Core Principles

In the early days of Sales Schema we tried every sort of outreach (like everyone else):

• Sophisticated complex funnels
• Multiple touch-points (LinkedIn, direct mail, phone)

Performance started suffering and eventually this stopped working. We also noticed everyone else was doing the same thing... we knew we had to do something different.

We started experimenting and decided on a new type of campaign for one of our clients:

• Find people that previously worked for a current client of theirs AND who also had moved to another organization that our client wanted to do business with. 
  • The results:
    • We found many connections (in the low 1,000’s).
    • Sent a two line email:
      • Ex. Saw you worked at IBM and we’ve done some great work for them over the years. Now I see you’re at Semantic, would you be open to catching up?
    • Achieved dozens of meetings over a couple of weeks. One went on to close for 7-figures.
    • Happy-ending: Client later went on to get acquired.

The competition from agency and B2B services is so crowded and everyone is battling for attention - this has created a skeptical market. 

Our campaign had worked better than anything we tried in the past and we learned that we needed to be more sophisticated in building trust.

We decided to explore selling our client’s services to people who are willing to talk to them based on personal commonalities or close business commonalities and experience success.

This worked for three reasons:

Principle #1: Go where you have an unfair advantage

• When selling into a skeptical market, the scarce resource is no longer information or differentiators, it’s trust. We focused more on building trust and when finding those commonalities.
• This has given our client’s an unfair advantage.

Principle #2: Give prospects a third path.

• Most outreach forces prospects into a binary: “Hey do you want to enter my sales process or do you want to tell me to go away.”
• Our process gives prospects a third option: “Let’s build a relationship.”



Principle #3: Find the Goldilocks zone between commonality-based personalization and scale.

• People typically ‘spray and pray’ with large automation and not enough personalization to be compelling.
• People do custom videos or lump outreach and only contact about three people a day, which eventually falls off.
• Find a relative amount of scale and the right level of personalization.