Webinar: 3 Plays That Playmakers Use to Double Their Pipeline

We’ve had a fantastic time at Dreamforce 2017, where our team was at booth #1501 to let in you in on the secrets of using data and science to power up your sales results. If you missed our live Facebook webinar from the Dreamforce conference, fear not, I’m here to tell you the story. I’m going to give away three saucy sales strategies for growing your pipeline in just a few weeks.

Hundreds of professional salespeople have joined our #Playmakers Facebook sales community already, and we’re grateful for that! 

We’ve been giving out prizes each day of the Dreamforce conference (6-9 November), so it’s not too late to join!

The Playmakers

In our Facebook community we welcome the top salespeople who want to improve their sales game. We share sales strategies, prospecting tactics and research, and offer a space for everyone to share their winning sales plays.

Playmakers are the modern salespeople, who wage war against traditional sales and win.

They use a data-driven approach to sales, and don’t just guess at the game.

The Plays

What’s the idea of plays? What does that mean? Let me take you through the concept. Each of the elements of a play will help salespeople run a strategic prospecting initiative.

Playmakers run plays. They don’t just run cadences or sequences. Those are sometimes just random activities. A play has to be more than that. It’s a strategic approach to sales.

P stands for purpose or goal. Play makers don’t just wing it.

L is for list or leads. When you run a play you’ve got to have a target, the person or account you’re going after.

A are your assets. Assets are needed because you have to give value before you get value back.

Y is yield. Playmakers, they measure everything. They iterate. They don’t just shoot from the hip.

S is the sequence. Those are the sales activities that lead to contact and increase qualification rates.

Three Plays for Growing Your Pipeline

We were live today on a Facebook webinar, showing you the three plays that pros use to win, and we had an amazing turnout, thank you all for joining!

The Starbucks Coffee Play

If you haven’t heard of our Starbucks coffee play, you need to try it out. Our goal was pipeline generation for this play, and we targeted accounts in Austin. There was only one sales rep working on this one.

Our assets were Yeti Starbucks coffee mugs, a $10 gift card and a hand written note. We also had some research for a data-driven marketing approach.

the Starbucks coffee play - yeti mug and card with inside sales branding

Then the results were fantastic! We had an 86% appointment set rate. We also made 700K in pipeline and $140,000 of closed revenue.

The sequence was to send the coffee mug and gift cards first, then follow up with calls, voicemails and emails to make sure the gift landed. This is how we were able to get in contact with our leads and find their paint point.

The Socialize Me Play

The second play is what we call “socialize me”. This was a social selling play to see if we couldn’t reach out to our target audience via social media.

We identified a handful of people that were more active on LinkedIn, this was our list. One of the problems with social selling is that everybody wants to do it, but some of your target audience might not be on LinkedIn or Twitter.

how to use linkedin sales navigator concept - social media icons on a mobile phone screen

The assets that we had in this case, were just LinkedIn Navigator. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is good, but we focused on LinkedIn this time.

The yield on this one was also pretty good, not as good the coffee play. We had 50% appointments set rate and about 150,000 in pipeline, I can’t remember the exact detail. And we closed two deals off of it.

The sequence was more or less the following: three phone calls, two voice messages, four emails, four social touches.

The Three C’s of Social Selling

The key on the social touches was the following: comment, connect, and call to action. I do feel like you want to keep this in your back pocket for all social selling strategies. These are the three C’s of social selling.

We call this program luv, L-U-V, which means “leaving unsolicited validation.” This means we didn’t blindly reached out to people. We first left unsolicited validation on their social media, in order to gain confidence. 

This meant following their social media activity and liking and commeting on some of their posts, or endorsing them for a few skills. This put us on their radar and then we had a higher chance of connecting.

The blind connection request is going to kill your sales strategy – it needs to be the last step.

Last, but not least, we made sure there was a call to action for them.

high impact mailer card - big deal message

The Dialer Tool Set

Play number three is what we called the “Why, What and How” video play. We just released, as part of our tool set, the ability for sales reps to send note cards as part of their cadence strategy. So we wanted to have a strategic outreach for targets that could benefit from this new feature.

I’m always a big fan of video, but this one worked exceptionally well.

The purpose on this play was targeting a very specific set of customers that we felt like would be good up-sell opportunities on the product.

The assets were three short videos (5-10 minutes long):

  • We explained why should care about direct mail, deriving videos out of some XANT Labs research on the topic
  • The second video showed what direct mail is, some examples, some experiments that we’d run. 
  • We created a video showing how can you actually utilize direct mail in your sales process. Then we ended with a pretty killer offer of a free trial for the product.

We had 12 appointments off the first initial play. This one isn’t finalized yet, so we are still running this play as I’m writing this. We had just under 300K in pipeline and we are waiting to see what closed.

This was the sequence for the play: on a Monday we sent the “Why” video embedded into an email. Wednesday we sent the “What” video. And then Friday we sent the “How” video.

The sequence was: three email cadence with these little videos embedded, sending them to a landing page with all three videos, that you could unlock every few days. The following week we did three phone calls and two voice messages. Finally, on the last day we added another email to educate them on the importance of direct mail.

It was a nice follow up strategy and it really landed well with our target audience, to those customers that we’ve felt like were going to be most likely to buy our product.

Those are the three plays that we’ve found to be very successful in the last 90 days.

Just One Play Away…

If you feel our sales plays are useful and you can work with them in your industry, let us know! Make sure you invite your friends to the #Playmakers group. We’re going to be doing some other interesting plays as the months go by.

Remember, success is just one play away…

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