Just Send Me Some Information

1. Let’s get a brief introduction to Storydoc. What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?

2. What does the typical “send me some information” lifecycle look like?

   • What are most reps doing today that doesn’t work?

3. People often look at SDR outcomes as binary – they take a meeting, or they don’t. I don’t subscribe to that, and it sounds like your solution is built to help with the other outcomes of prospecting (yes, but not now, and no, but maybe later). Talk about those other outcomes and where most SDRs falter.

   • How do you get someone excited to take a meeting when they have zero trust or context to do so?

4. Zoom out – how pervasive of a problem is this? The period of time between your first outreach and booking a meeting can vary a ton. What percentage of SDRs do you think struggle with that?

   • And what about buyers? What percentage of them actually take the time to read a follow-up email or dive into the shared content?

5. Let’s get tactical. What are some best practices that SDRs can adopt to improve the impact of their follow-up emails & collateral? What data do you have to back that up?

Top 3 Takeaways

🎮 …if you think about it, every time that we are on a call with a potential buyer, may that be a cold call or even communicating over email….we are sort of in control of the process.

The problem is that as soon as a prospect asks for more information, reps cede that control to them. And without that control, it becomes difficult to guide buyers further down the funnel.

That creates a disconnect, and reps usually rush to fill that space with brochures and PDFs. The problem is, those don’t do a great job of moving buyers to the next stage in the sales process.

So reps either don’t cede control (become pushy), or they find a new way to fill the gap.

Itai (and we’re guessing everyone else) isn’t a fan of pushy salespeople, so his solution focuses on finding new and innovative ways of bridging the gap.

I always felt that regardless of how good I would be on that communication, [the prospect] eventually needs to go back home and create a use case for it. Get some buy-in, get someone from another department to look into this, maybe their boss.

And I always felt frustrated that I had no ability to actually make an impact. It really would come down to how good this person is at getting other people convinced and engaged.

For him, bridging that gap meant making the process of taking information internally easier and more powerful. Going beyond a follow-up email and creating dynamic (and trackable) content helped him understand who was really interested and who wasn’t.

===

📊 [Your prospect] is trying to figure out if spending more time with you or with your company is a good fit for what they need or what they need to do. And that’s where data comes in. Even a little bit of data could really help you…figure out how the other side is discovering you. And that’s why even if you have very basic CRM tracking, for example, you might be able to see if they would revisit the website or get back to your email quite a few times. That usually is a great indicator that they are showing it internally.

Discovery is a two-way street. While you’re trying to figure out whether or not you can help your prospect, they’re trying to figure out if your solution is the best fit for their needs. And that discovery will likely extend beyond your initial conversation with them.

So not only does the content you follow up with need to be personalized and compelling, you also need a way to track whether or not the prospect is engaging with it (or other content on your site).

That helps you:

1. Prioritize prospects. Like we said above, if you see a lot of activity from an account after that discovery call, they’re likely more interested than an account that doesn’t.

2. Categorize content. Some content will be more compelling than others – it depends on your prospect’s specific needs and use case. But over time, you can start to find patterns in that engagement and select the best-fit content for particular prospects.

===

⌚ And let’s say that you’ve written a state-of-the-art email with a great subject line, someone would actually give you those five, ten seconds of attention. Now, the question is, how can you make those 10 seconds turn into a minute of truly listening to what you have to say?

Itai claims that 90% of opened decks are bounced off within 10 seconds. That’s…not great.

We’re all guilty of it – asking a sales rep to send them information, opening the follow-up email to skim the content, closing out of the email, and never doing anything with it.

(ok, maybe not all of us)

How do reps stop that cycle? Itai suggests modeling follow-up content to look like te beginning of a new Netflix series. Getting prospects to bite early and holding their attention is something Netflix does really well, and there’s no reason to believe that we can’t replicate a similar experience on the B2B sales side of things.