The Give-to-Get Play – How We Built $1.5m in Pipeline With a Simple Audit

In sales, just like in life, you really need to give value in order to get something back. Why would anyone give you 15 minutes of their time so that you can give them a sales pitch about your service or product? Your incentive really needs to be attractive — and you need to talk about it up-front. As long as people buy from people and form relationships, it will always be this way.

At XANT, we have collected trillions of data points on sales transactions, and we know exactly how human behavior influences a sale.

To help salespeople sell more, faster, we give you our true and tested sales strategies to show you exactly how you can close more deals by using data and science and incorporating it into the way we sell.

The Give to Get Play

We call our strategies ‘sales plays’ — these are strategic prospecting initiatives designed to build rapport and make contact with the right leads. A play has a structure of five simple elements, such as: purpose, list (the list of contacts you are targeting), asset (the value you are offering) and yield (the results of your play). Last month, our marketing and sales development teams focused on one strategic initiative we dubbed “the give-to-get play.”

This consisted of giving a list of potential prospects a free assessment of how their sales team is doing responding to leads, the comparison to industry benchmarks and some tips on how to do better. Basically, we offered them some insight into the performance into the performance of their sales organization in exchange for some talk time.

With zero to low commitment from the prospect themselves, and just some time and analysis from our team, we gave them something they can actually use to improve their business.

Here’s the structure of our “Give-to-Get” sales play:

P: Purpose

The purpose was to increase pipeline for a targeted market segment and get more appointments for the sales executives.

L: List

We focused on attendees for an upcoming event we were sponsoring, as well as people who had downloaded our content (did you see this neat infographic, by chance?) and contacts who were in our most prolific territories. It’s always crucial to get your list down and make sure you’re targeting the right personas, because the results will depend on how good your list is.

A: Asset

Here’s where it got a bit hairy. We built a landing page for our lead response audit, www.responseaudit.com, inviting prospects to test the response of their sales team to inbound leads. This meant that they would input their information, and we’d have our staff go to their website as pretend customers to see how fast they got a response and how many times they got a follow-up.

We built profiles for all our mystery shoppers, complete with web pages, legit email addresses and everything, and tested out the lead response immediacy and persistency. We then sent the results back to them, giving them a few tips on how to improve their lead response– and had our sales development reps also pitch the benefits of our AI sales automation platform on improving lead responses.

Y: Yield 

Everything in this world is a give to get, so the results of our play didn’t disappoint. Out of 300 contacts that took the lead response audit, 41 set appointments to talk to an account executive. We had a 70% appointment hold rate, which meant that 29 of these appointments turned into held appointments and then we had 20 total opportunities. That equaled 1.5million dollars in pipeline just with this one play. Wowza!

Find the Need — Offer the Solution

Now, what I want you to understand is that this play was built around one single question. “What does my customer need and would find useful to improve his business, today?”

This is not your sales pitch, or a product, or a service. This is something that your customer can use right now to help him win. We know for sure that even sales teams which took our lead response audit and didn’t become opportunities will be able to use the information they got to become better in their profession.

To build your own “give-to-get” play and apply it to your business, you don’t need to get as complex as we have with the Response Audit. We knew that this play would work because we had the data behind it. Interactive content (polls or assessments) have a much better conversion rates than your classic blog post or other static content. Here’s Kissmetrics data if you don’t believe me.

You need to customize the asset of this play to the needs and problems of your customer. What does your customer need that you can offer today?

Sales is about giving.

So what are you giving today, to get something back?

Watch the Webinar And Build Your Own Play

Tune in to our webinar to learn more about how you can build your own “Give-to-Get” play. In this webinar you’ll learn:

• The structure of a PLAY – a sales motion designed to increase your contact rates
• Using the “Give-to-Get” principle in your business
• Examples of how other companies are using the give-to-get play
• The result of the Response Audit Play at XANT