Best Of Sales Skills Podcast
Best Of Sales Skills Podcast
How to (really) get a Meeting with Anyone: Shahin Hoda
What would you do to get a meeting with your perfect buyer?
How much would you pay for a sales conversation with your perfect prospect?
Shahin Hoda is the Founder & Director of Xgrowth, they're an ABM marketing business- (Account-Based Marketing) and they specialise in landing meetings with very high quality and hard to reach accounts.
I challenge you to listen to the strategies and examples, that Shahin, shares and then ask yourself are you really doing everything you can to reach your IDEAL buyer?
I hope this episode gives you the latitude and the attitude to think outside the box when it comes to trying to land meetings with your IDEAL buyers.
Shahin Hoda
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoda/
Xgrowth
https://xgrowth.com.au/
Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/
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Shahin. Welcome to the BOSS podcast.
shahin-hoda:Thanks for having me.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, no problem. I really agree. I appreciate you agreeing to come on the show. I'm really excited about today. We've got some great things to share that I think the audience is going to be find super valuable for for many of our listeners that are trying to sell organizations. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So can, can you get, tell us a little bit about Shaheen and of course you're the founder and CEO, is that right? of XGrowth
shahin-hoda:That's right? Yeah. So We're a, we're an ABM agency. And would that, would, that really means is that we work with B2B organizations who are looking to kind of land and expand mid-market and enterprise deals. So that's the, we can kind of go in there and work with them on a strategy and then work with them own execution. That's us in a nutshell. Yeah, Okay. So, perfect. So how did we get here? Because I think that's a great little introduction, right? So you and I have got the same client and we've been asked to Michael, marketing's not stepping on sales outreach and sales outreach stepping on, you know, marketing starts. So that's pretty, that's pretty much what it was. Right. Yeah, it was pretty much it like you. We were, we were working with him from the marketing side and you're working with him from the sales side and and we had obviously connected before. And I was at, at some point, somebody in the organization said, oh, we're, we're working with mark. And I'm like, hold on. I know. would love to have a chat. So and that that's, that's how we connected again. And, and here we are.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah. And then we were talking about the strategies that you've put in place for this particular client. I'm not sure whether we're allowed to mention them or not. And I'm not sure we might've received a copy of check that before we came on. And I thought and we, you were sharing with me the strategies that you're putting in place to try and land some of these big accounts. And I was like, oh man, this is awesome. We've just got to share this with everybody because. Well, people just have to know that this stuff exists and they can do this because I think, I think they know what a surface level what's about. They're not really, they're definitely not going to be across the depth and the thought processes that are good for our harness and the quality of the, the IBM that you're putting together. So really keen to to unpack some of that and share some of those examples. So. When you, when you're ABM marketing for large accounts to try and win accounts for your clients, good at good size to what sort of things are you, are you doing? What, tell us what that entails.
shahin-hoda:Yeah. So, you know, we, we really start with understanding. The, the accounts that they're trying to go after. Right. What, what do these accounts look like? How big are they? What does the average customer value or average contract value? However they measure the deal size so that then we can kind of suggest strategies to go and acquire these customers. Right. So and in most cases, These are deals that are in the hundreds of thousands, if not in, you know, millions of dollars when when, when these organizations are going to go in and close them. So that's where we kind of start understanding these accounts, what their accounts are. And then we decide on what kind of strategy makes sense for these organizations, right? For these councils they're going after. And it's really, that's a really key part because. Sometimes someone would come to us and they'll like, Hey, we are a SAS company. We charge $50,000 a year. And it, it might, or even less than that. And they're like, we want to do ABM. And we're like, no, you don't do ABM because you'll never see your money back. And, and in particular ad campaigns would, would have a, a very finite number of accounts. So, you know, we would run a campaign. The law. I think the largest campaign that we've ran has had 125 accounts in it. Right. And that was it. And the smaller, the in terms of number of accounts, smallest campaign that we ran had one account in it. So so it's, it's taking that mindset and thinking about.
mark_mcinnes:Nope.
