Strategies for Modern Cold Call Success with Kevin Hopp

Mike (01:08.604)
Kevin, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the BTB Sales Club podcast.

Kevin Hopp (01:32.23)
thanks Mike. I appreciate it. We were scheduled this a few times, but I'm glad we were able to connect here and it's going to be a really good conversation.

Mike (01:36.988)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's because we're both obviously very client facing, very sales oriented. So, yeah, prospecting meetings and client meetings have got in the way, but we've now got a time, which is fantastic. So I guess the first thing is explain to the audience who you are, what you do and something unusual about yourself.

Kevin Hopp (02:00.87)
For sure, for sure. Let's start there. Good place to start. My name is Kevin Hopp. I'm an outbound sales consultant and trainer. I work almost exclusively in the B2B technology space. But recently I've been picking up clients in other areas too, because phone is relevant everywhere. I teach a phone led approach. If you look at my shirt, I have a shirt that has a dude holding a phone on it. I'm one of LinkedIn and the internet's...

biggest cold calling geeks, I would say. That's one thing about myself. But if you want to know something that's really unique about Kevin Hopp, that is, it's not one in a million, but it's close. I was born with three thumbs. So I have two thumbs right here, but on this thumb, on my left thumb, I had another fully functioning, opposing the thumb. It's called polyactility and it's the rarest form. So the polyactility is,

Mike (02:50.684)
Wow!

Kevin Hopp (02:57.382)
Fairly common people have extra toes or little nub on the side of where their pinky toe was. The rarest form of polyactility is to have an extra fully functioning opposable thumb. Now, that's half of my weird fact. The second half of the weird fact is I was born with three thumbs. I then, fast forward, how old was I? 24 years and I meet my wife and we start dating.

Mike (03:07.644)
Wow.

Kevin Hopp (03:25.062)
through the course of dating, I find out what she does for a living and what her father does for a living. We then get married. My wife is a pediatric occupational hand therapist, which is the only kind of OT I've ever done because I had to have hand therapy after my surgery. And she does OT for this sort of surgery. And her father is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon that does this surgery among many others. Now, how I didn't pick her that way. Okay. I picked her because I thought.

Mike (03:39.036)
Of course. Yeah.

Wow.

Mike (03:50.428)
Wow.

HAHAHAHA

Kevin Hopp (03:54.438)
I picked her because I thought she'd be a good time to hang out with and here we are. I've got so much thumb stuff in my life.

Mike (04:02.684)
Exactly. Now, did her father operate on you or not? Because that would be really coincidental.

Kevin Hopp (04:06.392)
No, no he isn't.

That would be Freaky Friday. No, but the first time I met him, he looked at my hand and he told me by looking at my scar and the way that it was done, he told me exactly when I had it done. He's like, you had this done in 1992, 1993. I'm like, how'd you know? He's like, cause we don't do it this way. He's like, the science has gotten better. When I did, I did one, you know, three years ago, I did it very different than this. And I'm like, well, there you go.

Mike (04:18.556)
Yeah. Wow.

Mike (04:33.18)
Yeah, it doesn't seem to have hindered you at all, Kevin, which is good.

Kevin Hopp (04:38.246)
Yeah, I mean people people will know me for literally years. I've had friends that I hang out for years and one day they look at my thumb and they go, what's wrong? What happened there man? I'm like dude, I have four three thumbs. My fun fact.

Mike (04:49.276)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (04:54.62)
So moving on from the fun facts into sales cold calling. So in the prep call, we talked about kind of three broad kind of topics and then we'll do a wrap up. So I think first of all, so I obviously like you, I work with an awful lot of salespeople in marketing agencies, consultancies, all sorts of different practices, mainly kind of marketing agencies. And a lot of people say, cold calling is dead. So is cold calling dead? Is that a myth or a reality, Kevin?

Kevin Hopp (05:24.582)
I'm gonna go with myth and there's two schools of thought here that they see on LinkedIn and I think the first school of thought is the old school approach of it's not dead, you just need to try.

