There’s a severe lack of qualified sales talent in the market.
The repercussions for companies are huge. We’ve seen many high-growth startups that failed to hire great talent, go on to miss quotas and revenue targets. We’ve also seen companies hire mediocre talent, leading to slower or poor growth, huge costs and disturbed team morale.
Sales can provide an incredible career opportunity, and there’s many people out there who are very well suited to become great sales professionals. So last year we set out on a mission.
We wanted to build an academy that would allow people to enter fulfilling careers in tech sales. We wanted to support them by building the best training program in the market: accessible to all, personalized and designed for employability...
Hyrise was born!
Following the sales funnel
When building the curriculum, we spoke to 50+ tech companies from all over Europe. We finally decided to design the course sequentially around the sales funnel, taking students step by step from lead generation, to qualification, demo and close.
Given we focus on training entry-level sales talent, we put special focus on top of the funnel activities. When it came to defining core lead generation concepts, we didn’t struggle too much to identify universal best practices:
● We teach students to define Ideal Target Personas and Customer Profiles.
● We show them how to research leads effectively to personalize their approach.
● They practice reaching out and creating cadencing routines using different mediums: email, cold calls and social selling.
And yet when it came to defining the best practices in terms of lead generation sales tools, our minds exploded! 🤯
Source: Winningbydesign.com
There’s so many tools out there to support each minor step in the sales process, it’s hard to filter out the ones that really provide value.
So what did we do? We had a look internally. What is the tool that’s giving us the best result in terms of lead generation both to acquire new students (B2C) and new hiring partners (B2B)?
We’ve been using Dux-Soup as our main outbound lead generation tool for both students and partners since we began. It’s affordable, saves us valuable time and, most importantly, it works!
During Stage 2, our students go on a deep dive of social selling, with a strong focus on LinkedIn outreach. At the beginning, we teach our students to generate leads manually to really live, breathe and understand the process. Once they’ve mastered this, we introduce them to the power of automation to save time and be more effective.
Students create an account on Dux-Soup and start to automate their outreach. They first build targeted search lists that match their Ideal Buyer Persona and Customer Profile, both through regular Linkedin Search and LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search. They then begin sending automated connection requests for one week testing at least three different messages. Finally, they switch to automated InMail messages to test the effectiveness of both approaches and understand the full power and functionality of Dux-Soup.
The results are staggering. Most students are blown away by the leap in effectiveness, and it really helps them understand the benefits of automating their outreach with a software tool that actually works. They also get to test different lead generation messages and channels within LinkedIn and find out which one is more effective for them.
Standing out
In a cluttered space, Dux-Soup manages to stand out by consistently delivering results in a simple, straightforward manner. For this reason, it will remain a core part of our curriculum for the foreseeable future, and we will continue using it as our main lead generation tool.
Long live Dux-Soup!
Sign up for all the latest LinkedIn lead generation Growth Hacks at www.dux-soup.com/learning
About the Author - Alvaro Rojas
Passionate about edtech and the future of work, Alvaro was an early employee and leadership team member at the leading tech school in Europe for several years. He's now the co-founder of Hyrise Academy, an online career accelerator looking to give people the space they deserve in the digital economy through education that's accessible, personalized and designed for employability.
