Being Intentional with Intangible Touches

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This is a podcast episode titled, Being Intentional with Intangible Touches. The summary for this episode is: <p>Did you know that you don’t have to be pushy with your sales efforts to get tangible results?</p><p>In this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl welcomes Shawn Finder, Co-Founder of Autoklose and SAAS Entrepreneur rockstar, to talk about the power of intangible touches in sales. They will discuss the best places to implement this tactic, explain how it works, and give you some actionable tips for engaging your prospects with no more than one call or email.</p><p><a href="https://info.vanillasoft.com/subscribe-to-the-inside-inside-sales-podcast" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Subscribe now and learn how to stay top of mind with your prospects, without the risk of coming on too strong.</a></p>
Lets talk about Shawn's podcast
02:40 MIN
Examples of intangible touches on LinkedIn
05:23 MIN
Connect with the influencers!
03:04 MIN
What's the most intangible this ever?
05:33 MIN

Darryl Praill: How you doing, folks? It is another, another episode of the INSIDE Inside Sales Show. It's early, When I say it's early, I mean it's early 2022. We're still in January. So if you're listening to this like a year from now, yeah, sure, it's a year old. And you're thinking to yourself," Why am I listening to this?" Don't go anywhere. This topic you're going to love, it's going to resonate with you. It's timeless, it's timeless, I'm telling you. Okay, that's enough of the promo. How's everybody doing? Are you focused? Have you done your sales kickoff yet? Question, do you call it a sales kickoff or do you call it a revenue kickoff? We're probably targeting doing our revenue kickoff the end of January. And so the team's getting all of their plans together, and it's a new year, so that also comes back to OKRs. So I don't know, in sales usually sales reps don't have OKRs, but they should. If your organization does OKRs... In fact, let's back up, does your organization do OKRs? OKRs, if you don't know what they are, that stands for objectives and then key results. This is my objective. I'm going to do this. And if I did this, these are the key results. These are the outcomes that'll happen. So basically the objective is a big picture idea, right? And the key results are very measurable tactics that you can say," We did X, Y, and Z." So the OKRs dovetail very closely to your sales or your marketing plan. Cool. That makes sense. If I define my OKRs for the year and then for each quarter, then my marketing plan, my sales plan at a corporate level needs to make sure they support those OKRs. Makes sense so far. Now, you work it backwards, the whole point of OKRs is that it works down through the whole organization so that every layer in the organization's OKRs support one or more of the above layer's OKRs. So therefore, if the CEO says," We're doing this," then that would get filtered through the whole organization. So that's interesting, right? And why is that interesting? Because it comes back to you as a sales rep. One of the things you hear all the time talk about is, are you planning? What are your goals? What are your goals today? What are your goals this week? What are your goals this month? What are your goals this quarter? What are your goals this year? You've got to have goals. You've got to have it pinned in front of you so you know your reason," Why am I getting up? Why am I doing this? Why am I letting people hang up on me? Why am I enduring rejection? Why am I banging my head against the wall? Why am I doing this as a job? Why am I such a mess?" Whatever it might be. And you go," Yeah, that's my goals right in front of me." So they tie into, of course, to the OKRs. You should almost have your own personal OKRs. One of the things about OKR, one of the things about goals, I think, that you need to look at is, for you to be successful in sales, is your approach to sales. Now, here's the thing. I did a LinkedIn Live not too long ago, in the last couple weeks, with a good fellow you might know, and his name is Jeff Bajorek. And Jeff Bajorek is behind The Why And the Buy. Great guy. If you don't follow him, you really should. We've had Jeff on the show I think twice at least. So you could look up his past episodes. You'd love him. I hate him. He's got a great voice, he's good looking, he's so annoying. And he's apparently a scratch golfer. So he's one of those guys you hate. And we were talking a little bit about, how do you develop your career? And what's interesting about that question is it's different, we were asking not so much the skills, the skills and the drills, we're asking," What are the other things you need to do to develop your career?" All right." So where are you going with this, Praill?" You're asking. OKRs, goals, LinkedIn Live, Jeff Bajorek, career development. Well, it all comes back down, I find, across the board you can set these specific objectives or specific outcomes or specific goals that you want to achieve. And that's true in sales. I want to make 50 calls a day. Okay. I want to learn how to better negotiate and take a course on it. Okay. And you will take a course that you will pass or you will fail, but it's black and white, it's true or false. What we don't understand is that in life, whether it's your personal life, whether it's your relationship, whether it's your run as a sales professional or as an executive or anything else, often what influences and impacts your success, achieving your goals, achieving and delivering upon your OKRs, doing your daily objectives, whatever it might be, are not the specific, clearly defined aspects that we just all talked about. But rather, it's the intangible touches, the intangible tactics that you're doing but which you see no immediate ROI on. Which others may look at you and say," Why are you wasting your time there?" Marketers know this well, right? The conversation comes up in branding. They give you a million dollars to score your brand, how did you improve my brand? We have more website visitors. But that's an intangible way of measuring it. Okay, what did those more website visitors result in? Well, they resulted in more sales proportionally. Can you tie that back to your branding efforts, or was that just because we had an article up here in the Wall Street Journal? Well, no, I really can't. It's intangible, but we know what makes a difference. We've never talked on this call, on this show, about the intangible touches that are going to propel you to success to hit your goals. So I thought, who do I know that's nebulous? He's kind of hard to pin down. You think he adds value, but then you say," Does he really add value?" You know, you think he's good looking, but is he really good looking? He's kind of not there, but he's there. So who's the most intangible person I know? And yes, I'm being a total smart ass right now. Folks, I want to welcome to the show a colleague who I've never had on. He was one of the cofounders of Autoklose, VanillaSoft acquired Autoklose back in October of 2020. He is the general manager of our whole Autoklose product line here at VanillaSoft. He is a legend onto his own. He had LinkedIn Live before I had LinkedIn Live, and to this day has a much bigger following than I do. The one, the only Sean Finder. Sean, how you doing, my friend?

