John Barrows

John Barrows is the owner of JBarrows, LLC. He’s been training companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, and other fast growing companies all about how to prospect.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on John’s success

The “Why You, Why You Now” e-mail technique combined with a contact strategy and telling your story

Result if you follow the steps in John’s session

Consistent high quality prospecting into your tier 1 accounts that drive high quality meetings

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

If anybody’s out there following, you know, account based marketing or account based sales or any of that stuff, kind of new trends there, everything starts with that ideal customer profile. What does that ideal customer profile look like?

And most people kind of do a very basic demographic view of this where they’ll go into Hoover’s or zoom info or any one of the list services and say, you know, “I want to see anybody between 10 and 200 employees, you know, in these industries and in this geographic region”, right?

And they get a list and then they just start hammering in it. You know, that’s the start of a list, but then you have to kind of take a look.

I call that the kind of the level one information, right. But then you tell, you have to take a look at the level to information like, the information you might have to dig a little bit deeper on to see if they are they really a good fit for us.

So stuff like categories would be something like, existing solution, right? What are they currently using that is comparable to yours?

And, you know, we’re competition, right? There are certain competitors that we face, some of our competitors, like, we have a great story to tell again, so we can go right after it.

Whereas other cases, we know that they’re using a certain competitor, and it’s kinda like crap, you know? Yeah, if they’re happy with them, it’s probably not worth me spending my time. So they might look like a great account. Perfect, sweet spot. But if they’re your number one competitor, who’s crushing it and has a super high retention rate, then you’re not going to, you know, it’s not worth going after him. Right?

So, there’s that and then there’s like existing technologies, right? So it’s a, what technologies they using. There’s certain technologies that our solutions, our services play very well into.

So for instance, I use a tool like, this is something that your viewers can use, it’s called Siftery. It’s free.

And what it is, is crowd sourced information on anybody’s tech stack. So for instance, I can go in and I can type in a name of a company. And it’ll tell me who like, who’s using their product.

So you know, if I have a competitor, I can put them and then see all their customers. But I can also put their name in there and see what kind of, you know, what their books, their sales and BD stack, what’s their marketing stack, what’s their operations stack, and then look for those things. And if I find something that I can tie into, now make some phone calls and really segment my, you know, messaging to that.

So, you know, an exercise that I worked my clients through is let’s identify every possible thing you can imagine that we can add that the tears out our accounts, right, so tier one, tier two, tier three.

And then once you find out what that stuff is, now go look for accounts with that stuff, right? And you start with the basic demographic, but then you start calling around and maybe using various resources to really clean up that list and get a very tight list.

I personally recommend everybody have a list of like top 25, where they have a list of top 25 accounts that they really, I call it their hit list. And I used to do this in my first company, when we did outsource it services, I would actually print out that list and carry around with me.

Because something that where like if you, you know, I used to get into a lot of conversations with partners, you know, and they would always call, “yeah, why don’t you go back to the office and see if you have any clients that you might think might be a good fit for us?”.

And I’ll do the same thing and you know, we’ll swap leads, we’ll start there and see where it goes. And nobody would ever go back to their office and getting any leads, right?

So what I would do is okay, you want to share some business, great. And I would just take out that list and be like, you know, anybody on this list, because these are the accounts that I want to get into right? And so with that list, those then, you can put those on all the social listing tools out there.