🎙️Transcript: Outbound Kitchen

Outbound Kitchen - Sales Podcast
"How to build a strong outbound culture with Prospecting Days"
Elric Legloire, Ralph Barsi
January 11, 2025

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[00:00:00] Today, I'm joined by a Ralph Barsi, a sales leader who has generated millions in pipeline from a single day of prospecting, but here's the hard truth. Most company rely only on inbound leads.

And this is a terrible idea. Is not inbound supposed to be the easiest way to fill your pipeline? Sure. But the number one reason sales team fail is an empty pipeline.

And inbound alone won't fix that. Ralph learned this back in 2015 when he launched prospecting days at ServiceNow. In this episode with Ralph, the VP of Sales of Kahua, we will show you how to run effective prospective days that can transform your sales organization and build a strong outbound culture.

You will learn how to create millions in pipeline in just one day. Welcome back to the Outbound Kitchen podcast. I'm Elric, the Outbound chef, and this is your go to resource for scaling Outbound.

Let's get cooking.

Let's start with this quote you've included in your prospecting days.

So the number one reason for [00:01:00] failure in sales is an empty pipeline. The number one reason for an empty pipeline is a failure to prospect every day. Sales team often struggle with an empty pipeline and that's a common reason for failure because they don't prospect. And from your experience, why is it so difficult for sales team to keep up with prospecting these days?

Because it's hard to do. Prospecting is really hard to do. And I really mean that with respect to all facets and steps in the prospecting process. It's hard to identify who your high value target accounts are and who the key personas within those accounts are. It's hard to actually warm up an engagement and reach out to them, whether it's, you know, through a second or third degree contact of yours or directly to build quick credibility and rapport and engage them in a conversation, highlight surface and agitate any pains that they might be experiencing today and then introduce your [00:02:00] offering and build a great relationship and get them to buy more and renew with you.

And that's not easy to do. So. That's the answer to that question. It's a good one. And also do that every single day. That's right. And repeat the process over and over. Yeah. Something else also you mentioned in your guide for prospecting days is companies rely too much on inbound leads. What's the risk of that?

Yeah, so two things. One, the guide that you're talking about is called prospecting to generate pipeline. And this is a guide I published in 2023 with my colleagues at Scale Venture Partners. And it provides a breakdown of how to run a successful prospecting day in your organization or at your company.

Depending, of course, on the size of your company. So that's the first part is the guide. The second part you brought up was how you can't really rely [00:03:00] solely on inbound leads being generated from the company. Now, this runs the gamut because some companies are really good at demand generation. And as a sales development rep or a sales rep, You can rely on an influx of viable leads that come from events or SEO offerings online, or a number of different channels.

On the other side of the spectrum, it's not as frequent that you're going to get steady volume of inbound leads in other companies. And so you always have to have in your back pocket the prospecting muscle and you have to have that as an arrow in your quiver that you can always pull from and take the initiative on your own to generate your own leads through prospecting.

So you're famous about this because before we were recording this, actually, I told you, I know some [00:04:00] companies run this, but I think you're the first one I've been following for the past few years that talks about this. Yeah. But also share the way to run that. So for those who doesn't know what's a prospecting day, so what is it?

Well, first of all, thank you. I'm hardly famous. Uh, however, I am among very few people who actually share the how and the tactics of running a successful prospecting day in your organization. I'm certainly not the first person to run a prospecting day, but I've learned from some of the greats. Throughout my career, and I feel compelled to give back to our communities that we can be better representatives of salespeople in general.

So for the leaders listening and anybody interested in a prospecting day, essentially it's a full day. It's dedicated to booking or hosting meetings with prospects and customers. When it's done right, Your team can generate millions of dollars worth of sales opportunities in one day. So I'll say that [00:05:00] again, you can generate millions of dollars worth of sales opportunities in one day.