Sean Finder: I'm great, Darryl, thanks for finally having me on the show.

Darryl Praill: I know. Well, it was the constant begging and groveling. I found it almost distracting, but it did work. It got you here. Now, you have a show of your own. So before we get much further, talk to me about your podcast.

Sean Finder: Yes, we have our own podcast. It's the Zero to Five Million podcast, where we bring on entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and teach entrepreneurs what are some of the struggles, mistakes that people make early on, because everyone makes a lot of mistakes early on in their career. And then we try and help you grow and give you different tips and bring on guests that can help you achieve those next steps inside your entrepreneurial journey.

Darryl Praill: So let's think about what Sean brings to the table. So he was one of the cofounders of a company, so he understands the life of a startup. He understands that you don't have a lot of budget or sometimes no budget to actually achieve your sales goals. He himself was the guy who owned the sales number, the revenue goals. They were to grow the company, and their install base ultimately led to a successful acquisition by VanillaSoft. So he might have made a buck or two in the process. That's if you measure success those ways, he's accomplished all that. Now he's come to VanillaSoft and he's like you, he's working the phones, he's got a team doing selling. We have two products at VanillaSoft. We have our sales engagement platform, which is our historical VanillaSoft product, and we have our sales nurturing product, which is the Autoklose product line, which is, basically the difference is one channel, email, versus multiple channels, phone, email, social, SMS, et cetera. So he's just like you. He's done it when he was the only sales rep and he was CEO, and now he's got a team. So he understands the challenges you have. So let's talk a little bit about intangible touches. I set the stage a little bit, but when you heard me saying it or when you thought about it, or as we were discussing it before we went live, what were some of the elements that were going through your mind about intangible touches, and what do we want our reps listening to this call today to take away and apply to their own efforts?

Sean Finder: So one of the things, Darryl, that I I've heard reps say for years is they'll come and say," Well, I don't want to be annoying. I don't want keep emailing that person. I don't want to go on LinkedIn and then send them a message right after the email, or I don't want to call them four times a day." So what I always like to say is, you can do things that aren't actually going to put yourself right in front of the client and be that persistent. So by intangible touches, the best place to do that is LinkedIn. And when I say intangible touches, it's certain things you could do on LinkedIn that actually is not sending out an email or it's not calling them or it's not putting your name there, but they are still seeing your name without you actually taking any action. And I think it's one thing that SDers really need to focus on, is those intangible touches that can be in your sequences to help you get in front of that prospect or to get that prospect to reply to you. And there's a ton of different things you could do on LinkedIn.

