#606 - How To Build An Elite Outbound Sales Team (Get Reps Dialing Fast)

0:00If you want to master the game of sales leadership, there is no better teacher than Armand Farrokh. Armand is a former VP of sales who led PAVE from zero to 13 million in less than two years and has literally managed hundreds of sellers. Now, Armand cut his sales leadership teeth over at Carta, where he ran one of the baddest SDR orgs in the Bay Area, where his SDRs were booking at times upwards of 50 outbound meetings per month. And so today, Armand is going to be breaking down his step-by-step playbook of everything that he did growing and building the Carta outbound machine. Whether you are a sales leader looking to uplevel your team or you are a rep who wants a peek behind the curtain of masterful sales leadership, this is one of our best episodes ever.

0:42And so with that, let's dive in. All right, Armando, we're talking about how to wield a world-class SDR team. You're a pro at this. Where should we freaking start? Yeah. So when I first took over the Carta SDR team, it was 20 SDRs. And frankly, all of the top performers had been promoted already. And so the remainder of the group was kind of an underperforming group. And I think the majority of the time when I walk down an SDR floor, there are tactics, there are things that SDRs can get better at. But the biggest problem is the sales floor is dead. And if you got to think about what you're doing with an SDR, you are convincing some kids straight out of college to get their ass chewed up on the phones every single day for 12 to 18 months straight.

1:26So nine times out of 10, if you are turning around an SDR organization, you do not have a skill problem. You have an energy problem. So I get brought in to turn around this org. We had a team all hands that was going to be on Thursday. So it was Tuesday when it got announced. Right. Right. So before that team all hands, I loaded 16 hours of one on ones back to back to back to back to back every single person one on one. And I had what I call between you, me and the wall conversation where I was like, hey, between you, me and the wall, like something's got to change here. Here's my plan. Can I call on you on Thursday when I'm like walking through the plan to be like like riff with me a little bit and like jumping on the conversation?

2:01So it's not a freaking dead room because this you could hear a pin drop. It's like freaking depressing in here. And so I had that conversation with every single person. They all start like they start none. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this person's like, this guy who's running the new team wants me to be involved. They want me to be part of the plan. I'm like, that's right. We step into that Thursday meeting. The CRO announces Armand's the new SDR leader. And immediately, you feel the room change completely. Literally, like the room is buzzing. I'm walking through the plan and I'm calling on, hey, Bonnie, you mentioned that this was important to you.

2:29Here's what we're doing in the plan. You mentioned that promotion path to discovery was really important. That's something I heard from you, Will. And all of a sudden, you see everyone start to lean forward. And so what normally would take three to six months of pussyfooting around and trying to get people to nudge them to dial, it was literally within 24 hours, the complete tenor and demeanor in the room had changed. What you're doing here is you are winning over each individual privately before you are trying to win over the group publicly. And part of the reason that this works is if you've got someone who's sort of on the fence, right?

3:04Let's imagine you've got one or two SDRs. You're like, they're not totally convinced that they're going to buy into this cold calling thing. Well, what happens is, is they get in that room with all 20 other SDRs. And you're like, we're going to build a cold calling culture. and all of a sudden they see 18 of their peers being like, hell yeah. Well, you all of a sudden look really freaking stupid if you're one of the two people on the team of 20 who is not making the cold call. So one of the ways that you can impact a group's thinking and a group's culture is you win people over one by one by one and the peer pressure will help win over the rest of the group.

3:46The next step of turning around the culture was what I call and this is people want to act like this stuff doesn't exist but the reality is if if you try to save everyone in a sales organization including people who don't want to be saved the entire sales organization will fail so i had to do what i call flip to fire to hire to which is there were two people who were young guns who like really were on board with the change and i was like those two i'm gonna flip them and i'm gonna help elevate them as part of like the people who were like gonna get this team dialing because no one was picking up the phones then i had to fire to And the reason for that is I care if you're not performing, but I care a lot if you're underperforming and don't want any coaching because that means you're in the way of progress.

4:28So I had to let two people go. And that's normally some people, they wait like nine months until someone just leaves on their own. Those two people would have scorched earth behind closed doors, told every, they would have constantly been just saying, this is stupid. You shouldn't be making cold calls. And they would have been in the way of progress. And the final thing is higher to, which is sometimes in a turnaround, like you have to make room to bring on new people to inject new energy. And those people had also gone through our new interview process, which I revamped in which the second step is a mock cold call where you, you know, before you start this job, I'm going to make you cold call before you start this job.

5:07So when you come in, you come in with full head of steam. And so normally, like all this stuff, the problem with turnarounds is people, I think they just want to be liked and they spend three to six months warming the team up. And I think there's something to be said about looking at what's going well and listening for a second. But I think a lot of times people are afraid to make these bigger, harder decisions faster. And then six months in the job, like they still don't have the room. Like you will never get the SDR floor energy back after that much time of a dead floor. How much did you care about the team liking you?

