Hi Croners, are you ready for the fifth episode of our column “The Prospecting Masterclass“? Great, us too!!
Elad’s answers should simply be taken, printed, framed and hung in the office of every SDR in the world. What an incredible vision.
Maybe it’s his DNA from the heart of the Silicon Valley, maybe it’s because he’s simply a master salesman. For sure, these answers are a must read.
Find his interview below. Thanks Elad!
Here is the interview with Elad Gilo, enjoy reading!
1) Hi Elad, can you tell us about yourself and your experience in B2B Sales?
My name is Elad Gilo. I’m American currently living in Milan, Italy. I was born and raised in the heart of Silicon Valley but my family ultimately moved to NYC.
I got my start in sales interning for a startup called Chartbeat. We were selling SaaS for monitoring web traffic in real-time so that websites, especially news sites could make agile content decisions to optimize traffic.
Since then I’ve done B2B sales in data analytics, ad products, industrial products, design software, AR and now my current company Reach – sales enablement.
My sales career is now over 10 years long and has allowed me to work in both enterprise and high velocity sales. I’ve done both top down and bottom up sales
2) How would you describe yourself if you could only use 5 words?
- Determined
- Self-reflective
- Loyal
- Nomadic
- Optimistic
3) What are the most difficult challenges you have faced regarding Prospecting and Outbound Sales in your past and current professional experiences? How did you solve them?
Early in my career the biggest challenge for me was learning how to create urgency in my deals. As many sales people have faced, deals often fizzle out or lack momentum.
I learned that you don’t create urgency, you drive it. Good discovery meant uncovering the pain and the cost of their pain. The more effective I was at getting them to see how costly the status quo was, the more urgency naturally existed in the deal.
My role then become learning how to drive that urgency over time until the contract was signed.
4) How do you see B2B outbound sales changing in the next 12 months? What challenges and trends do you anticipate?
I predict that 2023 is the year that 80th quartile companies will put a big focus back into quality of outreach and not just quantity. I also predict that teams will be spending a ton of time figuring out how to improve email deliverability. The past 5+ years in sales had seen the whole industry go head first into insane outreach volume. Many tools came out to facilitate this. This resulted in terrible reply rates and deliverability issues.
With Google and Microsoft cracking down on spam, and therefore seriously hurting deliverability issues, I predict that we’re going to see a push towards improved message quality and outreach practices that favor deliverability.
In terms of quality this means better researched emails that are more tailored and relevant to the prospect.
5) What advice would you give to someone starting today as an SDR?
Develop good habits. Consistency and discipline are muscles that have some of the best ROI and will lead to success. If you learn good processes early on and stick to them, your job will be significantly easier. But so will any future job you have. You’ll be miles ahead of many people.
