#615: How to Master Social Selling on LinkedIn to Book Meetings | Kade Hinkle | 30MPC Hall of Fame

0:00Kade Hinkle: Sellers, cold outbound sucks for both you and your prospect. It takes an insane amount of effort, reply rates are in the tank, and you are fishing in the same pond as everybody else. I literally wrote a book on cold calling, but Sam McKenna, who's the CEO of hashtag SamSales, completely changed my mind about what I thought social selling and great outbound prospecting is. Sam literally has broken 13 national sales records. She was recruited by LinkedIn because because she was so good at LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and she built her business from scratch into a multi-million dollar business using exactly what she teaches in her social selling course that she built in partnership with 30MPC.

0:43Kade Hinkle: Go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam. Her new course teaches you how to use relationship data and your network's network to get warm introductions into your dream accounts that would never answer your cold call, respond to your cold email, or open the gift that you sent to their office. If you go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam, we are giving away all of Sam's favorite LinkedIn sales nav reports, alerts, and scripts that you can use to break into more accounts with less effort. Over the next couple of weeks, everything we're dropping is going to be focused on either social selling or one of our best ever Sam McKenna episodes.

1:20Kade Hinkle: And the reason for that is at the end of October, we are launching our social selling course with Sam. Today's episode is a fun one. It's with Cade Hinkle. He walks through his step-by-step social selling process, and I hope you enjoy it. If you want to pre-order Sam's course, you can do it in the show notes. Anyways, on to the episode. Send 30 connections a day to your ICP prospects and engage with their posts and also post content yourself. If you're sending 30 a day, you're going to have at least five people accepting. Second point is, since they've accepted your connection request, this is why you start posting because they will see your content in their feed.

1:52And then once you get that signal to reach out, they're going to be familiar with you already. And then the last part of this LinkedIn is when you're sending out 30 connections a day, look if anybody is actively posting on LinkedIn. And if they are, you can turn on their post notifications and then engage with them when they post.

2:11Kade Hinkle: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. I'm your host, Nick Segelski, and today I have a very special guest and a very special co-host. We have our own account executive here at 30MPC, Alex Murphy, joining me with Cade Hinkle, who Cade was SDR of the year on his team out of 13 SDRs. And a big piece of this is this dude is a master at selling on LinkedIn. And Alex, part of the reason that we brought you on to co-host this one is you're also pretty dang good at booking meetings on LinkedIn. So I will ask you, why should people listen to this one other than to hear what your voice sounds like?

2:53Listen, everybody that I talk to wants to be good at social selling but has no idea how to do it. They think social selling means like scrolling through LinkedIn and hoping you get lucky. And that's very much not what Cade does. Cade is super systematic about how he leverages the entire platform in a way that is tactical and specific and isn't just going to eat up his day scrolling. If you are wondering how to get your sellers more into LinkedIn or how to be a good seller yourself on LinkedIn, you're going to come out of this one with a lot of specifics.

3:24Kade Hinkle: Hell yeah. A three, a two, a one. Let's get into this specific episode. All right, Cade, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. Number one is use videos for your second message and specifically follow-ups. For this, I use Condo and something I like to do is, again, sending videos specifically for follow-ups. I think it's better than a massive wall of text. It takes like one to two minutes and it feels personal. And if it works, look into why it worked. And then you keep doing more of that over time. And what I said in this specific video exactly, I booked a VP of sales at 150 plus person company.

4:03And I said, quote, there, congrats on the new role, guessing you're crazy busy and your DMs are flooded after announcing your new job on LinkedIn. I won't give you too long of a pitch on Common Room because I know you're familiar with us from our previous talks at your old org. I saw you guys might be fully inbound with a big account executive team, but no SDRs. If you're tasked with building the outbound motion, we'd love to intro you to Common Room. I have a few ideas for what you could be using us for, but again, hope things are going well as you're ramping.

4:30Kade Hinkle: Beautiful. What's number two? Number two is the 30 connection rule. So, Send 30 connections a day to your ICP prospects and engage with their posts and also post content yourself. Not a lot of people are going to like that last one. There's a couple of things that go into this. Number one is if you're sending 30 a day, you're going to have at least five people accepting. That's the lowest for my industry I sell to. I sell them to go-to-market leaders. I'm not sure what it'd be for others, but that's the baseline for mine. If you get five people accepting you, that's five more opportunities than you had before to book more meetings.