5:38Like how much weight and effort did you put into that versus not in this turnaround? I think you've probably seen this in the same way that I run sales cycles. The way that I get a customer to like me is being a little bit like cheeky and showing them that like I can give them an elbow check and I'm on the same level. and like there's something that I can learn from you, but there's also something that you can learn from me. I think a lot of times managers make the mistake of wanting to be their SDR's friend and wanting to be cool and not wanting to have hard conversations. I think one thing that I take pride on is what I call flipping the vigilantes or flipping the lone wolves, which is one of my top reps, Morgan Mello, is love or death, not easy to manage because she commands respect in the room.

6:30You can earn a lot of street cred with the team if you can show Michael Jordan that you've got one or two things to learn from me, even if you're better than me at this game. So what I'm learning from you, Arman, is so much of the success of an SDR org is dependent upon the energy of that org. And layer one is you have to get the right people in seats and get them bought in on the plan. But if you just do that once, it's going to fizzle and die. And so I know you live and die by what you call rhythms to inject energy into the team. Talk me through what a rhythm is and what the rhythms you installed into the SDR org were.

7:09Yeah, so I'm going to whiteboard this out. If you're on YouTube or Spotify, you'll be able to see this. If not, I will orate it or speak through it live. So there are five meetings that I used to run an SDR team. And I honestly think you could run 90 % of SDR teams with these five meetings. So here's what the week looks like, is you have Monday. And on Monday, you have what I call a Monday morning meeting or an MMM. And the purpose of that meeting is to, one, inject energy juice into the team. And then, two, focus on activity. So the goal of the Monday morning meeting is to get people calling their shot at the beginning of the week saying, I'm going to hit those$200.

7:50And I can walk through what that meeting actually looks like at some point. that's the Monday morning meeting. Tuesday, you got what we call teardown Tuesdays. So these would alternate. There are two to three types of teardowns. So type number one is a cold call teardown. Type number two is a cold email. We'll call this an email teardown. And then type number three is an account teardown. All right. So we would run teardown Tuesdays and teardown Thursdays, and we would just pick whichever were the most important ones for the team. And so what you're doing is, let's say cold call teardown. You have each SDR bring a cold call, and you usually like pre-select who's going to do it.

8:35So you get like through three cold calls, and your goal is to review three cold calls in an hour, or two cold emails an hour, or two to three accounts in an hour. And the idea is that the SDRs are the ones who are bringing their cold call, they're bringing their email, they're bringing their account, and they're saying, here's how I approach this thing. Let's tear it down as a team. So twice a week, two 30-minute meetings, you're giving your team the opportunity to be coached without adding a ton of time on the calendar. So those are meetings one, two, and three. You have Monday morning meeting, you have teardown Tuesdays, you have teardown Thursdays, and then on Wednesdays, that's usually when you do one-on-ones.

9:09And so that's when you get onto individual level coaching and looking at individual level metrics. So this is when you start to dive deep on like reply rates for one rep or being like, hey, rep, your specific connect rate or your specific set rate is not high. Let's do a couple of role plays live. There was one time with a gal named Paige who is now a top SDR leader. She will never forget in our first one-on-one, I made her practice the not interested objection and made her laugh before handling an objection for 30 minutes straight. And to this day, she talks about that exact meeting and does the exact same thing with every single one of her SDRs.

9:46And so one-on-ones are a great time for role play. And then the last piece is on Fridays, you've got team dials where every single SDR is dialing at the exact same time from 9 to 10 a.m. And any meeting that is booked gets posted in the public sales channel. And so we would go team versus team. We would go managers versus reps. we would go enterprise SDR versus regular SDR. But this is again, ending with energy juice. And then the focus is again, activity plus culture stuff. So you've got two per week that are focused on like more skill stuff with the teardowns. You've got a one-on-one that's individualized coaching.

10:29And then you've got bookending the week on Mondays and Fridays with like, just like pick up the damn phone and like, let's get the energy going in the room. All right. I want to really focus on this Monday morning metrics meeting because I've led it and I know I have botched it where it's kind of just like people don't bring their metrics. I'm like, oh, shit, they didn't fill things out. It's just like I almost feel like I start the meeting on a dud. Can you walk me through whatever spreadsheet or doc you were using for this and like what you actually cover in the meeting? number one is what I call good morning where I would literally scream good morning in the same way that you hear on this podcast every single day I would scream good morning at the team and come with an obnoxious amount of energy and some of that is just being like look if I'm asking you to pick up the phone get your ass kicked I'm going to show you that I'm going to at least be like obnoxiously excited to be here too that's number one number two is what I call Mondo's mic drop which is setting the tone or the focus for the week.

