Book Summary: Sales Engagement by Medina, Altschuler, and Kosoglow

My name is Jason Levin and I am a Marketing Consultant for RankSense. I help our users achieve their goals with our technology and educational resources.  I am a big fan of business books, and enjoy sharing my findings with others.  Last month, I covered The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge.

In this article, I’ll be dissecting Sales Engagement: How The World’s Fastest Growing Companies Are Modeling Sales Through Humanization At Scale by Manny Medina, Max Altschuler and Mark Kosoglow.  Manny is the CEO of Outreach, Mark is the VP of Sales, and Max is the VP of Marketing. 

The authors focus on the fact that most sales teams are not optimizing for how the modern buyer likes to buy.  For example, salespeople may prefer a text message whereas IT members may prefer long emails and white papers. Outreach preaches personalization on a large scale. By creating personas for each target audience, one is able to nail down his or her prospective audience and personalize a sequence just for a specific type of target.

In Outreach’s company, their sales representatives do not create their prospects in their eponymous software Outreach.  Rather, they have a team just for prospecting, and the salespeople are given their lists on a regular basis.  This frees up salespeople’s time to actually do the selling.  And isn’t that what they are getting paid to do?  Additionally, Outreach has sales development representatives only do call sequencing for the first couple months so they do not become reliant on email automation.  Interesting idea, right?

Outreach has built up a huge amount of data over their years in business, and while they do not share all of it, they do share some handy tips and tricks.  For example, they advise hitting 18-20 touches within 3-4 weeks.  These are spread out throughout LinkedIn, calls, and emails.  

Additionally, they advise emailing between Monday 6-8 PM EST and Thursdays 7-8 PM EST.  As for the logic on this, I am not entirely sure, and would welcome any opinions.  They also suggest calling on the 55-minute mark on the hour because that is when executives have free time after one meeting and before their next one.  The authors advise only using texting for warm touches.

Another valuable suggestion was that “[nothing] has the power to humanize a rep faster than video”.  I believe this is very valuable, and it is one of the main reasons why I have been releasing biweekly 2-minute updates for our Shopify Speed Optimization projects. Curious?  Click here to view it. 

The key takeaways of this book were personalization and data analysis.  It’s a funny combination because it often requires 2 types of people: the people person and the numbers person.  When looking for your salespeople, look at someone who can do both well, and there is a strong chance of success ahead.

Thanks for reading. 

Jason