How Kyle Asay's Team Increased Outbound Pipeline By 142% in 3 Months

My number one priority after being hired as the VP of Global Growth Sales at LaunchDarkly was to
improve pipeline generation. 


Here’s how we did it:  

Three months in, we increased outbound pipeline generation by 142%.

6 months in, we turned that pipeline generation into 40% higher revenue per AE.

9 months in, we broke every SDR outbound record and delivered 114% of our global revenue target.

Through this entire period, most of our focus for pipeline generation has been on the phone. Onboarding Nooks as our phone vendor accelerated our results - we saw 60% increase in connect rates nearly overnight and have sustained those levels.

So I was thrilled to jump on an opportunity to build a joint resource with the Nooks team to combine the power of my pipeline generation frameworks with the advantage of their technology.

This guide will give you tips you can use today to improve your cold calling, along with how you can use Nooks to accelerate success further.

Tip One: “Bucket Your Buyers”

‍I helped one of our SDRs go from hitting 60% of quota to 120%+ with the stupid simple advice of bucketing their buyers.

Before we met for coaching, they were uploading all of their prospects into a call list and cranking out dials.

They’d call a VP of engineering, then a product manager, then an engineering individual contributor, all across different industries. They were making it nearly impossible for themselves to be “audible ready” for conversations because they were creating their own massive context switching problem.

After we spoke, they started bucketing their prospects into lists based on level and title. Then, they spent entire call blocks on the same level and title, making it incredibly easy to nail the talk track when someone answered. Their conversion jumped, along with their quota attainment and commission checks.I recommend building a similar system for your call blocks.

Organize your list by: Industry, Level (IC, Manager, Director, VP) and Title and group similar prospects together. Then, when dialing, focus on those groups.

When you call the same titles in the same industry you'll be talking about the same: Pains, Opportunities, Customer stories/proof points on every call, which will help you stay polished and prepared.Much easier than swapping in different pain points, questions, and customer stories from call to call.

Tip Two: Dig for Gold

The best "cold" calls to an executive start with, “I spoke with Jenna on your team and learned that you are currently working towards [goal] but getting stuck with [challenge].

You'll immediately stand out from other sellers due to the strength of your point of view. While other sellers rely on publicly available knowledge pulled from research and AI tools, this opener references "secret information" earned from conversations within the account.

The only way you can start a cold call with that level of specificity is by having conversations across their org. This is critical to understand because it goes against what a lot of SDRs/Account Executives think about cold calling - setting a meeting is not the only possible "win" on a cold call.

In fact, I encourage my teams to call people that they don't want to set a meeting with. Instead, they want to have a quick conversation to learn some "secret information" that will help them open conversations higher in the account.

Here's a real cold call transcript of how this works (along with some of my commentary):

Seller: Hey, [redacted], my name is [redacted] I'm calling from Launch Darkly. To be totally transparent, this is a cold call, but it's a well researched cold call. If it's not relevant to you, feel free to, you know, throw your phone and throw me as well, but if you have 20 seconds, do you mind if I get into why I was calling today?​

Prospect: Well, I can tell you it won't be relevant to me because I, I'm familiar with LaunchDarkly. I met you all at a conference, two years ago, but I brought that up with us already and we're actually trying to run lean and mean, so we're getting rid of a lot of services and like there just isn't budget to, to bring stuff in unfortunately.​

Seller: OK, OK, got you, got you. I mean, I know you said it's not relevant, but just out of curiosity, what made you even want to bring it up to the rest of your team? (Great question that opens up the conversation... and leads to a referral! It's amazing what a prospect will share once you successfully get them talking.​)

Prospect: Because I thought the idea like the concept of simplifying, the launches, was, was nice because right now we have a pretty manual process, even though we have a whole devops team to handle it, so yeah, I was, you know, I like that in a perfect world, but, you know, sometimes you just don't get the budget for the tooling, so. I mean, I think the person you really would want to talk to unless you already have is probably [redacted]. He's the best person to be able to talk to because he participates in trials of software that we do consider and you know, he's much closer to budgetary decisions.​

Seller: OK, so [redacted] is that [redacted]... If I were to get him on a call, what kind of things would he mostly care about? (This question is phenomenal - it's a great way to "dig for gold.")​

Prospect: Time to production, so being able to reduce, reduce the time it takes, in our process to get things out and to be able to get them out, You know, consistently and more safely without issue and speed to roll back and I'm pretty sure you handle all three of those things, but yeah. (Now we've got some goal outcomes - these are gold nuggets.)