So obviously as we talked about, depending on your company size or what phase of growth your company is in the midst of, it can involve the revenue organization or it can involve the entire company. But that is a very long answer to what prospecting day is. And when did you start with Prospecting Days actually in your career?

Because I know when I was preparing this, I know you as ServiceNow, you were running Prospecting Days. So did you start at this moment and where did you start Prospecting Days? Yes. Uh, I'd first learned of Prospecting Day when I was leading global sales development at ServiceNow. So I was there between 2015 and 2019.

And one of the marketing leaders had brought Prospecting Day to ServiceNow from her previous company. And the concept of it was fascinating and we were able to pull it off at scale. So I have since iterated [00:06:00] on prospecting day in subsequent companies that I've represented. I went on to work at Trey and we did it there successfully.

And now I'm at Kahua and we're doing it regularly and doing it successfully on a almost monthly basis. It's pretty much every six weeks. Now what prompts prospecting day. And what drives leaders to create one is when you don't have enough pipeline. And when you have a big revenue target and you don't think you've got enough viable pipeline to support what that revenue target is, you kind of freak out.

And so the good news is, is that you can control the situation by creating a collective effort to generate new opportunities for your pipeline. And when you do it right, as I mentioned earlier, you can grow by leaps and bounds. In actually a short amount of time. And what, uh, why do you think it's different for example, because I know as their team, they are famous to run spiffs for example, [00:07:00] to when they need more pipelines.

So what do you think is different than running spiffs? It's a great question. So yeah, in sales leadership, we call it, you want to pull levers, you know, it's almost like. In an emergency, you're going to break glass and pull a lever. So that might mean you're following up on dormant leads or you're calling closed lost opportunities from a year or two prior, you're basically letting no stone go unturned and you're making sure that you're engaging.

With old audiences and new audiences. And some of the benefits that I have seen in my teams have seen from running prospecting days include, you know, the results of the work are instant. Like I said, it's a prospecting day. So by the end of a day, you have gone from A to B on activity levels, on meaningful conversations, on pipeline generated, on objections that you've heard from the marketplace, you probably have Intel on customer service.

Uh, the competitive landscape and people who [00:08:00] are talking to your prospects when you are not prospecting. So the results are instant. Number two, it's a team effort and there's a big difference between being on a team and being a team. So if the entire team is experiencing the lift from a successful prospecting day, now that informs everybody's morale, spirit.

And, um, camaraderie as you head towards that yearly revenue goal. Other things that I've noticed is motion causes emotion and where focus goes, energy flows. So if you keep those two mantras in mind and you see everybody making a collective effort to get on phones, to send emails, to speak with prospects, partners, customers, suspects, you start to Feel the momentum, whether you're working remotely or together in an office.

And then finally, it increases the probability of something incredible happening. Uh, I've done a number of prospecting days now over the last [00:09:00] several years, and we've created pipeline that has closed within 30 days, and this is pipeline we did not have prior to prospecting day. Uh, you see people go above and beyond what their normal remit and responsibilities are on a day to day basis, and that's exciting for everybody to watch and learn from.

So you already started to cover that. So we're going to unpack how you run a successful prospecting there, but you already started to talk about, uh, remote, for doing one remotely or doing it in office. So what's the difference? So how do you run that differently in, in a remote environment versus in office?

Sure. Well, first of all, you've got to create the fanfare and the camaraderie I talked about earlier. You've got to be very clear on the vision and the purpose behind even doing a prospecting day. And, uh, you know, I would implore all leaders to be better communicators and more frequent communicators, you know, 2024, [00:10:00] 2025, and people work all over the place now.

A lot of companies are working hard to pull people back into the office and they're doing that successfully. While others are doing just fine with everybody dispersed and remote. So if you, as the leader are communicating the mission clearly, cogently and frequently by way of all the different media channels that we have, people are going to get the message and you're going to create a two way street or a closed loop where you're hearing feedback as you prepare for the big prospecting day and you're getting everybody built up on it and lathered up and excited to be part of it.

