Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky describes practical changes that help sales representatives spend more time on the accounts and activities that matter. He covers signal prioritization, the limits of opaque lead scores, AI-powered research, and focused targeting.
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Give sellers a data-prioritization strategy
“onboard Pocus these are just some examples of ways that after really driving data and consistency across the sales team sales leaders see incredible success across their team awesome so let's start by talking about how we recommend sellers use data to prioritize their accounts what we find is that sales teams are often siloed from the data they need and there's often very little strategy from the top down as to what data sellers should be looking at or what technique sellers should be looking”
“keeps them in the loop as to how they should be spending time and how how they should think about the signals they have at their disposal a lot of companies when they feared about combining multiple signals think about a dashboard like this right they have some lead scoring model that their data team has bought or they bought some lead scoring tool and we think lead scoring is important but this type of dashboard where we say hey Ruth is a 66 and Bill is a 79 and Patricia is a 68 we have found time and time again that it causes sellers to very quickly lose trust in whatever data is powering this magical”
“they're only spend spending 30% of their time on the things that actually drive value for a deal right meeting with customers connecting with customers doing the actual prospecting or emailing of customers because of that if you go to a sales rep and say Hey I want you to start spending hours for every account that you're selling to understanding the account deeply and developing a point of view it's very very hard to actually drive adoption but what we found is you can actually use AI to do this very very quickly and give reps kind of on a silver platter all of the research and”
“so we think of first the important thing is really having a well-defined tam if your sellers are focused on a huge Tam of any company in the world and even within that any Persona in the world it's really hard for them to focus on the people who they actually should be they should be spending time on and trying to develop so one thing that we really recommend is as a leader having really really strong recommendations of where your sellers should be spending time both in terms of company and Persona next is Authority a lot of our job as Executives or people on marketing”
but it's my pleasure to introduce Isaac he is the co-founder and CTO of Pocus so welcome Isaac you awesome how to everyone um lovely thanks um my name is Isaac pety and I'm the co-founder and CTO at Pocus um Pocus is a company that helps companies turn every one of their sellers into a 10x seller and when we were first starting Pocus there was a study that I read that
really resonated with me throughout the rest of the time that we've been building Pocus and it was a study I think from Mackenzie that said that the top quartile of sellers generate more than 2x the revenue of the median seller at the average house company that really stuck with me because what it told me is that the different behaviors that different sellers are doing drastically changes the outcomes and the performance they're able to obtain at Pocus like I said our goal is to make every seller at the customers we work with turn into a
10x seller and the way that the way that we do that is trying to drive consistency in how sellers prioritize their time how they research and talk about their accounts and then how they actually action and work into accounts today I'm going to be talking about three different ways that you can turn every seller on your team into a 10x seller and of course I'm trying to sell you Pocus and we help with a lot of this but the changes that I'm talking about and the methods that we're thinking about here aren't platform specific they're really behavioral changes that
we recommend every top sales team think about awesome so let's live in over the next 20 minutes I'm going to share the details of three different changes that you can make to your sales team in order to 10x your sellers and make it that every seller is performing like your top rep we really think about the pre-sales process in three different main segments first prioritization thinking through what accounts and what leads should a seller spend their time on what's the best place for them to actually spend
their attention next planning and Mark was talking about this in his last talk research is mandatory in the best sellers are coming in with consultative strong value perspectives of how their product is going to help the company and our view is doing that well needs to happen before your first email ever goes out to a prospect and then finally there's prospecting it's really really important that when you're talking with prospects you talking with folks that are warm and folks that are the right contacts that you can actually tell the
right story to and one of the things that we find is the top sellers are not spraying and praying across their entire T they're focused on the right account deeply planning with them and then finally talking to the right contacts within those accounts and today I'll be talking about what changes you as a leader can make in order to drive those changes across your organization our customers have seen really incredible success once they've implemented a lot of the methods that we're talking about here um at Pocus we're really lucky to work with some amazing customers like monday.com and
