Groundswell

I spoke about this tactic on LinkedIn but wanted to share how I’m using “groundswell” to book more meetings.

What is Groundswell?

Firstly a lot of you might not have the faintest clue what I’m on about…

It’s also known as ‘below-the-line' or ‘bottom up approach’, but groundswell is essentially utilising the more ‘junior’ stakeholders in the company to gain information. And by ‘junior’, I’m not talking interns. A Sales Manager is technically more junior than a CRO.

And we’re going to be speaking to them to find out more about their company.

Information like:

• Tech stack

• Company objectives & priorities

• Challenges

• Stakeholders involved in making decisions

The point being that I can target the right stakeholders, with the right messaging at the right time…

Which most of the time is down to luck, but this isn’t the case when you’re doing your detective groundswell work.

How to find relevant contacts

Well it’s quite simple when you have SalesNav. Simply go on the company’s profile & search by seniority. I typically start with “entry-level” and then work my way up to “senior” & “manager”

And I simply send a blank invite to them.

The ones who connect faster I find are usually the ones more likely to engage and chat with me.

Messaging

Rep Messaging

So now they’ve accepted what do we say? Well firstly I’m not going to be messaging EVERYONE I will start with a few (depending on the team size but I’ll usually add people in different teams or locations so it doesn’t look like I’m spamming the team.

And I always start with the same first message:

The reason I use this is because I am gauging how open the person is.

If they’re replying fast like “yes of course, how can I help”, I might ask more challenging questions.

But if they’re blunt like “sure…” or “depends what”, I’ll be asking easy questions around tech stack.

See example below:

*Tip - if they’re extra chatty & sharing loads of challenges, don’t be afraid to ask for an introduction to their leader.

Stakeholder Messaging

So we’ve done our detective work & found out some juicy information. It’s now time to use that in our messaging to our stakeholders.

The structure is similar to a typical email:

• Context + Personalisation

• Challenge

• CTA

Example 1

Example 2

Both are similar but one uses more of a direct CTA & the other is focused on getting a reply (by using external deposit content)

Depending on the Tier of the account will depend on which I use, I typically will focus on starting a conversation with higher quality accounts > booking a meeting.

Finito

Hopefully from this, you have a good understanding on how to hone into your detective skills to help tailor messaging to senior stakeholders & decision makers.

Booking meetings is TOUGH today, and this is one way I’m ensuring my messaging & timing is accurate to help increase replies.

Thanks for reading, hope it helps!