William Miller - Outbounding

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To those who try to overcome their fears.

Little successes lead to big accomplishments.

2020 William Miller

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Book design by Aubrey Khan, Neuwirth & Associates

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ISBN 978-1-4002-1945-2 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-1944-5 (HC)

Epub Edition August 2020 9781400219452

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942665

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Thanks to HarperCollins; you folks are the best. Thanks, Tim, for getting this all done, especially with an author who has some good ideas and cant write. (Its why I married a journalism major.)

Thanks to my customers. You folks always ask tough questions and keep me on my game. Outbounding is an art and a science, and with your help, we captured some best practices.

Thanks to those I interviewed and got some best practices from. You are really at the top of your field, and you gave me some great insights. Thanks, Michael, Steven, Christina, Elizabeth, Sean, Melissa, Quinn, Dave, Greg, Dan, Kristen, Nate, all of you.

Thanks to my family. Yes, all fifty-five of you who show up every year for the clambake and Thanksgiving. GOT (Gang of Twelve), you are the best! To my kids, a dad could never be as proud as I am of you three. You guys are all rock starsall independent, with a competitive will, and an understanding that listening will get you further than talking.

Susie, my wife, you inspire me. You overcome adversity every day with a smile and a laugh.

To my readers, I hated prospecting/outbounding when I was in sales. Fear of rejection. My ego couldnt take a no. I was not good at it at all. I had to learn the hard way. Maybe that helped.

If I had to do it all over again, I would jump in, get dirty, and learn. So, here, in this book, is what I wish I would have learned when I was getting started.

Im sure youre familiar with the 211 phenomena: At 211 degrees, water is hot, but increase the temperature by just one degree, to 212, and that same water is boiling. And the by-product of that water, steam, can do amazing things.

Turns out, steam is also an essential part of sales organizations. And you can find it in Outbounding.

Ive learned from experience that if a company adopts an outbounding culture, its opportunities for success can multiply far beyond optimistic expectations.

As the former vice president of worldwide sales at WebEx, I was in a unique position to create a web-touch model for our go-tomarket strategy. We employed a few hundred salespeople and, with Skips help, became the dominant global solution for video conferencing, online meetings, screen share, and webinars. I think 100x growth and a successful IPO is a good endgame.

We had similar successes at Affectiva and RingCentral. Next up was Zoom, and as president, we really hit the go-to-market model out of the park. Yes, in all these companies we had an assist from sales development representatives (SDRs) with great inbounding efforts. However, if you want to know what really helped step on the gas for Zoom, WebEx, and RingCentral, it was outbounding. Thats where we turned hot water into steam.

You can make 80 percent of what you want to achieve with great inbounding efforts, but if you and your company want to really break through what you think is possible, to really hit the impossible, you need to outbound. Its there that youll find that extra 1 percent that can catapult your sales organization to a whole new level.

Im now helping small start-up companies to do just that, and Im bringing Skip with me as much as I can. From WebEx to Zoom, Skips sales model and his passion for selling are contagiousand they work. His tools are easy to understand, can be implemented quickly, and more important, managers can coach to them. Their beauty is in their simplicity.

Outbounding should not be something anyone puts on the back burner and will get around to it. By that time, its probably too late. I think three IPOs proves that.

Skips newest book shows you how to turn your organizations outbounding efforts into steam. Youll learn his tools, methods, and tips. Listen well, they are different from what you will usually hear, especially outbounding to the C-Suite, or Above the Line, as Skip puts it.

Enjoy what he has to say. I know youll be pleasantly shocked at how just a few of his tools can make a big difference.

DAVE BERMAN
Operating Partner, Spider Capital
Former President, WebEx, RingCentral, and Zoom Communications

While writing this book, I have always tried to keep you, the reader, in mind. I think of how lost I felt when I first started in sales with no one to help me prospect.

I remember one day, I had to go to the Anaheim Convention Center and go booth to booth asking for the vice president of marketing. We were selling small trade shows and conferences and were looking for companies that would rent a six-foot table for a day. We figured if they spend the big bucks at these major shows, they probably had some extra money to do local follow-up shows.

I got there at 10:00 a.m. Walked up to the first booth, turned around, went and had a cup of coffee (liquid courage). At 11:00 a.m., went to a booth, asked for the VP of marketing. I was told he was not in yet. Went to the second booth, looked around, and didnt even ask for anyone. I left shortly thereafter. Rejection.

OK, I eventually learned to prospect. I had to do it when I started my own company. It wasnt easy for me, but I learned. So can you.

When I did get some success, I pitched and hoped. Geez. I still remember pitching to the senior vice president (SVP) of Worldwide Purchasing at BFGoodrich with more than a hundred slides, all about us. I had screenshots of our software as slides. Cringe.

This is not a book on how to be a great SDR, salesperson, or how to implement a prospecting system. Its about you, the individual contributor and manager, on how to get results, both strategically and tactically.

As a manager, I was all about execution. Planning is great, but if I can do something, be 80 percent successful, fix the 20 percent and be 80/20 on that, thats 96 percent successful. Where I came from, 96 to 100 percent was an A-plus. Ill take it and let someone else worry about the 4 percent I didnt get.

Outbounding is not going to tell you what technology tools you need to use and buy. By the time this book gets to you, the technology roadmap will have changed, and companies we thought were winners will have withered. Go figure.

What this book will show you is what works and what doesnt through my lens. Do research on this topic like I have done and, wow, there are a lot of peoples opinions.