So. During the day of prospecting day, it's critical that you're doing check ins with everybody on a regular basis. I have leveraged video platforms like loom, for example, where I'll create a message and I've done the same in teams. I've done the same in Slack. Uh, whatever your platform is at your business or on your team, make sure that you're [00:11:00] leveraging video because it's pretty powerful, uh, of course.

Uh, regular emails throughout the day, phone calls to individuals, maybe during the breaks, because we have a couple of breaks during prospecting day, always helps, uh, reinforce the message and get that communication open. So you started to talk about, you have breaks during the day. So what happens from beginning to end of a typical prospecting day?

Sure. So prospecting day usually kicks off in the morning and it usually starts about eight 30 to nine o'clock local time. So for about 15 minutes, you typically do a kickoff call. Hey, we're really excited that, uh, we're about to embark on prospecting day. We've got some aspirational goals here that we would like to hit by end of day, as well as some goals that we'd like to hit by midday.

You've, you're armed with the lists of people that you'd like to call, uh, you know what your talk track is. If you're not in sales, for example, and you're a sales [00:12:00] engineer, you've teed up demos and discovery calls for the day. If you're an executive, you're tapping your network to find executives and decision makers who represent the high value target accounts that we are looking at, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's typically what that kickoff call entails. And then there are just several steps throughout the day. You've got four rounds. Uh, the first round could go from 9 a. m. to 10 a. m. where we say good luck to everybody. We turn off the video and we turn off the phone and you know, the team phone call and everybody gets to work and you go from nine to 10, you might take a little break from 10 And then from 12 is round two.

Then you might convene as a team for five minutes during the lunch hour. Round three and four are similar to the morning. And then maybe you wrap up with a happy hour. So that's an example of a pretty straightforward prospecting day. Uh, that includes four different rounds, a kickoff call and a wrap up meeting.[00:13:00]

And as a leader that hosts this event, for example, so how do you prep for these days? So what do you do before a prospecting day? Do you prep that? I imagine that you already have the rhythm. I imagine to run them, but how long, when do you start preparing your prospecting day? Let's say you have one on Monday next week.

Do you prep that 10 days before a week? So what's your process? Depends. Wonderful question. It depends on the situation you're in, the pipeline that you need to generate, how urgent things are. So in our company today, we scheduled all the year's prospecting days in January. So we just, we sent an invite to everybody in the company that was a relevant party for prospecting day.

And we pinned the dates on the calendar. And I think by end of year, we'll do about nine prospecting days. And so the prep work starts by assembling a team that I call a [00:14:00] tiger team. And that tiger team will assign a theme to each of those prospecting days. Maybe you want to just focus on high value target accounts.

Maybe you want to focus on dormant Opportunities or closed lost opportunities. Maybe you want to, you know, lift the lid on all the old leads that have gone inactive. Maybe it's just a networking day. Maybe you're doing a ton of social media. Maybe everybody's posting about the latest release of your offering or an event that your company is attending.

And so depending on what the theme is, that is how everybody falls into line in terms of preparation. And, uh, the Tiger team could meet weekly, bi weekly, monthly. It's up to the cadence that you want to design as a leader and as a company. And you host the agenda, you pick an owner and maybe an executive sponsor to represent each individual prospecting day.

And now you're getting more and more people involved and more and more people inquiring about prospecting [00:15:00] day and more and more people interested. So what's interesting because I thought you were doing the same topic over and over so it sounds like you have like a different topic every time. So do you adapt the topic based on your goal for the quarter or how do you pick the topic?

Sure. So you don't have to have a different theme or topic. It could be the exact same thing repeated over and over. Uh, but we'll look for little gaps or flare ups in our company. For example, maybe we need to be doing a better job in driving relationships that we have with our partner ecosystem. So we will.

Deem one of our prospecting days dedicated to our partner ecosystem. And our BDRs might reach out to partners that we've not yet engaged with to let them know about our partner community. Uh, we might have people from the partner team itself. Reach out to check in and see, Hey, what does the next quarter look like?

