Patrick Trümpi

"Cold calling" as a rep at Salesforce:

Prospect: "Sofia"

Rep: "Hi Sofia, it is Tony at Salesforce, hi"

Prospect: "Ah hi Tony, thanks for calling. I have been thinking of our CRM lately"

Rep: "Great. What have you been thinking about?"

Prospect starts talking

--

Cold calling as a rep at a Startup:

Prospect: "Sofia"

Rep: "Hi Sofia, it is Tony at {unknown company}, hi"

Prospect: "What was the company's name?"

Rep: "{unknown company}"

Prospect: "What do you want?"

Rep brings a great challenged-focused pitch.

or is screwed.

--

Spot the difference?

👏🏻 Kudos to everybody who is cold-calling for an unknown brand

I cold called mainly in Switzerland, Germany, UK and the US.

Those countries are quite different.

Switzerland is a paradise.

The US is hard.

And the rest is in between, check it out 👇🏻


What was your experience?

MEDDPICC is overengineered for deals < 50k ARR.

BANT is useless for outbound generated deals.

SPICED is not sophisticated enough for deals over 500k ARR.

Do you have to work with any of these?

Not necessarily.

I studied most existing qualification methodologies (NEAT, SNAP, ANUM, etc.) and found they have four main factors in common:

1️⃣ They are using an acronym to highlight the importance of focusing on the Need/Pain/Problem of the prospect. Why they need to buy anything at all.

2️⃣ They want to describe the impact of not solving a problem and/or building a quantitative business case for larger deals. They stress the understanding of what happens if the problem is not solved in the near future. The why NOW.

3️⃣ They highlight the importance of a salesperson knowing with whom they talk. They use words such as “Authority”, “Economic Buyer”, “Decision maker”, Champion” and other roles.

4️⃣ They highlight the understanding of the process and/or timeline to get the signature of the prospect. Some only use “timeline”, some use “Decision Process” and others “Mutual Action Plan”.

If you do not somehow direct the focus of your sales team on those four, you are probably doing something wrong.

And what about other criteria?

Add them if you think they are important for your process:

"Competition"
"Paper Process"
"Competitive Event"

How do you know they are important?

Answer these three simple questions:

- Why do we win deals
- Why do we lose deals?
- Why do deals slip?

That is how MEDDIC came to life.

5 months ago, we started to pay our employees for posting on LinkedIn:

Every employee who can show 20k impressions in the past 28 days will get $350.

Every employee who can show 100k impressions in the past 90 days will get $550.

And every employee who can show 1'000k impressions in the past 365 days will get $4'000.

The results?

1️⃣

Three team members already achieved at least one of the levels.

Two team members post almost every day, one landing his first brand collaboration outside the company.

Congrats to Sebastian and Samir for pushing though. You guys made it.

(Give them a follow if you haven't yet)

2️⃣

Many members of the leadership are leading by example and post at least once or very regularly as well (Samuel & Sonja 👏🏻👏🏻).

3️⃣

The first inbound generated opportunities in my 15 year sales career that helped us reach our best quarter in Q4/25.

Additional benefits:

👉🏻 All of them learn faster.
👉🏻 Better alignment of the company.
👉🏻 Brand building


PS: There is one simple rule to posting: It should be somewhat connected to their jobs or the company. Personal posts here and there are ok too.