Darryl Praill: All right, so give me an example. As soon as you said LinkedIn, my mind started going places. I'm going to let you lead and then I'll add some color. What are some examples of intangible touches that we could do on LinkedIn?

Sean Finder: Okay. So first thing you always want to do, no matter what your sequence is, you want to connect with the person. So the first thing you do is connect with the person. But once you've connected with the person, say in your sequence you're doing an email or a call. What you can do a day after or the same day is just go on LinkedIn and endorse them for something. Like them, comment on their post or a recent post. Because ideally what you want to do with those intangible touches is you want to continue to put Sean Finder in front of their face. And how do you do that? When you comment on their post, what's the first thing that's going to be in their newsfeed on the top right?" Sean Finder just commented on that post." And then a day later, two days later, when you like a post," Sean Finder liked that post." So now when you send those second or third emails or you do that second call in your sequence, guess what? They've already seen" Sean Finder" six times when I've actually only called them or emailed them once. So there's a big advantage of sharing, commenting, and liking that you can do on LinkedIn and endorsing that you can do on LinkedIn that are intangible, that will get your prospect to recognize your name, voice, and who you are, so when you do reach out to them, they're more likely to reply to you.

Darryl Praill: Okay. So let me tell you what was going through in my mind as you were giving that response, Sean, because I loved what you were doing. So what am I about to say doesn't necessarily apply en masse. It wouldn't scale. But it would apply to an ABM. So maybe if you have maybe five large accounts, maybe 40 named accounts, you can pick and choose. Hear me out, what I'm going to say, and then you can make the decision. But let's say you've got these five large accounts. You know there's probably maybe three, four, five people in that account. So you're going to do a little research, a little research on your prospect. So we'll say the prospect is Mary Smith. There we go. It's Mary Smith, Mary Smith's your prospect. You do some research on Mary and you see Mary's doing a couple things. Let's do the first thing. I see. Mary made posts on a regular basis, and I'm going to look at her posts. And every post she makes she may get 10, 20, 40, 100 comments. She's not going to reply to every comment, but I'm going to discern over multiple posts that there's certain people she always replies to. So in this example I'll say," Oh, I see that when Sean Finder comments on Mary Smith's posts, Mary Smith responds to Sean specifically. So clearly Mary and Sean have a dynamic at play." So what I'm going to do then is I'm, when Sean ever engages on Mary's post, because Mary's my prospect, I'm going to physically respond to Sean. I'm going to add value, add a little humor, but be part of that back and forth. I'm going to insert myself into the conversation that I know Mary's going to respond to. Mary's going to see my name. So that's tangible intangible touch number one. Intangible touch number two would be, because I know that she and Sean have a dynamic. I'm going to go to Sean, who may not be my prospect, clearly, but I'll connect. And whenever Sean responds, I'm going to then get into the conversation because I know Mary's going to see it. Whenever Sean posts something, I'm going to get into the conversation. And if Mary does respond, then I'll get into that sub- conversation. And then eventually the time is right, so this may take a month or two, but hear me out. I can then go to Mary directly and I can say," Hey Mary, I see we are both connected with Sean and we seem to really prize what he has to say. He's a funny fellow. Would you be willing to have a conversation about whatever?" Right? And of course you can do it much better than I did. My point is, everything I just did there was very intangible. You were intentionally doing it to be seen by Mary Smith. You weren't directly talking to Mary. You weren't necessarily tagging Mary. So that was my reaction, Sean, when I heard you say that on LinkedIn.

Sean Finder: Yeah. So there's two things I would take away. Exactly what Darryl just said, the number one is, no matter what you do, you want to be seen as much as possible. You want have your name show up on, whoever it is, on the comments as much as possible. Now, one other thing I will say, and it came to my mind when you were saying that, Darryl, is a lot of people that are on LinkedIn appreciate engagement. So for example, if Darryl's going on and going onto somebody's LinkedIn that could be a prospect, and now he's going through the comments section and he's starting a conversation with four to five different people that might have replied to that post, well, you know what? The person that posted that is now getting 40, 50, 80, 100, 120 comments, because Darryl's encouraging that engagement on that post. And in sales we all know it's a give and take. So you're giving them by appreciating and helping them get engagement, then I guarantee down the road a month or two, like Darryl said, if you now go in to try and set up that call with that person, they'll give you that time of day because you've already given time and helped them by engaging with their community. So I think that was a great point that Darryl said, but the most importantly, show up as much just possible in that news feed so they know that Darryl Praill is in my news feed. And that is somebody, when you do speak to them, I've already seen him on comments, on likes, et cetera, as many times as possible.