11:25Number three is manager metrics, which is we would go through this spreadsheet over here. And again, I was managing three managers. And so for each team, the managers would have their reps update this spreadsheet with the metrics you see on the screen. So the four metrics that we would go through for every single rep are how many accounts did you work? How many cold calls did you make? And so the goal was usually 200 at the time. How many meetings did you set? The goal is usually four, five if you were crushing it. And then how much pipe gen have you made year to date or rather month to date? From there, the fifth piece would be what is this week's commitment?

12:04We had a part of the Monday morning meeting, which was commitments and consequences. And so a lot of this stuff is you got to get your managers in the trenches and you got to be in the trenches with your reps. So I would always lead with my commitment and my consequence. So my commitment would always be something that I can control, which is I'm going to make$40 with you all on Friday and put together the cold call training. And if I don't, my consequence is I'm going to eat Greek yogurt for an entire day straight and you will see me eat it at my desk. And by the way, I'm lactose intolerant. And so that was not only an unenjoyable experience for me, but it would also be an unenjoyable experience for everyone around.

12:37You do these things and it's like, look, I don't care like how much you you aren't on board with this. like you can't help but like smile a little bit and like some of this is you just got to make the job of eating shit fun i got two questions on this today's show is brought to you by consensus which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room before i show a demo i set it up like it might have to work without me i include these three slides before i drop in number one the biggest problems i learned in discovery number two how we solve those problems and number three, a what-does-success-look-like-today slide.

13:10You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by ConsenSys. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end, and one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with.

13:40We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, PipeDrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

14:12And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. One, what are the activity thresholds that you are looking at for your SDRs? So what is an acceptable number of accounts worked, cold calls, meeting set, and pipe jump? I know everyone hates this answer. It depends on the size of accounts you're working. For most middle market sales motions or commercial sales motions, you're looking at for SDRs, 25 accounts worked and then 200 cold calls. And the goal is to get four meetings set from there, usually five if you're doing really well.

14:47Not just one person at an account. They might be reaching out to six people at an organization. So it's not like they're only working 25 prospects a week. Correct. So if you've listened to any of our leadership content, I think about like L1, level one and level two metrics. 25 accounts worked is the level one metric. If something's not going right, I'll look at how many contacts they sequenced. And usually I would want to see 25 by 75. So 25 accounts worked, three contacts per account, 75. If it's enterprise, I would want to see closer to five contacts per account. And then 200 cold calls. If we were parallel dialing, which we weren't doing at the time, it would have been more.

15:23And then again, four to five meetings set. the other L2 metrics is, again, if I see accounts are up, cold calls are up, this has happened month over month, but their meeting set are down, that's when I start to look at conversion rates. So I'm going to look at your cold call connect rate, which is around 5 % today, your cold call set rate, which for top reps should be 20%. I'm going to look at your sequence reply rates as well, which should be in the double digit range. And folks, we will link in the show notes a guide to how to think about sales metrics. Armand's talking about L1, L2. It can make your head spin sometimes.

15:57We've got a resource for you there also. Up until this point, we've talked about getting the team right, getting the energy right, getting the activity right. One of the things that I know, however, is you cannot mistake activity for achievement. And so it doesn't matter how many cold calls your reps are making. It doesn't matter how many emails they are sending. It doesn't matter how many accounts they are working. If the messages they are sending are crap. And so you talk about the different MVP frameworks that you needed to install with the team so that they were actually executing in an intelligible way.

16:26Can you walk me through your different frameworks that you use? Maybe we can start with cold calling. The three frameworks that you need are is you need a way to work your way around an account. So you need to know like what your ICP is and like where you should even target your dots. You then need to know how to make cold calls and then you need to know how to send emails. So if you can like break down an account, make a cold call and send an email, chances are you are like probably going to be pretty successful. Let's start with the targeting piece. And the reason for that is we will get to cold calling in a second.

16:59You all have probably heard our cold calling content consistently over and over and over again. No matter how many SDRs I've coached, no matter how many AEs I've coached, the highest activity rep is almost never the highest performing rep. and usually a prospecting performance issue is a targeting issue. It is not a my cold email copy could be a little bit better issue. I think cold calling skills and cold email skills can usually raise someone by a letter grade. So you can turn like a B rep into an A rep. You can turn like a C rep into a B rep. The wrong cold calls on the wrong account are F cold calls no matter what.

17:39Like those are bad cold calls no matter what, even if you are the best in the world on the phones. So as you know, you and I switched jobs and I recently took over the sales team. And one of the problems that I saw the team doing is they had a lot of prospecting activity and we were booking a lot of below the line meetings or meetings that were never going to go anywhere. So the first thing we did is we mapped out what we call our golden path. Okay. So we broke down organizations into different archetypes. So there's the, we basically sell training and enablement programs where we teach teams how to cold call and negotiate multi-threat, et cetera.

