This article is by Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and TalentBin (acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014). It's excerpted from the sales demo, phone, and email scripts chapter in his book, Founding Sales, which tackles everything founders and first-time sales staff need to know about acquiring early customers, building and scaling winning sales teams.
Building a winning sales deck is one thing. But what about the email templates needed to get prospects on the phone? What about the phone scripts for setting those sales presentation appointments? The best sales deck in the world isn’t super helpful sitting on a shelf, gathering dust because you aren’t setting appointments in which to use it! And while a sales presentation is all well and good, a well-scripted, live demo is required to show prospects it’s not all smoke and mirrors.
Of course, teaching a team of people what to say in each of these situations, not to mention, simply remembering yourself, is an entirely different animal than simply putting together a compelling set of sales slides. The key is to take as much variability and improvisation out of the equation as possible so you can define, test and stick with what works. But where do you even start?
First, it’s a question of making sure that the commercial arguments you likely have embodied in materials like your sales deck, and core sales narrative, are also available in the format for other parts of the sales funnel. That is, you can't build a house with just a hammer. You need the right tools for each part of the job. It’s also a question of how you want your company to sound. It’s not too far off from how startups need to position and define the public-facing tone and voice they want to use.
Sales is a significant channel through which companies need to tell a compelling story in a distinct voice. Every email your sales team sends, every voicemail they leave, and every demo they give in person or over the phone reinforces or detracts from this commercial argument you make to your prospect about why your solution is so fantastic for her business. The success or failure of this commercial argument is what will drive your revenue success or failure. You can see why starting from a strong position is so important.
In this exclusive article excerpted from my book on enterprise sales for founders and other first time sales staff, I share the critical lessons I’ve learned to nailing these interactions both in our sales org at TalentBin, and at numerous other early stage sales orgs I’ve advised.
But I also know it’s not enough to suggest the type of things people should say to clients. That’s why I’ve shared a number of examples of actual emails and demo scripts that have worked for us. You can take these and mold them to your own tone and value proposition, but if you’re looking for a starting point to get these conversations rolling, you’ve come to the right place.
EMAIL TEMPLATES
Just like your sales deck, the emails your team sends should be medium-specific encapsulations of your sales narrative, with an end goal of driving recipients to an online or offline presentation and demo. And just like your deck, these can start at the most basic level and get more elaborate from there as your messaging gets more specific.
We’ll start with the idea of outbound outreach. While inbound leads (that you heavily qualify) are the highest-quality source of potential deals, it’s unlikely when you’re first starting out that you’ll have inbound demand of any merit before you start doing outbound.
To start, you simply need a couple of outreach templates that you’ll use to contact decision-makers at prospect companies. The benefit of prospecting is that you are able to select prospects that have the business pain characteristics that your solution is able to transform and relieve. So conveniently, when you’re creating these templates, you can assume that readers have the pain points that you’re solving and, moreover, talk to them plainly about their business pains and your solution.
As you read the following email templates, you should recognize parts of your master narrative: the problem and who has it (the recipient!), the differences between yours and existing solutions, and proof points of your product’s superiority.
You’ll note the subject lines are often customized — there’s information in there to show the prospect that this message was specifically designed for him or her — and include qualification information (e.g., “Hiring Ruby devs? That’s NOT easy”). You’ll also see that the templates include “click targets,” hyperlinks pointing to pieces of collateral (I like YouTube demo videos in particular) that draw clicks from the prospect.
These are important not just because they can provide more context and persuasion, but because, with the sort of email instrumentation you should implement, they will allow you to see which prospects are clicking and thus demonstrating interest in what you have to say. And they don’t have to be just text links. You can embed a screenshot of a slide or — one of my favorites — a thumbnail of a demo video that’s hyperlinked to the source to drive click-through to more compelling information. Email templates should also include links to your website. This helps with the click-target question, but also allows the prospect to learn more, and potentially become an inbound lead requesting your demo.
You’ll also note that these sample templates are very specific about what the solution addresses, and take pains to demonstrate to the prospect that research was done to confirm that he or she has those business pains. In TalentBin’s case, that’s hiring technical talent. These emails don’t talk about “social recruiting.” They don’t talk about “recruiting” in general. They don’t talk about interviewing. They talk about the pain points of finding and recruiting technical talent, and potential solutions to those problems. And the messaging continually comes back to the prospect’s point of view. Prospects don’t care about you. They care about them.