Kevin Hopp (05:42.502)
getting after it today guys and this like rah -rah mentality that works really really well from you know 1980 up until about 2009 this rah -rah mentality yeah exactly these are the glengary leaves you know yeah coffee is for clothes yeah this is for clothes.

Mike (05:54.94)
Do you remember Glen Gary, Glen Ross? Have you ever seen Glen Gary, Glen Ross?

Yeah, correct. These are for closers. Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (06:08.134)
So that, that, that old school mentality around cool cons, not dead. You just need to do more of it. That doesn't really work anymore. And there's a really practical reason, right? And everyone listening to this show, you understand why that doesn't work, right? Because connect rates and pickup rates have never been lower. And that is going to continue. That trend is only going to get worse over time. So my, my two parts.

Mike (06:34.908)
Yeah. Which is also linked Kevin by the way. So that's linked too because scamming has increased dramatically. And so people are fearful now of picking up the phone because it's likely to be a scam. So you don't pick up the phone to unknown numbers.

Kevin Hopp (06:42.246)
yeah.

Kevin Hopp (06:50.022)
That's right. That's right. And you know, Apple and Android have settings where your phone, if you call somebody and you're not in their address book, it'll just go straight to voicemail. So things like that, the phone carriers are working against us. Everything's working against you. So like my two -part answer to you, to be honest is cold calling is not dead, but you need to do it in a modern way in order to have success with cold calling the old school method of like picking up a phone and punching 10 digits in waiting for it to ring.

Mike (07:11.772)
Okay.

Kevin Hopp (07:20.198)
that I believe is going away. And if you're doing that all day and there's somebody listening to this show right now that is doing that, my heart's with you. My heart is with you. But there is a better way.

Mike (07:26.46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they'll have an auto outbound dialer and they're sat there just hitting the phones. So if that's the old school way and it doesn't work, what's the new school way that has a better success rate?

Kevin Hopp (07:32.39)
Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (07:43.462)
So you mentioned it a little bit already, but there are so many different dialing technology platforms out there. They're becoming very affordable, which is good. There's a lot of competition in the dialer market now, which is good for the consumer. It's good for the everyday rep. There's three tiers to the auto dialing market. I can go over this really quickly. So the top tier are going to be these like gold standard dialers, which are agent assisted.

That means these platforms, when you log in and you hit go and you're calling a list, you're actually paying for a call center agent somewhere else in the world to do your cold calling for you and live connect you to the right person. It's like salesperson crack. Okay. It's like crack cocaine. It's so easy. It's so good. It's also cumbersome to implement. It's also expensive, very cost prohibitive for many organizations.

The middle tier of the market is the tier that's really exploding right now. And that's the parallel dialing space. That's the idea that you don't need to call one number, listen to it go ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, leave a voicemail, hang up and call the next one. I can call three people at once and there's an AI bot listening into every call and it's going to wait until they hear a live human. So if it starts, Hey, you've reached Mike, leave a

a beep at the voicemail or you know, voicemail beep, whatever. It's going to automatically either drop a voicemail if you want to tell it to do that, or it's just going to hang up that call and call somebody else. So you get this massive efficiency. You're calling three to four times as many people as you would have in a, in a window. So you get to that conversation three to four times faster, right? So the parallel dialing markets, the middle tier of the market, it's exploding. It's awesome. The bottom tier is your traditional power dialers. That is calling one number.

And without you having to press a button, another number gets called right after that. Those tools are very cheap. They're easy to bolt on to kind of whatever software you have. It's better than calling hand by hand, you know, punching villages at a time. But this, because this middle tier of the market's starting to explode, there's not really an excuse for not using Parallel. Like if you're actually serious about cold calling, you should be investing in a Parallel dialer. I mean, we're talking, they're doing deals, you know, 200 bucks a month, all you can dial.

Mike (09:39.964)
Exactly.

Mike (09:47.516)
Yeah.

Mike (10:05.372)
Wow. Wow. Yep.