18:09Right. So different team archetypes were pre-enablement, 0 to 250 employees. VP plus some managers, 250 to 500 employees. Now you start to have second line leadership, 500 to 1 ,500 employees. That's when directors come in. And then you have multiple sales orgs in one. So when you start selling to a, I don't know, a DocuSign, it's like a director of sales is a mega below the line person at that point. And then from there, again, if you're looking at the screen, you can see what this looks like. But we basically highlighted in green, those are the people that you should be targeting at and above the line.

18:46So you have the sole enablement hire plus a VP of sales are your main target. And then if you take one step down, you've got your yellow contacts who are your like kind of below the line, but they're like one meeting away from the meeting that you want. They're like, they're a reasonable groundswell versus trying to like go to a rep to get up to a VP of sales. You know what I mean? And so the rule with our team is you work all of the green contacts on the accounts. You work all of the at and above the line people. And then you selectively cherry pick the hottest yellow contacts who are giving us good signals.

19:20Like they've downloaded 30 NBC content or maybe it's like a particularly good account. This is what allows your SDRs to decide, am I actually working the right people? So when I took over the card SDR team, half the time, like the activity was actually pretty good. But then I would just like look at who's active in sequence. And I'll be like, we're selling like software to manage your stock options. What are you doing reaching out to a chief HR officer? That's like a benefits play. Literally half of your activities are just going into the ether. And so like a lot of times a turnaround can be done not by increasing activity, not by getting people better on the phones, but just like removing a lot of the waste in the prospect.

20:00Yeah. I mean, the way that I think about it is you might categorize your prospect personas into A tier, B tier and C tier prospects. And one of the things that you do, one of the levers you can pull is without having to increase activity whatsoever, you just take all of the C tier prospects that your reps are working and have them replace them with more A tier prospects. And so if they are working all A and B tier, of course, they are going to be getting better meetings than if they are working the same number equally split across A, B, and C tier prospects. Now we need to talk about what we actually say when we reach out to them.

20:40Let's start with cold calling. We need to give our team a minimum viable cold calling framework. I'm screen sharing our book right now because there is literally a script in it somewhere. So this is on page 69 on at the end of the section that covers both the opener and the pitch, you have your minimum viable framework. So this is actually where we came up with a lot of our basic frameworks that we now use at 30 MPC today. And so at the time, I think one of the things that helped me at Carta is that I was really successful as an AE. And the reason for that is I would use what I called the heard the name tossed around opener.

21:13And so I'd be like, hey, Nick, we work with a few other Sequoia portfolio companies. It's Armand from Carta. Have you heard a name would say no. And most of the time they would say no because I joined Cardat Series C before they were a big company. And then I would lead into what we call a problem proposition or what Jason Bay calls a reverse pitch where you basically lead with the problem before the solution. And so I would say like, hey, usually when I'm talking to a CFO, they find it absolutely ridiculous that you have to pay lawyers to issue out stock options, which cost you money. And then you have to go pay another firm to get your valuations too.

21:49And by the way, none of this stuff actually made you any money. It's literally just like pushing papers from left to right. And Carta automates basically all that stuff. Are you open to take a look? That was literally the problem proposition. And then from there, we had the Mr. Miyagi method to handle objections, which is usually CFOs would be like, well, I manage it on spreadsheets. I'd be like, I should have assumed you were a spreadsheet wizard over there, Charlie. Look, my guess is you're probably going to be totally fine with this thing. But like sometimes when you like get your first funding round, like you kind of want to have your valuation provider behind you.

22:21So like, do you want to take a look at this thing? Not for now, but just so you know, it's out there. And usually just like between those three things, a basic context, first opener, a problem first pitch instead of a solution first pitch, and then agreeing with an objection and selling the test drive before you handle it. Nine times out of 10, the SDR has got like pretty damn good on the phones. And guess what? They weren't even picking up the phones before. So it was all upside. And And so we go from like$50 per app to$200 per app. They keep email activity the same. And we taught them how to manage their calendars.

22:53They could be more efficient. And like the average meetings per SDR goes from like four per SDR to like upwards of eight sometimes. And it was just by like adding more phone skills on top of the emails they were already doing because the hard part is finding the good accounts to work in the first place. So that's cold calls. What about cold emails? Walk me through the cold email framework. And while you were pulling this up, Armand, one thing that I will add is one thing that I underappreciated until I led a sales team is the value of simplicity. There's like 47 different combinations and permutations of how you might open a cold call, how you might pitch, how you might handle all of the different objections that you might get hit with.