You must prioritize the prospects’ point of view; even as you present information about your solution, ground it in how it helps them.
The best templates do all of this in a plainspoken (dare I say fun?) way that speaks to the prospect candidly, authoritatively, and as a peer. They avoid bullshit jargon-speak and unnecessarily “businessy” communication patterns.
Same with overly ornate designs. Your templates should be 100% text, avoiding marketing images — with the exception of screenshots and slides, if you like. But avoid high-sheen logos and such. It makes your outreach look like a robot sent it, like there’s no qualification behind it and it’s therefore inapplicable spam rather than highly targeted consultative outreach. Don’t let your emails get mistaken for that other crap.
Lastly, you’ll notice that there are strong calls to action at the conclusion of each email, asking to set up a one-on-one interaction (whether via telepresence à la Join.me, ClearSlide, etc. or face-to-face). That is the ultimate goal of this outreach: to drive to a synchronous presentation and discussion of the prospect’s business pains and your solution. A “demo,” in the vernacular.
Here are a couple examples of cold-outreach emails (with mail merge code in place):
TEMPLATE: Short and sweet — quick pain documentation and ask.
SUBJECT LINE: Hey {{First Name}}! The magical solution to your technical recruiting headaches.
Hey {{First Name}},
I hope you're having a great day!
It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} at TalentBin, and I’m reaching out because I have something that I think help make hiring all those Ruby, iOS, and Java roles I see on your career page.
If you’re like most technical recruiters we work with (we have thousands of customers), you’re probably frustrated by the poor LinkedIn profiles of most developers, the fact that they don’t respond to InMails, and that it all just takes way too much time. Super frustrating.
The good news is, TalentBin is designed specifically to reduce that time and drudgery via automation, so you can spend more of your time having great candidate conversations and selling them on working at {{CompanyName}}. Which is what recruiting is all about, right?
You see, TalentBin is a talent search engine that helps recruiter find and reach out to fantastic technical talent based on the activity they demonstrate on places like Github, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Meetup, the US Patent Database, and more. More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI
I'd love to show you how we might be able to help you find qualified technical candidates for your open positions and hire more and better technical staff, faster, with less work on your part.
Do you have 20 minutes next week? What times work for you? Feel free to reply to this email, or you can ring me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.
Thanks, {{User.FIRSTNAME}}
TEMPLATE: Short and Sweet — the basics of TalentBin.
SUBJECT LINE: Hey {{First Name}}! Meet TalentBin: the Talent Search Engine
Hey {{First Name}},
I hope you're having a great day!
It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} at Monster, and I am looking to introduce you to our newest acquisition, a technical recruiting tool called TalentBin. It’s clear that {{CompanyName}} is hiring technical talent, and I’d love the opportunity to show you how TalentBin can make your life easier in that regard.
TalentBin has developed an amazing talent search engine used by recruiters to find software developers and other technical talent. More in this helpful video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and hundreds of other companies have recruiters using TalentBin daily to search for and recruit these hard-to-find candidates.
We derive our candidate data by crawling the *entire Internet* and making it your technical-recruiting playground. That means we are capitalizing on the grand potential of the Internet by recording information from disparate web locations and constructing rich composite profiles. So all those software engineers with terrible or nonexistent LinkedIn profiles who don’t respond to InMails? We have profiles for them based on what they do on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Meetup, and more. And we have their personal email addresses.
These profiles span professional and personal interests, and they include personal email addresses!
Based on the open technical positions I see listed on your career site ({{CareerSiteLink}}), TalentBin should serve you well.
I'd love to show you how TalentBin can help you find qualified technical candidates for your open positions and hire more and better technical staff, faster, with less work on your part.
Do you have 20 minutes next week? What times work for you? Feel free to reply to this email, or you can ring me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.
Thanks {{User.FIRSTNAME}}
TEMPLATE: Quick Summary of TalentBin — focused on how it will save time.
SUBJECT LINE: Want to reach twice the technical candidates in half the time? TalentBin can help.
Hi there {{First Name}},
It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} here with Monster. I wanted to take a minute to introduce you to the newest addition to our ever-growing bag of recruiting tricks: TalentBin. If the information below is relevant to you, I would love to connect one-to-one to discuss further. I believe it will be a very helpful tool for you.
