If you’re trying to build an outbound sales strategy today in the post-COVID world, you’ve come to the right place.

In this interview with outbound sales professional Charlie Light, he’s going to teach you the following:

How to build an outbound sales strategy, step by step, from scratch.
How to use content marketing to close more sales.
How to grow a thick skin and get over your fear of rejection.
How to send cold emails to prospects –– and get them to respond.
How to create a unique message that gets prospects excited about your products and services.
How to use digital tools to overcome sales challenges birthed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And a bunch of sales secrets Charlie Light has learned during his 6+ years of outbound sales experience.

More About Charlie Light

Charlie Light is an outbound sales specialist and owner of the Denver-based sales agency Prospect Aim, and his YouTube channel has amassed hundreds of thousands of views.

We think Charlie Light is one of the best outbound sales specialists in the world, and we can’t wait for you to learn from him. After this interview, you’ll know how to create an outbound sales strategy you can use to generate more leads and sales.

Enjoy the interview.

Please give us a step-by-step breakdown of your sales process?

Charlie Light: So I basically have two different components that I always talk about with my clients. The first one is the strategy or the approach.

The second part is the actual technical aspects of how to run a sales process. The second one is probably easier.

And so that's what I do for a lot of my clients, like putting together lists, making sure cold emails go out, making sure cold calls get made, or just making sure there's a plan to consistently do the prospecting.

However, for a company that's just starting out, the thing you need to focus on is the first part, the strategy, the approach.

And this is the thing that my clients have the most difficulty with –– figuring out how to approach a prospect to compel them to take action.

The companies that have good branding and messaging, they just do the prospecting or they do their marketing or whatever.

And they have all sorts of people who are super interested. They easily add customers as opposed to other companies that have salespeople who don't know how to approach prospects and get them interested.

And even when they do set a meeting, it feels like they're trying to force the prospect to do a deal with them.

So what I try to look at with my clients is –– let's figure out how we can actually compel people to take action. I don't want my clients to have a bunch of leads that aren't actually interested.

Some companies think that the messaging doesn't really matter and they just approach people and say, “Hey, we do this service. Do you want to do a meeting?”

I'm finding that this approach doesn't work very often. Listing your service, like just saying, “Hey, we do websites.” How interested can you really get someone just by saying that?

They'll just be a little bit curious. However, you tend to get people who are super focused on price. If that's all you do. If they don't think it's a really valuable service, all they have to go off of is the price. And it's a tricky thing, but I think you really have to work on your messaging.

The question to ask yourself is: How can you craft your messaging so that when you do a sales campaign, you're actually getting a 5 to 10% response rate?

I think for new companies –– if you're going to do sales and you're basically just getting like a half a percent response rate on your prospecting, it probably won't work super well. The conversion rates are not going to be high enough to justify paying someone to do the sales or pay for the tools you need to actually do your outreach.

When I talk to a prospect, I want to say something that could either be a result that you've had, or it could be something cool about your process, or if you're selling software, just something that will actually intrigue people. I don't want to call a bunch of people and force them to take a meeting with me. Have a good case study, something people might be interested in.

I don't necessarily want to book a meeting with someone right away. The thing that I do with prospecting and what I've started to do more of is, think of prospecting as building your brand awareness.

I don't think about it as us trying to book a meeting right away, just because I know that if you cold contact people and the first thing you're doing is asking for a meeting, that has a pretty low conversion rate –– the prospect doesn’t know enough to really commit to a meeting.

And then even if they do commit to the meeting, it's basically like you're starting from scratch. I don't want a bunch of meetings with people who get on the call and are like, “okay, so what do you do exactly?”

I'd rather educate them. So what I do for my personal businesses, I'll say like a good result we've had. And then I want people to watch a video. So I'll send them a five-minute video explaining what it is that I do. I want them to be genuinely interested.

I don't care if they don't book right away. When I do my outreach, I know that a lot of people will go to my YouTube channel. They'll watch a video or two.

So I've had people who, six months after I reached out, I didn't hear anything from them, but they reached out because I introduced them to my brand. And then a few months later they had seen enough of my Youtube videos where they are really interested.

Another huge thing is really just patience. The best sales process is built up over months and years; too many companies are just impatient.

They think, you know, I'll contact a hundred people, we'll sign two or three clients within the next week. And if it doesn't work out like that, they give up and they stop prospecting altogether.

So you look at prospecting as a top of the funnel strategy?

Charlie Light: Yeah, exactly. It’s a huge mistake to think that just because I'm urgently needing a client right now that whoever I contact is going to be just as urgent.

But what I try to do with my clients is build a large top of the funnel awareness. If we contact a bunch of people, give them an easy first step to actually interact with you, rather than trying to get them on a call –– you'll have way more leads.