23:30The problem is, is when you are leading an SDR team, these are usually folks that are making their first entry into sales. They are usually fresh out of school or they are career changers. And this is their first sales job. and a mistake that I made as a sales leader, I tried to give them everything. And when you throw complexity at your reps, it gets really freaking hard for them to actually use anything. And so you are better off breaking things into three simple steps, knowing that not everything is covered, but they are actually gonna be compliant with those three steps, as opposed to giving them 17 steps and they don't adhere to any of them.

24:05This is the current cold email framework that we actually use at 30 MPC. We just made it, so it's super fresh and top of mind. there are four parts of a good cold email what did i notice about you so in this case it says not sure if you knew but your team is full of 30 npc super fans like fan and fan who are itching for more tactical sales advice that's what i know about you doesn't tell me anything about the problem you could solve that's what paragraph two is paragraph two is the problem you solve problem is in enablement you get asked to run a multi-threading workshop and a product training and wrangle managers into scoring calls and cure world hunger with pretty lean resourcing.

24:42That's a problem. You don't know how I solve it, but at this point, hopefully you're sitting up and you're like, ah, I at least laughed a little bit, right? People are like, oh, you can only use humor because you're selling to sales leaders. I sold to CFOs, you prick. Number three, you then have the solution. How do you solve the problem? Well, some of those folks over there work with us to build an enablement program that teaches reps anything from cold calling to discovery with playbooks tailored to your sales cycle. that you can use forever. That's the solution. And then number four, a very simple interest-based or offer-based CTA.

25:15So this says, worth seeing an example program live. PS, humanizing PS. I might say like PS, a great game USC had against UCLA. Y 'all held a lot of discipline, scoring zero points against R50, something like that. And so then from there, you can see that this all fits on one page and you can look at like mobile preview down here. And like I've tested of this and this fits on a single phone scroll as well it's like a lot of people like they like over engineer they're like i gotta use claude to do like my 17 step multi-dimensional matrix of personalization with like 14 different triggers and like the backwards humanizing ps and i'm like guys like you build your list of the top five things that tell you your prospect wants to buy your thing.

26:02And then you pop those into the first and second paragraph and then you send the email and like you put some personality and write like an actual human being and throw all of your marketing buzzwords in the trash. And again, like that alone, some of these sequences, dude, like they were written by old CPAs on our AE team. They were like three page like emails with bullets and links and attachments and all this stuff. And just like a basic four sentence email got our sequences to double-digit replies. Today's show is brought to you by ConsenSys, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room.

26:36Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in Discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by ConsenSys. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full and Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end.

27:09And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full and Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. today's show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable crm with built-in meeting intelligence my favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when i'm talking with folks like you they're focused on a b or c which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question not on scrambling to take live notes and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 MPC closers hub.

27:57There's a link in the show notes. How much control are you taking over the messaging that your reps are actually putting out there? Because I know this is something I screwed up running the 30 MPC sales team, Armand, where I trusted that my reps, all they were doing was prospecting. And so I figured 100 % of their brains was better than 12 % of mine when it came to a messaging piece. So my question for you is like, how maniacal, how controlling are you over the messaging that your reps are putting out there. Yeah. So you are correct. 80 % or 100 % of their energy is better than 5 % of your energy writing a cold email.

28:33However, there are a lot of bad habits in sales organizations. You can put in 10 % of your energy on the cold email if you align with them at the beginning of the cold email and at the end of the cold email. And so it's my job to get it to 80%. It's the team's job to get it to 100%. But I can get it to 80 % of the way by saying, this is the four-step framework. Here's an example. I wrote one. Now you go write one for every other trigger, every other persona using this framework. That gets me to 100%. So that's sometimes if you're a manager, you should know. If your reps are like, this person has no idea how to sell, get one of your top reps to do it.

29:10I was in the game, so I knew I could write good stuff. So I wrote the first pass, but then the team did all of the additional passes. That's number one. But then number two is you have an idea of how this framework works in your head, and then it hits the market. And customers start replying. They start getting non-interested. They start raising competitors. And the tweaking of the messaging, it cannot happen from you as the SDR leader. And the reason for that is you're not getting the haptic feedback from the market because you're coaching. You're not in the deals. You're not on the calls. And so that's where you need to give some of the reins to your team so that they can go and tweak the messaging based on what they're hearing.

29:46So great sales team looks like we set up our minimum viable frameworks. The SDRs go take it to the market. They get feedback, bring it back, suggest a sentence change or suggest an email change, not throw away the entire sequence, but suggest one email or one sentence change. And then you slowly tweak your sequences from 6 % to 8 % to 10 % to 12%. You get it from six to 10, the reps get it from 10 to 15. Can you actually pull back up your gong engage that y 'all are using for your sequences, Armand? And do you just very quickly walk through the touch patterns for folks? Because obviously you're not sending these in a vacuum.

