DNX Workshop: How to Accelerate Sales Development
By Maya Edwards | DNX Summer Intern 2022
As some of you may know already, DNX supports its portfolio companies with monthly knowledge workshops. A highly rated value-asset, if you ask our founding community. Earlier this spring, we held a workshop led by sales development experts, Lars Nilsson and Travis Henry. The workshop, titled “Modern Account Based DemandGen Motions and Forecasting Principles Explained,” contains Lars and Travis’ collected best practices for Account Based Sales Development that they have accumulated through their vast self-lived experience leading sales development organizations — experience and know-how that eventually led to full time consulting of startups throughout Silicon Valley for many years. Currently, however, Lars Nilsson heads up the Global Sales Development at Snowflake, and Travis Henry leads Sales Ops for their SDR organization.
“Lars has a track record in the Silicon Valley of repeatedly transforming company after company with his teachings and SDR methodology, and most companies he’s worked at have gone to tremendous IPOs.” — Eva Nahari, Principal, DNX
First off, what is account-based sales development? Lars and Travis describe it as a 1-to-1 account-based prospecting that employs deep account research and highly personalized value propositions. It focuses on the importance of having personalized and relevant interactions with targeted buyers as opposed to the alternative strategy of casting a wide and unintentional net.
In this blog we highlight some of Lars and Travis’ best practices shared in the workshop:
Personalized and Relevant Content: “Nowadays, there is so much more content and information out there for buyers to interact with that it takes highly personalized, highly relevant, and even challenging pipes of outreach to get a buyer interested,” said Travis.
The Buyer Journey Takes Time, Be there Along the Way: “One of the key things to understand early on in the demand generation cycle is you need to be there at every single step of the buyer’s journey,” said Travis.
Have a Discrete Sense of Target Addressable Market: “Focus is your best friend at every stage of your company’s growth,” said Travis. “Instead of chasing down every single inquiry or potential buyer and risk wasting your time and energy on false positives, dominate a niche and address a target market and target accounts.”
Is Cold Calling Dead? Should You Make 150 Dials a Day? What is the best Outreach Sequence?: “The best method is multi-channel,” said Travis. “No single channel is great, but all together they are.” Their example of a 24-day multi-channel outreach sequence consisted of 14 steps: 5 emails, 5 phone calls, 3 LinkedIn messages, and 1 direct mail.
Template for Writing Personalized Emails: Travis warns attendees to not overlook spending time on subject lines because “the best email in the world won’t be read unless it gets opened.” In addition, he emphasizes the importance of the hook by saying, “the hook is the first thing the recipient reads and how they subconsciously know whether they are receiving an email from a genuine human or not.” (DNX note: this may actually change somewhat as NLP-based outreach SaaS is emerging and improving rapidly, but the point is the same: it is important to hit the note of the recipient to create an authentic connection)
The workshop content presented by Travis was followed by a lively Q&A where Lars shared many insights and self-experienced lessons learned.
The post-workshop feedback attendees gave on Lars and Travis’ presentation was overwhelmingly positive — one of the best in DNX’s workshop history — with a cumulative rating of 9.57 out of 10!
Thank you to Lars and Travis for an insightful and relevant session filled with new perspectives and eye-opening concepts! We will pay it forward and carry your best practices with us to help entrepreneurs and startups throughout future endeavors.
