Structure Systems Not Schedules

Optimize Outreach with Less Effort

Last week we covered doing live tear downs of outreach messaging, if you’re interested, shoot a note over to andrew@hackingsales.xyz. You can view what you’d need to send here.

Before getting into tear downs one of the realizations I had come across was how to approach structuring weeks and days. It’s relevant given that activity isn’t worth much it you’re just “working” rather than getting actionable results.

Added to the fact that given that I’m working on onboarding a new client, writing here, and juggling my F/T role - the volume of work is forcing me to rethink how to stay organized and thinking ahead on how I can systematize so I can juggle all those items. Plus, ya know, my life.

So is this going to be about consistent prospecting because that’s kind of obvious right?

Not really.

From a personal anecdote, I ended up losing a week because of internal back and forth on an RFI submission along with going tending to discovery calls, managing active deals, and putting out fires here and there. It’s not an excuse but we’re all human and it happens.

Better to be proactive than reactive.

Came across this tweet from Sahil Bloom which really drove this thinking into how to re-structure my days:

Credit: Sahil Bloom

The next question that came up was what if I thought about this in the inverse? As Sahil points out, it’s more about avoiding “negative” stacking.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve already seen some success from lower volume (note I didn’t say *no* volume*). Why not dial that in?

Today I’ll cover how I’m rethinking my system and some resources to take away to help you leverage these frameworks to implement on your own.

• Good Day Framework

• Intent Signals and How it’s Evolving

• My New Framework

Good Day Framework

One of the effective systems I’ve been using is an alteration of Kyle Asay’s Good Day Framework. You can watch the breakdown here.

I had to cater this more towards my role, since I have a limited number of accounts. I’d start here and taper it down or dial it up to what best suits your GTM role. Long story short, it’s a good starting point.

Intent Signals and How it’s Evolving

One of the interesting things that I’m noticing in market, and Florin puts together eloquently in this post is that the days of just finding an intent signal and blasting out an email doesn’t work anymore.

You need a business hypothesis and a combination of triggers to truly break through the noise. One of the tools, Common Room, seems like a great way to synthesize everything I’m discussing but the long and the short is that I as long as you do you research and develop your POV - you’re good to go.

I don’t want to emphasize using every shiny tactics or tool because:

a) tools are as only as good as how well you use them
b) earlier stage companies might not have the budget, or bandwidth, to take on new tools or initiatives.

One hack is leveraging ChatGPT to create Boolean searches to help target keywords in prospect profiles so that you can tie that back to initiatives

Credit: Pedro Castenada

My New Framework

A couple of observations I’ve realized that are similar to content creation is that most can be repurposed and has a long tail effect. In other words, maybe a prospect saw your note and timing just wasn’t there. But low and behold, months later it’s a response.

Additionally, why take the a really well thought out perspective and reinvent the wheel completely? Maybe someone didn’t open because of a subject line or just didn’t open at all. But the next email hits their inbox with generally the same message (a well though out POV) and finally catches their attention.

In my org we currently use a system of “weekly” sprints that help really focus on things that need to get done during the week, think micro to macro. Maybe I have a goal of identifying the right prospects against an initiative in an org because there’s a high probablity that will result in a large AOV. Great, that’s a goal.

With that, here’s what my week is starting to break down like so that I have the system in place:

• 1 hour of prospecting

  • Using the examples above and research on financials, more on this here.

  • Developing your POV and how you can help

• 1 hour of campaign writing towards specific personas tied to initiative

  • Actually sharing examples of what we can do and how it ties to iniatives (without talking about product)

    • ***Well aware that this might not be able to be applied towards books with a higher number of accounts to cover but you can bucket this into trends or isolate accounts that are in deed showing high intent signals.

• Activity against it (ie calls, social touches)

• The rest is simply calls, internal or external, follow ups etc.

It’s set up on my calendar every day so that I can get this out of the way. Inevitably, the day gets ahead of you and the goal here is to not only drive meetings but increase surface area of awareness/engagement in a THOUGHTFUL WAY (ie not congrats on your new job! or, we’re from the same college!)

Hope this helps and will keep you posted on how it goes. If you want me to dive deeper on this framework or how you can apply in your role - drop me a line.

As always, thanks for reading and see you call next week.

-Andrew K