shahin-hoda:Hey, these are really important accounts for my organization, and I want to give them a lot of love. Now, sometimes it might be expansion might be, you know, your organization has landed at a big bank they are, you know, you've, you've sold a million dollars to the bank and you're saying, Hey, this bank has potential to become $5 million. So working on that strategy, those are, you know, that other extreme where you have maybe one or five accounts in a campaign. And then the other, the other side is where you going after net new acquisition and you might have 20 5,000 accounts and account.
mark_mcinnes:Gotcha. Okay. So if I sit down with my sales team or the, or the C level and go, these are the top 25 accounts that we want to try and land in the next 18, 24 months. What's the best way for us to get into those accounts potentially we would then reach out and ask for help with you.
shahin-hoda:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. And you know, it also depends. I keep saying it depends on, and I know people hate hearing that, but it also depends on the level of sophistication of the accounts that you're going after. Right. So if you're trying to close a bank, That's very different compared to when you're trying to close a, you know, maybe 500 seat organization in the construction industry or in the tech industry, right. Tech is probably a better example because they're, they're, you know, move fast and break things where banking a large bank is very conservative. So the strategies would also differ between the type of accounts that you go on.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, W w what about government? Does it, does it, do you work with government as well, or are
shahin-hoda:Yeah, that's, that's that's also the same thing. You know, w w when you're approaching government longer sales cycle, extremely risk averse, where you need to think about is you, it's going to be really hard for you to land anything in like three to six months. It's, it's an, a lot of situations that 9, 12, 18 month kind of lives the SOC sales side. So then the, the approach that you have to take is they're very risk averse. We need to really nurture them through that journey until they are open to have a conversation with us and even consider us, and whether it's a tender process, whatever it is, but yeah, you're right. It, government is another curve ball in there that changes your strategy and your approach.
mark_mcinnes:So, and so what are we exactly talking about here? Are we talking about, is it content marketing? Is that the best way to describe it? Is that what we're doing
shahin-hoda:Probably probably not. So content market was definitely part of it. Right. So what I usually tell people is, think about account and there are many names for it. Account based marketing account based engagement, account, speak experience. Think about it. All the marketing channels and the ABM sits as a strategy level. So you can leverage events as part of your ABM strategy. You could leverage your content marketing as part of your ABM strategy. So I'll give you an example. So. We were a big telco, we're running a campaign against them. And, you know, a client of ours had landed at deal, which was about one point something million dollars. And they said, you know, this big telco is worth is worth $7 million for us. Right. So what we did was we did tons of research in this big telco in terms of what are their plans for the future? What are they are looking at doing? You know, what are some of the challenges that the telco space is facing? And we created, micro-sites dedicated micro-sites for this telco. Like it had their logo on it. It was talking about, Hey, this is what you need to think about. So it was only meant for people working at the telco that, that particular telco to kind of look at that landing page. Then we created blog posts for that. So that's where the content piece comes in. We then we also created an email. Like we wrote a whole ebook for that company and they has, they have a, and I'm trying not to use terminology because I would, I think people would immediately know who I'm talking about, but they, they have, they have a plan for a couple of years ahead. And we said, we did the research and we're like, all right, these are the four objectives. And then we created that ebook talking about. For those four objectives. This is how this, this client of ours can help you and create a whole ebook crafted video components out of that. And then leverage direct mail as well. With the IBA, sending the ebook, creating a video brochures to kind of send it to the main decision makers in this account. So you can see how. Content marketing came into place. Some digital advertising was definitely part of the, part of the process, lot of research and all of that come, come into come into the picture to kind of deliver that that, that campaign. Right. So it's all of it. It's a mix of everything for these specific things.
mark_mcinnes:It sounds like it's a lot of fun to do.