5:06And the second point is, since they've accepted your connection request, this is why you start posting because they will see your content in their feed because they follow you and you follow them. So your content is going to show up on their feed. That's just the rules of LinkedIn. You want to be a familiar face for when the time is right to get them on a meeting because over time, they're going to see your post in their feed. And then once you get that signal to reach out, they're going to be familiar with you already. And then the last part of this LinkedIn is when you're sending out 30 connections a day, look if anybody is actively posting on LinkedIn.

5:41And if they are, you can turn on their post notifications and then engage with them when they post. Right now, I probably have like 75 prospects notifications on. And it's just a part of always trying to stay top of mind in their world. And I'm always monitoring when it might be the right time to reach out. Maybe they're hiring SDRs. Maybe they just raised funding or they're coming up in a renewal with the current tool. And all of these signals that just show me it's the right time to strike. Well, it's the right time to strike for actionable takeaway number three. All right, number three is comment for a week and then pitch them.

6:14If you see that people are posting on LinkedIn, again, this goes back to my other point, turn on their post notifications. And then instead of pitching them right away, you want to wait a little bit for these people. I like to wait like one to two weeks, interact with their posts, comment on them, send them to other people. And then after that one to two weeks, send them a pitch because then they'll be familiar with you and it's a way higher chance of booking a meeting.

6:38Kade Hinkle: All right, Cade, I want to go deep on this 30 connection rule that you live, die, and beat quota by. So let's start at the very top of this, which is there's hundreds of thousands of prospects on LinkedIn how do you decide the companies that you're going to focus on and who are you actually sending these requests to? I imagine you have a territory or a book of business. Are you just connecting with like the VPs that you're trying to book meetings with? Are you connecting with reps? Do you take a different approach? Who actually goes into those 30 requests you're sending a day? It starts in common rooms.

7:19I use common room to decide what accounts slash people I'm going to reach out to. I'm a big fan of competitor, like reaching out to folks that are using a competitor. So like, let's say I'll choose five accounts per day that are using a competitor of Common Room. I'll send connections to all the people that I want to talk to. Sometimes I'll send it to below the line people, but most of the time not. I only will if I see some sort of signal that tells me, okay, this person, like maybe I'm already connected to them, then I'll ask them a question. But you really want to keep the three connections like high quality.

7:50I don't want to waste any of them because you run up pretty quickly.

7:54Kade Hinkle: Yeah. So it sounds like you're going above the line. It sounds like these are like VPs, directors, CXOs. Are you putting a note in your connection request? Are you leaving it blank? Does it depend? What does that look like? Probably 90 % of the time I'll put no note. And it really depends. If I get a referral or if I know somebody that they know, then I'll put that in the note. Or if they change jobs from a competitor. I've done this like three times actually. Somebody changed jobs from a company that is a competitor of Common Room. And I was like, hey, I know you're familiar with us. Let's talk.

8:28And that's been accepted every time. So it doesn't happen much, but I do put a note sometimes. Either way, you are going in and once they've accepted it, you're then going straight for a pitch. Is that right? Or do you soften them up a little bit with some sweet talk before you get in there and get into business? No, I'm always pitching probably 90 % of the time. and a lot of people don't post on LinkedIn. So like that other 10 % is when I'm interacting with their posts for a couple of weeks and then I'm pitching. But like 90 % of the time, I'm always pitching. And then if I do something post, I'll still interact.

9:02And another good tip is when you pitch somebody, if you see them post after, then comment on that. If you can comment on their posts with something relevant, then they're going to go look at your profile because they probably don't get a lot of comments. I do this a lot as well because I'll have people that I know I'm going, like I sent you a pitch and you didn't respond to it. And if it's time to follow up, I may go back and double tap on the message I sent, but I might just go throw a like and a comment on a post. And it's as good as, hey, here's my name again getting right in front of you so I can imagine why.

9:35It's not surprising that that helps. Do you find when you do that, they'll come back to the DM sometimes? A couple of times. There's not many times because a lot of the times people's posts are just posting about their company and stuff that they do where I can't really put a relevant comment on there. Maybe I'll put an emoji, but I don't want to put stuff that doesn't matter to them. I'm not going to comment just an emoji or something AI. I want it to be a post that I actually want to add value to. And then they can be like, okay, this person seems nice. Let me click them. Oh, they've actually messaged me before.

10:03Let me respond to them. They gave time to me.