TalentBin has developed a search engine used by recruiters to find software developers and other technical talent.
Facebook, Amazon, Kelly IT, Robert Half, and hundreds of other companies and agencies have recruiters using TalentBin daily to search for these hard-to-find candidates.
Based on the open positions I see listed on your website, TalentBin should serve you well in your search!
Snapshot of some sweet features:
- 4–5x more technical candidates than LinkedIn Recruiter can identify
- Millions of personal email addresses
- Messaging templates and mass emailing capability (Send an email blast to up to 30 candidates at once in a single click.)
- Email-open/link-click tracking (See when a candidate opens your emails.)
- Gmail and Outlook integration (Send candidates emails from within TalentBin without having to bounce out to another window.)
- CRM functionality (pipeline management & automation—no dropped balls)
- ...and some more cool/nerdy data stuff. :)
Quick explainer video (It's pretty funny. You *will* laugh.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI
We’d love to show you how TalentBin can help you find and recruit qualified technical candidates for your open positions. Do you have 30 minutes next week? What times work for you?
Don't believe the subject line? Email me! I'd be happy to explain. Or you can ring me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.
Thanks, {{User.FIRSTNAME}}
You should always approach these types of email templates with an iterative mindset. As your solution extends, you’ll extend them. In fact, as you add slides to your sales deck, you can often add a correlating outreach email, maybe even with a screenshot of the slide embedded. As you find permutations in your customer base, you can fork off templates that are specific to sub-genres of your customers.
As with your slides, you should keep email templates in some sort of “source repository” — which can be as simple as a Google Document or, eventually, a more complicated content management system, like Yesware, SalesLoft, or some other email-prospecting tool.
PHONE & VOICEMAIL SCRIPTS
While targeted email outreach for appointment setting is one of the most scalable means to put your message in front of qualified prospects, you’ll likely be getting on the phone — either dealing with inbound calls (perhaps prompted by your outbound emailing!) or doing out-and-out cold-calling (which everyone knows can be pretty nerve-racking).
While there’s little chance that a phone call will directly follow a script, having at least some quick bullets to refer to can be helpful to ensure that you’re nailing your messaging points. Again, these should be a reformatting of your core narrative, designed to be delivered in thirty to ninety seconds. This is not the kind of phone script that you’ll have when you get to 10+ sales reps; instead, it’s about having guideposts to help you when you get on the phone trying to drive toward a demo.
Below are some appointment-setting phone scripts from a company named HIRABL, which makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies. These scripts are for a product that helps agencies know when candidates that they’ve submitted to clients may have been hired, even though the client hasn’t reported it.
Cold-Calling Scripts — HIRABL
Version #1
Hi there!
This is NAME at HIRABL. I wanted to reach out, because we’ve been helping staffing agencies like yours identify backdoor hires.
Are you familiar with backdoor hires, or have you had many at your agency?
Customer: Yes, we are familiar with them, but we don’t do much about it because we don’t know how we’d go about it.
Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It sounds like a demo with our Account Director NAME might make sense — do you have 20 minutes on DAY or DAY?
Version #2
Hi there!
This is NAME at HIRABL. How’s your day going?
The reason I’m calling is that we develop software that notifies recruiters when clients hire their candidates and forget to tell them. Last year, we found over 4,200 missed fees across just 120 customers.
I’d love to set up a time for you to speak with our Account Director NAME, because I think we can identify fees you’ve already earned.Do you have twenty minutes on DAY or DAY?
---
And this is a more involved call script for TalentBin, which includes more of the sales narrative than the succinct ones above. It’s unlikely that all of the information in this script would be used in a given call, but having the information available to the caller is always helpful.
Hey there!
It's NAME from Monster.
(Pleasantries. Weather. Sports team. Personal tidbits.)
So, I'm calling because I know that ACCOUNT_NAME hires quite a few (software engineering/design/health care) professionals.
Monster recently acquired a company called TalentBin. Did you see that news?
(Customer responds.)
Got it! So TalentBin develops tools used by recruiters to find talent. And it does this by crawling the entire Internet for activity that those folks engage in.
Because these sorts of candidates are highly employed, recruiting them often requires a passive-candidate outreach approach.
But at the same time, because these folks tend to not spend time on professional social networks like LinkedIn, finding them there can be really problematic. Unlike recruiters and salespeople, they just don't spend time there.
