Treat outreach like crazy golf

If you’ve ever played crazy golf, you’ll know that if you could just aim at the pin you’ll fail.

The fun is in having to navigate the obstacles and hit your ball in seemingly the wrong direction in order to win.

I was listening to a re-rerun of the most listened to GTM Podcast featuring Lars Nillson, the global head of SDRs at Snowflake.

In the podcast Lars drops a simple sentence at 25 minutes:

“What gets me always is somebody that they have triangulated, that knows me really well, that they have gotten ahold of, and gotten their endorsement to make a connection to me”

SDRs and AEs are so eager to get to their goal (a call or meeting with their target buyer) that they are aiming straight at the pin,

When often they would be better served by aiming in a different direction to get a valuable referral and recommendation into that target buyer.

Who could be a trusted referral?

Don’t immediately take this as advice to start at the bottom of the mountain with a low level contibutor and ask for referrals upwards.

This is the path to small transactional land and fail to expand deals.

Instead, consider who your target persona trusts, respects and looks for advice from.

• Business unit heads that might not be buyers of your product, but would be users and experience the pain the product will solve.

• Trusted partners that already work with your buyer

• Previous colleagues that used to work with your buyer

One of the reasons I love this approach is because your outreach to these individuals comes across much less pitchy - because genuinely you are not trying to sell them anything.

Challenge your sellers

As part of your account our outreach planning pose the question:

If you were not allowed to contact the individual directly, how would you indirectly make contact with them?

And don’t stop the exercise until your SDR or AE has come up with at least three crazy golf routes to the pin!