EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
Building a target account list is the critical first step for any successful sales strategy, yet it remains an overlooked and haphazard process at many SaaS firms. Rather than leave targeting up to individual reps, centralize it to boost efficiency and revenue growth. As Helen Fanucci, founder of Pipeline Power, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank emphasize in this episode, outdated title-based targeting must give way to responsibility-based keyword searches on LinkedIn and intent signals from job profiles. They delve into common missteps sales leaders make, from over-researching targets to allowing bloated pipelines and territories that hamper productivity. Tune in to learn how to focus your targeting, embrace open territories, have meaningful conversations, and build trust with the right prospects from day one. You’ll pick up tangible tactics to scale pipeline and accelerate deals. Listen to the first half of this discussion, Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
Corey Frank (00:30):
To be here, bestselling author of Love Your Team by Helen Fucci and former executive over at Microsoft and DRL over at Mediafly. So Helen is joining us today, Chris, and we’re going to specifically talk about, I think something that we’ve talked about many times on the Market Dominance Guys, which is targeting, right, the four legs of the bar, stool, target list message, and reps. Sometimes we forget that targeting is one of the easiest to overlook, and so we brought the heat, we bring the expert, Ms. Fanucci on the market dominance guy. So Chris, over to you to introduce Helen and some of the things that we’ve been talking about before we jumped on air here about targeting and what we can all learn from Helen today.
Chris Beall (01:16):
Sure. Thanks Corey. Well, just to let you know, by the way, speaking of that Hawking thing, my most recent book I read is Molecular Storms, which is the application of the second law of thermodynamics to everything. So I think that it applies to targeting, actually, interestingly enough, targeting, it is an attempt to reduce the entropy that is the number of micro states that correspond to a macro state. The macro state in this case would be, Hey, bookings, we’re making money. The micro states would be all of the folks that you talk with and what you’re talking with them about and all that. And you’re trying to get that ratio in line so that you can survive by talking to relevant people, avoiding talking to irrelevant people and all that kind of good stuff. And Helen and I talk about stuff like this all the time.
Chris Beall (02:00):
Somebody said to me once, you must be the nerdiest people, at least in all of Quail Creek as a couple. And I said, well, perhaps as a working couple, yes, that’s possibly the case. We may have nerdier people here in Quail Creek, but I don’t think very many of them were both of them profess to have jobs. So Helen, you’ve had some recent experiences and some previous experiences that I think bring something about targeting into focus that is often missed, which is kind of the cultural issues and the people issues and the change management issues around targeting and B2B, Corey and I tend to refer to it like, Hey, you’re the boss, let’s make a list. And as you have known all along and have certainly gotten to experience recently, it’s not quite as simple as that from a people perspective.
Helen Fanucci (02:55):
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to be said in response to what you just said. So I’ve never had a job or been in a company where there was centralized targeting. Of course, everybody wants to engage the market. So when I was at Microsoft and my team had these big global accounts like Intel and hp, they were responsible for their own targeting and creating a strategy for reaching out to executives or go higher or broader, what have you across the organization. But even if an account rep didn’t have a single account but had a territory, again, they were responsible for it. And then more recently at Mediafly as a CRO, the reps would decide what accounts to focus on and who to reach out to as well as the SDRs. And it just got me thinking that that is perhaps a misuse of resource, that it might be more effectively done if it was centralized.
Helen Fanucci (04:08):
And then there was some deliberate strategy around the targeting rather than leaving it up to the individuals with a theory that, well, they’re being paid to make their quota, and it’s up to them how they go about doing it. But I think that that actually is inefficient. There is a piece about it in terms of defining strategy and helping craft that strategy as represented by who do we want to talk to in the market? Who do we want to get feedback from in the market? Who do we want to pursue to generate growth and revenue? And then there’s a piece that is just, let’s do a job well and have it centralized versus the fragmentation that comes when everyone’s doing and applying it in their own way.
Corey Frank (05:00):
So if we could take a step back though, Helen, I mean Chris, you and I, we speak with a lot, lot of organizations, a lot of CROs, a lot of VPs of sales. How do I do this really poorly? In other words, what is a traditional steady state of an organization? When they say targeting, do they say, Hey, I gave you LinkedIn navigator, you know what industries we play in, what geographies you are responsible for? Is that where it typically ends for most organizations?
Helen Fanucci (05:30):
Yeah, I think that that’s a really good statement. So there’s Sales Navigator, but then there’s also data providers. And I like to learn by doing. So I went into sales navigator myself, and then I put in our data provider, they have a Chrome plugin. And what I noticed in the lists on Sales Navigator when I wanted to translate that into a contactable list with phone numbers and emails, that the data provider only had about 50% of the people that I had identified in Sales Navigator that I wanted to reach out to or have my team reach out to. And I thought, man, that’s really inefficient. That doesn’t feel great that we don’t have all the data. It’s multifaceted. Are we talking to the right people? There are people who are experts that have felt that, okay, I’ve been successful selling to vice presidents of sales or sales enablement or what have you.