10:06Kade Hinkle: Let's actually spend a little bit more time on the engagement with the content. And so it sounds like you're not doing just an emoji or an AI generated thing. you're turning on post notifications. So every time you go on LinkedIn, you're getting a bunch of notifications of Alex Murphy posted, Jane Smith posted, Bob Dole posted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How are you managing the workflow of engaging with those posts? Like, are you just doing it as the posts come up? Are you time blocking it? And then can you give me some examples of like what you might actually write on those posts? Because I'm really curious about this warmup.

10:40Kade Hinkle: This is something I never did when I sold to law firms. And I kind of wish that I had, because I think it would have helped me break into more hard to break into accounts. There's not really a way to automate LinkedIn, as we all know, which kind of sucks, but it's totally manual. I'm basically just chronically on LinkedIn, which is probably the answer. Okay. You're chronically online as a GTM. I see the notification. I'll probably interact with it within five minutes. People are probably like, what? How is this kid interacting with my posts every time? The times that I have commented, it's not many because a lot of the times they're not posting about relevant stuff.

11:11But it's if they're posting about something personal, basically if it's anything aside from their company. Because again, most of the time they're just posting stuff about their company where I can't really add anything to that. And if it is them, if it's them talking about hiring, then that's good. Because that shows me it's time to reach out because they're scaling the team. And also I have a lot of people in my network that I can refer. So I'll comment somebody's name and be like, hey, open role. Nice.

11:37Kade Hinkle: Alex, what's your approach with this? Well, I think for me, the hard part is systematizing all of it because you're not just doing LinkedIn. You're also, I assume you're calling people, you're emailing, you're doing a multi-channel approach. So I think like I'm doing a lot of this in flow. Like I've got, you know, a sort of an automation tool that I'm going step by step. And when I see it's time to reach out to so-and-so and it's time for the LinkedIn touch, the first thing I will do is go to their page. And if they just posted something, I'll use that as the follow-up step. Like I'm not going to go back into the DM if they haven't responded to that or haven't accepted my connection request.

12:09But how do you think about structuring all of this together to make sure that you're not letting things fall through the cracks, you're not missing opportunities? Or are you just Batman-level vigilant on LinkedIn at all times and just know what's happening? A little bit of Batman-level. But I think of LinkedIn as sort of my hub. And then there's emails, calls around it. Everything I'm trying to do is just have conversations with my prospects and then connect with them on LinkedIn. So then when the time is right, then I'll book a meeting with them. And it's LinkedIn for me specifically because my ICP lives on there.

12:43Like maybe somebody sells to plumbers and they live on Facebook. So maybe that's somebody else.

12:48Kade Hinkle: Kate's on Facebook, posting on their wall or their news feed. I haven't been on Facebook in a while. Kate, Facebook is a social media platform from the mid-20s to 2000s. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but I do use it. I use it for marketplace. Facebook is great. Oh my God. He's flipping trading cards on the internet. Okay. So I want to talk about in the pre-show, you were talking about a prospect recently responded to you immediately being like, let's book a demo. This was the best LinkedIn outreach I've ever seen. And you were sharing the story of you basically orchestrated this. You were commenting on his posts, another person's posts.

13:28Kade Hinkle: You were using like voice notes. and I think also videos. Can you talk to me about the story behind this one? I'll start from the very targeting. I saw this company was using a competitor, added people from their company on LinkedIn. This is the VP of RevOps he happened to accept, which is great, and he posted a lot. So I saw that, turned on his post notifications, said I'll wait a little bit. He happened to post like twice a day, which is a lot. So I was interacting with every single one for like, it was a while, it was like three weeks. I waited a long time for this one. And then my signal to reach out was, I saw that a marketer who worked at Sixth Sense moved over to that company.

14:05So I sent that guy a note and I put a note in the connection request for that guy. Like, hey, you worked at Sixth Sense. You're familiar with Common Room. I'm trying to book a meeting with you. And then he accepted. And he was like, yes, I do want to have this team look at Common Room. But then he went ghost. So I was like, all right, time to go back to the other guy. And then I sent him a voice note, talked a little bit about what I talked with the other guy. And that was after like three weeks of interacting with his posts so i bet he knew exactly who i was and he was like uh your sequence of engagement by posts up to this outreach is like the best cold outreach i've ever received let's do a demo also are you looking to work yeah no thanks but uh when works for you yeah man and he he it sounds like was really responding to the fact that you did surround sound with multiple people at the account and just like he knew your face because you're posting yourself, which you mentioned a minute ago, and also commenting on his thing there.