Asana and canva and Meo and webflow to implement these changes to really use data to make every single seller a consultative seller who really spending time with the right accounts and the way that I know the techniques that we're about to talk about work is because we've seen the success with the customers that we work with um web flow for example grew their pipeline by over 90% after onboarding Pocus because of a lot of the datadriven Outreach we helped them do Hex generated over $10 million a new Pipeline and linear increased their average deal size by 30% once they
onboard Pocus these are just some examples of ways that after really driving data and consistency across the sales team sales leaders see incredible success across their team awesome so let's start by talking about how we recommend sellers use data to prioritize their accounts what we find is that sales teams are often siloed from the data they need and there's often very little strategy from the top down as to what data sellers should be looking at or what technique sellers should be looking
at to decide who they're going to talk to what accounts they're going to spend time with out of their book of business and what leads they they're going to really hone in on our perspective is that if the responsibility of leaders to help their sellers use data to create Focus for their for their team and make sure that the team is spending their time on the right accounts the right leads and reaching out at the right time the way that we recommend you do this is by looking at all the different intent signals that might exist for your company grouping them into high intent
low intent signals and then actually Building Systems to help your reps prioritize where they should be spending their time then sharing these data points in the context around them to make sure that every seller is actually following this process and using signals to prioritize correctly what we found is that reps really need time really need help focusing their time on the signals that matter um if your company is like 85% of the companies that we talk to sellers might have five 10 different tabs open trying to understand what accounts and
what leads they should spend time with they have mqls in one Tab and pqls in a different Tab and intent signals coming from a different tab maybe they're getting email notifications about who's viewing their page on G2 and then popping into sales nav to find some additional search engine intent and what we found is helping make sense of all of the different signals that a seller should be looking at is crucial to make sure that the seller actually knows what signal matters and where they should be spending their time and the reality is different signals mean really different
things some signals are really obvious like for example if a user goes to your website and requests a demo that's a really high intense signal it looks like they're trying to buy a product and we call that declared intent it's where a user raises their hand and says this is something I'm really interested in and want to pursue some companies only give this this declared intent signals to the Reps and that's the only way that reps are able to see activity of within my book of business where should I spend time but what we found is once you can
introduce inferred intent which we think of as helping you look at different data signals to find who might be interested or might already be looking at your product even before they've raise their hand you can drastically accelerate pipeline you can find a huge amount of new opportunities and really focus sellers on what matters what we found is that leaders that help reps use signals to help them gather and prioritize data points go a really long way but the reality is you often need multiple different signals to decide to go and reach out to an account and that's where
it's important to actually centralize and actually organize how all of these signals work together because it's very rare that a single one of these signals maybe someone visiting your website or someone commenting into LinkedIn or even signing up for your product is enough of a reason for a sales rep to divert their attention to that lead it takes a combination of signals and that's where it comes in to be really important to centralize and organize how these signals work together as you gather these signals and these data points it's really important that we found to present it to your team in a way that makes sense to them and
keeps them in the loop as to how they should be spending time and how how they should think about the signals they have at their disposal a lot of companies when they feared about combining multiple signals think about a dashboard like this right they have some lead scoring model that their data team has bought or they bought some lead scoring tool and we think lead scoring is important but this type of dashboard where we say hey Ruth is a 66 and Bill is a 79 and Patricia is a 68 we have found time and time again that it causes sellers to very quickly lose trust in whatever data is powering this magical
score because after four or five times of reaching out to someone who's an 85 or a 99 on their lead score and they don't get a reply or they get on the phone with them and they find out they're actually not at all in market for this solution it's very very easy for rep to lose trust in what this means so one of the things we really work hard hard to do with Pocus is making sure that when we are giving different signals or teaching a rep what they should be spending their time on we're actually presenting them with facts right we say you should be spending time with this person because they recently visited the website or they attended a
