, really good content. Definitely want to connect with people on LinkedIn.
It's just Jason Bay, blissful prospecting. I think it's Jason, D as in David Bay. So linkedin.com/in/jason D Bay. I post content every day there and that's kind of like a hub for everything. Yeah, I would say those are the two places where, where I would suggest checking out herself.
Mark McInnes: [00:43:55] Okay. So listeners chase up Jason, on those two locations, hopefully you've had a pen and paper and you've taken down some of those fantastic strategies that Jason shared with you.
Jason, thank you so much for coming on the boss podcast, the best of social selling and sharing your LinkedIn and the bigger blissful prospecting story. I really appreciate it.
Jason Bay: [00:44:13] Absolutely. Thanks for having me on man.
Mark McInnes: [00:44:14] Cheers,
Jason Bay: [00:44:20] please help others. Just like you find this podcast by spreading the word. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and rate us wherever you source your podcast. Thank you for listening to the boss podcast. Join us next time for even more tactics discussion. In ideas to help you improve your social outreach.