15:00I'm curious about the voice note piece. So that's another channel. You DM him a voice note. What are you saying in that? I've dabbled, but I always feel a little awkward. And there's some people who are like, no, that's disrespectful to make them listen to your voice note. How do you think about that? So I said, what's up, dude? Question mark. Probably not the best. But I said, it's Cade here, I spoke with your new product marketing manager about two weeks ago, and he was previously for five years. So he's very familiar with the intent space and I'm trying to get common room in front of him. He mentioned you guys were using clay and that he wants to get common room in the mix.

15:41But I'm sure he has a thousand things going on right now as he's ramping. So I thought I'd shoot you over a note. You can think of common room a lot more out of the box and user friendly than clay. The pricing is set instead of being on a credit cost that clay has. So the price isn't just going to skyrocket out of nowhere. But anyway, what we're going to do is bring together all your data into one dashboard for your reps and make that data actionable. Like your about section says, quote, I'm all about turning data into decisions and systems into well-oiled machines, unquote. That's like common room to a T.

16:11So anyway, I can send over a few specific examples that I'm thinking of, but let me know if this sounds relevant. And then that was super long, probably not the best voice note. So then I sent like a message afterwards, like too long, don't listen. And then I just gave like a quick one, like spoke with Nate. He mentioned you guys use clay and he wants to get common room in the mix as well. Thought I'd shoot you a note because he has a million things on his plate. Dang. That is so good.

16:35Kade Hinkle: The first thing that I noticed was in this voice note, you had multiple levels of personalization. You cited, hey, I talked to this person over here and this is what I heard. And then you also cited this is what they were using right now and why the person wanted to look at something else. You also cited what was in the prospect you were reaching out to's LinkedIn profile and tied that to why Common Room might actually be helpful for them. And I feel like that's really powerful because I don't know, five or six years ago, you used to be able to pick one piece of personalization. And that was the only thing that you needed in your message.

17:19Kade Hinkle: And I feel like now to stand out from some of the AI slop, you kind of need to show that you know them a little bit more than just one thing. So that was the first thing that I picked up on. The second thing that I picked up on was like, instead of being like, do you want to book a meeting? You actually had an offer. And this is something that we learned when we did an analysis of, gosh, over 300 million cold emails in partnership with Gong, where we looked at what CTAs were most effective. And it used to be interest-based CTAs, hey, do you want to learn more, were the most effective CTA. And what we actually learned was that making an offer, an offer of value, actually has a much higher likelihood of getting someone to agree to a meeting and continue the conversation.

17:58Kade Hinkle: And that's what you did there. You were like, hey, I can send over a couple ideas or examples. And then the last thing, I love this, you had the TLDL, the too long didn't listen, like the short summary. And I love that. What I actually think that also helps with is, you guys are chronically on LinkedIn, so you probably know this. If somebody sends you multiple messages on a thread, you don't just get one notification. If I send Alex three messages in a row, he gets three notifications. And I'm kind of anal retentive, and I have to clear out all of my notifications every single day. And if I see three, I'm like, oh, God, I got to go look at this one.

18:34Kade Hinkle: So, Alex, that's how you can get me to respond to you. is like when you send somebody those three messages in succession, they actually get more notifications than if you just send one. It is like the smallest nuance thing, but I feel like psychologically it increases the chance of response a lot more. One other thing I noticed there too, Cade, is it's always a tricky dance when you're referencing somebody else at the company in a prospecting note. So in the example you just gave, Dave, you had a substantial conversation with the first person and then they went ghost on you, right? Yep. You didn't just, I think it would have been less effective if you had said, I talked to Nate because a lot of people who are prospecting do that.

19:15And the conversation they had with Nate was like, please never call me again. And then they'll be like, hey, I talked to Nate on your team. But you brought in the specific substance of the conversation. Here's what we talked about. You made the specific thing to sort of catch this person up to speed, which I'm guessing is a part of the standard motion when you're kind of doing a name drop. Yeah, and it's a little tricky. Usually, I'll ask the people. They'll be fine with it. But this guy just went ghost. So maybe I shouldn't have mentioned his name, but I did. But be careful with that because some people might get upset.