I think this is from a Jeffrey Gitomer Book, but he said, if you contact a hundred people, probably three or four of them are actively thinking that they need your service or your product that week.

I think his example was for car sales, but he basically said, if you're going to cold call a hundred people, probably three of them were actively thinking that they're going to buy a car within the next few weeks or a month or two.

However, you know, probably 50 or 60 of them will buy a car within the next two years or three years.

As a salesperson, the question becomes, how do you actually come up with an approach that targets those 50 or 60% that will buy your service without annoying the hell out of them? Cause if you contact them every single day, is that going to work? No, probably not.

With less face-to-face interaction taking place because of COVID-19, have you had to adapt your sales process?

Charlie Light: Even before all this, I rarely met my clients in person. So no, for me, not really.

For people that have had to adapt, the one thing I would look at is video. I guess I kind of had to adapt before all of the COVID stuff, just because of not meeting people in person. I just used video a lot more.

If I have a call with someone and there is something I need to send afterward, I send a document, but I also do a quick five-minute screen record where it's just me talking over the thing.

People like the videos a lot more than typing everything out in an email. So yeah, video is like the number one way to help with not being able to meet people in person.

What are the essential things you need to make a sale? What content assets are necessary for the sales enablement process?

Charlie Light: If someone's on a phone call with me and is interested in using my service, I want them to have a very clear idea of what they're getting into. So what I would send after a call is an outline. It's a document that basically says, here's our process for onboarding. Here's like the five steps for onboarding. Here's how long it takes. Here's what we do once we get a campaign going.

We'll have an onboarding call, a phone call where we kind of evaluate the results, tweak the campaign if necessary. So that's a super important one, like a timeline of what your prospect's getting into.

Because if people have a very clear, specific idea of what they're getting into, it's much easier for them to make a decision. It's hard for people to make a decision if they don't quite understand what they're signing up for.

I also recommend case studies or testimonials and examples of your work laid out in something that can easily be sent. So like a PDF of results of past clients that you can send over.

So another one is the pricing. Having really clear pricing is super important. I mean, personally, I like to just have it on my website so people can see the pricing. I know other companies don't like to do that, but I like to put the pricing out there, just so people understand what they're getting into.

How do you warm-up cold leads and get them to buy your products and services?

Charlie Light: When you approach someone, you really only have that first chance to give a good first impression.

So here’s an example from one of my HVAC clients. Basically, we made a video where we talked about a specific strategy that this agency had. We made like a five-minute video basically explaining how to use google ad words to get more clients. And so it's very quick, obviously, it doesn't explain everything, but we'd send that to people and basically ask them, do you want to see the full version of this?

So we kind of get a little bit of an opt-in, and then we would send the full 30-minute video where we fully explained it. It's very hard to nurture leads effectively if you don't really interest them from the beginning.

After we get the prospect to opt-in to the longer video, we ask for a sales call. If the prospect isn’t interested in a sales call, we give them another option, like signing up for an email newsletter.

To nurture the lead, we continue sending the prospect helpful information.

I don't like to push products and services on people. I feel like they're just going to tell me off. How have you built a thicker skin over the years?

Charlie Light: I struggled with that in the beginning. Every time someone said no, or ended up backing out, I was just like, “Oh God, this is horrible.” I mean, it happens. So I started looking at it from more of a logical approach.

So number one, how do I build a sales process that's going to add 10 clients a month? How can I do that with a few hundred dollars and my time?

If I contact a thousand people with the intent of trying to get 10 clients out of that, I'm going to expect to get 50 or a hundred people who say no. If I just got 10 clients a month at the end of the year, I'd have 120 clients, my business would be doing amazing.

You'd be making a couple hundred thousand a month in revenue, but that's only a hundred clients, right? A hundred businesses using your services out of . . . I think there's like 28 million companies in America. That's like you’re a tiny little speck in the grand scheme of things.

That’s how I started thinking about it. A hundred clients, that's almost nothing, but my business would be doing a hundred or $200,000 a month in revenue.

So I kind of started to look at it as, you know, just present the service as clearly as possible. So that at the very least, when I contact someone, they get what I'm saying.

If it's not right for them, totally fine. Because I know that it's a good enough service that other businesses will like it and they'll go for it.

What are your predictions about the future of sales?

Charlie Light: I think cold calling is definitely kind of just going away. People don't answer. People just don't want to have phone calls with strangers. And I get that, especially now.

A video can be just as effective as doing a phone call with someone. So I kind of see things going towards video. People will get the information from a video and get on a phone call once they actually have a lot of info.

How can people work with you?

Charlie Light: My company is Prospect Aim, but the main way people find out about me is through my YouTube channel. So if you just search Charlie light on YouTube, I'll show up.

How to build a crazy-effective outbound sales strategy in the post-COVID world