1: Upselling, response times, and Boss' feedback
What's helping me engage customers and grow a tech start-up
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Agenda:
Booking meetings to upsell existing customers
How fast you should respond to inbound leads
Boss’ feedback
Quote of the week:
“You don’t start by saying, ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ If you do that every single day, soon you will have a wall.”
~Will Smith
Time flies.
It’s already been four months as an Inbound SDR at Packagecloud.
It’s funny because I feel like I’m barely getting the hang of things.
I guess that’s what it’s like working in the tech start-up space? Chaotic. Exciting. A mix of both?
Regardless, my experience has been becoming more and more valuable. I have an incredible team and I’m under amazing leadership.
Why is this relevant?
Because I’m building a solid foundation for my sales career. Which means I’m going to share with you some tips/tricks that might help you book meetings and continue to thrive as an SDR. Duh. Why else would you be here?
Kidding! Obvious sarcasm.
Anyway, let’s take a look at some things that have helped me this week!
How to engage existing customers to upsell
I work at a tech startup called Packagecloud, a software package hosting/distribution solution.
I was hired along with a new team. This means we inherited the old team’s processes. There lies the problem: we inherited suboptimal systems including pricing plans, lack of features, etc.
For that reason, we’re looking to get customers on the correct pricing plan along with the benefits and features that are designated to whatever plan that is.
However, doing that’s HARD.
Why is it hard to upsell to exisisting customers you might ask? They’re not looking to buy. They’re already paying customers. So, they have no motivation to potentially upgrade their plan.
Although I haven’t personally had success securing upsells, some of my team has. I also have been able to start a dialogue and book a meeting.
Here’s how I/we did it:
Use a non admin as the point of contact
For example, if you have a non admin’s phone number give them a call. They’re not a decision maker, but they’re more than likely working closely with them if they were invited by the admin/owner of the account.Ask to be connected to the owner of the account
I was able to get the non admin user on the phone. From here, I simply asked “can you connect me to the owner of the account?”.
The catch: you have to have a because/value proposition.
The only reason it worked here is that I had a because which was that we are making changes to our enterprise level accounts which can potentially change their plan/experience for the better.
Because the non admin wasn’t rehearsed in dealing with the account, he introduced me to the admin via email. This works because it caught the admin’s attention. Here’s what I said through email:3. Execute
It was easy from here because I piqued the admin’s interest. He/she was interested in the meeting. So, I BCC’d the non admin and sent a Google Calendar invite. Which they accepted.
Contacting the admin straight away is an option. I’d try that first. However, if that’s not working, here’s another option that can possibly get you a call booked.
There’s one more factor that’s important in order to make this work.
Response times
This is obviously applicable for all sales activity in order to elicit a response. In this instance, my CRM pings me whenever someone is invited by an admin. So, I jump on it.
What’s the ideal response time?
Under 5 minutes.
In a study done by Harvard Business Review in 2011, they found that the longer you took to respond to a customers inquiry, the less likely they were to respond. HBR determined that the ideal time to respond was within 5 minutes.
This was 10 years ago. It's probably worst now. We now have the attention span of a fruit fly (3 seconds).
The point: respond quickly.
Ideally less than a minute now, but when starting out the goal is less than 5 minutes.
In any case, I used this knowledge to pounce on the opportunity which landed me a meeting.
Boss’ Feedback
Like I said earlier, I’m under great leadership. Here’s a quotable moment from this week from my boss:
“Your job is to turn maybes into yesses, not nos into yesses” — realistically, you can’t convince people to a call via email
Below is a screenshot of a conversation I was having with an inbound lead. We’ve had some email/phone correspondence up until this point. I went for the meeting 3 times. He declined every one. He was geniuely not interested. To avoid wasting your time and respecting your leads decision, the response in the screenshot is recommended!This shows you respect your inbound lead’s decision and actually care about their situation. The meeting was for you to try to help. If they don’t want it, you’ll still be there.