[00:16:00] How could we be of service or the opposite? We've got a couple of leads for you that we'd like to talk to you about. How would you approach this? So it, like I said earlier, really runs the gamut on the types of themes that you want to label for a prospecting day. And it should depend on where the gaps are in your organization and what needs a little bit of lift.

Gotcha. And we talk about the leadership side. Now, if we talk about the rep side, so A's or BDRs, so, um, do they prepare, prepare this the day before? What's the process for that? It should be the, uh, several days before. And, uh, some examples, especially for reps or BDRs, they might want to create a list of prospects that they would like to engage with on prospecting day, not necessarily call and hope that they get a conversation, But schedule time to speak with those people on prospecting day, and they'll create a list.

They might send a preemptive email saying, I'd love to speak with you [00:17:00] on Thursday. In fact, I'll probably call you between 8 your time. If you pick up the phone and we talk, it's going to be a five minute call. And we're going to we're going to center that conversation on these three pieces that gives the.

prospect an opportunity to say, no, I'd like to reschedule or, you know, maybe they come up with more topics for the list in a perfect world, et cetera. But a lot of preemptive work is done to make sure that, uh, the rubber meets the road once prospecting day arrives. So you already started to talk about other teams.

So BDRs and AEs, I imagine they are the most involved in this. So let's talk about Kahua, for example. So do you, what other teams are involved on prospecting days? Sure. So we employ everyone from the executive leadership team to marketing, to the BDR team, to the sales reps, to the sales engineers. To customer [00:18:00] success to the partners.

Those are our critical business functions that get involved on prospecting day. I mentioned teams and slack earlier. So we have a dedicated channel to prospecting day. We give out prescriptive. We are the tiger team. We'll give out prescriptive. Recipes or plans, if you will, for each of the business functions that I just mentioned to make it very clear to them what it is we'd like them to do on prospecting days.

So there's no confusion and it's very clear for everybody as to what their responsibility is on that day. And you get great benefit from doing that because everybody's really fired up and they know what it is that their role is that day. Yeah, I got you. When you join the company in April, How did you introduce Prospecting Days?

Did you introduce that during the hiring process? That was part of your plan or how did you introduce Prospecting Days? Well, I, uh, I [00:19:00] did my due diligence to meet everybody on the team and, and get a real lay of the land and get acquainted with not only the amount of pipeline that we had, but how realistic that pipeline was.

And also took note quietly of the energy level and the spirit of the team. And I'm a pretty energetic, enthusiastic person. And I like to work with people who are like that as well. And on teams that are like that as well, because I feel like you can get a lot done when everybody's really excited about the same mission.

And so I raised it. I raised it, uh, in a board meeting and I raised it to our executive leadership team, uh, by talking first about the viability of our pipeline. I talked about the pipeline coverage that is required to, uh, have predictable, repeatable sales, and, uh, also felt that we needed to build that prospecting muscle that I mentioned earlier.

Uh, typically, [00:20:00] uh, if a company, for example, is reliant on. Let's say a handful of really big deals to help them make their number for the year. When those deals slip or push out, it's almost like the tide goes out and you get to see all the leftovers. And when you're not happy with the leftover pipeline there is, that should be a call to action.

Having done prospecting days at previous companies, it was a trigger for me. And it was the very first thing I leaned on in terms of building pipeline that's repeatable and viable and predictable. And I know how we can do it. And I know how we could do it well. And it goes a little something like this.

And I've introduced prospecting day and it did not fall on deaf ears. In fact, everybody was excited by the prospect of it, no pun intended. And, uh, within just a couple of weeks, we were already planning the very first one. And you said people were excited, maybe not like [00:21:00] our previous company, but did you get any skeptics or resistance for running Prospectus?