However, these sorts of professionals do spend time other places online, leaving trails of information about what they do professionally. TalentBin scoops up all of that information and makes it recruiter-ready.
As a result, TalentBin identifies more of these professionals than any other sourcing tool on the market. It makes it easy for you to reach them directly, by providing personal contact information, like personal email addresses, and social communication vectors like Twitter, Meetup, Facebook, and so on.
Pretty nifty, eh?
Yeah, what’s more:
[Technical: For instance, in a given geography, say TalentBin will have five to ten times the number of Ruby, Java, .NET, iOS, and Android developers compared to LinkedIn, and will have oodles of personal email addresses for those candidates. This is because TalentBin has crawled GitHub, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Twitter, and many other sites where those engineers hang out.]
[Healthcare: For instance, in a given geography, say TalentBin will have five to 10 times the number of registered nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physicians (oncologists, orthopedists, etc.), and so on thank LinkedIn. And it includes lots of direct phone numbers and other contact information for these candidates! This is because TalentBin has crawled every single healthcare license database where those professionals have to show up. So we literally have every healthcare professional in the United States in our database! How cool is that?]
Lastly, TalentBin saves recruiters tons of time by automating a lot of the drudgery involved in candidate sourcing and outreach. Features like integrated email, templating and mail merging, mass messaging, drip-marketing campaigns, and email-open and click tracking make our clients super efficient jet fighters! It's like a robot recruiter helper, freeing recruiters up to spend more time on higher-value activities, like closing candidates.
Which is why Monster bought the company! Because it's really impactful for our clients who hire these sorts of staff. Thousands of clients have signed up for TalentBin, including big names like Amazon, IBM, Kelly Services, Manpower, and more.
Because of ACCOUNT_NAME's current hiring characteristics, I feel that this is something that would be very impactful to your business. I would love to set up a walk-through demo for your team with myself and my TalentBin product specialist colleague to dig in more.
Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth your time.
---
When we built this script, we also included some reaction permutations to help guide the next steps of the call:
Client is interested — Book demo.
Great! What are some times that work for you next week? I have availability TIME BLOCK on DAY, TIME BLOCK on DAY, and TIME BLOCK on DAY.
Great. I'll send a meeting invite to block your calendar with the online meeting room information. We'll do a screen share and walk through some slides and the product. Looking forward to it!
Client asks follow-up question — Defer and drive to demo.
That's a great question! Usually that's the sort of thing we like to get into in a brief presentation and demo with one of the TalentBin product specialists, who are the pros when it comes to explaining every feature. It's usually thirty minutes and focuses specifically on your business pains and where TalentBin can help.
It's very educational, and well worth the time.
Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth it.
Client asks, “Is it free/does it cost money?” — Defer and drive toward demo.
It is not free, but it's extremely powerful and provides a strong return on investment. It's not uncommon for TalentBin to drive an additional engineering hire per month.
But usually that's the sort of thing we like to get into in a brief presentation and demo with one of the TalentBin product specialists. It's usually thirty minutes and focuses specifically on your business pains and where TalentBin can help solve them.
It's very educational, and well worth the time.
Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a 30-minute demo? I promise it will be worth it.
Client says, “I'm not interested” — Deflect and articulate value. Drive toward a demo.
NAME, I wouldn't be on the phone with you right now if I didn't strongly think that this could help ACCOUNT_NAME hire more people, faster, with less cost and less work on the part of your recruiters. [In the case of an agency, "And ultimately make ACCOUNT_NAME more money."]
I promise you that this sort of technology is going to be industry standard. By deferring consideration of it, you're putting your business and your ability as a recruiter at a disadvantage.
Client asks, “Is this like [COMPETITOR NAME]?” — Deflect and drive toward demo.
Oh! You're familiar with COMPETITOR_NAME. TalentBin is similar, but is actually the original pioneer in the industry, with the richest functionality, the best data sources, and the most automation. Which is why TalentBin has won the most industry acclaim and awards! Given your familiarity with the space, it seems like a demo would be very helpful for you to further complete your knowledge.
Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be worth it.
Client says, “No, I'm really not interested.” — Articulate that you're going to follow up, and aren't going away. (More on how to do this here.)
Okay, I understand that while this is relevant to your business, it sounds like the timing is not right just this instant. However, I am convinced that TalentBin is something that will help your business be more successful.