Helen Fanucci (06:36):
This is how you do it. Go into Sales Navigator, get their contacts, et cetera, et cetera. So it kind of pretty much ends there. Some companies have the point of view that’s really important to do research, and in fact, when I was at Microsoft and I was trying out or utilizing ConnectAndSell to reach HR executives, I thought, oh gosh, I’ve got to do some research on these people because what if I ended up talking to a few of them, which I hope to do? And they said, well, wait a minute. We have a relationship with Microsoft. I felt like they would expect me to know more about our mutual relationship. So I did some research and when I used ConnectAndSell, I realized, oh my goodness, I over researched. I did it for my comfort as it turned out, but it was not actually needed in the conversation. So I think sometimes that happens too. People get over
Corey Frank (07:41):
Researched, our good friend, mutual friend, Steve, Richard, right? He advocates the three by three, Chris and Helen, which is, hey, get three pieces of information in three minutes before you make the call. Now, Chris, you and I are big advocates of, although Steve is brilliant in many aspects, I think we fundamentally disagree if you’re doing cold outreach to do three pieces of information for three minutes before you make a phone call. Correct. Tale’s point about doing too much targeting, too much research before you jump into a role of cold outreach free.
Chris Beall (08:16):
Yeah, I mean, given that there’s a one and end chance and running between 10 and 30, that person’s actually going to answer your research is wasted somewhere between 90 and 97% of the time. So we don’t do very many things in life where we say, I insist that this be done. This is the most important thing to be done. And by the way, it’s complete waste. At least one out of 10 times you do it, you’re just going to throw it away. It’s sort of like saying it’s really important for these students to do their homework. So we know that they’re practicing and learning, say in a calculus class, and we’re going to assign them the homework, and then when they turn it in at random, we’re going to burn 90% of the homework that they gave us as well just, I don’t know, we can’t read it or whatever.
Chris Beall (09:05):
I don’t know if that’s a great analogy, but it’s kind of similar asking somebody to do work and then throw away that work because the next step in the process is fundamentally statistically unreliable is just bizarre. And in fact, I don’t know if you know this, Corey, but our friend Jeb Blount called me last year and said, Hey, you did this presentation at Outbound about time, about how many hours in the day that we have, and I think my calculation said that it takes about 25 and a half hours in a day in a given day, and there are not 25 and a half hours in a day to follow the research and call program that’s recommended if you are attempting to talk to 10 people a day. So when you kind of look at it that way, it’s like our people at ConnectAndSell talk to 40 people a day.
Chris Beall (09:52):
Would you rather have 40 conversations in which you’re relying on, I’ll call it the canned research, which is are they in your ICP as a company, do they meet the criteria for size of the company, industry, whatever it happens to be, and is the person more or less somebody that you want to talk to either to get a meeting with them or have ’em direct you somewhere else and yes, no, not me, not now kind of categorization. If the answer is you’ve done a reasonable job making the list in the first place, our view is just talk to somebody you’re targeting actually starts with the conversation. It’s true. It really starts with centralized list building, but the real action begins in the conversation where now you’re targeting based on high quality information coming back at 20,000 bits a second rather than here’s something I read and I sure hope it’s relevant and I can use it. By the way, research has another problem, which is almost none of it can be used in a cold call safely. You call somebody up and say, Hey Chris, how about the Wildcats? And I go, actually, it turns out I grew up in Scottsdale and I was a big A SU fan.
Corey Frank (11:00):
That’s right. That is true. It’s inauthentic, right? Authentic and highest degrees can actually dissuade somebody from building trust, which is the intent of the cold call to begin with, because that feels manipulative from a traditional vanilla list building. Helen, to your point, about 50% or x percent of a given cohort that I want, they’re not available on traditional off the shelf one source, right? There’s a LinkedIn and may have to cross reference to get all these other different platforms. So when you give one of your reps, let’s say Microsoft or any of the other executive positions that you’ve held, do you assume that is that go with part of their expectations that you know that there may be 58 people inside of Honeywell that I want to target for this particular software product, but really only 14 or 15 of them are readily available in traditional office sell type of solutions. Do you factor that in when you’re working and leading your team?