Kevin Hopp (10:05.574)
Unlimited dialing and it's parallel. So you're not listening to the phone ring. It's a nice experience. Reps are going to get anywhere from like six to 10 conversations an hour. Like it's real. So you should be using tech.

Mike (10:17.244)
Wow.

Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So, which brings us on nicely to the next kind of problem, I guess, or question that we discussed, which is, so why do salespeople find it so hard to pick up the phone to strangers? So now we know about the tech, about parallel dialing. We've taken away the fear of picking up the phone and dialing the number. That's kind of all gone. But you've now got a live human being that a salesperson is about to engage with.

and that's anxiety inducing for many people. So why is that? What creates that kind of anxiety? Why don't we like it as human beings?

Kevin Hopp (10:50.47)
Yes.

Kevin Hopp (10:57.222)
Well, there's a generational component to it, which I think is like an interesting thing and something that like you should talk about. I'm a millennial and believe it or not, that's why I get hired a lot as a consultant and trainer. You know, people, people my age who are, you know, salespeople at companies say like, well, how can you be a consultant? You haven't like sold a big company or I'm like, no, I'm, I'm a millennial and I teach a millennial Gen Z friendly way of hitting the phones and you know,

Gen X and Boomers, which are the people who are controlling the purse strings at these companies, they look at me and they say, this is a methodology that will actually get my reps. They're young, you know, they're 32 and below, 35 and below. They're actually going to use this methodology to have more conversations. So there's a generational component that more and more people are born into these worlds with technology where they don't have to pick up the phone and call people, right?

my mom and dad's generation, like all they had was phone and every time the phone rang, you picked it up because you didn't know who was on the other end of the line. We live in a completely different world. Yes. Right.

Mike (12:05.852)
Correct, because there was no caller ID at the time. So even then your friends and family weren't actually in your phone as caller ID. Now we have caller ID, which is much better.

Kevin Hopp (12:14.406)
That's right. That's right. So the real point of me explaining all this background of like the fact that there are differences is in these newer generations, millennials, Gen Z, your ego was always protected by this barrier, right? If I'm on Instagram or if I'm on TikTok or if I'm anywhere, my ego is one to two steps away from actually having to look a person in the eye.

and make a judgment call about anything that's going on in the situation. Now that concept is why people don't like picking up the phone because when you pick up the phone, you're having the, you know, the what's the balls to call somebody and ask them something that they didn't ask for. Like you're going to call them. They didn't ask for you to call them. Wow. You got a lot of that's a lot, right? You're interrupting their day.

Mike (12:56.188)
Yeah.

Mike (13:05.532)
You're interupt... You're interrupting their day.

Kevin Hopp (13:11.814)
And if you've, you've been so used to interacting with so many people that you know, and don't know in this, you know, barrier driven world where you don't have to ever look them in the eye or ever talk to them one to one. Now you get your first job and they're like, here's a phone call people and ask them about stuff. And you're like, what, what, what have they seen? No, what if they're not interested? Right. And I think it just be, it's like the number one reason that people have call reluctance is because they're not.

Mike (13:28.828)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (13:33.212)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (13:41.254)
used to calling strangers, right? So this also, the second half of this, I would say that if you are somebody that, you know, talks to strangers a lot, is naturally kind of a talkative person, me, right? Like my wife always rolls her eyes because my wife and I are yin and yang, right? She's the opposite. I'm very outgoing. She's very introverted.

Mike (14:01.66)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Hopp (14:06.662)
I make friends in the security line at the airport, man. Every bar I've ever been to, I walk out with a new best friend. Things like that, right? If you're that kind of person, you can make a killing in sales because so few people naturally have that outgoing tendency. And it's that ability to put yourself on the line, to put your ego on the line and reach out to someone and try to make a cold connection. That is the rare skill, I would argue.

Mike (14:35.164)
So, do you want to do an experiment, Kevin? Shall we try a cold call experiment where you're the caller and I'm the receiver? And then let's unpack it afterwards about what's the kind of methodology that anyone can try. What I'm trying to do here is I'm just gonna get people in the audience that are listening to go, yeah, that's easy, I could try that. Okay, yeah, I could do that.

