In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction, talks with guest Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. They are discussing the three key shifts (identify, engage and create) to make in your outbound approach. They also talk about the challenges around technology.

Episode Highlights

• 01:14 – Sam says, one can't close the deal unless they get a meeting; everything starts with the prospecting piece of things.
• 03:34 – Jason says, it's kind of accepted to get a call during business hours if it's related to business.
• 05:19 – Jason got used to being okay with interrupting someone.
• 07:03 – In the past 5-10 years whatever shift we have seen in sales, has it gone in the right direction for the better in sales, enquires Sam.
• 10:15 – We need to find a balance between mass blast and customizing everything. 
• 12:39 – It's a big deal to get a client, so it makes sense to do this type of segmentation, says Jason.
• 14:52 – We don't always actually need to personalize to the individual, mentions Jason.
• 16:50 - There's a whole personalization and relevance kind of thing and he looks at those things interchangeably. 
• 18:20 – Sam enquires, how as an individual sales professional, should he think of quality first, what's the thought process behind that?
• 20:30 - We should be thinking about how can we scale the personalization that we’re doing not how we can do personalization at scale.
• 23:10 – We need to be like not how personalized can we get, but what's the minimum we can get away with and still be increased by 1%, 3%, or 4%.
• 24:18 - We have to think about how do we optimize the hours of our week during the time that we do spend doing outbound because we can't be everything for everyone.
• 26:38 - When we can shift the conversation to what the other person cares about, that's how we get people to talk about themselves, says Jason.
• 28:04 – Jason states the priority drop is how we can get this person talking about themselves.
• 30:38 – Jason can shift the conversation away from talking about him by talking about how we help people that we help are into in the problems that they have.
• 34:50 – What we need to think about is if we're asking for 30 minutes of this person's time what is going to make that time worth it, states Jason.
• 36:45 - What kind of insights do you share that are helpful for them even if they decided not to use our product or service.
• 41:10 – People try to overcomplicate what we're doing with outbound, says Jason.

Three Key Points

1. We need to get good at figuring out if our target market is this big circle. We need to figure out what the segments are, and how can we find patterns between people?
2. We need to find a balance in how can we still take advantage of the technology that allows us to automate a lot of stuff and make the workflow a lot easier, and not have to customize everything.
3. Jason highlights – he has a good system for identifying good fit opportunities. He has got some tools at his disposal through phone, email, or social to engage and start a conversation with and he’s able to create opportunities out of it and do a little bit of projection.

Tweetable Quotes

• “I'm going to interrupt you, but I get to decide if I am an interruption.” – Jason Bay
• “Buying cycles are getting longer and people are buying less because it's so complicated.” – Jason Bay
• “Prospects are starving to interact with sa