How to Run a Sales Blitz and Revive Cold Leads (Ask Jeb)

0:00Rubrik is the security and AI operations company built for what happens after an attack hits, not just the moments before. AI has turned the threat landscape into quicksand, moving too fast for any human to fully predict. That's why an agentic cyber resilience platform matters. Automated recovery, clean data, a business that keeps moving no matter what hits. One platform, not a patchwork of stitched together tools and gaps. Don't wait for the next attack. Secure and accelerate your business at Rubrik.com. Again, rubric.com. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, best-selling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked.

0:38And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. We just got together as an executive leadership team and decided that there's a couple products that could really move the needle if we do a sales blitz in Q1 of next year. But we have a vast product mix. I'm curious if you had any thoughts on doing a quarter long blitz and any suggestion for launching that. How many salespeople? Out of the 45 in our whole company, there's probably going to be about 20 focused on this. Okay, so 20 focused on it. Would you be doing this blitz to existing customers or would this be a blitz to new logos?

1:13Both. Okay, both. The existing customer blitz is relatively easy because you already know who they are. You already know where they are. You already know what they're currently using. and really what you need there is compelling messaging for why they need to add this additional product to their mix. So the question for you would be, why would it take a quarter? Come back to new logos, but let's just focus on existing customers. Why would the blitz need to be a quarter? I think that might've been an arbitrary number, but just impressing upon us as the executive team impressed upon us, this needs to be what we're focused on.

1:42I would say that it's 30 days. You already know who your customers are. You already have a person assigned to them and you have a compelling message and then you have just to think about what the approach is going to be. The only thing holding you back is calling them. So if you've got 20 people and 50 ,000 customers, then maybe it does take a quarter, but I doubt that's your number. So you've got probably a doable number and you just break it up and you just start every day and say, this is what we're going to do. And then the leaders have to say, we're going to have a meaningful conversation with every one of these customers about this product.

2:16In other words, you're calling, you're setting up an opportunity to spend time with them. It could be a quarterly review or a discovery meeting, what have you. And unless they just tell you, no, we're not going to meet with you, then you're having that meeting. And it wouldn't be a sell it over the phone type of thing. You know, call them and try to one call, close it, have a meeting with them. They're your existing customers and they're going to talk to you. And then all you do is set goals around that. But that would be the first 30 days of the year. You want to go after that existing customer base.

2:42And that could be an hour a day, two hours a day of work. When it comes to the new logos, go back to your 90 days. 90 days is a long time to maintain a blitz. Like a blitz is we're blitzing, right? You know, when I used to do blitzes, when I was the head of a division for my company, and we would do blitzes, we would go to a city and we would put a pin in the map where our competitor's location was. And then I would bring 50 salespeople in and we would draw a circle around it and we would call on every one of their customers. And we would do that in a day. It would turn the world upside down for that competitor.

3:11So when you start thinking about blitzing, maintaining that over 90 days, you're never going to be able to maintain that energy level. So with your new logos, you want to mix that in. That's where your leadership team really has to get dialed in. And this is what I mean by this. You can't start January and tell your salespeople, we're doing a blitz on this product, go sell a bunch of it. Right now, build the list. Here's the list of prospects that are new logos that we're going to go after. And your leadership team, along with your marketing team, and if you've got some data analysis, they're going to tell you, These are the personas that are most likely to buy.

3:44These are the types of businesses that are most likely to buy. These are the size of the company we're most likely to buy. And you build for every one of your reps a big enough list with a goal on it, like a closing goal on it. It's going to have a meaningful impact. So it could be, you know, sell to small businesses. It could be a thousand opportunities per rep. Larger business, it might be 250 opportunities per rep. Then the blitz is we need to contact every single one of these businesses in the next 30 days. And we're going to do this by calling 50 a day every day for the next 30 days. This is the sequence we're going to run on them.

4:17And then we're going to have check-ins twice a week on where we are on the list. Because a blitz only works if you're there holding people accountable for the activity they're supposed to be doing. So the salespeople, when they start the year, they know the product. They've got the list. You've built, here's the messaging. Here's what we're going to ask for. Here's how we're going to set meetings. And then every rep has a goal. With a new logo, you need to have five new meetings a week to have a conversation with these new logos about this particular product. With your existing customers, it's going to be a lot more because your existing customers are going to meet with you because you already have a reason to be there because you're already servicing them.