Kevin Hopp (14:40.55)
Sure, well explained. Come on man.

Kevin Hopp (15:00.806)
Yeah. We could do a, we could do a before and after, right? So all I will call you as a sales rep who is trying to sell you something at, at Piscari, right? And I'm going to do it the way that most people are cold calling the way that most sales managers that haven't picked up the phone in 15 years are telling them to cold call. We're going to use that talk track and then we'll use the talk track that I teach. Ready?

Mike (15:26.588)
This will be historical. Excellent. And bear in mind, Kevin, I'm an ex -procurement director, so I'm an ex -buyer.

Kevin Hopp (15:34.286)
Professional buyer, huh? I love it. All right, you ready ring ring

Mike (15:38.716)
Yeah, so there we go.

Mike (15:44.412)
Hello?

Kevin Hopp (15:46.054)
Hey, I was looking for Mike.

Mike (15:49.148)
Who is this?

Kevin Hopp (15:50.918)
Yeah, my name is Kevin. I'm actually with Acme Incorporated. We're the number one B2B platform.

Mike (15:54.94)
No, no, no, not interested, not interested, no, too busy, bye.

Kevin Hopp (15:58.374)
Well, Mike, Mike, we're number one, we at Gartner Magic Quadrant, I love it, I love the show it to you.

Mike (16:02.076)
Bye!

Kevin Hopp (16:09.446)
Man, that's unbelievable. I can't believe that even though I have the number one software, you didn't want to look at it.

Mike (16:16.22)
Correct. Not interested. Don't care. You've interrupted my day.

Kevin Hopp (16:20.422)
tough. That's tough. Now, let me say this that you had this very abrupt, you know, you had down tone when you answered, and then immediately said no, I would actually classify someone who's that quick on the no, as what I call not a phone lead. I want I don't want to call you back. I'll find other ways to get in touch with Mike. But

Mike (16:21.8)
You

Mike (16:42.684)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (16:45.606)
Life is too short to deal with people like that, to call them back again and again, because the law of numbers is going to be other people that are open to a conversation.

Mike (16:48.636)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (16:54.62)
Exactly. So the next one, I'll be slightly more open.

Kevin Hopp (16:58.214)
Love it, love it. You ready? You ready? Let's do it Kevin Hopp style. Ring ring.

Mike (17:05.468)
Hello?

Kevin Hopp (17:07.302)
Hey, I was looking for Mike.

Mike (17:10.14)
Uhhhh... Yeah? Yeah, it's Mike.

Kevin Hopp (17:14.15)
Fantastic Mike, look, I know I'm catching you out of the blue here. My name is Kevin Hopp. I'm with Acme, Incorporated. Are you heads down doing something else or you got one minute and I can tell you exactly why I called.

Mike (17:26.3)
I was a bit busy but I can probably spend a minute. Okay.

Kevin Hopp (17:30.758)
Awesome. One minute. Start the timer. Look like reason I'm reaching out. I work with people just like you every day to help them solve challenges in their business. We do this by implementing Acme. Now let me ask you a question about your business. When it comes to this process in particular, are you guys doing this or are you doing that?

Mike (17:33.244)
Okay.

Mike (17:53.02)
So we've got an existing system. It's been in place for about seven or eight years. It's kind of clunky, but it kind of works. So we weren't thinking of changing.

Kevin Hopp (18:03.974)
I totally get it. Look, I mean, if you were thinking about changing, you probably would have called me Mike. But you know, it's interesting. It's a lot of our best customers were using that system and they found that one of the challenges they had was integrations in the evolution of the platform that that company's been around for a long time, which is great, but we're actually a new player in the space. We're coming at this challenge from a bit of a different angle. Would you be open -minded to learning about how we're different?

Mike (18:31.9)
Yeah, as long as you're not trying to sell something. Happy to learn. Happy to learn.