So I'm going to send some video examples of the massive time savings and ROI that TalentBin can provide for ACCOUNT_NAME, and I'll make sure to touch base in a month or so to update you on what's new. [From there, follow up by email with materials as defined in Email Templates.]
---
Next, we have some example voicemail scripts designed to prompt callbacks. As covered in the appointment-setting chapter, voicemails should generally be paired with emails.
While listening to a voicemail can be easy (especially in the age of transcription to email), prospects will rarely return messages. It’s better to think of them as audio emails.
That said, an email that is paired with a voice mail that has piqued a prospect’s interest is ripe for a reply.
Follow-Up Voicemail
Hey there! It's NAME from Monster again.
I wanted to follow up on my previous message regarding TalentBin by Monster, the talent search engine.
On paper, it seems like your company would be a great fit for our tool, given your hiring needs, and I just want to chat for a quick minute to see if scheduling you for a live web demo would make sense.
Once again, NAME calling from TalentBin, PHONE NUMBER, that’s PHONE NUMBER. I look forward to speaking with you soon.
Customer Proof Voicemail
Hey there!
This is NAME from TalentBin.
I’m reaching out because our company makes amazing technical talent search software, and it looks like your organization loves to hire amazing software engineers.
We're super popular with awesome technical recruiting organizations like Facebook, Amazon, Groupon, Microsoft, and hundreds of others. So we're legit.
I'd love to connect with you on what we're up to and how it can help you guys with your engineering hiring needs.
Hit me back at NUMBER. I look forward to chatting with you soon!
Thanks!
---
Of course the goal of all these emails and phone calls is to get to the demo stage of the process. That’s concrete progress through the sales funnel, and your chances of making a sale at each stage are that much better. Of course, your chances of fumbling the deal are also greater because you’re moving into a higher touchpoint part of the process. To make sure you don’t sacrifice all the hard work that comes before a demo, the next section is about how to win at that level.
DEMO SCRIPTS
Your demo should be crafted with your overarching sales narrative front and center. And because a live demo will typically come after you’ve shared some initial slides from your sales deck, you should follow the framing you presented in your deck. Your demo will reiterate much of it, but with much more context, customization, and visual clarity.
What exactly is that framing? Well, as with your sales deck, it’s the bucketing of key use cases and the features that enable them. Ideally, you should already have those use cases identified, as they are likely referred to in your sales deck. But think about the combination of most common, most important, and most impressive use cases your solution enables. Then rank them, such that you start with the most important and most compelling ones — because you never know when a demo will have to end early! Beyond that, I like to think of a demo as telling the story of how your solution is used, again starting with major pain points.
Customization
Your demo is where customization to the specific prospect can really be done in earnest. In fact, as you’re developing your product, think of ways you can make it easier to demonstrate using prospect content — it could be something as simple as ensuring that a prospect name and logo can be quickly embedded, or as complicated as making it easy to import customer data to use in a live demo. But the purpose of the demo is not to be a cold rehash of the features that you may have just touched on in your sales presentation.
Your demo is an opportunity to demonstrate the potential value the product could provide to the prospect, richly, before their eyes.
More customization will raise close rates and shorten deal cycles. The simplest version of this type of tailoring is knowing the prospect’s business context — either from prior research or from discovery questions at the beginning of your call — and using that to guide the demo.
At TalentBin, that meant making sure that our sales reps knew the technical- and design-hiring requirements for prospects they were talking to, which was easily divined by looking at those prospects’ career web pages ahead of time. That way, the TalentBin rep could easily say, “I know by looking at your careers page that you’re hiring some iOS developers in Philadelphia. I would love to show you how TalentBin could help with that.”
Consider this in contrast to something that is non-contextual, like “How about we show you what this looks like for recruiting for Java developers in San Francisco?” — when the prospect doesn’t recruit for Java, and definitely isn’t based in San Francisco. What are the key pieces of information you could use to modify your demo and make it more impactful to the prospect? Which can be sniffed out ahead of time, and which need to be elicited from the prospect?
If your demo is non-contextual and not tied directly to the business realities of the prospect, it will always smell like you’re running the demo to make the product perform at its peak attractiveness, rather than showing how it will work when used by the client. You can avoid that by focusing on the prospect’s business context first and foremost. It will make your materials more believable than other vendor demos they see and raise the trust factor. It also helps to do this research yourself. Because if you simply ask clients what they want to do, they may not know, or may ask to go in the wrong direction.