30:22You're not just sending one email, not just making one call. I wanna see your sort of spacing. I wanna understand how many calls, how many emails. Maybe do that pretty quick for us. And then let's roll into the hovering part to wrap. I'll go through how many calls, how many emails, but there are six messages in the sequence that I want to get across in two different chunks. So here's the first problem, bubble it up, send you a case study, all on the same subject line. New subject line, here's the second problem. And now instead of using bubble ups, I'm going to use breakups. So I'm going to say, second problem, are you the right person?

30:59And then a formal breakup. Here are some resources. Here's an overview. Is it okay if I reach back out in 30 days? If not, tell me right now. That usually gets the reply. So it's six email messages and then a bunch of calls and other touch points in between. So here's our actual sequence on day one. So what starts the sequence is a LinkedIn connection. And then from there, we send our first email. So I always like to lead with LinkedIn email. And the reason for that is like you'll get a bunch of people who are like, I don't work for the company anymore, yada, yada, yada. And email is the fastest way to figure out whether or not you should call someone.

31:30So that's number one. Then two days later, there's a cold call task. And again, like that first problem I already read off this email, but the focus here is like enablements asked to change the world and cure world hunger. But like enablement teams are also like really, really lean and they don't have the resources to build out all these playbooks on their own. Right. So then you have a cold call and then a bubble of email right afterwards. And it basically just says any thoughts. By the way, I just left you a voicemail. Then on that same third day, you follow up with a LinkedIn message. I like to use LinkedIn messages as bubble ups, where you basically use the LinkedIn message as another email to say like, hey, I'm not gonna do this whole connect and pitch thing, but like, did you see my email?

32:11So I've got like all of these paths. I've got this email that I've done all this research on. I've got voicemails driving back to the email and now I have LinkedIn DMs driving back to the email. I'm gonna get a response. So from there, we wait two more days and now we are on our next cold call. So our second cold call overall. And then we're on our next cold email. So this is the case study bump. So again, we've done like our first problem email, a normal bump email, and then a case study bump email. This was inspired by Jason Baza. Thank you, brother. And then one more LinkedIn message. So we do a LinkedIn bump.

32:39Any thoughts? So if you look at where LinkedIn is, LinkedIn is like just one step behind the emails. It's like problem email, bubble up case study. And then LinkedIn is just like personalization bubble up right afterwards. So now we wait four days. So we've gone through our first three touch points. Again, if we just go back here, those first three touch points are we have the problem email, the bubble up, the case study. And so far, we've also added a call plus LinkedIn, and then a call plus a LinkedIn at this point. And then this was like a LinkedIn connect. So like that's, that's what we got.

33:12So now we go back to the flow. Now we're on day nine, we gave a little space because we've like hit them pretty hard in like outreach clusters, which tends to drive replies. Now we have our second problem email. And this is an auto email because we already personalized the first one. And there's a lot of diminishing returns in terms of like just continuing over and over and over, like wasting all this time personalizing emails. And so we're using the same trigger that we used in the first email, which is you have 30 MPC super fans. But the problem that we leave instead is the fact that a lot of sales trainers like bore people to death.

33:44It feels super theoretical. It feels like it was made in the 1970s. And your team has a bunch of 30 MPC super fans who like already be excited to take our courses and like work with us. Right. Are you open to taking a look? Cold call again. So that's our third cold call. And now you start to see the breakup riff. Notice at this point, that was our last call. So we hit one more cold call back here. So if I go back and share my screen, we hit one more cold call when we reached out with the second problem. We only did two LinkedIn touches. So we did a connect, which doesn't really cast touch. And then we did a LinkedIn message and then one more LinkedIn message of bubble up.

34:18We did one more cold call alongside the second problem right here. and now we phase out cold calls. So they do three cold calls on an account because our stuff tends to hit really well on LinkedIn. There are other teams that will do four to five dials. Typically after five dials, you hit the law of diminishing dial returns. So 13, you see that this is a basic three sentence email that's just like, hey, are you the wrong person? Now I'm just trying to like get an answer. And then this is, here's how we help you. Here's a case study. I'm gonna reach back in 38, in 30 days. Is there any reason that I shouldn't?

34:51it's like that's the sequence and does really well um and it's very similar to what we did at card and pave as well you were talking earlier about being able to sort of elbow check nudge your top rep your michael jordan what do you do if you have an sdr who is putting too low of a commit or they're consistently not hitting the activity and you know they're freaking good you know they're good how do you check someone if what's going on from an activity perspective on here is not up to par. So for example, Morgan Mello famously makes zero cold calls, like, like is known for making zero cold calls.

35:28And I was trying to get the team to dial. And so you'd see all these numbers where people would say, I'm going to make a hundred cold calls. I'm going to make a hundred cold calls, et cetera. And then Morgan would be like, I don't know if I'm going to make cold calls. And so number one, I would just like kind of call that out. Cause we had a good report. I'd be like, Morgan, like your dial numbers looking pretty hot this week. I mean, you're going to go crazy on these phones these weeks. She's like, I know I'm going to book so many beings. I'd be like, hey, Morgan, what if I match you, Dalton?