Kevin Hopp (18:35.75)
No, of course. Hey, Mike, I give away things for a living. That's what I do. Isn't that what you do? You give away everything for a living, right? No, so, Mike, I'll be honest with you, Acme does cost money, but the point of our conversation that we're gonna schedule here for later this week is not to take your money from you, but rather to learn a little bit more about your business to see if what we do at Acme could solve problems for you. And if it doesn't, you walk away learning more and I walk away knowing that I can go help somebody else.

Mike (18:40.284)
Hahaha!

Mike (19:05.18)
Okay.

Kevin Hopp (19:05.19)
How does Friday at one o 'clock work for you?

Mike (19:08.028)
Yeah, that's good actually. Yeah, okay, done.

Kevin Hopp (19:10.854)
Alright, see you then.

Mike (19:12.7)
Cheers.

Kevin Hopp (19:15.462)
Let's go, meeting booked. A lot better, a lot different.

Mike (19:19.612)
Better, exactly. A lot different. So just unpack that for us, Kevin. What's the kind of, what's a consistent method that's really easy to like, kind of remember that helps people to reduce anxiety and get on the phone?

Kevin Hopp (19:35.654)
For sure. So the first thing I want people to think about in that last call, did I sound like a sales rep at a software company or did I sound like kind of how Kevin Hopp talks? Sounded very relaxed, right? A big part of my methodology is before we make a cold call, we have a script. The script is not something that you need to read word for word every single time because of course,

Mike (19:50.364)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (20:03.974)
People normally don't talk like that, but the script is going to help me stay in a linear progression through the call. That's why scripting is important. It's not important to read every word. It's important that you get on a track and you stay on a track. The point of the core call is to have a purpose driven conversation. Now, the second thing that I want people to notice about that call, it was about, I talked a little bit about Acme and my solution and what we do.

I put it into context for you right away for the prospect. And then I flipped the script and said, tell me about your business. And I asked you a very specific question about a specific process that you're using. Now this is what I call getting into a topic driven conversation, right? If you think about the first cold call, what most reps do is they lead with what I would call advertising, right?

Mike (20:56.796)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (20:56.934)
Hey, what's up? I'm calling with Acme. We're the number one solution and da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

Mike (21:04.316)
and who wants to watch, yeah, who wants to listen to Javits these days? Yeah.

Mike (21:14.94)
Yeah. Correct.

Kevin Hopp (21:26.118)
business to understand if there are opportunities for you to help them. And of course, what ends up coming up in these calls and inevitably somebody listening to this is going to say, well, I don't know enough about their business. And what if they say they're all good? And what if they say it's all, you know, you had an existing solution. Everybody has solutions to problems and, you know, against this goes against the old school thought, but not everybody's walking around in pain. Right.

Mike (21:53.98)
Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Hopp (21:54.918)
A lot of old school trainers, when I was a rep, I was taught to look for pain, find the pain, they're in pain. And then you go make a few thousand cold calls, you talk to people, you're like, damn, people are generally not in pain walking around with half an arm sticking out. They actually think that what they have is great. So my close, my first close, if you heard it, was, are you open -minded to hearing about how we're doing this differently?

Mike (22:08.444)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (22:23.078)
That's not, hey, I want to get you on a sales demo. Those are triggering words for people, right? Particularly procurement directors. You guys understand what a sales demo is. You got to that eventually, right? You did bring up the point of like, hey, I'm not looking to buy anything. Point of a cold call, like you shouldn't be cold calling people unless your problem is you need to talk to more people in your market. Does that make sense? Like, I understand.

Mike (22:51.548)
Say that again?

Kevin Hopp (22:52.998)
The point of a cold call, like you should be cold calling if you need to talk to more people in your market. So it's a concept that I call going from zero to one, right? So let's say I'm Acme Incorporated and you're Piscari. Right now, the reason I would cold call you is no one at Acme Incorporated is talking to and has a direct line of communication to anyone at Piscari. So we cold call, we get into an open -minded conversation. Then when we follow up.