Because I know it's new, so maybe sometimes changes are not good, but how did you handle those concerns? Yes. So the answer is yes, I did. And the skeptics or cynics, uh, were, were for the most part teams that aren't used to prospecting. They're not a sales team. They're not a sales development team. They have different business functions with different responsibilities and different goals.

And so the word prospecting frightened a lot of people. People got insecure thinking that they don't know how they can make a contribution. Isn't that something for sales or sales development to do? Yeah. What do you think it is that I could do to help prospect and how I handled it is by being very prescriptive with them, getting a very clear understanding and having a clear understanding of what everybody's role is, uh, depending on their business function.

And talk to the customer success team about [00:22:00] the customers that they speak to on a regular basis. Uh, what their talk track typically looks like, how they share adoption and usage metrics to our customers. Whereas with the sales engineers, I was talking about discovery calls, demos, the questions they ask.

How could we be better? Perhaps we can create a standing demo that's publicly facing. So that we can invite the broader marketplace to see a high level demo of our offering. So everybody can play a part. Just the second you start, you know, shining a light on what it is they could do, they start to calm down and they start to get excited about it.

Yeah, I imagine because, yeah, that's, um, something I've seen, uh, people not, they don't enjoy prospecting, uh, because they don't see the value of it or they, they are not comfortable doing it because They think they are annoying people. I think we've outbound specifically for prospecting. It's maybe not the mindset, [00:23:00] but the way you approach it, if you think you're going to annoy them, that's obviously not the right way.

Yep, exactly. But I know for me, outbound or prospecting, it's more like about educating my prospect or customer on a specific problem. And when you're, you come up with like a potential solution for a problem, I If you teach them something new, that's. Not prospecting anymore. So you are showing them something new.

And I think that's the mindset for people who are skeptic with prospecting. That's the way I approach it. I couldn't agree with you more. Uh, so it starts up here in your head. If you think you're going to be an annoying salesperson reaching out to someone, you're likely going to come off that way.

However, if you flip the switch and you. Take to heart some of the things you just mentioned that you are an educator and you educate people in the market about some of the pains that, you know, like, uh, roles and titles are, are experiencing that they might be too, uh, you're going to get their interest.

Also, if [00:24:00] you're professional and tactful and you approach prospecting with class, you will be mindful of people's time. Uh, yes, you're interrupting them, but you're interrupting them with value. And if you're asking smart questions, if you're keeping things concise, succinct, brief, if you're prepared, if you've practiced your talk track and your calling, it's going to come off way better.

Lastly, if you're leveraging your network and the network of those around you in the right way, it's no longer a cold call, it's now a warm call. Something you're going to say is, yeah, You and I both introduced one another to people in our networks and it's been a very warm engagement because I got the referral from you and vice versa.

So pardon my interruption there, I didn't mean to talk over you. No, no, you're good. But something you just mentioned here, also the research, because also something else, when I coach people new with prospecting, they always talk about them. And normally you should be having done some [00:25:00] research or you understand at least the pains that they're facing.

And you talk more about them, the problems they're facing more than you. And that's also another thing. And something else you just mentioned here, it's the network. Um, I know, I imagine on prospecting days, do you make cold calls on prospecting days? Or do you make intros, for example, for UIAs to the right people?

Or what's your A little of both. So I have gotten on calls with BDRs, for example, and I have made cold calls along with them. But I've also, and of late, done more of the introductions. If I know someone in a target account that we're Looking at, I'm happy to broker an introduction, uh, and get them talking with us.

Also, the point you made about talking more about them versus you, that is how life should be, uh, not just prospecting and not just sales, but we should always be focusing on others versus ourselves. Uh, you're going to find that life is much more fun and fruitful when you take that approach versus just [00:26:00] constantly talking about you or your company's history or your company's product.

Or the awards that your company just got, et cetera, et cetera. Talk about them all the time. So to your point, again, really important to do that deep research. So you at least have, you know, three to five bullet points or punch points that you can bring up in a conversation, uh, in short order. So, so far we talk a lot about how you can run a prospecting day.