Again, with TalentBin, the worst approach would have been to ask, “What’s a role you’re having a hard time filling?” Because the client would likely simply bring up their current most difficult role. Better instead to focus on the roles that the client has the most hires for, for instance, because that’s the larger pain point.
A more evolved version of demo customization is a demo that actually includes user data. A great example of that is how HIRABL (the company that makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies) runs their demos: A week ahead of the demo call, the prospect sends HIRABL candidate submission data from the CRM system they use to track hires. HIRABL then runs their “missed hire” analysis in a new instance of their SaaS software spun up for the prospect.
When it comes time for the demo, they execute a lightweight presentation so the prospect understands the general mental model of the problem, solution, value, and such, and then they turn to all the missed fees that HIRABL has identified for that prospect. That’s a pretty killer demo! “So, we found what looks like around twenty-five missed fees from your last two years of submission data. You make about $20,000 per placement. Would you like to purchase the product so you can get cracking on collecting that $400,000 of missed fees? We would just give you access to this instance right here. It’s ready to go.” The answer is usually “Yes!”
Obviously the latter case is far more advanced, and by no means should you say, “Well, we don’t have the ability to hyper-customize a demo environment, so we can’t start selling.” Not at all. However, when you work with product management, providing feedback on features you’d want to see in the product, remember that there are features that will make selling easier via a more customized demo. And even if those features don’t necessarily provide post-purchase value to customers, they can still be very valuable from a revenue-generation standpoint, in that they raise close rates and bring in more money.
Example Demo Script
What did a demo script look like at TalentBin? Well, of course, it correlated to our core sales narrative, and was built around the “Search, Qualify, Reach Out, Automate” framing we presented in our sales deck. You can check out how we handled those first two buckets below (and if you want to see the whole script, you’ll find it in the Appendix.). It starts with one of the most important use cases for our audience of recruiters, and then progresses from there in the way a recruiter would move from discovery of a new candidate to qualification of that candidate to outreach — a full life cycle of what recruiters do so often in their day-to-day workflow. Also note that it’s broken up to allow for pauses and discussion with the client.
As you read through it, imagine what it would look like to walk prospects through all the ways TalentBin fits into their day-to-day, and solves their pains at each step, while screen sharing the product. And think about what your demo would look like! What are the natural workflows that your prospect works through on a daily basis? How does your solution fit into them and make them better, faster, stronger?
Search: Enhanced candidate discovery was TalentBin’s first value proposition, and one of the most easily comprehended by prospects. This section was where we touched on the importance of being able to discover engineering candidates who were previously undiscoverable in traditional recruiting databases — or at least super hard to find, requiring far too much manual effort.
We knew nothing would capture the attention of a technical recruiter like showing them the potential candidates they could find and engage using our solution, especially as compared to standard databases, so we started with that:
"Well, I saw from your company’s career site that you need to hire some Ruby engineering staff there in the Dallas area, so let’s search for some. Here’s how we build a search for people who know Ruby in the Dallas area. We can do it manually, or we can use our new Job Req Translator that automatically pulls out the relevant terms in your job posting. I actually grabbed this posting before the call, so let’s paste that in there. See how easy that is?
Now we can save that search for later use since we’re going to come back to this. Also, by saving that search, you’ll now get recommended candidate emails from those searches every few days. But let’s expand this some to see the total number of potential candidates for this role in Dallas. Excellent! Well, it looks like we have around eight thousand results there. That’s promising, since LinkedIn only has around eleven hundred for that same query! Very nice, so that’s like seven times the number — I’m betting there’s a pretty hefty load of people in these search results who have zero LinkedIn profile.
And, of course, the way that you’d do this previously was to manually browse through GitHub or Stack Overflow or Twitter; it might take you five minutes per valid candidate. This way they’re already ready for you to review. And tons of them aren’t on LinkedIn being accosted by every other recruiter with a LinkedIn Recruiter seat!"