Mike (23:15.42)
Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Hopp (23:21.35)
when the account executive sends a follow up email, when all this stuff happens, there's an actual amount of trust and respect in that communication. So we actually learn things as opposed to, yeah.

Mike (23:29.852)
Exactly.

Yeah. And something else, Kevin, so something else that, and this will be very familiar to you. But as you say, there is no, people aren't walking around in pain all the time. Cause if they were, they'd go off and solve the problem. They'd talk to a doctor and they'd solve the problem. But when a problem comes up, what I used to do is obviously now in my old buyer's role, I'm now looking for five suppliers. So I need to contact five suppliers.

to get them to bid for my piece of work? Well, out of the five, one's the incumbent, one's someone we worked with before, one's someone that's recommended, two are unknowns, but we have some kind of contact normally. Well, if you could be the one where we've had a contact with you and had a conversation with you and there's been a few follow -ups and you've sent me some thought leadership and I've been to a breakfast, you're much more likely to be in with a shout than the last person who is...

Kevin Hopp (24:20.966)
this.

Mike (24:29.852)
I don't know who you are. We've never worked with your company, never talked to a rep, but you're on the list because you qualified on a web -based search. Your chance of winning off a web -based search with no contact and relationship is a bit bigger than zero, but not much.

Kevin Hopp (24:47.558)
Right. So you use the R word there and this is like a, it's a, it's a triggering word for me because when I was a sales rep and before I got a consulting for five years, I carried it back. Right. So I have been a sales rep, although I am a young consultant and trainer. the thing that I heard again and again is sales is about relationships. I used to sit there at 25, 26 years old and say, well, fuck, I don't have any relationships. What am I going to do? You know,

Mike (25:07.836)
Right.

Mike (25:14.236)
Exactly. Precisely. How do I hit quota? How am I going to hit quota?

Kevin Hopp (25:17.222)
And I actually, I got hired at a company where I was part of a team of account executives. I was 27 years old. The next closest guy on that team, 37 years old. The oldest was 48. And guess what they had? Relationships. So a big reason why teams like my methodology is it turns their reps into little business people having business conversations.

Mike (25:29.532)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (25:36.348)
Yeah.

Kevin Hopp (25:47.206)
And if you can have a business conversation with somebody, that's when you start to build trust. Then we follow up. One of the magical things I teach is follow up. And when you follow up, we're going to build that relationship. And that's how you start to build your Rolodex. So it's the very zero to one of starting that snowball down the hill. We got to start by packing the snowball, then put it on the ground. And you know, so cold calling is that hard part. But if you take the pressure off of, I'm not calling to get Mike to buy my stuff today.

Mike (26:15.964)
Correct.

Kevin Hopp (26:17.062)
I'm calling to have a conversation about his business and see if we can schedule a time to then explore that, to then explore it, to then explore it. That's gonna help.

Mike (26:25.532)
And that's the key. Correct. So can we just talk, just give us a quick summary of what's the kind of ABC of that method. The first thing you do, the second thing you do, the third thing you do.

Kevin Hopp (26:37.062)
so the first thing that you want to do with a cold call is be relaxed, right? The thing that, you know, I always tell reps, if they have an Apple watch, I'm like, tell me what your heart rate is right now. If it's over 90 beats per minute, we're not making a call. Relax. The key to relaxing is going into the situation, understanding what can happen. So one of the first things I do when I get reps, we get there, get there, the dialer set up. We got there.

Mike (26:53.18)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Hopp (27:04.838)
sales lead list, everything. And I say, Hey, look at that list. Nobody on that list is interested. If they were, they would have called you. Now let's go have curious conversations with them. Here's your script, right? So part one is relax. And that, that comes from having a plan, have a plan, have a structure to the way that you're going to go do this. Part two is follow a script. Now following a script is not

reading a script word for word, but it is being able to track in a linear motion through a conversation because conversations go all over. We know that, but the difference between a sales conversation and a normal conversation with your mates is we have a point that we're trying to get across. And the other thing I'd say is you need to have a point of view, a point of view. You have to have an opinion on something in someone's business, right? That all comes from the script.