Now let's talk about some success about prospecting days, because you mentioned that you've started at service now. Could you share like, um, A success story about the prospecting that you've run that could be this year or the previous years, but could you share a success story? Sure. I know of late, uh, at Kahua, we've seen, uh, you know, engagement of, you know, close to 30 to 35 percent of our target accounts in a given day.

That is, so let's say you have a hundred target accounts, uh, for the purpose of discussion and you got in touch [00:27:00] with 30 to 35 of them. And had meaningful conversations with them in that given day. That's a huge, huge lift. Uh, and now, uh, back in the day, uh, when I was at ServiceNow, you multiply that by five to 10, uh, in terms of the number of accounts, just because of the sheer scale of that organization.

So you could see how quickly you can move things from X to Y and how excited everybody gets. Uh, other things that we've seen is. You know, an average of, you know, for a small team, 80 to 100, uh, engaged calls, uh, in one given day, not just somebody picked up, Oh, you've got the, you know, wrong person or wrong number hangs up.

We're not counting that. We're actually counting full on conversations that we've had with people. So that's huge. And then, you know, lastly, the most important metric is the pipeline. So to be able to increase the pipeline by. You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars in a given day is, is just fantastic.

And then you [00:28:00] watch, of course, how that pipeline matures over time. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes we've seen closed one opportunities within 30 days of sourcing it on prospecting day, and that's just, that's exciting. Curious, do you track opportunities sourced by prospecting days in your CRM? Yes. So, uh, we use Salesforce, and I've used Salesforce at the, uh, uh, the previous company I was at, and we would create an individual dashboard by prospecting day.

So, We had a November prospecting day dashboard, then a January one, then a March one, etc. And we've of course aggregated all the results and data from those, from that collection of dashboards to then report up the chain of command as to how well we've done over time. Nice. Okay. That's, yeah, that's, that's great to do that.

Um, curious also about the success of, uh, those days. So, do you gamify those days, or do you have, like, uh, [00:29:00] the BDR against the AE team, or, and the leaderboard or so? Or, what do you Absolutely. Uh, people love competition. People love ribbing one another and, uh, you know, talking a little bit of smack over the, uh, over the, uh, inner webs.

And, uh, we will, we will, uh, definitely build that type of camaraderie where we will have teams going against the others. Uh, we had a dunk tank one year where we had the executive sponsor get in the dunk tank at lunch. And, uh, if somebody had X number of meaningful conversations or produce X number of opportunities, they get to throw baseballs at the dunk tanks, try to get the executive dunked, that's super fun.

And then of course, uh, the results, uh, yield some great gifts. We've done gift cards. We've done experiences where people go to nice restaurants. Get a day off, get, you know, a gift card to, you know, an airline or something so they can go somewhere. It gets super creative. We've had people, [00:30:00] uh, been able to call 1 800 FLOWERS and send flowers to a loved one anywhere in the United States, for example, on the company's dime.

Uh, it runs the gamut in terms of the gifts and the gamifying that we've done. Uh, and it's just important to include that. I'm glad you mentioned it because that's. That's that keeps everybody's energy level high throughout the day. Now let's focus on your takeaways and learnings about prospecting is because now that you've run like I don't know.

How many did you run? At least a hundred, I imagine, or? Let's say 75, 50 to 75. 75. Okay. So now let's focus on how, um, if you could start over those days, let's say tomorrow, that's your first prospecting day. What are the, not maybe the mistake, but your key lessons about, uh, what you know today and how you will run them differently?

Wow. Uh, let's see. [00:31:00] Well, uh, knowing what I know now, I would have done these sooner, uh, because I was doubtful. You know, you said earlier, we talked about, you know, some people feel like they're going to be annoying or a big interruption to prospects. Uh, I've been pleasantly surprised over the years that, uh, regardless of business function, uh, our colleagues get really excited about making a contribution and actually moving the needle on prospecting day and they want to help and they want to be better.

