The key to outbound? Showing them you know where it hurts.

In this episode, Darryl's guest is Christian Banach, Principal and Chief Growth Officer at Christian Banach LLC. Join them as they cover: the first thing to get right with outbound prospecting (and how to hone your skills), differentiating your communications in a way that works (based on customer feedback), balancing quality vs quantity in your prospecting efforts, the one metric you should be focusing on, and how to build trust.

🔗 LINKS

Find Christian on LinkedIn, or at his website.

Connect with Darryl on LinkedIn.

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Oh, my friends. My friends, my friends. You know, it's interesting. We are the sum. Of our experiences. Would you agree with that? We are the sum of our experiences. If we had a traumatic childhood, then it's more than likely that we have difficulty trusting as an adult. We may want to protect ourselves and keep people at a certain distance.

You know, if we were the last person pick. For every single sports team ever growing up, we may have a little bit of insecurity now as an adult, even though we're no longer going through the ugly puberty stage and we're actually kind of successful and we're actually, no, not the most ugly person going, All right, we are the sum of our experiences and what's interesting.

Is that continues to manifest itself over and over and over again. As we grow I have multiple situations where I can point to, I can point to both on a personal and on a professional level. Tell me if this, if this is something you can relate to. I remember now my wife and I. We've been married at this point in time, 33 years now.

Yes, she clearly has bad judgment and she might wanna reconsider this investment of time. And, but here we are, 33 years later, however the story goes, that in our 11th year of marriage, we came incredibly close to divorce and I don't mind sharing this. Everybody knows it. Who, who knows me. And why is that?

Well, We looked at the situation and we said, Do we need a marriage counselor? Cuz we still loved each other, but we're having difficulties living with one another. And upon after discussion we didn't think we did. What we thought was interesting was I, and now in my early thirties at that point in time, was exhibiting behaviors that I could probably point back to my childhood as was she.

And so we decided to individual. Go see a counselor and work on some of those issues that had were part of our experiences that were affecting how we behaved now. And what happens is as you get older, some of those behaviors become more pronounced. And so for us, you know, some time spent with some professionals who knew how to work the process was wonderful.

Total sidebar, I remember my therapist doing an exercise with me that they probably teach on the second. In, in their, in, in university, which was, she said, Darryl, go write your obituary. And I write my obituary. Yeah, write your obituary. And so I'm like, Okay. So I go, I write my obituary and I come back next week and I say, Here's my obituary.

Read it to me. I write it to them. And they're like, Okay. So basically Darryl, you're a loving father, devoted husband. Well liked you made an impact on people's lives and you, we missed. Is that the gist of it? Yeah, that's the gist of it. Okay. Well, nowhere in that obituary did you talk about. About all your accolades, about whether you hit quota or didn't hit quota about whether you were speaking on stage or not speaking on stage, that that wasn't in there Get, If I watch how you're living your life and what's affecting your marriage, It's you, you are heavily focused on your work.

Why is that? Darryl? And you're like, son of a gun. All right. So that's an experience, That's one experience. It's personal experience. Just showing you how we are, the, some of our experiences on a professional side. You know, I've done sales, I've done marketing, been VP sales, VP marketing, chief sales officer, chief revenue officer, I, I, I know a thing or two about revenue.

That sounds obnoxious. Not meant to, not meant to sound obnoxious, meant to set the. Yeah, for 10 years I had my own agency, my own marketing agency, and I was a marketing agency selling to b2b businesses typically marketers for my services. And I would try to focus on, you know, mid-market. That was my, I didn't wanna go small to medium for me.

I didn't want, I didn't wanna go enterprise. And despite having all these skills, it was the most challenging situation. Because I had great difficulty initially the first couple years, not couple months separating myself from others. I had difficulty. Procuring new business. Much of my business was word of mouth because I had a positive reputation, which is fantastic, and I got referred into other accounts as happens.

That's the normal, but that's the reality. So because of that experience I now am very cautious when I take on a new opportunity in my life, my professional life that has me selling in a high commodity. Highly competitive, difficult to to separate yourself from others. Basically what people may describe as the red waters as opposed to the blue water.