Darryl Praill: Let me throw another idea out there for you. On related note, it could be social media, but it's content as a whole. And one of the things we've talked about sales reps all the time is, you need to create your own content. Now, you can work with your marketing team if you want to to help you author it, but it needs to be from you with your name on it. So again, let's use the Mary Smith example. That's your prospect. With a little bit of research you can see that, okay, so Mary and Sean connected and they have a dynamic. We know that, but Sean's just another person in the sea of millions of people out there. In this example he's just a regular Joe. He's not the influencer that we know he is in real life. So who else does Mary connect with? So maybe Mary's a big fan of, I'm going to throw some names out here, okay, just for demonstration purposes. Maybe Mary's a big fan of Scott Leese or Amy Volas or Luigi Presidente or Benjamin Dennehy. I could go on, you get the idea. These are notable public influencers, okay? What you can do then, because you know that Mary Smith consumes their content a lot, and you can discern that by if they're physically liking their posts or commenting on their posts, they're influencers and she's engaged. Then what you can do is a couple different tactics. You can write a blog post and you can ping them. You can write a LinkedIn article and you could ping them for a quote that you include in the LinkedIn article. And then when you share your LinkedIn article, you tag Scott Leese or Benjamin Dennehy, and she'll see that because she's a fan. Or you could be really bold. You can reach out to them and say," Can I have you on my podcast? Can we do a quick little video? Can we do a quick little LinkedIn Live?" Because I think LinkedIn Live now has rolled out globally to everybody. And again, then you can tag that influencer, and Mary Smith will likely see you hanging out with the person who she respects greatly. And now your name's there. You never went to talk to Mary, but you used that content. The beauty of that intangible approach is my example, there's a good chance many of your prospects would follow a Scott Leese. So that is a one to many way of being intangibly influential. I just made that up, Sean, intangibly influential. There's my alliteration for the day.

Sean Finder: Yeah. and just like Darryl said, I just came up with an idea right there and then, was you can also go into one of these LinkedIn posts and say, Darryl's prospect puts a LinkedIn post out, you could take that post and turn it into a blog. And then say," Okay, quoted in the blog was from Darryl, from Mary, from Luigi," et cetera. So then when you actually do that blog now, not only those influencers are getting a back link from your blog post, but you're also engaging and taking that content that's already online and building it in for your community. So there's a ton of different ways where you don't have to actually get on the phone and call Mary or email Mary all the time. You can do all these different cool things on LinkedIn, blog post content, like Darryl says, bring them on a podcast, that will really help you get in front of them. And obviously if you're doing the ABM route, get those five, six accounts that you want to really engage with you and hopefully give you the time of day.

Darryl Praill: So I love that idea, and I've never thought of that idea myself, and I'm going," How stupid am I?" So to recap what he just said, Mary made a post on," This is what's killing me these days. How do you people do it?" Maybe Mary did a poll.

Sean Finder: Yeah.

Darryl Praill: I mean, everybody's doing polls. Mary did a poll." This sucks. What's your approach, A, B, C, or D?" Now you go write a blog post or an article and you quote them and you tag them, even though you've never talked to them. They'll love you for the visibility. They're going to check you out, which then says, another segue to influential, intangible touches, which is, again, back to their profile. Sean, are there certain things we can do to our profiles and they finally do act on us because we've pinged them indirectly, we've intrigued them to learn more about us. When they go to our profile, they go," Dang, this person's a player I need to know them."