shahin-hoda:It is I'll T I'll tell you I'll actually, I'll give you another example. Okay. This is, this is a little bit more, more fun. So we had a, so this was obviously a campaign that I, the one I just told you was, was like one account. We're doing this against one account. There was another campaign that we ran for 20. And what we did for them was we retargeting to individuals within, within this organization. And one was the CEO and the other one was the CIO. And what we did was we we, we started running ads across the web to these 20 accounts. We wanted to make sure that there was brand awareness. They at least know the logo of the company so that if a sales person reaches out, they will be like, I've seen that logo somewhere. I don't know where, but I've seen it somewhere and it just increases the likelihood of them answering an outreach. Then we created these this ebook that was specifically talking about their the, the area that our client focused. Printed it bounded really nicely sent it to the CIO. And then to the CIO, we said, Hey, we also have reached out to your CEO talking about this topic. We'd love to have a chat with both of you and see how we could potentially help what the CEO got was a box of cupcake. So we send the box of coffee to the CEO and on the cupcakes, it spilled out Google. And we had a letter that was attached to it as well. So that doesn't sound too creepy and we'll just, you know, a bit of explanation. But when they did Google their name, we bought their name as a Google. And they talked her name in Google and there was an ad right at the top of Google. So they, when they clicked on that, there was a dedicated landing page for them had their logo. It had their our client's logo. There was a video that was scroll down and say, you know, they click play and says, Hey, mark. Thanks a lot for jumping on the, on the land page. I hope you enjoyed the cupcakes we sent through. We also reached out to your CIO and then they will go into the pitch and they will talk about what they were trying to do. And and, you know, they also say, you know, if you, if you want, my details are below police, feel free to reach
mark_mcinnes:Okay.
shahin-hoda:Otherwise it will be. Through through other mediums, right? And then at the same time, there were calls and emails that were going out to kind of book meetings with these individuals. So you can see the digital coming into it, the direct mail piece coming into it, you know, the research that needs to go and identify these decision-makers the content piece that comes in. So all of it comes, comes, comes together and becomes really fun. Like, you know, we had situations.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah.
shahin-hoda:would pick up the phone and call the salesperson
mark_mcinnes:Okay.
shahin-hoda:whole office is talking about these cupcakes that you guys have said. And you know, it, it, it, it was definitely a great way to break ice and kind of equip the sales team to kind of have those conversations and open those doors.
mark_mcinnes:It's it reminds me. And I, this is not a, it reminds me a lot of, of a good solid LinkedIn outreach, you know, like a multichannel outreach. Like if you fan somebody yourself, you, you could almost your own. What type I send it to the CEO or if I go average sales person. Right. you could do some of
shahin-hoda:Yeah.
mark_mcinnes:strategies on a, on a low budget. If you've, if you've got three or four or five accounts that you want to talk to in a quarter, right. These, this is exactly what, what we talk about when you talk about using social selling omnichannel, you're just doing it, know, like at super polished top of.
shahin-hoda:with a bit of steroid
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, like yeah, exactly. On steroids. Exactly. So really cool. You shared some examples. You know, there was some, there was one about two factor authentification. Yeah, Can you share that? I thought that was, that was a really cool.
shahin-hoda:did. Yeah, we did another one. That we were talking to our we're talking to the prospects of our client about security and you know, the theme of the campaign was secured and new normal. So everybody talks about the new normal on COVID and we were like secured the new normal, you got multiple people working from home security is a big issue. So, so secure to normal new normal was the theme of the campaign. And what we did was we send the gift to to the main decision maker, to CIO of these organizations and the gift landed on their desk and what the gift was actually saying. So they have th there was a instead of a box that was the gift was inside of the safe. And the message was, Hey, this is how safe our, this is our secure, our gifts are I imagine how, how secure it's going to be when we work with your organization to to secure the whole thing. But when we did deliver the gift, the other, the other catch was there was They didn't have the code, the CIO didn't have the code and we send the code in a scratchy card that they have to like, kind of scratch it off to the security manager of the same organization.
mark_mcinnes:Wait. So you met, you made, you made your own scratchy card.