The red waters where everybody's kind of fighting over the same chunk of meat, if you will, and the blood's in the water and there's lots of sharks. I had a great, I, I, I tend to want to avoid that even though the most current job I took, that was a conversation I had with my ceo, my soon to-be ceo Emerick, Emrick, Orno.

And I said, Ric, I see at Gopal School Company. I love the culture. I love the product. I mean, I love, I love everything about it. But emer, there's this product called Hootsuite. There's this product called Sprout Social, like it's a bit of a commodity businesses, and it, what's special and what's different about you in Emrick said, Well, Darryl under our NDA.

Let me show you this piece of technology and feature function we're about to release. And it, I saw it and I'm like, Oh my gosh, nobody's doing that. It's game changer. And I took the job, I took the job because I thought I can work for that. I, I, it's a little more blue water, a little less red water. We are the sum of our experiences.

Our experiences drive what we do, but sometimes when you're in the middle of that experience, you're like, What do I do? All right. So for example, many of. Are exactly where I have been, where you are selling an item where there's a lot of competition, there's a lot of noise, and you're struggling. How do you stand apart?

How do you generate new business? How do you hit quota? How do you, you know, hit your revenue target so you can get that paycheck? How do you stand above the crowd so you can continue your career? How, how? Well, with that all said, I think we need to talk to somebody who has done. Who is living that, Who understands exactly the pain you're going through, Not when does he understand the pain you're going through.

He's living it, him. Every single day, and today I'm really excited to bring to you the one, the only, the amazing Christian Banach. Christian, how are you doing, my friend?

Were you sit, were you sitting here thinking to yourself, Oh my God, he's having me on a show and he is calling me a commodity? Or were, you're sitting here thinking to yourself, I can get into this cuz I can help these people.

What's interesting about Christian and one of the reasons that he is so attracted to me was because you know, the company is somewhat still young. It's a year and a half old, so it doesn't have, you know, an established inbound reputation out there that it can rely upon to be a constant source and.

With that said, he's gotta go and very much grow his own business, his own reputation, and differentiate from scratch. So this is the guy. Now with that said, let's just continue with me totally both highlighting what he does. But helping you better understand his circumstances. So Christian, why don't I let you explain to the crew here exactly what it is Christian Bach does, and then when, when he tells these folks, you're gonna go, Oh, I see what you mean.

But that's a, that is a competitive marketplace, so go for it.

We've all seen them. We've all experienced them. So that's the business that I'm in and there's a lot of what I would call maybe bad actors in the space that don't provide very good quality services. A lot of it may be outsourced to, you know, far off. So it's, it's not always considered in the highest regard.

However, there are certainly firms out there and we believe we're one of them that actually do provide a very high level of service. To our clients and, and we really serve a great function. So at the most basic level, we are a lead generation company, but how we've started to differentiate ourselves, and this is why I'm gonna start to sell the story here, you know, we are a business development and growth consultancy, and that's how we position ourselves.

So we don't say we're a lead gen company and we help advertising and marketing agencies along with MarTech c. To land six and seven figure opportunities predictably. And we do that through a proactive outbound prospecting approach. So that's through cold calling, cold email and social media engagement to ultimately schedule appointments between decision makers at enterprise companies and our clients, which are again, those advertising and marketing agencies and MarTech companies.

But I love his differentiator. See how you went, right? He, I didn't even ask him, he said, But our differentiator is, We are a business development and growth company. We are not a lead gen company. We are a business develop and growth company focused on advertising and marketing companies and MarTech companies plan six and seven figure deals.

Boom, boom, might, might drop, like he knows who he is. There's no ambiguity there. Okay? So with that, what we're gonna do is gonna do something a little different we've never done before. We're gonna walk through and Christian's gonna help us understand, you know, essentially how he. Gets new business and the challenges he face and what tools and techniques he uses that are are helping him be successful.

And now, and I want you to think about this, okay? Christian has got beyond being in a commodity space beyond being bad actors, he's selling a product. To his buyer who does the same thing already. In other words, he is a marketer, he is a sales, they are selling to MarTech. Companies are selling to marketing and advertising companies who themselves do marketing and advertising for lead gen, who MarTech companies who themselves are used for lead gen, which means the, the executives he's selling to claim to have the same skills he has, which means they're scrutinizing how good he is.