19:47Kade Hinkle: I want to ask you guys about video messages via LinkedIn. in. When I was a new salesperson, it was like the hottest thing in the world to go to your friendly neighborhood office max and buy a$12 whiteboard and write the prospect's name on the whiteboard. Hey, Alex, and then have a video message go out to them. I imagine times have changed. Man, I feel old. What are you guys doing in your video messages to stand out from the crowd. Alex, why don't you go first? And then Cade, I want to hear from you. So I think, you know, that you feeling old thing. I mean, you did a Bob Dole. So I think the old ship has sailed.

20:30I give up.

20:32Kade Hinkle: Just send me your forecast. Damn it. Zero dollars. There you go. Okay. So back to Cade. So the for me with the video, I'm trying to be as personalized as possible because there's In my mind, it's like the video is short of the first 90 seconds of what a good cold call would sound like, but I don't have any responses from the person. So I'm coming in with some relevant stuff that I know about them and their business. I am then connecting that to a problem that I'm hypothesizing. And then I'm going into a little like a quick one sentence about like, for me, I sell our team training program. So it would sound like, hey, there, you know, I saw that you all are hiring 12 new reps and you added four like in the last quarter.

21:21You also had a fundraise last year. And so I'm guessing there's pretty high growth targets right now. And you're trying to balance hitting those numbers with onboarding people. And most most teams are like struggling to get the ramp time where it needs to be. Not sure if any of that's relevant, but we have a team training program that will take some of the skills coaching off of their plate or off of your plate, I should say. And so you can really focus on like making it last mile applicable and, you know, getting folks where they need to go and much more likely they're going to hit your, your ramp number and still hit those targets.

21:50I have no idea if any of that's relevant for you, but if it is, you know, it might be worth the chance to, to chat and, you know, worst case scenario, I can share some free stuff that might be valuable in the short term. Either way, you know, I'd love an opportunity to talk to you, but I hope you have a great rest of your day. And then I'll just like, I'll send it. And usually I'm like walking around outside when I do that. Now, which I learned from Darren McKee. But Kate, I'm curious how that squares with what you do. Sort of have the same CTA. I also say worst case scenario, we can share how this team booked this amount of pipeline, but I'll do the same.

22:18I just try to keep it human. I don't try to take too many takes. So I just usually take like two to three. I'll be like, hey, name, nice connecting. Even though people hate the nice connecting, that's basically what I say every time. Like, hey, name, nice connecting. I saw you guys sell to such a technical persona. I'm curious if you've looked into surfacing conversations from places like GitHub, Reddit, Discord, Slack, et cetera, to kind of find where your buyers are living. A couple of examples you could be tracking are like, one, specific titles complaining about insert two competitors. Like I'll insert that stuff.

22:50And then I'll give another signal, like new job changers asking their community what tools they should bring on as they start to ramp in the first 90 days. Not sure if any of this is relevant, but would you be open to a chat about this? Worst case, we can share how this team book like 75 % more pipeline after one quarter using the strategy. And that's kind of like who I'm targeting right now. Like I'm targeting companies that sell to technical buyers. So that's been my strategy the past couple of weeks. I like that you've added some value even in the message. Like if my whole goal with Outbound is to make it clear that I'm going to add value in the meeting, even if you never talk to me again afterward.

23:29And like the one that I just ran through, I'm sort of talking about the solution, but you actually give two specific signals that you all are recommending people look at. So the worst case is this person doesn't respond to you and they're like, oh, I should be checking Discord more. Why am I not doing that? Right? Like you're adding value, which is a great way to make it clear and build some trust that you're going to do that in that first conversation anyway, which I really, really like. When I'm pitching, I'm always trying to give them ideas of what they can use with our tool. It's like almost, again, I'm pitching 90 % of the time in those pitches.

23:59I'm going to say, here are two ideas you can be using this for. Kate, I'm curious about, so we were talking about the 30 connection rule.

24:07Kade Hinkle: They're either posting or they're not. If they're posting, you warm them up for a little bit. You engage, you put some nice comments, yada, yada, yada, and then you pitch. If they're not, you're hitting them right with the pitch, it sounds like. So I want you to pretend Alex over here is your target buyer. He's a VP of RevOps at one of your dream accounts. And he accepts your connection requests. and you'll look at his profile and Alex Murphy has not posted on LinkedIn ever. He barely has a profile picture. He's like Bob Dole status over here. My LinkedIn headline is 6X girl dad. That's all you get.

24:44That's all I have. I'd use that then. I'd use that. There's nothing. There's literally nothing.