shahin-hoda:Absolutely. Absolutely. We made the scratchy card. had the, had the code for the lock there to the scratchy card, right. And that link to the security manager. And we told them that, Hey, you guys need to talk to each other to to make this happen. And this, this security manager would, would scratch it off. This is to two factor authentication, man, this is again to the extent that we go with our gifts to make sure that they're fully secure. And again, the whole concept was to have these convers, to have these people meet, create a bit of buzz around the office. You know, we had we, we had people from really large organizations. And in this I'm quoting this, our client, he called me up and he said, look, this company. Massive name. He's like they called us up and they said, Hey, we really love this concept. We don't think we have a need for you guys. But this was so creative. We're happy to give you a meeting in two weeks time and have a chat. And it's just awesome to hear those kinds of.
mark_mcinnes:So it sounds like the, you know, there's no single answer and I guess that's exactly what you're gonna say, but know, if, if, if I've got 50 clients or 40, 30 clients, you know, like the inside that sector that you're talking about, that I want to talk to in the next 18 months,
shahin-hoda:Yeah.
mark_mcinnes:Punch it to our need to, to be able to do this in a grown-up way now, you know, obviously you creating your own scratchy codes is going to be significantly. Time-consuming take up a bit of creative spice and cost some money. Right. You know, w how do you know where that cutoff is? Like, whether that's, how do you work that stuff out?
shahin-hoda:I mean, that comes to the first point that we talked about, right? It, it, your, your, your average contract value is so important. And I mean, some of the stuff that we do when Oracle tries to close a $50 million deal, they don't care for, you know, they would, they would allocate half a million dollar for for marketing for that. Right. So, and that's obviously extreme, for example, I know Westpac and sorry, not Westpac. IBM had a had a really big deal. And they started a campaign just for that one account three years in advance. And they were just, they have dedicated team members, three years working on a renewal. That that they wanted to achieve. So, so it really depends on the size of the deal that you're looking at. Right. And and it does not mean that you got to send a safe and your own scratchy card for every single account, because it doesn't financially make sense is, is they're expensive. Like, you know, we would look at, you know, these could be a $50,000 campaign,$60,000 campaigns that that you would run across a number of accounts. What I'm trying to say is there is a lot that goes into the process to decide how many accounts you're going to be going after. What is, what is the amount that you, what is the budget that you can allocate per account? So that for, for the business as a whole, it also makes financial sense.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, Completely. I get it. Have you ever been in this situation, must get a real boss. When, when they ring up inside, my family landed a meeting with the CEO, but you must be sweating
shahin-hoda:Yeah,
mark_mcinnes:between sending all that stuff out and hearing that back. Right.
shahin-hoda:that's correct. That's correct. And, and I think, I think, look over time. I've got better, right? Because you know, the first times when we were doing these kinds of campaigns, it was like, oh my God, is it going to work? But you know, as we, as we start to better and better understand the what works and what doesn't work, then obviously we bring a certain, we also bring a certain confidence that that organizations don't have because, know, sending a $400 direct mail package to somebody and not being sure whether it's going to work on it. You know, that's a risk for, for a marketing manager. So so that's definitely that was definitely a concern in the early days of like, you know, is this gonna work? Is this not going to work? Are we going to get that meeting? And over time we, you know, we start to learn more and more what works and now I'm, I'm not as worried, you know, now, in fact now, you know, we have an exercise that we do with our clients. We kind of do a reverse ROI calculation of, you know, what, what do we expect to see from a campaign here? And unless something crazy happens, like we've had situations where a week before a campaign Sydney goes into LA. And that's not good. That is not good because you know, you've gone and planned based on, there is no lock down. Everything is open and then suddenly certain things get, you know, you have to improvise on certain, certain stuff. So but with those. Yeah. And now, even now we've put, put measures in place that if there is locked down, how do we, how do we kind of go around it? And it's hard to get direct mail to people, but but if there are no crazy things that would happen the week before campaign we have a good understanding based on number of campaigns that we ran that, you know, what are we going to see? What kind of results are we going to see? So not as much these days, but definitely in the early days.