35:49And she'd be like, you're going to match me, Dalton. I will sit right next to you and we will dial together. You're going to dial with me? I'd be like, Morgan, I don't know. You think it doesn't work? I bet I can prove you're wrong. And then like, you kind of like have fun with it and you like joke and you're like, again, you're just like a little bit buddy, buddy. If I show you that I'm willing to eat shit with you, then you will probably be willing to eat shit on your own. What I will say is the other piece of it is that I think there's something to be said about figuring out what your reps strengths are.

36:14and then once they are good enough, letting them lean into that. And so a lot of times people will be like, yo, Morgan doesn't make cold calls. Why do I have to make cold calls? And I would be like, you're totally right. But when Morgan first joined, she was making cold calls and she was good on the phones. And then we found out that Morgan has a 70 % win rate. And so if you get a 70 % win rate and if your emails are getting 20 % replies and if you're booking six meetings per week like she is, without cold calling, you don't have to make cold calls. Until that happens, you got to do it our way.

36:50So if you can do it our way and it works for you, then you can double down on what works for you and then you could do it your way. But until that happens, you need to follow the process. You had something in the prep doc for this that you called demonstrate your street cred. And you've talked about this stuff. We're like, you're the SDR leader, but you are dialing with the team to show them that it works. You're like getting on that Friday Guile Blitz. We're working alongside the team. You're making people post in the public sales channel every time they book a meeting on that Friday dial blitz so that it's almost weird if you are not cold calling during that period.

37:25You had one note on the demonstrate street cred piece that I have to ask about, which is, it just says, Blue Hair Mondo. And I don't know what goes into that, but I have to ask. In addition to me doing the dials with the team, we had like launched a new SDR team and it was really hard to book meetings for a new product. So Carter was reaching out to founders at the time. And this was supposed to be reaching out to like venture capital firms, which are notoriously challenging to get in front of because it's like a very kind of incestuous space where like it's all referral based. And so I set a target where I was like, if we can hit this collective team meeting rule, then I will dye my hair blue.

38:09It's like stupid thing. Like I'm willing to do it at my own paying an expense I guess I was 28 26 at the time so I was young and I was willing to dye my hair blue but like yeah at the end of the thing they hit it and I dyed my hair blue and it sucked but it was like a little thing that showed up you could argue that I didn't do everything right and you could argue I was a bull in a china shop but no one could have argued at the time that I didn't give a lot of shit about the team. The last thing I want to talk about is naturally when you are running such a high performing work Armand you're going to have people that graduate up and move out And we also in the beginning talked about you were hiring from the beginning.

38:44So can you finish this playbook by walking me through your minimum viable hiring process for SDRs? Here's our minimum viable hiring process. So there are three very brief steps that happen before the onsite. So it's four steps total where the onsite is three interviews. OK, so number one is it's like a 15 minute recruiter screen that protects my team's time. And the key question to answer is, are you a buffoon? like do you even show up to this to this call like can you compose a sentence do you know what carta does maybe you do maybe you don't but if you don't get safe on a call with me armand that yeah yeah just like at the beginning of the career folks some of these people i'm like god like just don't have the camera looking up your nose like put on a clean shirt little things right so that like cuts like 50 of the applicant pool then you get to the hiring manager interview and I see this as like the first real interview.

39:39This is when you start to suss out, are you smart and do you care? So this is when you start to ask, why do you want to get into sales? Why do you care about Carta? What did you do to prepare for this interview, et cetera. From there, very quickly on, the behavioral bullshit ends and then you go forward to the mock cold call. And so the mock cold call is when you actually get to see hands-on keys. People can talk about the idea of cold calling an abstract, when you make them cold call, you see some very different things. So the key to the mock cold calls, you run this twice. So I'll send them like a podcast and that's it.

40:15And I want to see on the first one, how much did you listen to the podcast? And did you do research on Carta? And did you at least try to put it together? The cold call is going to suck. Like the cold call is going to suck. That does not matter. You're looking for like, are the gears turning because the number one most underestimated thing in SDR is the ability to think. Most people can like crank the wheel. Very few people can actually think. The key one is you want to look at the second cold call, which is when you you'll typically give them feedback after the first cold call. So you do the first round through.

40:46That was awful. Hey, here's one thing you did great. Would you try this differently for the second one? If they don't change anything going into the second call, that is a massive red flag. Are you giving them like an entirely new opener to give? Are you just talking about the words? Are you talking about the pacing? What's the common type of feedback? Because I imagine you don't want to give them an entirely new script. I might say, hey, you might have heard in the podcast, one of the things that we talked about is like a problem proposition. You mostly led with a pitch. Let's riff. What is the problem that a foreign and evaluation solves?