Mike (27:53.34)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (28:01.094)
And then the third thing I would say is to take the pressure off of the demo and make the close a conversation. Next meeting. It's just, we're going from zero to one. We're going from, I am not talking to anybody at Piscari about anything. Do I have a scheduled meeting where this person is going to show up and we're, we don't have any pressure of it being a cold call. You have no pressure of a proposal in front of them. We're having an open -minded conversation about their business. So I think those three, if you, if you,

Mike (28:08.508)
next meeting exactly.

Mike (28:24.7)
Correct. Exactly right.

Kevin Hopp (28:30.95)
If you institute that, you're gonna have a good time.

Mike (28:33.98)
Relax, have a point of view on the business issue that they care about, and then the only action is, book another conversation.

Kevin Hopp (28:43.174)
Yeah, close for conversations, not for demos.

Mike (28:45.18)
And that's it. Brilliant, Kevin. So I was going to ask you three practical tips to improve sales strategy. You've just given them, which is perfect. So just as a kind of like a drawing altogether, because we run for about 30 minutes, as you know, kind of across all of the companies you've worked with and all of the kind of sales people you've worked with, if someone is sat in their car and they're maybe on the way back from.

Kevin Hopp (28:54.79)
Yeah.

Mike (29:13.276)
taking the kids to school, which is what I do, listen to a lot of podcasts when I do that, is there may be like a commercial director, sales director, and they're going, I've got 10 salespeople, we need to do more out bounds. We've now got a bit of a method for doing it, sounds great, but where did they kind of start? Where would a sales director start the journey of getting into, apart from calling you, clearly, what would their first kind of stats be?

Kevin Hopp (29:38.15)
Yeah, call me.

So one of the classic misnomers about Outbound that kind of gets a lot of sales managers out of having to do a lot of work is they say things like, well, we sell relationships and it's strategic. And Bob is my top rep and I just need 10 Bobs because Bob has the Rolodex, right? But we got Kelly at the bottom of the list. She doesn't have the Rolodex and she's sitting there saying, well, how do I get the relationships? So.

Mike (29:56.572)
Right.

Kevin Hopp (30:11.11)
The problem here is the manager's not giving them a structured process that allows them to get into conversations. So that structured process really only takes three things. And this is like part of my consulting, by the way, that always blows people's mind. I don't come in and say, all right, here, we need this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,

A CRM. Okay, we have that. I need a lot of contacts and I need them to be as valid as humanly possible. That's a whole, we can talk about that for like five hours. The struggle, I get it. There is a struggle. But as a sales manager, as a sales director, that is your job to go figure out how to get that big list of contacts. Because without these two things, the third thing won't matter. The third thing is technology. We need technology to lower that effort.

and to increase the amount of conversations people have in a day. Because if I quote all day and I talk to one or two people, the mountain in my head that builds up in front of me doing it again tomorrow is insurmountable. So use technology, find leads, you have to go get a lot of leads for people to talk to and organize them.

Mike (31:20.412)
Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (31:30.982)
And if you skip one people in the process, it's going to be disjointed in all other places. I see, I see teams that just have the dialer and just a lead list. They throw it in there and then they call the same person four times in a week. Right. Or you call people you already talked to. You need to organize your process and you need to enable your reps to have a lot of conversation.

Mike (31:41.692)
Yeah, exactly. Just disastrous.

Mike (31:50.172)
And just in terms of like really, really broad kind of picture, how many, when you say you need a lot of kind of pre -qualified contacts, what's a kind of, what's a lot do you think? What would be a good starting point as a database of people you're going to start trying to call and build some kind of rapport with?

Kevin Hopp (32:07.846)
Good question. So I generally like with, with my clients, I tell them, like, I'm like, if the rep is going to start calling on Monday, I need them to have 200 callable numbers in a list. And that list needs to be monothematic. What does that mean? That means everybody in this list has something in common. And that is what I'm going to base my script on is what they care about. Right.