24:48Kade Hinkle: There's literally nothing. What do you say in this pitch to Alex? These are the most tricky. These are the ones where I'll usually go generic and just send more of a, I'll still do the same thing where I'll give the ideas and the signals. Because a lot of companies are just cold. There's no hiring. There's no funding. There's no profile picture. There's nothing on this LinkedIn I can use. So these are the ones that are always tricky. But I just try to do the same thing I do with the other people. Be human. You can't use as many signals. Maybe you'll get a response. Maybe you won't. But most of the time, these are the people that don't respond to me.

25:22But again, thankfully, people in my ICP are mostly active on LinkedIn. So there's not too many that don't have a profile picture or aren't active.

25:31Kade Hinkle: You were talking about, I've seen messaging from you before, both in these LinkedIn messages. And also, I think you posted a cold call transcript. You literally, you're like, I am writing or I am calling to book a meeting with you. Can you talk to me about like where that gets included? I'll do the LinkedIn message first. When I'm prospecting a new account, I'll send them connection requests and also add them into an email or sorry, call sequence. and I'll generally send them a connection first and then I'll call them later in the day. But if they don't accept, I'll call them. They're like, hey, my opener right now is I'm calling to book a meeting with you.

26:02And that's been working really well. People are like, okay, what are you talking about?

26:08Kade Hinkle: Play this out and hear what it sounds like. Will you call Alex, your prospect? Ring, ring. Hello. Alex. Yes. Hey, this is Cade from Common Room. I'm calling to book a meeting with you. Is that right? About a meeting about what, Cade from Common Room? Yeah. Are you familiar? I feel like I've seen you all. Yeah. Yes. I feel like I've heard of it vaguely, but not super tight. Okay. Well, I'll give you a quick pitch. It's all about signals and intent data. And particularly for you guys, since you sell to such a technical buyer, have you looked into tracking places like Reddit, Discord, Slack to kind of find where your potential buyers are living and talking about topics related to your company or your competitors.

26:57Maybe they're complaining about them, that sort of thing. But you might tell me you have all the pipeline you need, and this is totally irrelevant. Well, I won't tell you that because it's not true. But I mean, we're doing okay. It's not like we're in the dumps right now. Yeah, we talk about this all the time. Yes, we're selling mostly into the DevOps leadership space. And so yes, GitHub's a big one. Reddit is a big one. problem is it's all like anonymous on like it's hard to know you know you can get general themes but it's kind of hard to like track where specific people are showing up so we do it but it's not

27:33Kade Hinkle: like super systematic i actually want to go back to how you open that call because it sounds like it's really intentional talk to me about what you're doing in the like the first words out of your mouth and the pause i'll say their name just to make sure i'm the right person and also So it's never not worked for me. I'll usually just say their name. Like I said, like Alex. And they're like, what? Or like, yes, this is Alex. And I'll be like, I'm calling to book a meeting with you. But I'll say like some uhs, like some pause. So I don't want to just say it super quick. So I'll be like, I'm calling, or sorry, I'll say this is Cade from Common Room.

28:05I'm calling to book a meeting with you. And I'll say Cade from Common Room because I've already sent them a connection request on LinkedIn. And a lot of people have said, oh, yeah, I saw your connection request earlier. Or yeah, we're connected on LinkedIn. So I'll be like, this is Cade from Common Room. I'm calling to book a meeting with you. And then they'll be like, okay, well, what do you do? And then you just get straight into it.

28:24Kade Hinkle: That's badass. I really like the, I haven't tried this, but when you lead with just their name, they're going to respond. And the type of response you get, they might be super friendly. And they'll be like, this is Alex. How can I help you? Or they might be like, what? And that then sort of allows you to calibrate your tonality and how you approach the call from there. without being like locked into immediately hitting them with a permission-based opener or something. So I really like that because it allows you to calibrate. And then the I'm calling to a book and meeting with you, I like it because you are literally bottom line up front telling them what you want.

29:01Kade Hinkle: You're not trying to close a deal on the call. You're not trying to like rob them of their social security number, which is something prospects are worried about when they get a call from an unknown person. Like you're leading with what you want. And I feel like it's such a pattern interrupt. And there's like a piece of curiosity. Alex can't help but be like regarding and that opens the door for you to give him a pitch yeah and there's another good point is when I say their name I can you really have to listen to like what mood they're in like maybe they're like uh yeah or they'll be like oh yeah and they'll be happy I'm like okay yes like I'm trying to not pitch like if they sound distraught like oh it sounds like you get a lot of cold calls and then they'll like open up and be like oh yeah and then I'll just have a conversation so whatever if I can do something to like talk to them like a normal conversation before I get to my pitch.

