Guest post by Andrew Kappel, Global Manager of Sales Development at Protegrity
At Protegrity, we have a small but growing team of highly skilled Business Development Managers, who function largely as SDRs and are distributed across the world. While our team is used to working across time zones, we too are suddenly thrust into the same unique challenge as other sales organizations as we navigate this mandatory work from home (WFH) environment.
Like other sales orgs, we use Outreach as our System of Action to bring the data to life in our CRM, Salesforce, our System of Record. Outreach gives our sales reps a guided workflow for executing the right activity, with the right messaging, at the right time.
Here are three ways that we rely on Outreach to execute our sales processes at a consistently high-standard across the globe, and how we are using these to help the Protegrity team throughout this extended WFH state.
1. Track leading indicator inputs
Adjust for uncontrollable external factors
As we deal with an unprecedented health crisis that has the potential for major economy-altering effects, we need to shift our expectations. At the same time, it's critical for us as a sales team to maintain consistency and continue to build momentum.
A key leading indicator metric that we track closely is Meaningful Connects. We’ve traditionally defined Meaningful Connects as a piece of new information that either helps us to qualify or disqualify the investment of additional effort prospecting into an account. Each team member strives to each get twenty Meaningful Connects a week. Outreach makes it easy for our teams to log this activity as part of their daily workflow.
For example: when logging a call, our users select Call Disposition to automatically record Meaningful Connects activity back to our CRM:
2. Iterate & learn from the best
Understand what is working and what isn’t
With an intuitive dashboard and clear Sequence and template reporting, Outreach enables our management team to peek under the hood and see exactly what messaging and which tactics or touchpoints are most effective.
With this visibility into what our top performers are doing, we can continuously iterate and reverse engineer our best reps’ messaging and tactics and then share it across our team and also ramp up our new hires quickly.
During the current health crisis, we have made adjustments and added in extra thoughtful and personalized touchpoints to show our prospects that we care about them during this moment that is difficult and filled with uncertainty.
3. Use Master Sequences for easy updates & standardization
Allow users to tweak messages to reflect geographic and cultural nuances
Our partners at RevShoppe helped us fine-tune our messaging and consolidate our Sequences into a few Master Sequence categories, which use a standard geographic and Sequence type naming convention)
For example:
- REGION - Cold Outbound Master Sequence (Q1’20)
- REGION - Inbound Master Sequence (Q1’20)
We have a few more niche categories such as "REGION - Revisit Protegrity Master Sequence (Q4’19)" used for targeting leads that were involved in prior meetings or opportunities but didn't convert into customers.
Using Master Sequences gives us many benefits, including more holistic reporting and simplified processes for when we modify our messaging.
Typically, we update and refresh our Master Sequences a few times a year. However, with the current uncertain times ahead, we rolled out quick updates and tweaks to our most often-used Sequences and Templates.
Updates to our Master Sequences include more focus on the people who are receiving Protegrity’s messaging, and being more empathetic within our sales messaging, increasing time between steps, and softening our Calls to Action from, "Do you have 15 minutes on Thursday afternoon?" to: "If you'd like to learn more, perhaps we can setup a time to talk next month".
In these unfamiliar times, Outreach allows us to maintain consistency and focus on empathy in our sales messaging. Our management team can easily adapt and iterate in near real-time to provide the best possible experience for our users and, most importantly, for our prospects and customers.