As part of that due diligence process, he has got everything stacked against him and he's being incredibly successful. So sit back boys and girls, and let's go on a journey and let's see what Christian can teach us all from the man himself. Christian, where do you wanna start with this story?

So, so yes. So we drink our own Kool-Aid here and it's outbound prospecting is our number one source. And where do we begin though, with outbound prospecting and, For us and for our clients, we always start to focus first and foremost on the problem that we solve for our clients. And, and that is critical.

It's not we can send you x number of emails or all of the outputs that you might get from a campaign. It's really about how we can help solve a pain point that somebody's experiencing. So in our situation you know, we get very granular. We have taken a look at the market, so the advertising and marketing agencies, and what are the problems that they're experiencing when it comes to.

And then we will build specific outbound campaigns that drill down into how you know, Hey, we think you might be experiencing this problem, and we have some ideas around how to solve that problem. We've done it for others in your space. So that's really the first thing that we look at is really understanding is there a pain point and can we solve that pain point for for somebody.

And I'm, I'm right away into the, the features. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm feature pitching, just like you talked about. It's not about the activity of the outputs, but about addressing the pain or addressing the problem. So how did you figure out the problem? That you solve? How did you actually identify what it is?

How would you coach my sales audience? To identify the problem that they solve.

Now you may not have that luxury, so you may want to go out and try to schedule some you know, stakeholder type interviews and, and try to then again, get to un understanding their world. And what are some of the experiences that they're that they're having right now and some challenges, What's keeping them up at night?

That may not be available to everybody either. So the internet is a great place to go to and start searching in, In my case, it's very easy to go and, and Google, you know, marketing agency challenges and marketing agency problems. And there are other third party resources out there that have done surveys and you can find different articles about it.

Podcasts like this where you know, you can listen in and. And find out what are some of the challenges that those are, are, are facing. And I think that really is probably true of about any industry. I mean, if you can, you know, if you can hear it directly, that's great. If you can talk to past clients or former clients, that's great.

And then doing some third party research and start to really see what those themes are that, that seem to keep emerging.

And I love the fact for many of you won't do that, you'll say, Well, I don't have time, or, I'm shy, which is weird cuz you're in sales. Or we're new, we don't have a lot of customers. Therefore maybe it's not a big enough sample. Okay, fine. , he took away all your excuses when he simply said, I got on the internet www and I did some research and it was crazy talk, and I, and I can talk, I can go on social to all my key people and look at what they're talking about.

My, my target customers. I can look at their content, I can look at industry reports. I can look at Anna's reports, I can look at surveys. Hell, you can call the customers up of your perceived competi. And ask them why they're with them, why they chose them. Because if you know, chances are you, you're gonna be able to fix the same problem.

So there's no excuse for not knowing that. But once you understand the problem, one of the things that Christian hasn't mentioned yet is that not only do you understand the problem, you also start to pick up the lingo, the vernacular, the verbiage. And, and now you get stories that you can start to drop in to make yourself sound way more credible when you're doing that prospecting.

And that's huge cuz then if you're speaking the same language, I'm speaking in my day-to-day activity, you must be one of my tribe. And now I, I automatically start to trust you right away. So I love that you're doing that. You're doing the problem now. Okay. You know your problem. Now you mentioned your biggest one is outbound prospecting.

Talk to me about the outbound prospecting tactics and techniques you do, the challenges you had differentiating and help us understand that a little more.

We're all receiving you know, lots of email communications. And our buyers are likely getting even more. So how do you stand out in the inbox first and foremost, so they even read your message? So one of the things that, that we do for ourselves and, and we advise our clients as well is personalization is first and foremost, I think these day and age, everybody can sniff a sales email, a marketing email away from a mile.

So in order to stand out you have to do some level of personalization. So, you know, we highly advise and we do for ourselves, is we do some research into each company and we find out something that's happening that's related to that problem in, at that they may be experiencing. And we use that information then to customize a subject line and customize that first opening, you know, sentence or two of the email so that individual who gets that inbox gets that error in the inbox, knows that it's unmistakably written, you know, for them and for their company.

And that has really helped us, you know, achieve incredible open rates compared to industry average. Which then, you know, is leading to much better results overall.

To your outbound efforts, because to your point, they get a lot of outbound, you know, attempts for them to become customers of other vendors, you know? Do they share with you why you?