41:18Okay, cool. That's the problem. Great. You got it. Could you lead with that and then give your pitch the exact same way and just try it? right so now you're like pulling to to see if they can start to connect the dots another one is conversation you're not just saying here's the thing go do it like there's no space for this to breathe and that's that makes it feel safe i'm not trying to play stump the chump i'm trying to i'm trying to see can we riff together can you be coached like that's how i would coach someone give no more than two points of feedback so if you give more than two points of feedback like they're just they're gonna like freak out and i've seen people just like fall apart in the second one because they're overwhelmed trying to digest all the information.

41:55Like again, like one thing at a time. Sometimes I'll just tell people to slow down as if I'm not talking at a million miles per hour right now. So that gets you through the mock cold call. And like at this point, like you should know if you have someone that you want to hire. So we would like call this like the triple A point, which is like, you should know if you have a triple A hire at this point in the process. From there, we scheduled the triple onsite, which is three back to back interviews. So one is a mock cold email. There are two ways you can do this. One is we would give people a laptop and have them write it live.

42:24Two is you would have them draft an email and then bring it to the meeting. And then you would ask them all these questions around why they made certain decisions. Or maybe have them rewrite an email on the whiteboard or something like that. Take one sentence, rewrite it. And again, you're testing for not did they write the best cold email, but did they apply the prep and did they use their brain in this process? or did they just like copy paste what chat GPT gave them? So that's number one. Number two is we would do, I would always run what's called the rep filtering test, which tests for the first framework that we teach, which is if there are 40 ,000 venture-backed companies at Carta and you can only reach out to 25 this week, I want you to give me filters that take you from 40 ,000 to 25 and we are not going to stop until you hit 25.

43:12And so they would say like, well, give me the companies that were funded in the last two years. I'll be like, great, That brings you from like 40 ,000 to like 10 ,000. Give me like another four. And I would always like wait until they got stuck, which is usually around three. And you learn a lot about someone when like they have to start to get resourceful and like they start like writing things down. Like you want to break bedrock in the thoughts and like see, do they get excited about that or do they get like freaked out about it? And then the last piece is the rep wildcard where to the point around like reps get you from 80 to 100 percent.

43:43There are just like hustle tactics that exist in every SDR around like how to find accounts, who jives with AEs versus not. And I would always throw a rep in there. And it's like also just like reps love to get involved in this stuff. It makes it easier to sell the SDR and it makes it more exciting for your team to feel like they picked someone on the way in. And you can be like, hey, this is going to be your buddy when you join. So I would have the reps do like some sort of fun wildcard test and also just like test for cultural fit. Dude, this has been a phenomenal episode. Folks, we are going to take all of the resources that we covered in this episode, from the outbound frameworks to the sequence template to how to think about metrics to that Monday morning spreadsheet that Armand built, and we are going to put it together in an SDR org care package.

44:26And so we will have that care package in the show notes of this episode. It will be free. It is designed to help you and your org out. So go grab it. Steal some of Armand's stuff. But before we wrap, Armand, if I'm an SDR leader listening to this or I'm an SDR who like wants my team to get better, how can 30 MPC help them out? Well, folks, a lot of times it's really hard to be a sales leader around these parts because you're asked to get your SDRs to book like 4x the meetings, but AI slop is filling their inboxes. And sometimes you just want someone who kind of has the answers on what a good cold call looks like, the answers on what a good cold email actually gets replied to.

45:04And you just want someone to help you like build out all of your call scripts, all of your playbooks and get your team really excited to do that stuff. So that's exactly where our 30MPC enablement program helps is we literally teach your teams everything from cold calling to cold email to social selling to negotiation to multi-threading and then partner with you hand in hand to literally build out all your called scripts, all of your cold email frameworks, all of your sequence templates, all of your discovery questions so that you all can sell the exact same way that we sell at 30MPC and it is way better than having and someone show up for like 48 hours and do a training and then disappear.

45:42And folks, they're literally like we had one team who boosted their cold call conversion rate by like 60 to 70 percent in three months, which was nuts. And it gets results fast. And most importantly, reps like actually want to take it because they're already probably listening to 30 MBC. So if you like the way that sounds, go check out 30 MBC dot com backslash training. We'll also put a link to that down below in the show notes. if we get 10 people to reach out to Armand from this video, I will buy Armand a vat of dairy-free Greek yogurt. It is going to change his life. So please do Armand and to our team a favor and reach out if you'd like some help.

46:21But seriously, folks, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We will see you on the next episode, 30 a.m. PC. Today's show is brought to you by ConsenSys, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by ConsenSys. Go check it out in the show notes.

46:53Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

47:20Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

47:48And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.