webinar and they're part of a Target account and theyve they they visited the demo page and one of their job postings mentioned new engineering roles in the last 30 days right so combining all of those different signals and presenting it to a rep in a way that they can actually understand how did we get to this recommendation is crucial because if you don't do that they're really just going to ignore the signal that you worked so hard to get for them um in our work with webflow we saw firstand just how important data can be to this prioritization process so Phil
Canton a sales leader at webflow um shared with us that they closed a six figure expansion deal with an account that using their old scoring model before onboarding Pocus was ranked really really low because it was an account with only four users that were on the product typically when web flow thinks about big Enterprise expansions they're thinking about accounts with hundreds or thousands of people using the product but the secret signal that they found using Pocus was the number of websites created was actually really highly correlated with Enterprise
expansions and once they changed that in their sales motion and started to focus on accounts that had a lot of websites created even if there's only four seats on the account they uncovered accounts like this that even though they only had four employees were actually an agency that was creating hundreds of websites for a lot of really big Brands and needed the Enterprise functionality that webflow was trying to offer them awesome next 10x hack that we recommend is really building perspective through deep research and consultative planning of why a particular customer should buy
the product that you are selling what we found is that in the last couple of years sales has really changed transactional sales motions where you have sdrs spray and prey to a large T without thinking very much and you have AES pick up the phone and sort of walk someone through the deal process it has really stopped working budgets have tightened the expect of leaders has really changed and now what we found is in order toose a big deal you actually need to build initiative within the company that you're selling to and the way that you can do that is by really
coming with a perspective of how your product how your solution is able to develop a a high Roi and really provide value to the company that you're working with and to do that it requires a lot more than just finding the name of the person you're going to email you really need to put Research In Time into developing what will that perspective be and how are we going to convince this company that this is the right time to buy art tool one hack that we found is AI is actually really good at this because what we found is reps have a lot of process fatigue if you go to a rep
and you train them on command of the message or you train them on different value based selling Frameworks what you'll often find is leaders love it they are so excited to get those Frameworks out but sellers often forget about it the next day and that's because reps have so many tasks that they're asked to do this is a great visualization from a Salesforce study that came out earlier this year and what they found is that rep spend 70% of their time on non-selling activities stuff like updating Salesforce or researching accounts or prioritizing who they're going to spend time with and
they're only spend spending 30% of their time on the things that actually drive value for a deal right meeting with customers connecting with customers doing the actual prospecting or emailing of customers because of that if you go to a sales rep and say Hey I want you to start spending hours for every account that you're selling to understanding the account deeply and developing a point of view it's very very hard to actually drive adoption but what we found is you can actually use AI to do this very very quickly and give reps kind of on a silver platter all of the research and
preparation they need in order to be successful developing strong points of view and being really consultative with the sale without asking them to spend hours actually doing it this is exactly the type of task that AI is really good at right extracting information and connecting dots between multiple things and it's something that we found can be really successful with off like off the-shelf um AI models like chat GPT or claw if your reps know what they're doing but here at Pocus we've actually been building a solution that does kind of goes a step further and builds a much
higher quality model by custom Training it on what your company does so we take in all of your sales enablement materials understanding the value props of what your company sells and we combine that with research about the target account that you're selling to so we look at 10ks earning calls news podcasts blog posts really trying to build a model that specifically is built to understand how youry company should sell into a Target account and you can see up up on the screen an example of how that looks um this is an example of how pokets might sell into web flow and
it shows you what's happening at web flow different events that have happened recently and how Pocus actually fits into those events um we actually have a free demo trial of this tool that's really really powerful I encourage you to share it with your sales team and I'll have a link to it at the end of the deck um for you to actually give this a try with your company and your target accounts to see how you can use AI to automatically prepare research and develop strong point with you and what's really exciting is we are actually watching this work with our team once our team got better at doing research
