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Outreach Unleash19 Top 5 Takeaways - an Attendee Perspective
Outreach Unleash 2019 is over. 😪
The allure of three days and nights on a private island drew in a crowd of 1146 sales pros, thought leaders, SDRs, and sales techs. But it was the connections, learnings, and skills development that served as the main draw.
Now that it’s all over (having danced to as much 90’s music as possible🕺) we are left wondering, “What did we actually learn from Outreach #Unleash2019?”
If you happened to forget your notepad or were one of the almost 500 people on the waitlist this year, don’t worry. We flew in 10 of our global outbound sales strategists and they were able to attend every keynote, break out session, and sponsorship booth.
Outreach Unleash19 Top 5 Takeaways - an Attendee Perspective:
1) Embrace Relationships
There are so many articles and thought pieces floating around that declare what works or doesn’t. What you should focus on or avoid. How to increase sales or go out of business. Truth is, most of this is fluff. Written in an effort to drive one’s own stature, versus driving your growth. I mean, we’ve even written a post about this “clickbait.”
But, what you learn from an event like Unleash is that the people behind these posts are real. They do care. They are invested in the industry. It’s just, you are better served building a relationship with them and getting to a point they can connect 1x1 to drive real value and provide real advice.
If you find yourself following the advice of leaders in Sales Development, do yourself a favor - reach out to them, invest in building a relationship, have meaningful conversations, and the insights you’ll gain from their perspective will guide your own growth and the growth of your business.
2) Test & Optimize
The idea that you could have a foolproof list of subject lines / email templates / call scripts that you could use as a template for your outbound sales program would make lead generation a breeze!
But the problem lies in the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all template to any aspect of an outbound sales strategy.
So, learn from industry experts. Take home insights from events and conferences (like Unleash 2019). Utilize all of this as a baseline for your own unique strategy.
The great thing about Outbound Sales is the ability to test. Here are a few outcomes to test:
- Test your go-to-market messaging
- Test markets to find your product fit
- Test to find out who your decision maker is
- Test to find out the price point your market is willing to pay
- Test to find the use case your market cares most about
Once you test your outbound, you’re empowered to do so much (outside of sales projections). You get to redefine your message. You can adjust your service or product offering.
Just look at how Peloton CEO John Foley explains the exponential increase in sales after increasing the product price.
3) Outbound Prospecting Answers 4 Main Questions
This one is straightforward but will help drive “response” performance of your outbound.
Bottom line, a good outbound email answers four questions (below).
If the email answers these questions, you will get a conversion. Structure outbound along these lines.
- Should I pay attention to you? If yes:
- Do I like you?
- Can you help me solve a problem?
- Are you credible?
4) Product Differentiation is Dead. Win with HOW You Sell Instead.
The speaking session from Chris Orlob, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Gong.io spoke some truth. Fact is, for the majority of businesses your product or service isn’t “special.” With the rate of technology and products being developed, even if you do have something “great” on your hands, it’s likely going to be imitated very quickly. Chris knows this more than anyone, as Chorus.ai was additionally a sponsor at Unleash positioned right across from the Gong booth.
But, that’s ok...who doesn’t like competition. (With the crowded Lead Generation space, we get this more than anyone.)
Competition is great because it breeds differentiation for the market, outside of your product. Your team comes forefront and you drive success through your approach vs. relying on features.
Chris broke down the 3 realities to consider to WIN your market:
- Buyers can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors
- Use only relevant social proofs; buyers don’t care if Google is your customer. They are nothing like them.
- Describe the buyer's problem better than they can describe it themselves. If you can do this, they will automatically assume you have the best solution.
5) Understand how technology is advancing the Sales Development profession
By nature, the Sales Development Rep (SDR) role will always be human. This is something that Sergey Olexa and myself believe heavily in and the reason we founded Leadium. But, we’ve also always understood how technology is both altering and advancing the profession.
It use to be, that you hire a young sales professional (maybe even a recent grad) and it was their grit and drive that made them successful in the role. With a little bit of training, they would understand the concept of “pain points” and “value propositions” and combine those methods of communicating with potential customers (phone, email, etc).
But technology has advanced. Not only in the way of optimizing the engagement of prospecting (through platforms like Outreach), but Gmail and Outlook advanced in their ways of monitoring your communication and punishing you for bad practices.
The evolution of the SDR role has begun.
Today, you can’t just get by with grit and drive to be successful. You need to be a strategist, a technologist, heck...you even need to have an understanding of the human psyche. The great news is, the “harder” the SDR role becomes, the more solidified the “human” component becomes in driving the role.
Still, your job is to merge the continued technology with the human.
Craig Rosenburg the Co-Founder & Chief Analyst of TOPO spoke in detail on this during his “Crystal ball: Where Sales Engagement is Going” breakout.
Craig reiterated that the SDR work will always require a human touch, however, the bots are coming and are in many ways already here. That this technology advancement will not necessarily take SDR jobs, but rather augment their jobs and offload many of the manual tasks that are currently taking up too much of their time and resources.
Bots aside, Leadium is already providing this same value now. Like solving the problem of how two thirds of your SDR’s time is spent on non-selling activities.
That’s not ok. You pay them to sell!
That’s a wrap for Outreach Unleash19! Now onward to Unleash20!
The allure of three days and nights on a private island drew in a crowd of 1146 sales pros, thought leaders, SDRs, and sales techs. But it was the connections, learnings, and skills development that served as the main draw.