Helen Fanucci (12:01):
Well, so a couple things is you’ve got to factor in that you’re not going to be able to reap everybody. Yes, that’s true. However, if it’s a big company like Honeywell and you have a big team like I did at Microsoft covering Honeywell, chances are they can navigate to those individuals in ways that the average person going in through Sales Navigator or a data source. So that was an advantage position for sure. But if you’re not in Microsoft and you’re in another organization that doesn’t have those relationships, then I think it behooves you to have a broader list of folks. There is an assumption that you know who to talk to, but that’s a bad assumption. So one of the things that I believe deeply is that anyone you talk to, you’re going to learn from. And years ago when I had my first sales job, part of the training I got navigating and selling in big organizations is talk to people at lower levels or easier to get to learn and find out what’s going on, and then who’s responsible for solving a certain class of problems that your product addresses and then ladder your way up to different people in the organization or get sponsored in.
Helen Fanucci (13:28):
So I don’t ever have heartburn over talking to the wrong person because it’s always a learning opportunity. And in fact, one of the things I think is missing, and if you look at my LinkedIn profile with pipeline power, I talk about closed-loop targeting. And what that means is taking your learnings from lots of different sources. It could be from your CRM system, it could be from your outreach, the dispositions of your outbound lead sources, what have you, and find out, use that data to inform and sharpen your targeting so that you can be more and more deliberate as you go to market.
Corey Frank (14:14):
That’s interesting. I haven’t experienced that. I haven’t heard that. So there’s probably an element where if the three of us are all doing cybersecurity inside of Honeywell, we may have the same title, but odds are is we don’t, there may be some standards that are on a business card that are in the HR PeopleSoft system, but when it comes to maybe a LinkedIn or what a Zoom or with these other off the shelf type of solutions, it seems like that’s a big rub. That’s a big problem out there, is trying to coalesce these lists when three of us are doing the same gig. Same, but we have three different titles, but yet I’m supposed to try to search, my boss said I want to search for these titles. Marketing said I want to search for these titles. And therein lies a little bit of the challenge, doesn’t it?
Helen Fanucci (15:02):
Yeah. Well, that’s your first mistake. I think titles are an outdated mode of targeting, but they’re the common practice. It’s a common practice, but it’s not common sense. It’s kind of the opposite from my book is common sense, but not common practice. Well, I am putting that on its head and going after common practice is not common sense. So the reason I say that is a director of sales can mean a lot of different things. It’s a titled and so if, to use your analogy, if the three of us are responsible for cybersecurity, but we have different titles, why not just search on the term cybersecurity and sales navigator? Because people in their profiles on LinkedIn, they represent what they do and the words they say and it’s like, okay, so who cares about a class of problems? Is it if it’s cybersecurity, they probably talk about cybersecurity or they probably talk about threat detection or whatever kind of security words that are relevant.
Helen Fanucci (16:20):
It’s also a representation of what the company has hired them to do. I know a lot of people will look at job postings to find out what company strategies are, what gets revealed through company strategies, but also if you look on LinkedIn, it will reveal people who care about a certain class of business issues by how they structure and what they put in their LinkedIn posting. So why not search on that instead of director of sales, or you could do director of cybersecurity or what have you, but just put in cybersecurity as a title and search on that and then see if you get closer to a optimal target list.
Corey Frank (17:09):
Yeah, so because fundamentally, what I hear you saying, and Chris, we’ve talked about this in the past, is that my message is why the power of the 27-second message is relevant today. But if I’m a inside sales rep and I’m trying to craft a telemarketing, an outreach message, I risk if that is catered too much to the three by three pieces of information or what I think is that particular title, your example of Wildcats versus Sun Devils for instance, and whatever is the equivalent in a business outreach. I risk wasting a lot of my outbound conversations that I have with the message that is too catered too specific to what I think is the title. Do I have that right, Chris and Helen?
Chris Beall (17:55):
Yeah, that’s a big part of it. I mean, I’ll give an analogy. If you’re in a gunfight, if it’s dark, you want a shotgun. If it’s light, you can see the target. Clearly you might want to a rifle. If you’re far away, you might want a sniper rifle, right? Well, in business, when we’re starting to engage, we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s a dark room, it’s a dark world, it’s dark woods, and we really don’t want to be too precise at that point because that precision just means we don’t get any feedback when we miss the target, all we get is a hit or a miss. I’d rather wing a few of them and hear the Yelp. So anyway, you get what I mean, right? And what Helen’s pointing out also, I think speaks to this other question of intent. So we’ve talked about how what’s called high intent now is somebody from that company maybe in a relevant position if we can figure that out, is looking at our website or is looking at other folks’ website or is going G two crowd and poking around or whatever they’re doing.
Chris Beall (18:57):
That’s called high intent. It’s also called by people who understand strategy entering a red ocean. If they’re looking at your competitors and they’re looking at your category and they’re looking at you, that means it’s a competitive situation already. One of the main things we want to do in business is stay out of competitive situations. It’s always a problem when it’s competitive. It means you come down to battle cards, you come down to besting, whoever it is while they’re in the fray. You’d rather come and actually win in advance by building trust early and then waiting until somebody is appropriately in market. So the way we miss is not so much in space, but in time we miss by being too early. We miss by being too late. Well, too early is great, too late is bad, and right on time isn’t as good as early.