And the other, another very important thing is to keep your messages. We are writing our emails at less than a hundred words. And that's not easy necessarily to do when you are going to try to demonstrate personalization. You're gonna poke at the problem, you're gonna introduce your solution, and then there's a call to action in the email, the four kind of tenets of a good call email.

So to do that, all in a hundred words ist easy. But it can be done and it takes some refining and takes some editing. But that email and keeping it short and concise and to the. And casual in tone as well. You don't want to be super formal in the messaging. Our research shows that you want to keep messages written at a, maybe like a sixth grade level or below.

And you gotta just think about how are prospects now engaging with email. They're probably reading it on their phone. They're running from meeting to meeting. This is not a college thesis paper that you're trying to write them. You are writing if something very casual to start a conversation with them.

You're not trying to sell them anything in this first. So that is another thing that comes up again and again for people that respond and say, Hey, we don't normally respond, but this is why you would personalize. You sound real and authentic and you know, we figured, what the heck? Let's give it a shot.

So do that. You do your own quick little dirty research and you can continue to optimize that. You gather up their some stories, you understand how they speak, the language they use, and then you go and you do active outbound including. Keeping emails short, less than a hundred words, that's what re my, my alarm bells are going off cuz I'm like, yes, because I can skim through that very quickly on my phone, which is where they're likely consuming it and keeping it very casual to that.

I mean, think about it. Let me share, you know, I'm a guy Christian would likely look at me as, as a prospect. And if he was prospecting me, because, you know, I'm a head of marketing, for example I get so many bad outreaches that when I get a good professional polished outreach, that alone stands out from the crowd.

He's not wasting my time. He understands my role, he understands my pain, He understands my, my, you know, how I speak. I'm not shocked that he says, we don't normally respond to this, but yours stood out. So let me ask you this, Christian, do you, how hard do you, or how do you balance activity? Quantity versus outreach quality.

Cuz quality takes time. That affects the, the quantity, you know, What's your, what have you seen work well?

So, you know, we really, you know, try to code you know, codify kind of the process that we use to find these insights. LinkedIn is obviously a great, you know, resource to go to right out of the gates. Looking and seeing if, if somebody has posted something recently, we think of it almost as a continuum if that prospect has posted something, We call it self authored content.

So they've been on a podcast, they've posted something about something that's happening at the organization. Those are really, really great nuggets to look for first. Now if you don't find anything that is personalized, and we're talking, this is a quick scan on LinkedIn, you should spend more, no more than a minute to look and see have they actually posted something?

If they haven't, then you want to turn your attention more towards the company itself, what's happening at the company level. And again, it's a quick looking on the, on LinkedIn, it's a quick Google search company name. And maybe what you, what your organization. So that's another, a quick look and you're looking to seeing if anything's happen on it, more of a company level.

Then, so the process, once you get into the flow and you know what works, and I think every organization that's listening in probably has different resources that they would wanna, you know, look at. But you know, you should be spending, you know, I would say maybe 10 minutes tops on doing the research.

And then you gotta, and then you start writing the, writing the message. If you're spending more. You're either looking in the wrong spot, you don't have a good process in place or you're just kind of avoiding, you know, trying to do the work which I do see happen sometime as well. So yeah, so you just want to get a process in place.

Have some places that you typically go and, and spend no more than 10 minutes doing the, the research portion of it.

Yeah, that's my mouth says that's six per hours. Let's, let's say we can 15 minutes. Let's have some fun. Say it's 15 minutes, it's four per hour, so in an eight hour day, that's still 48. That's civil round will say 50. That's a lot. That's a lot. If you were to do that, that's highly personalized, highly relevant outreach attempts.

Now I'm curious, you made mention. Earlier to about, it's that you convert much higher than the average because of what you're doing. And that's also a promise you make to your prospects as well, that your, your future customers, that if you engage you, this is the results that'll happen. How, how are you, how do you tend to measure yourselves and, and validate that you're, you're doing this right?

And when do you adjust your tactics, your techniques, your approaches, your method. To cuz maybe suddenly they, they stopped working for whatever reason.

Should be coming back as what we call a positive reply, cuz there are gonna be replies that say, Take me off your list, I'm not interested. Go to hell. You know, you're gonna get some of those as well. That's just part of the business. So we really measure what the positive replies are and there the percentages are gonna range from, you know, if you're doing enterprise, it's gonna be much lower than small business if you're doing certain industries or tougher to break.

