How Reply helped Just Sales Jobs keep their outreach personal

I knew from experience that a lot of people have trouble finding good salespeople, so with that need in mind, I tried a pilot program. Right from day one, it was successful.

Along with focusing on filling sales roles, we also keep our operations to a specific area, working from Toronto to Kitchener/Waterloo, as well as any cities in between. There’s more than enough demand to keep us busy, and we want to stay focused so our database of talent and our reputation remains well known in this area.

Clients have asked us in the past if we’d be able to help them with sourcing talent in other locations, but we know we wouldn’t be able to meet our own high standards if we did that diluted our reach. Our focus enables us to create a comprehensive database of all of the top candidates, as well as building a reputation for delivering talent quickly.

The challenge of finding top sales talent

Sales is one of the most important positions to fill, in any business. Finding the right salesperson will drive sales and increase profits. However, it’s also one of the toughest positions to fill.

It’s like trying to find a world-class programmer, somebody who’s Silicon Valley quality. Top programmers are tough to find; if you interview a programmer, even if they have everything on their resume, how do you actually know they’re a good programmer?

When you’re looking to hire someone in sales, what you’re really looking for is a rainmaker. However, it’s hard to know who that is before you hire them. There’s an art and a science to sales, but it’s almost impossible to define what exactly makes a good sales rep. That’s why so many people struggle when hiring a salesperson for their businesses. They just can’t be sure if they have a good sales rep in front of them or not. Then, if they get it wrong, they’re not making any sales.

For as long as there have been businesses, sales has been this really tough position to fill. For most companies, it turns out the top 20% of your salespeople will end up bringing in 80% of your business. That’s what our clients are looking for from us, that top 20%, somebody who’s going to drive sales.

If we can identify those top 20% and place them, then we’re going to really help our clients.

Why we started using Reply

The biggest challenge we’re personally facing?

Finding the ideal candidates.

Demand for quality salespeople is high and we’ve got to fill all these jobs, as quickly as possible. As a result, it’s a real challenge to meet that demand.

First of all, we work with our clients. They’re the people that pay us to find them the talent who will be the ideal fit for their needs. On top of that, we’re constantly looking for the top salespeople. We never charge salespeople any fees, but obviously we still need to keep in touch and work closely with them.

By chance, I happened to meet the CEO of Reply. When he explained what their product did, it sounded like the ideal solution for us. Now we use Reply to reach out to potential clients and candidates, the businesses we think may need our services and candidates that we think may be an ideal fit, and then we send both a marketing campaign to see if they’re looking for salespeople.

There are a couple of Reply features I particularly like. You can set up campaigns that’ll be dripped out to your clients and potential candidates, and because it’s controlled drip there’s no risk of accidentally sending the same message multiple times, getting flagged for spam, or anything like that.

With its automation features, Reply has also made it easier for us to continue to reach out to our clients and potential candidates. The process is simple to use, so we can set up multiple campaigns and then walk away, essentially letting them run themselves.

Cold emails that work

The other part I like about Reply is how my emails appear to my clients and potential candidates. It doesn’t look like some kind of MailChimp promotional campaign email. It’s very personalized, and prospective clients will get the email from my actual email address. The message feels much more personal and not just another generic email, so a lot more people end up responding.

To me, a successful cold email campaign really comes down to the content. That means it has to be an email that’s from the heart. It has to resonate with people. That means it can’t be anything like those traditional marketing emails. If you try to talk marketing and all that sort of stuff, it’s not going to work. Having spent so long in sales, I know what they’re feeling.

The content I write is probably not in line with the modern so-called ‘best practices.’ For example, I’ve had marketing guys tell me my emails are way too long. However, they’re still super-effective, with open rates of up to 45%.

If you’re a company looking for top sales talent, or if you are a sales superstar looking for a new position, and you’re in the Toronto to Kitchener/Waterloo area, then make sure you get in touch with Bryan at Just Sales Jobs.