mark_mcinnes:So, is it easy for you to quantify that for us? So like, if, if you're reaching out to 20 businesses and there's, let's say there's two people in each business that you want to talk to. I think you've been using example of CEO and CIO as an example, you know, did too many people get those things and just ignore them? Or do you get a, you know, a 50% response rate roughly? I mean, most people must at least. Because of the level of creativity that's going into it, they must be a point, an inflection point where people go, there's so much work being put into this. I've got to take a phone call or at least sight, you know, thanks. But no, thanks. I can't see too many of these going, you know, being opened and not getting any response at all, or am I
shahin-hoda:Yeah, no, no. You're you're you're right. So I'll, I'll tell you let's let's let's I'll give you a more specific example, right? So mid-market, let's say mid market thousand seats in a boat, an envelope, right? That's what I would say, mid market. So 200 to a thousand seat organization. A very sophisticated campaign. can get responses of up to 80% of less kind of less sophisticated campaigns. We've been able to get 25%. Right. So like if we're targeting a hundred accounts booking meetings and holding meetings, what about 25% of us? But if you run a very elaborate campaign like you would have direct mail pieces again, that you have to make sure it makes sense financially for the business, but if you have all those pieces in place, we've seen as high as like 80% having some sort of a conversation with a decision maker that we're talking. At those accounts, which is crazy numbers. Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, obviously all of them are going to turn into pipeline and turn into revenue, but it allows the the the sales person to have a conversation with with a CIO or, you know, it might be whoever it is that they're, they're going.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, I'll tell you what the the sales rep, the sales person that takes that first meeting certainly wants to be on their bit, very best game. If they've spent, organization spent, you know, X thousand dollars on getting the meeting, you wouldn't want to be having a bad night the night before you'd want to be pretty well rested. And well-rehearsed,
shahin-hoda:Yeah, rocking up hangover. I'm hung over and just be like, so what are we doing? Yeah, it's so true. And you know what marketing is like, what we, what we usually see is like marketing is like, like a Hawk over the sales team of like, what. Is that reporting. I am not buying. You did not enter that into the CRM in this situation that needs to go. I need to have full visibility in terms of what is going on. Otherwise we will pull your accounts out of the out of the campaign. So yeah, for sure, for sure.
mark_mcinnes:yeah, yeah. That meeting go. Oh man, you wouldn't believe it. I turn up to the room and dress. Yeah. I went to the warehouse, not the office.
shahin-hoda:That is not going to go down.
mark_mcinnes:buddy.
shahin-hoda:Yeah, that is not going to go down well.
mark_mcinnes:That's right. So have you got a story that you're able to share that no way things haven't gone. Right. You know, you've sent out a bunch of stuff and it just didn't ring the bell. You know, you might need to be careful about the way you phrase that. Um, Conscious that I'll have to let you know about that in advance.
shahin-hoda:Yeah, I'm trying to think of. We, we put a lot of care into, into direct mail. And I'm actually looking at my board in front of me that has name of name of clients. And, you know, I'll tell you what, like we've had success incorporating direct mail into our campaigns. Right. And then. We went, we went back and we said, Hey, we're going to take direct mail out of it. And, you know, we still gonna see great results or we're still going to see the recent results ma you know, w we're going to subtract certain percentages, but we're going to see, see results. And we did it. And we, we weren't able to get that kind of w what we anticipated, we would get even with the reduced success rates. And it kind of showed us the impact of some of these tactile elements, these, these, you know, physical components on a campaign and, and the impact that they have into a, into a campaign. So, you know, that's the, that's the example that I can remember where. You know, we kind of went and said, oh, you know, financially doesn't make sense. Let's not put any direct mail in there. Even though there was maybe room for a certain type of direct mail, we kind of took all that out. And the climb was kind of like pushing for the budget to be reduced. And, we, you know, we also felt confident that we're going to get results and we didn't. So we've, we've seen a lot of results. So there hasn't been situations that we would say. You know, really cool and and not work out, but there's definitely been situations that maybe we got to too, too proud or too is probably the better word. then and then, you know, we, we took out certain pieces and it didn't work.