So we have a general guideline that we look for for our clients. But again, the idea here is that you just wanna measure it, you know, get a couple hundred emails out and then. Improve upon it. And it doesn't really matter where you stack up against others in the space. It might be a guidepost, but you just want to constantly iterate and get a little bit better every time.

And just, if you're just trying to outdo yourself every time, eventually over a period of a few weeks or a few months, you're gonna have a really high performing campaign. And, and I think that's been a key for us and, and the way we look at things is we build everything out in what we call. So we do 30 day sprints where we'll have a certain message, we put it into market and then we test and we learn and we see what is, what the response rates are, what are the conversion rates that are actually happening from those emails.

What are some of the. Feedback that we're getting from that. And then the next month we're gonna make some tweaks to our overall message and our process based on the learnings that we had from the prior month. And we do that on a monthly month month to month basis.

And we're always looking to gain a percentage or two points of improvement every iteration. And that just comes by Ashley being intentional, putting it in your calendar that it's time to go and review the results. And where do I need to do, What do I need to do? Where do I need to optimize to get better results?

As opposed to just saying, I don't know, it's not working, I'm just gonna. It's about being intentional. I love that you're doing that. Everything I'm hearing about you would, I can totally see what your customers buy from you and sign you up and, and trust you because it's such a methodical, intentional, logical, easily provable approach, and if I'm being prospected by you with that approach.

Then I trust you and we haven't talked about that. How, What are, I mean, I trust you because of your actions, but what are you doing to build trust with your prospects Christian, so that when you get to the point where you, you're in an active sales opportunity, and do they sign or not sign? And that's when Rudy.

The trust factor really kicks in. So what are you doing to build that trust with them?

So when we're reaching out, for example, to agencies in our tech c. I'm gonna reference that we've worked with this agency, that agency, and the other agency, which then builds some familiarity and oh, if they're doing it for them, maybe they could do it for me. And I think it's really important to try to be relevant in who you name.

You know, it wouldn't be relevant if I mentioned, you know, a garbage disposal company when I'm reaching out to an advertising agency. They won't see the connection point. So I think that credibility and that trust starts from the beginning. I think it also then once you actually land the meeting, then there is a, a whole other set of other things that have to do.

And, you know, number one I think is, is. Saying what you doing what you say. So if you say that you're gonna meet at a certain time, you show up, you're on time you are prepared for that meeting, you've done your homework. I think that is also key. I can't tell you also how many times I run across people that they, they don't, they don't follow through with what they said that they're gonna follow through with.

So I think that is also. It's really key. If you have then case studies and other sorts of, you know, sales assets that can help, you know, prove your claim, that will also help, you know, build credibility and trust with the prospect. So I think those are a couple, you know, a couple things that come to mind.

You know, kind of more so before the deal is signed that you can start to think. And really start to build that trust with the prospect. I think there's really, you know, you gotta think about it before, before to sale, during, you know, the engagement, during the pitch, in the meeting, and then even after, what are you gonna do to keep that trust alive with your client?

Be intentional with your structure, being intentional with your outbound prospecting, being intentional with your follow up. You know, being prepared is another way of being intentional. I see too many reps when they manage to get the call, they don't do a call plan. You know, what do I, They're just, they're just winging it.

And yet you heard Christians say, Be prepared. That comes across in the call. If you're winging it with me, now you're gonna wing it. If I sign up with you, and that makes me nervous. But if you seem like you're repaired, you're respecting my time, you have good structure you can name drop other credible resources, you can gimme case studies to back up your statements.

You're very believable when people are, Think about it, if, if Christian is promising six and seven figure deals, if he's engaged, then that means Christian, him. Is probably a, I don't know your Christian's pricing, but I'm gonna guess Christian himself is probably a premium service for a premium result. So for he and his team to achieve the results that they're achieving, they need to be able to project that we're safe, that we're worth it.

This is what you've got. You've got confidence because people, when they buy from you, they're entrusting you to not let them down, because if it doesn't go well, their job is at risk. That's what a lot of reps don't understand. So it's so much about what he's talking about here is relational and trust, and it goes back to your workflow.