Showing off scaled search results for desired skills in the prospect’s region:
Qualify: This is where we would cover why having access to all of this aggregated professional activity was fantastic for qualifying that a candidate had the characteristics recruiters were looking for. Moreover, we looked at how using that contextual information, both professional and personal, in outreach could dramatically impact response rates and recruiter efficiency:
"Okay, let’s start looking at some of these profiles. You can see that we show a preview on the search page that includes the relevant information for the skill that was searched for, along with the various social profiles we have identified and crawled for the candidate. And if you want to, you can tag these folks as ‘interesting’ or ‘not interesting’ for later bulk processing. But for now, let’s check out an individual. Natalie here looks interesting."
Showing off search results and preview information:
Profile View: Understanding that a candidate “fits the bill” and is at least worth reaching out to is a core recruiting workflow. Whether basing their decision on a resume or a LinkedIn profile, recruiters are used to doing that. So showing them how they could do that with a TalentBin profile, but with data aggregated from all over the web, was important:
"Let’s click into her profile. Now you can see that we’ve aggregated all of her various web profiles. See, here’s her GitHub, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and we even have her Lanyrd social conference profile. Nice. If you ever wanted to go to those sites, you can just click on these like this. However, the big idea here is to aggregate that activity so you don’t have to do that.”
Showing off Natalie’s various web profiles and how they’ve been aggregated:
Interest Details: Understanding “why” a given candidate has the relevant professional skill is also important for recruiters. Often they spend time cross-correlating resume claims with sources of professional activity on the web. Moreover, they know that using contextual information in outreach is a valuable way to raise responsiveness, but often takes too long to do in a scalable fashion manually:
“So let’s look at how we know that Natalie has ‘Ruby’ relevance. Okay, see down here on her profile, we’ve got her ‘interest viewer’ section, and if we click on ‘Ruby’ there we see that, wow, Natalie is really into Ruby! She’s following a number of Ruby repositories on GitHub, she has it in her Twitter biography, she’s a member of a couple Ruby Meetups, and she has answered some Ruby questions on Stack Overflow.
Nice! Looks like Natalie is really into Ruby. The problem is that historically this is the sort of thing you’d have to spend five minutes clicking all over the web to determine. Nice that these interest details are right here so you can check them out, and maybe even share them with the hiring manager. Let’s go check out Natalie LinkedIn profile. Whoops! That link is dead! Probably because she deleted her LinkedIn profile. But we’ve got it! We can see that she’s got a bunch of other interests in technologies that are relevant to us — Ruby first and foremost — so she looks like a live one!”
Navigating around and showing off the Skills viewer:
From here, we would cover the key remaining buckets, “Reach Out” and “Automate.” We continued to follow the recruiter’s natural workflow — using a real-world candidate that matched that prospect’s hiring needs — and highlight features that would boost efficiency at every step. Importantly, we would tie parts of the demo to prior elements, making sure to create a holistic understanding of how the product would impact the entirety of the recruiter’s workflow for the better. If you’d like to read the whole script, check out the Appendix.
In TalentBin’s case, the product was fairly evolved, so there was quite a bit of bucketing, and a good amount of ground to cover. But that doesn’t mean that this has to be the case with your demo. The goal is to connect the known pain points to the solution and its benefits, step by step, so your prospects can truly see how it fits into their workflow and makes their lives better. You know you’re doing it well when prospects are saying things like “That’s awesome” or “You have no idea how much this will help me with XYZ.”
Think about the right way to go about demoing your offering. Is there a natural workflow to walk the user through? Is there a chronology? Are there specific key use cases that correlate to the value that you’re providing that you would want to start with? Think about the “story” of your product in the hands of the person you’re presenting it to, or the person that reports to her. What things will they care about, and what will make them better, faster, stronger, smarter, and more successful? Focus on those things, and you’ll be in a good spot.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
New product enterprise sales is a multi-touch exercise that requires compelling, consistent messaging up and down the sales funnel. So while a great sales deck is helpful, by no means is it the end all be all! Rather, you’ll need at least minimum viable incarnations of your sales narrative for each part of the funnel.
At the top, that’ll mean email outreach templates and phone scripts, and nearer the bottom, that’ll be a great demo script. It’s not exactly rocket science, rather it’s just a question of taking the time to put the work in and write them out rather than thinking you can “wing it.” But if you put the work in, you'll find these materials invaluable, first for you to consume and refer to on your way to memorizing them (it’ll take dozens and dozens of iterations for it to start becoming muscle memory for you), and later, as a reference as you hire and onboard other sellers to your team. They will need documentation for training so they can execute all of this as flawlessly as you now can.