Sean Finder: Yeah. So one thing I always tell people is, you want to connect with all the influencers. So you want to be with the people that are building out those communities who have those blog posts. And the number one thing on LinkedIn, why is LinkedIn there? It's for personal branding. You have to be able to brand yourself. So I think on your LinkedIn you want to make sure that you are in those conversations with those influencers. You're posting, commenting, and this is one thing that I will say Darryl's really good at, is any time I ever go to an influencer's post and I see a poll or something, he's always engaged with them. So on my news feed Darryl's, maybe because we work together, but on my news feed Darryl's always there. So if I'm looking on LinkedIn, I'm looking to who I should connect with, I'm looking at Darryl as somebody I would connect with simply because he's involved in many conversations. He's involved in that little network of community of people that I'm trying to prospect to. So I think you really do need to spend time on your personal branding, but really making sure that you are connecting with the right people. And I think Darryl said something earlier, it might not be Mary, it might be somebody that's an influencer that replied or commented on Mary's post. That might be the person that you want to connect to, but you want to make sure you are in that circle.

Darryl Praill: What I'm always amazed at is how many leads I get coming inbound to me or VanillaSoft because of a speaking engagement or a podcast or a webinar that I was on elsewhere. That's an example of an indirect intangible touch. I have no idea who they are. They found me. The only way that can happen is if you put yourself out there and get on all these various podcasts or webinars to have a voice in the conversation. You don't need to be an influencer. I want to be clear on that. You don't need to say," I don't want to become you, Darryl, that's not me. I'm not comfortable." But inserting yourself into some of those conversations so that at least that you're recognized as a smart cookie, somebody with something to add to the conversation, will result in leads coming inbound to you. Okay, Sean, we've beat up LinkedIn pretty good. Are there other channels or other methods I can use as a sales rep to get intangible touches that result in me achieving my sales goals?

Sean Finder: Yeah. So I think just like we touched on LinkedIn, I think any of the social channels. If your prospect's lying on Facebook, Facebook you can do the same sort of thing you're doing on LinkedIn. If they're on Twitter, I know Darryl's active on Twitter. If you see they're active on Twitter, there's different ways that you can get. But the key here is, you want to make sure you are doing things that, A, provide value, but B, that gets your name in front of that prospect. If it's LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, go on TikTok, wherever they might be located, you want to make sure you are there and you are commenting, sharing, liking, involved in those conversations. Because at the end of the day you want to be seen as that person that is, A, giving. So when you ask for that a month down the road and ask for that 10- minute call, you can take it and they'll give that to you. So you want to make sure it's a give- take relationship. And then I would say any social channel would be great, but make sure you are really trying to get your name out there without actually just dialing and emailing all day to that prospect.

Darryl Praill: Now, one thing on the whole dialing and emailing all day long, one of the things that some people may not realize is, this is a bit of a borderline intangible touch, but it still is an intangible touch, is you could dial your prospect after hours. Knowing they're not going to answer, but either at that moment in time because it's after hours they may ignore you, or they come to the next day and they see they have 10 missed calls, who were they? Or they may come to their email inbox saying," You missed a call from..." They're going to see your name. So that's another way of an intangible touch. So that's something else you can think about. Another thing you could even do, we've talked about getting quotes from companies, I'm sorry, from individuals, like I mentioned Scott Leese or whomever. You can also do it from companies. So maybe it's Mary Smith's company. You do an article about certain companies that have certain attributes and you name her company. Or maybe it's Mary Smith's competition. Or maybe you get an article about Mary Smith's competition that might have been, who knows, in Tech Crunch, I'm making this up. And you physically just post it out there saying," This is an interesting article, check it out." Or this could be even in an email blast in your company newsletter. And you make sure that somebody in her company is copied as part of that distribution list so that it will get filtered and shared internally because that's the competition. So those are ways you can do it. And similarly, you can do it with your press releases. Because most companies, like for example, here at VanillaSoft we know who our competition is. So we've got monitoring software, that's Peanuts, and every time any of our competitors are mentioned, it goes into our Slack channel. And we have a channel for each of our competitors. That's a very common thing. So your company could actually do a press release or an article or a piece of content, your marketing team, that mentions the competition of Mary Smith. Her company will find it and they'll learn about your company. So that's the second layer removed. Now we're getting really intangible, it's not from you specifically, but it's from your employer, which, again, you represent. And when you finally talk to Mary you say," I'm with VanillaSoft." She goes," Oh, I've seen VanillaSoft. You guys were dealing with so- and- so."" Yeah, that's us." So again, different ways you can do that, all intangibles. What's the most intangible thing you've seen happen to you that has resulted in an active deal in your pipeline? That you had nothing intentionally to do with, or maybe you did. Talk to me, Sean.