Just like you were taking, you know, 10 minutes minimum per to kind of do the research, that was intentional, right? You're not winging it. You're not trying to use bots or shortcuts. You're physically being intentional. That's what all this process is. Okay. So you've been doing this a year and a half. You started from scratch.

What was the biggest. Thing you did starting from scratch, that was, that started getting you the success and the, and the goals that you desire.

And I was in the same boat. I was a business owner for about 15 years. Then I went and worked at advertising and marketing agencies for about. But in the back of my mind, I knew that I wanted to be doing something on my own again, and I knew it was probably something in the advertising and marketing space, but I wasn't sure what, when or how.

So what I actually started to do is I wanted to build up a. A pro a profile for myself. I wanted to build some awareness. I wanted to start branding myself. I wasn't even sure what went or how though. So I started creating content and I posted it on LinkedIn. I started connecting with people in that space on LinkedIn.

I started developing an email list and it was pure value. Keep in mind, I was working at an agency At the time, I was not trying to sell any services. I didn't even know what services to sell at the time. It was really just about putting myself out there. And this went on for about two years before I decided that I was gonna, you know, move on and, and start my own company.

But when I did move on and start my own company, I had already developed a little bit of a following from agency owners and MarTech. Because of the content that I was producing and I was back to kind of the trust portion of it, I was consistent in that content creation that I did. And there was a level of trust then that people had.

So when I decided to make this move and I reached out to some people that were now in my network they were, yeah, I would love to, you know, work with you. I'd love to take a chance and, and, and, and see how this goes with you. I was starting from scratch. Yes. I had no clients day one, but I had laid some groundwork, you know, for two years beforehand.

So I, I, I share that story. You know, again, because I think whether that is you deciding that you wanna work on your own like I did, or even if you just want to you know, start to brand yourself as an expert in a certain area, there is a long tail that will come with that, that will help your sales career down the.

And I think a lot of people are thinking very short term, How am I gonna get the sale tomorrow? Versus thinking about how am I gonna build a brand, a personal brand around myself that's gonna, you know, hopefully help me for years and years to come.

I, I had a talk that I. Created that. I gave it a variety of shows for a brief period of time. Cuz then, Cuz talks get tired, but it was called Sell Like A Marketer, that's what it's called. Like, and it was saying you as a sales rep need to learn from marketing and what they do now listen to what Christian just told you.

Now listen, I'm, when I told what I've told people in that session, I said, You need to become a branding expert. Only the branding is. How do you brand? You, You need to write content just like marketers write content. You need to you need to appear on podcasts and webinars, just like marketers Do you need to start your own podcast like marketers?

Do you need to do a newsletter? Like marketers, do you need to build an email opt-in list like marketers do and then the early time all you're doing, like cuz marketers are not monthly or quarterly based, they're much longer horizon. So they're building up this brand equity by adding value for the first, you know, six, 12, maybe 18 months, two years in the case of Christian, before you start to harvest that.

And the beauty. You can use that, all that content, that branding though right away in your messaging, in your sequencing, you know, as part of your credibility, as part of your selling technique. Cuz you can share your own content depending on the objections you get or the questions you get. There you go.

That's exactly what Christian talked about because he's committed to his craft. He invested it. He's in a highly competitive marketplace, and he's been able to distinguish himself, and it all goes back because he knew what the problem was that his audience had, and he was able to approach it in professional, methodical, intentional, sophisticated, outbound prospecting manner that resonated with his audience.

And then he committed to continually optimizing and improving and iterating with a series of sprints. So he can increase his results and he's been in business for a year and a half. And the outcomes speak for themself. Folks. That is Christian Banach. He is Christian Banach.com. Christian, what's the best way to get ahold of you, my friend?

The good news is it's not as hard as you think. The bad news is you have to be intentional. Follow his technique, and you will be successful just like he is. My name is Darryl. That's Christian. We're gonna get outta here, but I'll be back next week. In the meantime, please share this show. Give us reviews, like comment.

If you're watching this on YouTube, hit the bell cuz hey, you should always hit the bell. That's what I always say. Can ever have enough bell, which is not to be confused with more cowbell, completely different situation. My name is Darryl. I'll talk to you guys soon. Take care.

This episode was digitally transcribed.