4:51And I would say run that hard over a 30-day period, January 1st to January the 30th. And then if you feel like you need a reboot for another month, do it another month. But then that next month, pick another product that you're going to blitz and blitz that product the next month. Keep it very focused, very dialed in, but don't send the reps out there and say, we're doing a blitz. Like you got to tell them exactly what they're going to call, exactly who they're going to call, exactly what they're going to say. Yeah, thank you. Going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes.

5:22And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting. Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepin S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase.

5:57Question from Lindsay because I know she can't get on. Share with us your number one piece of advice for reconnecting with cold or old leads. Pick up the phone and call them. To give you an example of this, okay, so last week I've got a client of mine. We've been working with them for 12 years now. It's what we call an integrated partnership. So we train them. We do consulting. We help them figure out their hiring practices, compensation planning, which we're doing right now with this company. We're working now on helping them get more outbound going. They generate a lot of leads inbound, but their number is going up.

6:27but we don't expect they're going to get a higher call volume, right? So we know the call volume is going to stay the same. So the only way that you're going to be able to sell more is either you have to increase the average order value for each deal that you close over the phone, or you're going to have to have more conversations. So I've been working with them for a long while on outbound. We go in, we're talking about outbound, and they're like, ah, outbound doesn't work. Nobody helps us. Nobody answers the phone. And for me, like outbound for them is just call old customers, like call old leads, call people that you haven't talked to in a while.

6:56And I have my son with me who is an absolute fanatical prospector. One person's complaining and he goes, all right, somebody give me a list. One of the leaders goes and pulls a random list and hands it to him, 25 names on the list. And he starts dialing and he dials for about 20 minutes. 20 minutes later, he talked to 10 people. He made 11 dials. The first one went to voicemail, the other 10 answered. And four of those conversations turned into pipeline opportunities. Think about that. You looked at the leaders. I was with him and he says, okay, explain to me why this isn't working. I mean, that was just a random list, right?

7:29Yeah. Why is it not working? And they're like, I don't know. Like, I can't understand. Like, why does that work for you? How could that happen? And I have the same experience. And he says, look, I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, but here's the deal. Nobody answers a phone that doesn't ring. And the message to him was really simple. It's not that outbound doesn't work. It's not that calling inactive customers and like closed loss deals doesn't work. It's that you're not actually making the calls. So you're looking for the secret of how do I reactivate old deals? And the secret is call them, pick up the phone, have a conversation.

8:02Some of them are going to say, oh yeah, I remember you. You know, we're ready now. Some of them are going to say, hey, I've got something that I need some help with. Like for example, this company sells commercial kitchen equipment. It was an old dead deal. It was an owner of a Mexican restaurant. Called the guy up and the guy immediately starts complaining about something that he had bought, a margarita machine that he'd bought from the company a couple of years earlier. The guy goes, yeah, I got this margarita machine. It's not really working really well. I need a attorney. He goes, thanks for telling me about that.

8:29What else you got going on? Turns out that the guy ends up having three more restaurants and he needs a bunch of stuff. So he gives him an order for a bunch of stuff that he needs. Most people wouldn't do that, right? But all he did was just pick up the phone and start having a conversation. My best advice with anything that's old is call them. How are you doing? I've got another one of my clients who are working on the same thing. And these were just old customers. They'd bought a long time ago. They didn't buy anything now. They sell capital equipment. And we just called and said, hey, you bought from us in the past.

8:59When do you think you're going to make your next purchase? Now, out of 100 of them, 80 of them went, I would not buy anything right now. 10 of them told us to go pound sand. We don't like you anymore. And 10 of them said, you know what? I'm glad you called. we're looking for something. I would suggest, and this is, I think is super important. And I bang this drum all the time. Call your inactive customers, call closed loss. So anything that was in the pipeline that didn't buy from you. I mean, I wouldn't call the closed loss from last month, but call the closed loss from March, call them, call the closed loss from last year, call people that you put into the pipeline and ghosted you.

9:30And this never showed up again, call them back. They know who you are. You have a level of familiarity. We don't know what's changed in their world, I do think that salespeople have a very bad tendency to bounce off something that didn't close and they put it away and they never come back to it again. And Chris, my point about building lists is as a leader, if you want more of that to happen, what you do is you build the list for them, you hand it to them, and then you sit next to them while they're making the calls. You make some calls too. If you don't do what they want. If you've got people who said no to you because you didn't have a feature in something or because the price was too high and you've got something new, different.

10:07You've got an offer. That's an easy thing for a basic email communication. Hey, I've got something different, new, something that's changed. You can do those things, but you want to be very careful with that. You don't always have that at your disposal, but you always have pick up the phone, synchronous conversation.

10:30We'll be right back.

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