Sean Finder: So for me it was, I was big on LinkedIn, I've always been big on LinkedIn. So for me it was years ago. I was trying to get in with Rogers here in Toronto. And knowing those big companies, it's so hard to find out exactly who that person is, that decision maker that will be able to sign that PO. And what I did was I would email and reach out to a lot of people at Rogers and be like," Who's the best person?" And once I had somebody, two to three people that said the same person, I knew I had that decision maker at Rogers here in Canada. And what I did was I actually went on LinkedIn, and every time he posted, I was involved. I was just involved in conversations. And then what happened was, about after a week after, I think he had some sort of confrontational thing on his LinkedIn post. And I actually called him up and my whole starting of the conversation was," Hey, I was part of that conversation. I had a question about... in that post that you did." And that's what actually got me in the door with my first meeting. So it was actually through a phone call that I used and that got me in the doors. And Rogers early on, I think this was 2014 or'15, ended up being the biggest deal we've ever had, which actually was the way we started Autoklose, was through that big deal. So I would say if I had one thing that you guys can take away from this, it's make sure you are not just sitting there emailing and expecting the prospects to come to you. Take care of some of those intangible touches that Darryl and I mentioned today and you'll be very successful moving forward with your prospecting.

Darryl Praill: So you could start to think outside of the box. There's no limit on the intangible touches. So another stupid example. If you're in an industry where maybe there's a trusted body or two, an association, for example, an industry association, and they have certain maybe steering committees or a board of advisors or what have you. If you get yourself involved in that, then every time they issue an update or a paper or an advisory, you make sure your name is mentioned along with other, maybe it's an author of the piece or what have you. That gets in front of all the Mary Smiths because they're in the same industry and they are members of this advisory or this association. All right? Or if they don't do that, you can just do an email blast to all the key people in the space and saying," Hey, I'm a co- author on this article," or," We made this advisory. Not sure if you saw it, check it out. And by the way, if you're not members, you should sign up." So now it looks like I'm actually just trying to offer some value. I'm not trying to sell you a darn thing. And I'm advocating on behalf of the association. But of course all my key targets in my vertical that I sell into, the vertical that I own, are getting copies of this and they're seeing my name. So that's another example of indirect intangible touches that are influencing people's perception. I go back to something I shared a while ago that I heard Morgan Ingram say, which was, he was talking about the power of content and personal branding. But the point, the punchline applies here. His punchline was, so when he called into this woman who he did not know at all, he was prospecting her, she saw Morgan Ingram on the display and she picked up the phone right away because it's Morgan Ingram." Is it the same Morgan Ingram that I know from my social circles and everybody talks about? Is it that Morgan Ingram?" And that's how he got her to answer the call. So they were completely cold with each other. This is the same premise here. You want your name to have appeared enough times that when you do reach out, whether it's email, phone, whatever, that they take your call. Now, Sean, would love your take on this last little comment. Everything we're saying here takes time to set up, right? You've got to set the stage. You've got to set the table, so to speak, right? And the biggest thing I see is too many sales reps are impatient and don't want to spend the time setting the table, and then they wonder why they have no success getting through. Any advice on the whole patience game, playing the long game?

Sean Finder: Yeah, well, I will say if you don't set the table, you can't eat dinner. So you have to set the table. I think you have to be patient, especially if you want a bigger deal. Nothing happens overnight. It's all a marathon. So if you're looking at it, you want to have in that sequence, you want to have, as I said, multi- touch. It could be phone, it could be email. You want to have those LinkedIn touches, but you can be doing those LinkedIn, set some time on your calendar and say," For that hour I'm going to go after those 10 to 15 to 20 people that I need to be in front of to get my five, six deals in." So if you do that every month, your first month, well, you might be doing the groundwork, but then once you've build the groundwork, that thing will continue to build and build. And month over month you're building the right relationships and you're getting those six, seven deals. Now those six, seven deals might say," Hey, I worked with Darryl on this. You should contact Darryl." So now you can start getting not only those relationships there, but you can get the word of mouth from those six, seven people. And as Darryl said, if they have 80 to 100 comments, you might be replying to one comment, but you might have 80 different eyeballs that are seeing Darryl Praill, CRO at VanillaSoft." Oh, you know what, what does VanillaSoft do? Let me go to their website, see what they do. Oh, let me contact Darryl to see if I can learn more." So all these different things begin to hit a snowball effect and will only help if you're prospecting if you start setting it up up front, be patient, and it'll be good in the long- term game.