and deep account planning we saw incredible success with our AES in fact just how effective this was is Katie one of our really early AES who joined the team um in her first quarter at Pocus she put a sticky note in her laptop saying that she wanted to close $500,000 of new AR in her first quarter which like is pretty aggressive for any AE let alone AE on their first quarter but because of how we were able to support her with AI research really developing expertise and a strong point of view using our product she actually told
$700,000 in her first quarter and we saw incredible success um so much so that we ended up throwing her apart you can see it says holy you did it we were so excited with the success that she had because of these techniques awesome third I want to chat a little bit about the last change you can make which is really focusing your prospecting efforts on where we call warm outbound we're focusing on leads where the water's already warm and they actually want to hear from a sales rep instead of being annoyed their new email is clogging up their inbox no one likes
random outbound no one likes hearing from a company or a person they've never heard of before but what we found is you can actually manufacture warmth you can make people who would be annoyed by your email get really excited by it by following what we call our warm framework very conveniently named so the warm framework the goal of it is really to help you manufacture warmth manufacture people who are excited about working with you um out of thin air in order to make it that every sales conversation and every prospecting call is really done with intent and strategy
so we think of first the important thing is really having a well-defined tam if your sellers are focused on a huge Tam of any company in the world and even within that any Persona in the world it's really hard for them to focus on the people who they actually should be they should be spending time on and trying to develop so one thing that we really recommend is as a leader having really really strong recommendations of where your sellers should be spending time both in terms of company and Persona next is Authority a lot of our job as Executives or people on marketing
is really to make it so that when a seller is coming into a conversation they are able to come into it with authority right Authority means establishing your brand with expertise trust and people actually leaning on you before a seller ever reaches out to them and that's really what we think of the objective of the marketing team at Pocus to be at Pocus we think of the job of our marketing team of how can we deliver value to people who've never even talked to us or never even used our product what are the things that we can do to make sure that they are really already finding value out of a a company before they've ever actually interacted with
any of the things that we're selling and because we've done such a good job of that through our community and amas and blog posts what we find is overwhelmingly people are excited to hear from us and when we send them an email we often get replies just because they've been following our content for so long anyway next up is relevancy um making sure that not just being personalized in your email but being relevant in your email tying tying the thing that you are selling and the initiative you're working on to initi initiatives that are already happening in the company make people a lot more excited to actually talk to you and then
finally and I know you've heard this one before really making it personal not just the name of the person or the city they're from but really looking at things that they've done podcasts they've been on events they've been to recently what they put on LinkedIn and tying that back to the relevant message that you're trying to bring to them what we found is that when people are prospecting only to warm um leads their sellers spend a lot more time selling and a lot less time dealing with systems than sending out emails in fact at linear they did such a good job driving this warm framework that they
found that they could achieve a 50% outbound reply rate which is much much higher than the 2% average that most sellers are seeing and the way they were able to do that is by only focusing their sellers on people that actually want to hear from them using signals and data to prioritize people awesome so in the last 20 minutes I showed you three ways that you can t every seller in your company into a 10x seller first by using data to prioritize what accounts and what leads they're going to spend time with
second by using data to plan what perspective and approach a seller should take within an account and really come with a consultative strong value based perspective and third prospecting using data to only talk with people who actually are excited to talk to you and developing those those sort of warm relationships from the start um if you want any more info um of course we would love you to take a demo of Pocus that's a link there at the bottom and this QR code actually brings you to that demo of the AI strategy tool that I told you about earlier so it's
totally free to use the way it works is It'll ask you to type in what company you work for It'll ask you to type in what company you're trying to sell to and then we automatically scrape information about what your company does and its value props we'll scrape information about the company that you're trying to sell to and what internal initiatives we think they're working on and actually give you a value based perspective of how you might be able to tie into those initiatives this is something that we're super actively working on Super welcome you to share this link to your team so they're able to get they're able to give it a try and please give us feedback because again
it's a new for us and something we're really excited to be working on thank you very very much for spending the time with me today um my emails done here at the left and I'll be hanging out in the outside for a little bit after thanks everyone
