Sam Nelson: Referral Magic from The Tenbound Sales Development Conference

​You can usually spot Sam Nelson easily… he’s the guy with the blue dyed hair popping up at sales conferences and in your LinkedIn feeds, sharing his thought leadership with the community. His day job is the SDR Leader at Outreach (a Sales Enablement Platform)

Sam (SDR Leader @ Outreach.io)  is a well known entity in the Sales Development world, and gave a great presentation on how he and his teams have integrated referrals into their outbound sequences with great results. We’ve compiled a few highlighted takeaways below for you, but you are going to want to take a look at the session recording to get the more granular advice.

Don’t train for perfection, train for the majority

Sam tasked himself with creating a comprehensive flowchart of all known objections and questions prospects would come up with, and the subsequent responses for his team. After creating this ‘nuclear bomb’ of a flowchart, he realized that spending so much effort for him and his team to train for those infrequent scenarios wouldn’t be as beneficial as putting their focus on the 80-90% of scenarios that they saw frequently. By not striving for perfection, his team improved overall.

Referrals from prospects are definitely worth your time

In his career, he’s had ⅓ of his opportunities come from prospect referrals! In addition, he found that those who were referred were significantly more likely to be engaged and close.

Working referrals into cadences increased response rates

In addition to the opportunities generated through the referrals, Sam also noted his teams saw increases from 1% up to 40% in reply rates when these referral techniques were integrated to their outreaches.

Turn that wrong dial into the right one!

Instead of saying thanks and ending the call when it’s been identified that you aren’t talking to the correct person, Sam teaches to use this as an opportunity to get info on who the right contact is. He warns to keep it simple though… your time is limited at this point so be strategic in your approach!

Click play below to watch his presentation for yourself

PS Tenbound just released a new Referral Training program specifically designed for SDRs... check it out here.

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