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When to Ignore the Data and Trust Your Gut
Three time author and two time unicorn king Max Altshuler has perfected the art and science of finding customers who are ready to buy.
The reason it's not all science is because account sourcing requires finding the middle ground between data and gut instinct.
Max has played a key role building demand and nurturing leads at Udemy (I teach there) and Outreach, where he works now as vp marketing. And he founded Sales Hacker (and I've written for them).
Udemy and Outreach are startups that grew to unicorn status. He sold Sales Hacker to Outreach before he joined them. Outreach is a sales engagement platform that makes it easier to build custom sales sequences that reps can use to prospect and qualify leads.
According to Max, it all starts by building ideal customer profiles that can be used to to help companies target the right buyers. Successful ICP strategies target the right customer, in the right place at the right time.
For his example, Max says it's going to be easier to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of a marijuana dispensary then a gluten-free restaurant.
After you build an ICP, it's time to develop persona buckets for the c-suite, managers and frontline employees because everyone has different pains and responds to different messages. You're selling to pain points.
Max has perfected outbound selling sequences that optimize the conversion of sales accepted leads. He's figured out how many times to call, email and tweet a prospect to convert them to a sale. And he's built a state-of-the-art sales tech stack which he walked us through in detail.
He also explains why marketing qualified leads don't matter and why sales accepted leads do. But he takes revenue attribution models with a grain of salt and warns marketers against relying too heavily on correlating metrics where causation is unproven.
If you want to come up to speed on where sales engagement is and where it's heading, and you're not necessarily knowledgable about this space, this 30-minute Master Class is for you.
All these skills are transferable to marketing and public relations. So give it a listen and tweet me and Max and let us know how you're implementing demand-generation and lead conversion at your organization.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
ES: Now, before we get into Outreach and your book, because I want to talk about both of those, let's talk for a moment about Sales Hacker. So, how did you wind up building a 100,000+ membership community for salespeople online?
MA: I was working at Udemy, which is an online education marketplace, small startup back in 2011, 2012. And they had entrusted me with building out the sales side of the marketplace, the supply side, which was getting instructors to teach courses. And I looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes: what if the normal sales process had never existed before? What would I do right now? I had a blank canvas and I started reading a lot of books and learning some of the best practices and layering on certain things that typically work, but then challenging the status quo on things that might have been a little more manual than they should be. So I ended up hiring a team of virtual assistants in the Philippines to do a lot of sales development work and go out and get a lot of our leads. I used Python, which is a programming language, to scrape information off sites to fill out our databases and build some of our intent, which led to the copy that we created for these instructors in our emails and phone calls. And then I used an early sales engagement platform called ToutApp. I was one of their first customers to send all these emails and make these phone calls ...
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By Eric SchwartzmanThree time author and two time unicorn king Max Altshuler has perfected the art and science of finding customers who are ready to buy.
The reason it's not all science is because account sourcing requires finding the middle ground between data and gut instinct.
Max has played a key role building demand and nurturing leads at Udemy (I teach there) and Outreach, where he works now as vp marketing. And he founded Sales Hacker (and I've written for them).
Udemy and Outreach are startups that grew to unicorn status. He sold Sales Hacker to Outreach before he joined them. Outreach is a sales engagement platform that makes it easier to build custom sales sequences that reps can use to prospect and qualify leads.
According to Max, it all starts by building ideal customer profiles that can be used to to help companies target the right buyers. Successful ICP strategies target the right customer, in the right place at the right time.
For his example, Max says it's going to be easier to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of a marijuana dispensary then a gluten-free restaurant.
After you build an ICP, it's time to develop persona buckets for the c-suite, managers and frontline employees because everyone has different pains and responds to different messages. You're selling to pain points.
Max has perfected outbound selling sequences that optimize the conversion of sales accepted leads. He's figured out how many times to call, email and tweet a prospect to convert them to a sale. And he's built a state-of-the-art sales tech stack which he walked us through in detail.
He also explains why marketing qualified leads don't matter and why sales accepted leads do. But he takes revenue attribution models with a grain of salt and warns marketers against relying too heavily on correlating metrics where causation is unproven.
If you want to come up to speed on where sales engagement is and where it's heading, and you're not necessarily knowledgable about this space, this 30-minute Master Class is for you.
All these skills are transferable to marketing and public relations. So give it a listen and tweet me and Max and let us know how you're implementing demand-generation and lead conversion at your organization.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
ES: Now, before we get into Outreach and your book, because I want to talk about both of those, let's talk for a moment about Sales Hacker. So, how did you wind up building a 100,000+ membership community for salespeople online?
MA: I was working at Udemy, which is an online education marketplace, small startup back in 2011, 2012. And they had entrusted me with building out the sales side of the marketplace, the supply side, which was getting instructors to teach courses. And I looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes: what if the normal sales process had never existed before? What would I do right now? I had a blank canvas and I started reading a lot of books and learning some of the best practices and layering on certain things that typically work, but then challenging the status quo on things that might have been a little more manual than they should be. So I ended up hiring a team of virtual assistants in the Philippines to do a lot of sales development work and go out and get a lot of our leads. I used Python, which is a programming language, to scrape information off sites to fill out our databases and build some of our intent, which led to the copy that we created for these instructors in our emails and phone calls. And then I used an early sales engagement platform called ToutApp. I was one of their first customers to send all these emails and make these phone calls ...