29:46I find that I book way more meetings. I wish I had a number of a percentage. But if I can talk to them a little bit before I get to my pitch, that always works really well. So when you say their name, listen to their tone of voice. And if they're distraught, then talk to them or say sounds like you get a lot of cold calls. If they're happy, like, hey, well, hey, I don't know. Say something. One thing worth noting here is you know your audience. You're selling to sales leaders primarily, they presumably have a team of people cold calling for them. And so what you're doing is pretty audacious to say, I'm here to book a meeting with you.

30:20I can imagine there are some people who would be like, you know, no, right. But like, I think you are knowing your audience well there because you're selling to these GTM personas. And like something you've talked about before is making sure that you're always experimenting and it's worth testing. I will be testing that on my next Dial Block.

30:37Kade Hinkle: I love it. Well, Cade, we could continue this interview for hours and hours and hours, but Alex has some connection requests he needs to send. We're running out of time. So I got to move to the final question, which is this. We've talked about a lot of best practices for salespeople of what to do. Now I'm going to flip it on its head and ask you about a shouldn't. And so the last question is, what is one bad habit as it pertains to Outbound that you see a lot of salespeople exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps? Definitely not being consistent with outreach.

31:05At the end of the day, I feel like all we're trying to do is have as many conversations with our prospects as possible. And so many people, they don't want to send LinkedIn messages. They don't want to send emails. They don't want a cold call. And these are all things that just get you steps closer to the people. And like, I talk to SDRs almost every day and they're always like, oh yeah, I'm not really doing this consistently. Like not sending LinkedIn messages consistently. So I feel like you need to find some way to be consistent with that, which is hard. Like even I struggle with it sometimes, of course.

31:34Kade Hinkle: Hell yeah. Cade, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap. Coming up soon. All right, folks, it is time for your two by two recap. Alex, what were your two big takeaways from this one? The cold call opener that Cade shared around just, I'm going to literally go right now and try it, which is just Alex. And it gets a response for him. I think it's a little audacious of I'm calling you to book a meeting. So I'm going to give that one a shot. I think that's great. The second one is he's given people meaningful stuff that they can use, even in the opening conversation around like, hey, are you checking Discord and Reddit for signals of where your technical buyers are showing up?

32:13And even adding that kind of value in the outbound makes it way more likely that people are going to consent to spend 30 minutes of their time with you in a meeting. So that was huge for me. How about for yourself?

32:23Kade Hinkle: My two were, one, the 30 connection rule. It's just like an awesome thing to bake into your workflow. I think it's a great thing you can do at the beginning of sequencing a prospect, connect with them on LinkedIn, and this starts to accrue. 30 connections today over an entire year, you start to build up a network of people that you want to sell to. And this is great if you are going to stay in your specific vertical for a long time. Had I stayed selling to law firms, I start to build a good network. And that's how you start to build ability to get referrals, introductions, et cetera. So start the 30 connection rule now, and that will start to accrue over time.

32:58Kade Hinkle: The second one is follow your prospects by hitting that like little bell icon on LinkedIn. And the reason that you do this is so that you do not become beholden to your feed. It is a horrible use of your time to be randomly scrolling your LinkedIn feed, hoping that you see a post from your prospect that you can engage with. When you follow them, you get notified when they post. So you can go straight to that post and not get distracted by all of the drivel on the LinkedIn feed. So 30 connection rule, follow your prospects. Alex, this is normally where people ask, Nick, how can people help us out?

33:34Kade Hinkle: So you know what? I'm going to say the way people can help us out today is if you're not following Alex Murphy on LinkedIn, he's one of our star account executives here at 30MPC. And one of the things that I appreciate about what you write, Alex, is you are not writing to be a LinkedIn influencer. You are simply sharing the highs and lows and lessons that you are learning as an account executive who transitioned from being a teacher. and you've written some things that like we've worked on as a sales team here at 30 MPC. And so Alex is somebody that I promise you can learn from. Go give him a connection request and mention that you heard from Nick and folks will see you next week.

34:10Kade Hinkle: Alex, I'll see you on your pipeline review in an hour. God help me. See you.

34:17Today'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.

34:43Kade Hinkle: 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. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

35:14Kade Hinkle: There's a link in the show notes.