mark_mcinnes:So I'm a big fan of direct mail. Every team that I sit down and talk to. And when we build out their cadence, you know, so, you know, I like a cadence. I like to build out you know defined steps for outreach across multiple channels. I always introduced direct mail at the start of the conversation, if I guess, yeah, that's great. We should definitely do something. And of course they all think, oh, we can just print out a bunch of brochures. Right. And get marketing to send them to like none other than that, what we want to do handwritten. So maybe we'll just get like a. One page of, you know, maybe the results page of a white paper that we've already print we've already had. And we'll print that out in black and white. And you can write a note that goes alongside it. Hey, Shane, I thought this was interesting for you because right. And then you can write on the envelope by hand and then go and put, put it in the letterbox and because we're all grown up. So we're only chasing, you know, 10 new conversations a month. that going to be? You don't have to put like 20 envelopes in the mail by the time I finished saying that they're all nice too.
shahin-hoda:Yup. I know. I know I've been there. I've been there.
mark_mcinnes:they weren't even, I might've been wrought sentences on a piece of paper and stick it in the envelope. Oh, that seems like it's too hard I know when people do the basics, you know, the simple stuff, it, it works, you know, a couple of years ago we printed off a bunch of dos, like a six sided dice. It's like a funny. You know, to dual sided triangle thing and it was had coaching conversation. So the idea was you'd sit at your sales meeting and you'd roll it around. And you know, that adapt and get asked questions from your sales team. Right. We'd send it to sales leaders as a way to start conversations And that worked really well, sending that out in the first instance, a lot of people would having something on their desk. He's like, hi, I'll send you that dice that funny looking diced a couple of days ago or a week ago. Oh Yeah. I wonder what that was and where that came from. Like, and that's like, when we had the might in Toronto, we had thousands of them have soup. We've still got thousands of them because we decided to just keep, you know, is only this much 10 thousands that just get 10,000 of them,
shahin-hoda:Yeah, exactly. I hear ya.
mark_mcinnes:But, but it's, it's great, but it's so powerful, but so many as soon as the, soon as it gets harder than sending an email, nobody's interested. It's crazy.
shahin-hoda:I, you know, it's funny, we had this issue, we had this issue internally with with our fails, right. Of like our sales team. Send letters out. Right. yeah, it was, it was hard. And, and what I also noticed was that an interruption their flow. Like, you know, also a sales person gets into the flow of making call, making, call, making call. then the whole letter thing becomes a little bit of, a little bit of an interruption. So we even inter internally had to introduce somebody who would do that for them. You know, we, we did some in Philippines, they were like ship it out before campaign would go live. there was a lot of planning that would go into it, obviously they're like, you have to tell them what to write that final touch of personalization might not be there. But yeah, we found, we found challenging even with ourselves. And that's why, you know, a lot of, lot of these campaigns we sent handwritten letters. But we, you know, we do. At errand not, or the sec it's signed by the salesperson, but but you know, they sometimes might not even know what it says. yeah, I, I
mark_mcinnes:Okay.
shahin-hoda:know what you mean. It's it's it's hard to get sales to do that. Logistic logistical work.
mark_mcinnes:Yeah, but you know, the results are differently there if you take the time enough to do so. I mean, so, I mean, I just love this stuff and I wanted to share that with as many people as we could on the spot. So thanks for coming on. Like how can people get more of, of of yourself or more of XScribe what's the best way for them to do that? If they more.
shahin-hoda:us up. It's X growth.com to you. That's for x-ray, G R O w T h.com that I, you or hit me up. Shaheen Hoda. There is no other Shane Hoda on LinkedIn. You just talk to them. And and I'll probably be the only result. So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and more than happy to connect with people.
mark_mcinnes:Lovely. And you see podcasts, you'll go. Okay.
shahin-hoda:Yeah. Podcasts will go on and you know, if anyone's interested. Yeah. On
mark_mcinnes:Okay.
shahin-hoda:aisle. Thank you very much for that. I'll if anyone's interested on the marketing side of all of this check out growth colony. When we, we share a lot about ABM and ABX in there and tips and strategies. So us out there as well.
mark_mcinnes:Yep. My thanks for coming on and sharing that, that, that was really cool stuff. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time.
shahin-hoda:really, really enjoyed this conversation and thanks for having me.
mark_mcinnes:Thanks man.