Chris Beall (19:44):
It just isn’t. You’d rather be early when you can dominate with trust. So that’s part of it. The other part about intent that’s interesting is let’s compare two things. So there’s a website visit, somebody shows up at a website and looks at something. So that’s thing number one. Or to quote Dr. Seuss thing one. Then there’s thing two, which is you pay a bunch of money to have somebody do a job for you. Now, which one shows greater intent? A website visit or paying somebody a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year to do an important job for you? Clearly the latter shows more intent to solve that problem on the part of the company, the employer than the former, which is somebody goes, looks at a website. So we have these multi-billion dollar unicorns that have been built around intent data, which is mostly website visits, and meanwhile, the most obvious and powerful piece of intent data.
Chris Beall (20:39):
What did companies actually invest in their biggest investment, which is always people sitting right there in the profiles, as does people describe themselves in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That is they describe themselves in the same way their company would describe the job to be done because advertising themselves to future employers to do that same job. So you get intent more clearly out of job profiles than you do out of the big fancy intent products, including LinkedIns because there’s no choice. I hire somebody to do a job. How are they going to describe themselves to the world as somebody who can’t do that job? That makes no sense.
Corey Frank (21:25):
That’s fascinating. And in your universe then, I would imagine, right? Helen, I’m sure you saw this when you had a new rep who penetrated an account, Chris, you see it all the time at ConnectAndSelll, my universe on day one, maybe this size, my universe on day 30 is this size my universe, right? And day plus X or so is even smaller, and that’s ultimately that filet that I can continue to harvest. And if I don’t target, what does my universe look like Pretty consistently, probably maybe basis points, degrees in much smaller at gas. Correct.
Helen Fanucci (22:01):
One of the things that was interesting is this idea of territory assignments, and we have a rep that has a locked in territory and people, I guess feel a comfort zone with that versus well, okay, here you have maybe 10 accounts, but all the other unnamed accounts are fair game and they go to whoever gets a meeting in those accounts. It’s so interesting to see how anxious or irritated people are by having open territory concept. It’s like everyone wants to have their patch defined, locked down so they can pursue it as they wish. So is that going smaller and smaller? It probably is, and it was just fascinating to me to observe the dynamics around that and the discomfort with having all these accounts that were fair game for anyone to go after. I wonder if you have seen that much in what your thoughts are about that, but when you talked about the shrinking world or shrinking view, that’s kind of what I was thinking about is, yeah, you can zero in, but then you lose sight of what’s possible where you’re not looking.
Corey Frank (23:21):
Yeah, it’s funny. I think it’s probably the same reason why a lot of sales reps have the security of a bloated pipeline. They can’t disqualify folks in this particular quarter. Hope Springs eternal that this person will always close for this angst, this fear that if I keep sending them touch base emails, not picking up a call and have a conversation, not promoting something new, that I’m seeing what’s happening in the world from 40,000 feet that’s relevant or German to them. But if I simply do touch base emails, which is the equivalent of did you decide on choosing me and giving me your money yet? Or is there a better option that’s out there? But that’s why pipelines remain large. I can see that there is certainly from the team that all three of us collectively and Broaden knows we’re a sales organization. The bigger, the more states I have, and Chris, you and I have talked about this when it comes to people too, if you’re a sales manager, the more people I have under my purview, under my fiefdom, certainly the more prominent I am, I guess the more secure I feel. You probably saw this a lot at some of the larger companies you were with Helen, right? Is how many headcount are under your particular p and l, and that somehow is a status thing.
Helen Fanucci (24:33):
Well, it’s power. You have more resources as a sales leader. You don’t have budget compared to headcount. So headcount is more resources. It is a version of power to be able to get bigger revenue, bigger quotas, because headcount always comes with bigger quotas. The more headcount, the more quota. So if you’re willing to take that on, great. Why not?
Key Points:
Centralized targeting can be more effective than leaving it up to individual sales reps to figure out their own targeting (Helen)
Over-researching targets is inefficient since there is a low chance of actually reaching many of those contacts (Chris)
Targeting based on titles alone is an outdated approach; it’s better to search for keywords related to responsibilities in LinkedIn profiles (Helen)
Being too specific with an initial outreach message risks wasting conversations and not getting helpful feedback (Corey and Chris)
Job profiles show greater buying intent than website visits since companies invest significantly in hiring people to solve problems (Chris)
As reps develop domain expertise over time, their relevant target universe tends to become smaller and more focused (Corey)
Many sales reps feel anxious without strictly defined territories and accounts; they resist more open territory concepts (Helen)
Sales leaders often equate headcount and territory size with power and status (Corey)