Darryl Praill: Let me use a final example of how I use as my own efforts. I had an individual reach out to me the other day and they were saying," We just listened to your webinar." This was a CEO of a large company." We just listened to your webinar, and it was the transatlantic take- down, it's the UK versus the US. And my head of sales adores, revers Scott Leese. And you had Scott Leese on the US team. But we sat around, because I shared your webinar with everybody else on my team," which, again, talk about intangible touches." And the overwhelming question we had that I'm wondering if you could help me understand is, you had every major influencer on the UK and on the US. How did you get all those people there? How do you even know them all? How did you do that? We want to know." And my comment to him was," It was really easy, but it took a little time. And let me explain to you." And I said this is a rinse and repeat process. So this is what I did, literally what I did. When I would see Scott maybe, using that as an example, post something, and obviously lots of comments, of course, because he gets lots of comments. And if I disagreed with part of what he's saying, part of it I agree with, I would get in there and I'd be," Well, I agree with this but I'm not sure about that." And I would challenge him intelligently. This is important, not just an opinion, because everybody's got one of those. Scott, those comments would, or anybody for that matter, that takes you back and you engage. You can't help yourself." Well, let's have that conversation. Well, this is why." And periodically those, that back and forth in the comments became bigger than the comment thread itself. Point being, Scott and I would go back several times in that example within the comments on that specific thing that we were discussing that might have been contrarian to what he posted. Then I reached out to Scott, in this fictitious example, whom I'd never talked to you before but I had connected with him previously. That's a key thing. And I said to him," I am the guy who instigated that great conversation. I loved it. There seems to be a lot of interest on this topic because there's huge engagement. Did you want to do something together? Webinar, podcast, article, blog, whatever? I'll do it all and I'll share whatever leads I get with you. But I think this is really interesting." They always said yes. So what was the indirect intangible touch there? The intangible touch there was that I didn't know Scott. I followed him. I didn't know him, he didn't know me, but it was because I commented and we had the back and forth, that gave me the excuse, the premise, the context, the relevance to personalize a message to him and continue that conversation offline. Again, that was an intangible touch that was very intentional that led to a tangible conversation offline. All right, we're out of time. Sean, my friend, when you're not kicking ass, finding companies and flipping them and being a LinkedIn Live diva and a podcast host and a general manager and a sales rock star, what else do you do and where can we find you?

Sean Finder: Well, I'm very passionate about tennis. A lot of people know that about me. Recently, last few years golf, but definitely passionate about tennis. So if anyone ever wants to talk tennis, I'm your guy. Find me, LinkedIn, I always have the tab open. So if you have anything you want to talk about on LinkedIn, anything about sales, entrepreneurship, startups, I'm always willing to talk. Because I know when I started Autoklose I got a lot of help and met a lot of mentors throughout the way. So if anyone has anything, any question about sales or entrepreneurship, more than happy to talk. And my email, sean @ autoklose.com, and that's Autoklose with a K, A- U- T- O- K- L- O- S- E. com.

Darryl Praill: All right, that's Sean Finder, folks. Remember, we started off today's conversation about hard core goals and objectives, but then we segued to that secondary layer of the intangible items being similarly important, and you need to be intentional, as intentional about the intangible touches as you are about the measurable OKRs, KPIs, goals, whatever it is you aspire to do. One supports the other. My name's Darryl, that's Sean, this, my friends, is the INSIDE Inside Sales show. We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye- bye.

DESCRIPTION

Did you know that you don’t have to be pushy with your sales efforts to get tangible results?

In this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl welcomes Shawn Finder, Co-Founder of Autoklose and SAAS Entrepreneur rockstar, to talk about the power of intangible touches in sales. They will discuss the best places to implement this tactic, explain how it works, and give you some actionable tips for engaging your prospects with no more than one call or email.

Subscribe now and learn how to stay top of mind with your prospects, without the risk of coming on too strong.

Today's Guests

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Shawn Finder

|Founder of Autoklose