Do you have dream clients or accounts that you want but you have just no idea what to say when you reach out to them?

I feel your pain. I used to feel the same way. When I started my last company Order Solutions I really had no idea how to prospect and reach out to customers. Then I learned a strategy from John Barrows that really helped me. It’s called trigger based selling.

This strategy worked incredibly well and I put my own spin on it that helped me bootstrap and scale my company to millions of dollars of ARR without a large sales team all with the cold prospecting strategy I’m about to share with you.

Basically a trigger is a reason to contact. It’s an event or something going on in a company that is related to whatever solution you're selling. For example hiring a specific role. Like my last company was a BPO, essentially a call center company. So if I saw a company was hiring internal call center reps in the US I used it as a trigger as a reason to contact them because it was relevant and useful for them because we would read the job description, look at the salary range and know we could save the prospect money.

And this is huge for us to personalize our messages at scale so we can position our messages and outreach as relevant and useful for our prospects.

Another example of a trigger event could be new leadership, an executive quote talking about a pain point that your solution can solve, opening a new office, using a specific technology. For example in my call center business we focused on the restaurant vertical and if we saw a big brand was using OLO we would reach out to them because those were out best buyers meaning paid us the most, easiest to services, and easiest to satisfy.

The list of triggers can be anything and everything that you can tie your solution to. Could be that you see a prospect used to work at the company that is your client now, you went to the same college, you’re in same organization, you read something in an earnings call transcript that you can add value to.

Now the next step here you’re probably wondering is where you find this information. My favorite ones are LinkedIn, so looking at the linkedin profiles of your prospects or target accounts, Apollo.io has an awesome hiring filter so you can all of the companies hiring for a certain role. Inside view and google alerts are good as well.

Now once you know who and what to say to reach out to the next step is to start reaching out to your prospects. So start using this in your cold calls, cold emails, linkedin messages.

Here’s the secret and this is what helped scale my company to millions of dollars per year. When I learned these strategies I was like uh this is going to suck and it’s going to take so much time.

So what I started doing is standardizing and automating the best triggers. For example I’d group together targeted lists of prospects that were all hiring the same role in the same industry so I could personalize my messaging at scale and crank out the volume.

This led to building a huge top of the funnel fast. Also we’d hire virtual assistants in the Philippines to gather the more specialized info that was time consuming and put them into lists for us.

What this is really doing if you think about it is giving us massive leverage. This is how you grow revenue with little resources. How you get the biggest return on your effort. The delta between your customer acquisition and your customer lifetime value once you scale this up will be massive.

Now hopefully you found this helpful. If you did please like and share it. Also I have a book called the Art of the enterprise sale you can get free that covers more of this strategy. Just click the link below or the link in my bio to get your free copy.