My first takeaway would be give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Don't think that they're not going to be excited about this. It is all how you convey the message. But people are more, um, for this than against this. That's number one. Two, uh, when you got a good crew of people assembled to help lead the prospecting day efforts, a lot of magic can happen.

We all work with a lot of really smart people. And if you can tease out. Strengths and gifts that they [00:32:00] each have and apply it to what you're building with prospecting day. A lot of great things can happen. Third, and probably the last main takeaway is don't boil the ocean. You know it, it really doesn't take a lot of overwhelming effort.

It's not as heavy a lift as a lot of people might think it is. You can run a prospecting day effectively, probably tomorrow if you really put your mind to it. And, uh, lean in to the process. And I think you'd be surprised at how quickly you can move the needle and how frequently you can do it. And actually, that's the next question.

So, for people who want to implement that tomorrow, what would be step number one? Well, step number one would be download the guide that I wrote because all the answers are in there. A great way to get to it is ralphbarsi. com forward slash guide. G. U. I. D. E. And I allow you to download the guide for free and it is a, uh, roughly 20 page [00:33:00] document on how to effectively run a prospecting day in your organization or in your company.

I'll add the link also in the description so you don't need to, you can search for it if you want, but I'll add the link also so people can find it. Um, now let's think about more like next quarter, what should be the new goal for them next quarter and how, and how often they should run those prospecting days.

Again, it all depends on your situation, your growth phase, et cetera. At the same time, everybody needs pipeline and pipeline yields revenue and revenue solves most known problems. So. In an effort to build pipeline and build it constantly, I would recommend number one, your team sales and sales development that is should be prospecting every single day anyway.

But with respect to a collective effort and a prospecting day, you might want to start with maybe once a quarter, then once every [00:34:00] six weeks, and maybe once every month. And as you start to iterate on it and figure out where the kinks in the chain are, you could dial it in and then the frequency of it's going to become smoother.

And I don't know, maybe because of the size of your company, it might be a really small one and you're nimble and agile and you could do a prospecting day every week. Did you see some hawks do that every week? So when I have seen I've seen all types of it. I've seen weekly prospecting days, I've seen monthly, quarterly, et cetera.

What I haven't seen is like two a year or one a year. It's usually at least quarterly, but yeah, small, nimble sales development teams that I have been part of have had prospecting days regularly, maybe every week or every other week. I forgot to ask you that earlier. For AEs, um, for prospecting AEs, do [00:35:00] they block their calendar so they don't have like, demos or first call, or first call, or locals with, um, their current opportunities, or what's, uh Not the indication, but do you have any guidelines for them?

on that. Yes. So that's another reason why we want to schedule those prospecting days for the, for the year so that they're able to plan accordingly. And all of a sudden they don't have an excuse of, Oh, I was traveling. I was gone that week. I flew to New York to go see a prospect. Uh, sorry. I know it was on prospecting day.

And, and, and. Life happens. And when things like that do happen, our account executives make up the prospecting day. It will write to their sales leader and me, and they will tell us when they're going to be doing the prospecting day because they missed it. So the guidance is. Dedicate yourself to it. It is on the calendar.

So put the blinders up, block out all distractions and focus on prospecting into [00:36:00] your territory or into your marketplace. And you're going to be surprised at the outcomes that you, that you find. Again, it's what you put into it is what you get out of it. And last question about prospecting days, who should own that?

Uh, so sounds like every company you are joining, you are the one owning that, but have you seen like CEOs or founders, for example, or who should What I've seen is whoever is primarily responsible for generating pipeline, they're, they're the owners, right there. Uh, sometimes that's sales, frankly, it's always sales, uh, and marketing as well.

But those are the two key, uh, business functions that are usually involved in owning prospecting day. But again, you could be at a very small company where it's the executive team running it. Sometimes it's rev ops running it because they're looking at the pipeline every single day and, [00:37:00] uh, they have a say in, in how it's built as well.