This other old school methodology is like, I need to look at Mike's LinkedIn. I need to look at his Twitter. I need to read the S one of his company. I need to, I need to. Dude, no, like you need to go have a conversation about their business in a curious fashion with a point of view on how you might solve a problem in their business. But you don't need to know anything about, you don't need to personalize all this, right? You should let your personality come out through the call and we get into personal conversations, but.

that problem holds a lot of people back. So you need at least 200 callable numbers. And then how this works is you should have 200 callable numbers, but you should also be ready to replace, you know, 30, anywhere from 20 to 40, 50 leads a week to keep that pool of 200 ready. Cause if you're calling that lead list every day, you're going to bump into people. I'm going to talk to a guy like, you know, the first Mike who I'm not calling you back. So you're out of my lead list, right? I'm going to set meetings. They're on my lead list.

Mike (33:18.428)
Exactly.

Mike (33:26.14)
Correct. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Hopp (33:32.39)
You need to be able to replenish that. So that's all you really need to have. a solid amount of conversations every day, as long as you're using a dialer, the dialer is the piece that takes time and condenses it. And the beautiful part about that is like sales is time. We all get paid to do X amount of work in X amount of time and to get X outcome in X amount of time. Dialers condensed time. Every sales team is using a dial.

Mike (33:57.852)
Exactly.

are just top of the head kind of numbers for every hundred people that you actually get through to, and they don't do the first mic, they actually kind of have a conversation. Roughly out of a hundred initial conversations, roughly how many follow -up calls should people be aiming for out of a hundred? Just a simple follow -up call.

Kevin Hopp (34:21.734)
Yeah, I mean, we've got a, there's a lot of variables here. There's a lot of variables. I would say. Yeah, really top of the head. It really matters company to company, market to market. But I would say in general, if you're doing it right, meaning you have this conversational style, we should get about 20 % of the people that are somewhat interested. Now that could mean, Hey, yeah, that sounds interesting. I got to go send me an email.

Mike (34:24.764)
Yeah, yeah, huge number. This is really top of the head.

Mike (34:44.636)
Okay.

Kevin Hopp (34:49.222)
Look, send them an email and call them back in two days. That is a warm follow up. Or it could mean, you know, various levels of interest. Yeah, actually we have a project going around this and I don't want to set a meeting yet. Send me your information. I want to learn more about this really warm follow up. And then that also includes meetings set. So I'd say about 20 % of your connected calls to the right people, to the right people should result in something positive. Now the meeting set rate in itself.

Mike (34:52.444)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike (35:10.364)
Connected calls, correct. Exactly.

Kevin Hopp (35:18.758)
is different. Elite reps will be around seven to 10 % of their connected calls will turn into actual sales meetings. So good top of, just top of the head numbers. Don't quote me on them.

Mike (35:20.7)
Cools.

Mike (35:29.148)
Right. Brilliant.

Yeah, exactly. Kevin, it's been fantastic. Genuinely. I love podcasting because I meet new people. We didn't know each other before. I've now met you. I know what you do. You've educated me. I've learned something new. We've had a conversation. I've got someone new in the States that when I'm in the States next, I can go along and have a conversation with. So it's been amazing. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Hopp (35:55.302)
Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mike, thanks for having me on. It's been a great time and I hope everyone out there gets the courage to go pick up the phone and talk to a stranger.

Mike (36:06.716)
Exactly. And now you've got a way of doing it as well now, so there's no need to be scared. Perfect. Anyone listening, if you've loved this episode, please could you subscribe to the podcast, it really helps and give it a review, that'd be great. And yeah, I look forward to hearing about it next time. All right, Kevin, thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

Kevin Hopp (36:10.534)
Yeah, there you go.

Kevin Hopp (36:29.35)
Cheers.

Mike (36:31.484)
Okay, let me stop the recording. Make sure the record.