Seller: OK, and then if you don't mind me asking, this is great information. What's your release process like today? How often are you releasing? (Great question to better understand their current state and associated metrics.)

Prospect: I mean different teams have slightly different cadences, but generally speaking from the time you plan a release to getting it out there, it's probably 7 to 10 days.​

Seller: OK, and that's getting it through different environments and testing and stuff like that. And then for roll backs how long does it take to roll something back?​

Prospect: I mean, anyway, once you identify a reason to roll back that can take anywhere from maybe 5-10 minutes to like an hour and a half depending on the situation.​

Seller: Usually within that time frame, would you say that your customers are seeing the backlash of maybe like a bug being introduced during that time frame? (Great question to start uncovering some pain/impact that we can use at the executive level.)

Prospect: Oh, that that's the only reason we would ever roll back, yeah, got it customer customer impact yeah.​

Seller: Got it got it are you first identifying the problem whenever a customer reaches out to you guys or you guys have some kind of proactive way of identifying a problem?​

Prospect: Both we have logging and monitoring and alerting, so we try to proactively identify it or it could come from a customer complaint but it could be both.​

Seller: Well, amazing hey I don't wanna take up too much of your time, [redacted], I really appreciate the insight and I really appreciate you being nice about giving me this data. I'll reach out to [redacted], and, we'll hopefully I can, I can get him on a call, but again, really appreciate it and hope you hopefully you enjoy the rest of your day.​

Prospect: Thanks you too alright bye take care.

This call didn't lead to meeting booked, but it's full of gold nuggets that will help us get higher into the account.

Here are the "gold nuggets" we learned:

• They are consolidating tools due to budget constraints
• They have a manual release process, despite having dedicated DevOps resources
• Who to talk to AND what they care about: time to production, safe releases, speed to roll back
• Current state details:
  
  • Release frequency is 7-10 days
  • Rollbacks take anywhere from 5 to 90 minutes
  • Bugs sometimes identified via customer complaints

Not bad for a "failed" cold call where we didn't set a meeting.

Now let's revisit my favorite opener with these nuggets included:

‍“I spoke with [redacted] on your team and learned that some of your rollbacks take as long as 90 minutes which is compounded by customer complaints. Sounds like the team is working on improving a lot of these processes but still has fairly manual processes - do you have a minute for me to share how we've helped similar companies automate their release/rollback process so they can fix problems before customers notice?"

When cold calling, look for (and celebrate!) multiple wins. Setting a meeting is great, but learning gold nuggets that you can use to book meetings in the future is also a big win.

Nooks will track your nuggets from prior calls and your CRM notes so you can use them later in future conversations.

Tip Three: Problems, Not Product

One of our AEs was having massive success with their cold call opener, but was consistently shut down shortly after (it's one of the openers I shared in a prior lesson).

The challenges he’s seeing come from what he says next:

"We are a feature flagging platform that allows developers to separate deploy from release, toggle features on or off...

"We've already lost the prospect because we started with what we do.

Most of our ICP already does something similar to what we offer. So, when they hear this pitch, they think, "Yep, already got a solution for that, not interested."

This problem isn't unique to my current company. When you lead with what you, do your pitch will only resonate with people that are actively shopping for your solution. At any given time that represents roughly 3% of your market.

Not great odds - your cold calling is essentially just hoping you catch the perfect person at the perfect time.

When you lead with problems you solve, your pitch will resonate with people that are actively facing that problem.

If you:

• Work for a company with a legitimate product
• Follow my advice for how to prioritize your accounts
• Follow my advice for how to prioritize your prospects 

Your pitch should be relevant to a much higher percentage of who you are targeting (at least 40%+).Problem based messaging should loosely follow this template, and should follow your cold call opener:I'm reaching out because [observation related to a goal they likely have].

A lot of [similar personas] are sharing [challenge preventing many of your ICP from accomplishing the goal].

For LaunchDarkly, it might sound like:"I'm reaching out because I noticed your team's focus on AI-driven development to increase velocity.

A lot of engineering leaders we talk to are sharing the challenging trade-off between speed and risk: more code with less time for testing means more potential for things to go wrong at release.

"Curious if that's been a conversation with your team at all?"

We all know problems > product in selling, but sometimes we forget how it applies to prospecting.

Lead with problems, and you are more likely to have more meaningful conversations in your cold calls and book more qualified meetings.

‍Pro tip: Use Nooks Live Battle Cards to have the right value-based talk track populate when you make a connect.

In Conclusion...

Nooks has been an absolute game changer for our team at LaunchDarkly. Meet with their team and join their community of next-gen sellers.

Book a demo here: Nooks.ai/book-a-demo.