And any mistakes that you've seen from companies running prospect days that they should avoid? Yes, uh, some mistakes I've seen is they're not organized in planning it and they fall on their faces on prospecting day. They don't get 100 percent engagement from the team and they decide, you know what, prospecting days are not effective.

We're not going to do them anymore. Let's go back to the way we were doing it and they end up suffering. They suffer from low pipeline volumes and weak pipeline opportunities. And as a result, their bottom line is impacted. Their revenue targets are impacted. And then before you know it, there's a riff in the company and they don't even work there anymore.

Yeah. So here, what I'm hearing is lack of preparation and lack of buying from the go to markets mainly. Right. If you fall down and you do it wrong, do a post mortem. [00:38:00] It's important to do that pre mortem. Uh, do the, the regular communications during prospecting day, and then do a debrief or a post mortem.

About what went wrong? What were the gaps? How could we have communicated this better? What do we need to do next time to be more organized and precise in prescribing different responsibilities for people, etc.? And you'll be pleasantly surprised at what you can do for the next prospecting day.

Fortunately, I haven't seen it often, but those who have given up, that is exactly the story that has happened to them. And I'd hate not to happen to any of your viewers or listeners. I'm sure they are going to find some success by reading those days. But because, yeah, I think with this episode plus your guide, I think they will have almost maybe 70, 80 percent of what they need just to run, start, to start hosting prospecting days.

I hope so. Now, I want to ask you this question for you because we are talking about, yeah, if the mistake you have [00:39:00] seen, but for you, for example, at your last prospecting day, did you. What do you think you could have done differently or improve on the last one?

Let's see the last one. The theme was, uh, centered on our partners. So we wanted to make sure that all the accounts that we were engaged with and opportunities rather had a partner associated with them. And so what we could have done better is maybe educated. Uh, the, the team at large on who our hottest partners were, the ones we were most engaged with, who we needed to engage a little bit more, uh, we probably could have dialed in the talk track, uh, for some of the opportunities that we were calling into as it relates to partner conversations, uh, but it was a successful prospecting.

All that said, but to answer your question, those are some things [00:40:00] in the post mortem that came up. Uh, and so we're going to be very mindful of that as we go into the next theme and the next theme is just a general prospect today, calling into, uh, you know, uh, you know, inbound leads, dormant leads, as well as some of the target accounts that aren't just our tier ones, but our tier twos.

Gotcha. And just to clarify that when you say partners, are you talking about channel partnerships or tech partnerships or what type of partnerships? More channel partners than tech. We do have partners that help us with third party apps. For example, we have something similar to an app exchange like Salesforce, but for the most part I'm talking about our channel partners.

We do a lot of work through our partner ecosystem and we could always be better. It's a two way street. They could always be better and we can always be better. Hence, uh, we, we deemed one of our prospecting days, uh, with a theme of partners. Perfect. Ralf, I [00:41:00] think, uh, we have everything to run a successful prospecting day.

Before we end the episode, do you have anything else you want to share with, uh, the listeners? Any what to share? Anything else? Uh, last advice? Uh, just know that, uh, it is doable. Again, it's not as heavy a lift as you think it is. And, uh, if you're suffering from a lack of pipeline or a lack of viable pipeline, Look at the resource that you have, resources you have just around you at work and see if you can rally the troops, so to speak, and get everybody to engage the marketplace.

I think you'll be pretty excited about what you can do as a team. Perfect. Ralph, thank you so much for being on the show today and for everyone listening. I see you on the next episode. Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

If you find this episode with Ralph useful and want to build a strong AdBank culture at your company, you might enjoy my newsletter, AdBank Kitchen. You get a free version every Sunday. And there is also a paid version [00:42:00] where you receive more in depth content. I sent seven already. You get, uh, the last one was nine cold message frameworks deconstructed.

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