SDR Superhero Episode 5: Evan Patterson @ Reprise

Meet Evan Patterson, a senior BDR at Reprise, a demo creation technology to fuel product-led growth for SaaS companies. We sat down with him to get his top tips on prospecting. 

What’s the longest it’s taken to book a meeting with a prospect?

The longest it took me to book a meeting with somebody that I was going after was about 10 months. But I think the biggest reason I kept going after them was because they were a solid logo that my company really wanted.

The frustrating part is they responded, and the next week I got a new job. So I never got to see the benefit of it at all. So kind of kicking myself for that. 

What’s your favorite subject line?

My favorite subject line has always been just the person's first and last name, nothing else.

My second favorite is just putting, “Can you take a look at this?” or “Is this working for you?” Something that normally an internal person would send to a manager. 

It's a bit clickbaity, but I'm always under the impression it needs to be like a TV ad. It doesn't need to make sense. It just needs to grab attention and get you talking and thinking. 

What’s the best piece of sales advice you’ve received?

The best sales advice I ever received is that you need to be a great writer.

You need to learn copywriting. You need to be a creative writer. You need to be able to take your thoughts and convey them properly in any form of writing — blogs, LinkedIn posts, emails, text messages, internally. You need to be really good at jumping from one format to the other.  You need to find your style. For me, it's shock value, it's humor. It's talking very casually, but yet compelling. 

Your style might be something different, but you need to find your style and get very good at it. And you need to do that yesterday. 

What are your favorite tools in your tech stack?

I'm obviously going to start with the tech stack tools that I love, like Chili Piper. I've used them at multiple companies, but I'm using them now again. It makes my life so much easier. 

I also am a big fan of Lavender. I use them less now because I don't write as many emails as I used to, but if I was still writing a ton, best believe I'd be using lavender every minute of every day.

I'm also a big fan of Linktree if you are a BDR or SDR, who is a social selling style person. It will help you so much with bringing all those B2C influencer marketing tactics into the B2B space.