Friction to Momentum: The Top Down & Bottom Up Prospecting Blueprint
Real-world tactics for turning buying signals into high-value meetings—faster
Last week we talked about how to approach managing friction amidst answering the question: “When is aggressive too aggressive?”
If you missed parts I and II, you can check them out here (I), and here (II).
This week we’ll cover how I’d approach this if I had to do it all over again taking a top down and bottom up approach. I recently ran this exercise with my SDR.
A quick heads up but this will be a little bit longer of a read, but IMO worth it ;)
Signals to look for
Doing the research
How to Position
Signals to Look For
Depending on what org you’re in, you’ll have tech stacks that vary providing you with signals and the ability to do quick research.
Our tech stack:
6sense
Poggio
LI Sales Nav
Hubspot
Gong
Salesforce
On 6sense, I typically look at queries that tie to back to our value prop. Bonus points if there is new hires/growth in a certain department, or other shifts in the org like transformation, or new leadership.
In this specific example I was looking at a food company - Hain Celestial. Since this is one of my named accounts I noticed signals on 6sense with queries for “product development”, “(competitors)”, or “innovation pipeline”.
Nice signal. If you don’t have 6sense though, you can use LI Sales Nav to look at strategic growth objectives. Here’s a quick way to look at this snapshot:
These are nice signals that let me know something is brewing and our solution can help. Let’s dig further though.
Doing the Research
Annual reports, Earning Transcripts, and other financial documents are going to be clutch if they’re a public company. If you aren’t sure on how to navigate financial docs, you can check out this 10k walkthrough to get a quick primer.
When I do research on financial docs, I’m using Poggio (no affiliation). You can follow
on here or on Twitter. It’s a great tool to accelerate your account research and planning.If you don’t have this, check out Perplexity which can also help you dig up research fast, and organize in project folders to always reference - I do this in conjunction with Poggio to surface any industry news/publications for me to get more info. Especially if this a private company.
Here’s what Poggio surfaced:
From here, I can start outlining how I can position my messaging to various personas within the org, based on financial docs and news. But it doesn’t stop there, let’s go deeper.
When you have some brand equity or your org has been around, you have customers that leave or follow your company, even their LI posts are helpful. Here’s things I’m cross referencing:
You can dig into each of these to find low hanging fruit from an outreach perspective. In other words, familiarity is your friend when it comes to cold outreach. I’ve written about socializing within accounts, and how to make cold outreach warm before if you dig in further.
During this I found, 4 contacts who have posted about transformation initiatives, all sr level, along with 2 contacts who both follow my company and just changed jobs. And all of whom had posted recently on LinkedIn validating all the above is true.
Good signs.
And those contacts are the priority. I wasn’t able to surface near term discussions in Gong, but I did see we were supposed to meet with them at an event (and they agreed to) within the past 3 months.
How to Position
Titles mean various things to various organizations so you should know your persona. A nice primer on doing that is a framework that I’ve used from Kyle Asay, and you can learn what application in real life looks like here.
Credit: Kyle Asay
From my research above I can now start crafting messaging of recent events to the level of the persona with what matters to them.
So when reaching out to their CMO, I was able to craft something simple but relevant. And the goal in this outreach is to accomplish 3 things:
Start a relationship
Build awareness of how the problem can be solved
Get internal folks talking up and down the chain of command
***reviewing this I realized I had a typo but IMO, it’s okay - prospect will know this is definitely not AI.
Now, not a TON of specific info, but definitely relevant. You can look at each comment of how each section is broken down and why.
My CTA is to fwd over, because a C level person most likely doesn’t want to do a discovery call, they want you to tell them how your solution can move the needle on their initiatives. Right now, I don’t have enough info to ask for their time. But I’ll still ask at some point (because why not right?)
The cool part:
We launched this yesterday and it got two opens from Sr directors with a template like this, modified to each persona. As of this writing, their CMO opened this morning.
Both my SDR and myself made calls to those target accounts yesterday. No dice, but given these are first touches, combined with all the signals we’re getting, confident we’ll get a meeting in no time.
Hyper targeted prospecting and micro campaigns are where outbound is going.
Our goal - book the meeting, get more info on the challenges and validate. Public info is great, but in order to carry this forward in a deal cycle I need to be using the language of IC’s and stakeholders to really drive forward my hypothesis and tie it back to their business metrics.
I’ll cover validation in a future post.
Hope this helps. As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week.
If you have any questions or thoughts, shoot me a DM or email andrew@hackingsales.xyz.
-Andrew K
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