🤘 Jason Bay: Blissful Prospecting, Chief Prospecting Officer

Market-to-Revenue

16 minutes with Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. “Inbound-ish.” Dial in the content. How to get people to ask for help when they need it. Getting people to take action on what they learn. Regret minimization. Socratic method. Bite-sized content that is immediately actionable. Myself as a bottleneck. How to systemize and get a team around me. What if I'm wrong? Show transcript.

Here’s what Meghann Misiak said about Jason:

Jason Bay is someone I work with very closely. He is the king of outbound. He's a great prospecting trainer and he has a program called Outbound Squad. The results speak for themselves. He has a lot of incredible followers and is a great trainer.
—Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s Club → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

1) Inbound-ish. I teach companies outbound, but I don't do a lot of outbound to get business. I've been fortunate in that regard in the last couple of years that the inbound engine works pretty good, but I still do a form of outbound. I call it “inbound-ish”. The way I look at client acquisition is you have inbound methods on one side and outbound methods on the other side. If you're listening, imagine a piece of paper, you’ve got inbound on the left, outbound on the right. What I look at on the inbound side is the organic content that you create. That could be blog posts, stuff on your website. Then there's also guest content, there's third-party content. Getting on guest webinars, guest podcasts, et cetera. What I do is, I try to use those forms of content that I create, whether that be through LinkedIn content or being on someone else's podcast like this or a webinar, and I use that to drive traffic to my website, or if it's a LinkedIn post, I use it to get likes and comments on my LinkedIn post. Then I'll proactively reach out to those people. I'll still do outbound on those. It's just a little bit warmer. That's a really big strategy.

2) Posting daily on LinkedIn. Where I get most of my business from is posting daily on LinkedIn, every weekday, posts, so that people will engage on it. A lot of them are already target market. I'll just reach out to them directly, to set up sales calls. Or to get them in my programs.

3) Partnerships and co-marketing efforts are really big thing that we do and webinars have been huge. We just did a webinar with ZoomInfo last week on cold calls. We got almost 2000 people to sign up for it. Again, I'm building my list at that same time. I'm able to see who reached out and signed up for this webinar. And who can I engage with directly and kind of do this “inbound-ish”, this warm outbound, so that I can get clients.

What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?

Where to start? This one made me think a bit. Dude, running a business is hard. It really is. It's a lot of fun because, for me, I sort of grew up in sales. That was my career. And then I spent two or three years in marketing. But if I had to do a job where I only did sales, or only did marketing, or only did some sort of fulfillment, it would be really boring for me. The thing that makes this hard is also the thing I love about it.

1) Dial in the content. Specifically, we have a client program called Outbound Accelerator. It's six weeks. I'll take companies like Gong or Zoom, who’ve been some of my clients, through a six week accelerator with their team and it's really hands-on, “How do we outbound?” What I've really focused on is, how do I reduce the complexity of how I do this so that one, it doesn't drain all of my willpower fulfilling this, but two people get better results and it's just easier for them to do, so I think trying to figure out how can I teach less and say no to more things and really dial in the content and really, really focus on, hey, what are the handful of things? If there was one thing each week, during the two, one-hour training sessions that I needed everyone to take away, what's that one thing? And really distilling it down and simplifying it. It's just been so hard to find those things that will move the needle the most. We completely revamped our course content. Again, a lot of it is, how do we take 10 hours of content and whittle it down to the best two or three hours that's going to get the best results.

2) Figuring out how to systemize and get a team around me to support me. Another thing that's completely unrelated to that is our marketing. Just like you, I have a podcast and what we'll do with our podcasts is that, we'll take that, we'll chop it up into video clips. We'll re-share it on LinkedIn. I'll share it to my email list, getting mileage out of content. It sounds really nice in theory, to be able to re-share it all these places, but you need good systems in place. Otherwise, I end up being the person to spend all the time to do that. Figuring out how to systemize that and get a team around me to support me has been a really hard problem that we recently figured out how to do.

📡 Put go-to-market operators on your radar

↓ Find out what other GTM teams are learning right now

What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?

1) Myself as a bottleneck. In terms of roadblocks, me, I've always been the biggest roadblock in the business. I have three virtual assistants that work with me full time. I basically consider them full-timers even though they live in the Philippines, they work with me full-time, and then I have a couple of contractors I use to help with coaching. Those folks don't work with me full-time yet. I ended up being the bottleneck in most of the instances. I just got rid of myself as the bottleneck with marketing. I am trying to get rid of myself as the bottleneck with delivery and coaching and actually executing the trainings. That's a big thing that I'm working through.

2) How to get people to ask for help when they need it. I think engagement is really tough when you have a paid community of people, like in our Outbound Squad program, it's for individual reps. They pay a certain amount of money every month to get group coaching, course content, and then access to a Slack community. We have 85 people in there right now. Getting people to engage in a virtual environment. It's tough. It's something I'm still honestly trying to figure out, how to get people to ask for help when they need it. That's something I'm trying to figure out right now, actually.

3) Getting people to take action on what they learn. I am getting better at that, but this is what I've done the last 14 years, is coach and train salespeople. I'm still learning so much. A guy, Sam Ovens, he runs a company called consulting.com, what he talks about is “eating our customer’s complexity”. I thought that was interesting. A small example of that is, if I teach you Chris, “Hey, when you make a cold call use a permission based opener, it sounds like this: “Hey, Chris, Jason with Blissful Prospecting. I know I probably caught you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and you can let me know if want to keep chatting?” I could just say that to you. Or what I could do...