What is a Consultative Evangelist? That’s how today’s guest refers to himself. Listen in to hear him discuss his role and learn how his consultative approach is supported. In today’s episode, Simeon discusses how someone in his role advances people in the pipeline, whether Simeon’s approach has changed, and how he defines the term “trusted advisor”. 

Episode Highlights:

• Simeon’s experiences as a Consultative Evangelist
• What Simeon’s role means as far as advancing people into the pipeline
• A typical flow that works now in the pre-prep stage
• Whether Simeon’s approach has changed in terms of the corporate hierarchy
• How to transition to a trusted advisor sale
• How “trusted advisor” is defined
• Practicing the skill of being a consultant or trusted advisor

Resources:

Simeon Atkins

SimilarWeb

Transcript

Marylou: I think it’d be very helpful to understand a couple of things. One, is your consultative approach supported by data and metrics? Meaning, your actions and your conversations, do you try to find intent and insights first as you prepare these conversations to become more consultative, and/or is it a combination of asking a question, hearing the answer, and then building the conversation from there? Which really requires a lot of experience in order to know how to navigate that. 

I would love for you to talk about, first of all, your experiences working as a consultative evangelist, as you call it, and what that means in terms of advancing people into the pipeline?

Simeon: It’s very easy as a salesperson, I think, to fall into the trap of wanting to be the expert in the room. I think it’s natural. I think when you go to a client, you want to seem like you’re the expert, and obviously, what are you an expert in? You’re an expert in your products and services. What happens then is you tend to dominate the conversation with your products and services.

The problem with that is then you don’t really get to the core of what the challenges are for your clients and really understand initially whether you are a good fit for them, and if you are a good fit, how you are a good fit for them? I definitely think that doing research in the first element is crucial, and actually understanding before you go into a meeting who are you speaking to, what markets are they operating in, and how you can help.

I actually think quite a lot of this comes even before you reach out to a client. I think a lot of it comes when you first start in a new company, in the onboarding process from the management perspective. My experience with sales teams generally is that the onboarding for a sales rep would be very much focused on your product, your company, your service, what you do, et cetera, rather than actually learning as much as you could about the customers you’re selling to and their market. I think someone agrees with me.

I definitely think that the first piece is almost like an enablement piece when sales reps first join a company is actually, during that onboarding process, making sure that there is enough time allocated to learning about who you’re actually selling to, what kind of challenges they’re facing, as well as learning about your products and services. I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing is we were saying is coming to those meetings prepared. But that’s not always easy, particularly if you’re an SDR and you’re targeted with a thousand calls a day. How would you possibly do enough research into one client to justify a good conversation? I think tools like SimilarWeb do help with that. We have what’s called insights generated, which actually provides insights to you. With a click of a button, you can find an interesting insight which you can then put into an email […]. There are definitely ways around that.

But then to your point, absolutely. When you’re face-to-face with the client, whether that’s obviously on Zoom these days or whether you’re going into speaking to a client or speaking on the phone, it’s very, very important that I would almost spend (if you can) 90% of the time listening to what the clients say and 10% of the time talking (if you can). 

Almost challenge yourself to—the next meeting that you have—try and speak a little bit less or try and ask more relevant questions. Because that’s really where you can start to learn about your clients. A lot of the time, you will find your clients are very happy to talk about what they do. They will appreciate the fact you’re taking an interest in what they’re doing. That you’re not just babbling about your products and services.

It’s not just a case of asking any old question. It’s about asking the right question, of course, but I think it’s about spending a lot less time talking yourself and actually letting your clients give you all the information. 

Then what you’ll find is that there’ll be common threads between certain clients you’re speaking to. You won’t always necessarily have to do as much in-depth research in similar clients because there’ll be common threads that you can take into meetings, and then actually can speak more on a peer-to-peer level about, well, actually, I was speaking with client X. He’s in a similar market with similar challenges, and this is what they’re doing and this is how we’re helping. So you’re speaking a far more kind of peer-to-peer level. I think it definitely runs across those three areas.

Marylou: It’s interesting that you said that about the thousand calls a day from an SDR perspective. It is virtually impossible for them to—especially if they’re following a model that is transactional-based, they’re trying to reach as many people as possible. They don’t really know who they’re going to get in touch with. Especially some of the tools here in the states that we still use where we dial, dial, dial, dial, dial until we get a body. If we didn’t feed our sequence or cadence with like people and we end up with a customer experience person on one call and then an IT person on the next call, it’s hard to switch gears that quickly.

Tell me a bit about this research part because back in the day—that’s when I was in selling, which was 100 years ago practically now—we definitely did a lot of research upfront. Even though we were the evangelists of the product because there was no internet when I was selling, we were the people that they came to for information. We were the folks that had the in-depth knowledge of the products, the industry, the competition, so there was more of an implied trust there. But we still did a lot of research upfront. 

I spent many nights in the library because we didn’t have the internet to do some research on particular clients I was chasing or particular roles and what their workflows look like. I did spend a lot of time researching, and it was probably—for me, personally—hours of research for particularly one client depending on how big they were, the cost of the average deal size, et cetera. What is the typical flow that you think works nowadays with the internet with tools about how much time do people need to spend in that pre-prep stage before they actually start a conversation?

Simeon: Thankfully now, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with that—SimilarWeb definitely being one of them—whereby you have this incredible market intelligence data […] what’s going on on every website in the world. How much traffic they’re getting, where that traffic is coming from, or what do you think the traffic is like online, customers, I suppose, going into a virtual store. What the kind of engagement levels are like, contact details, and all that sort of stuff. 

You can actually get a lot of that within one platform like SimilarWeb, for example. You can actually utilize that from an SDR perspective, if you’re responsible for generating leads, you can actually utilize tools like SimilarWeb to filter and find companies that meet that ideal customer profile. That will take some of the research out of it because for example, your search could be I want companies that are headquartered in the US that are receiving customers from countries XYZ that have seen the 20% growth year over year in the number of customers, et cetera. 

So you can really actually filter down, and so you’ll actually know a lot more about your customers ahead of time than you would have done before versus going on Google and finding top 100 ecommerce companies. You will just get a list of names, then you will have to do your research because there’s no context behind it. Actually utilizing market intelligence data to get those insights beforehand is crucial. Then from there, you can utilize that data in your consultative selling approach. 

I would say it depends on obviously who you’re selling to and the market, but I think particularly for online businesses, you can definitely use tools like Similar to take a lot of that time out. Like I was saying before, what we have is insights generated which essentially pushes insights to you around what’s going on with your client, how are they benchmarking against their competitors in certain markets where the opportunities, potential, and gaps are in their strategy. You can actually get that in a couple of clicks of a button. Thankfully, it’s somewhat easier.

Marylou: Than me with my coffee pot at the library, right?

Simeon: I think there’s always going to be a little bit of an element of that, but hopefully, a lot of that legwork will be taken.

Marylou: Yeah, that’s great. Tell me about the top of the funnel then in terms of consultative selling. What is an approach that you feel really works well now? We do have a lot of tools. There’s a lot of stack that we could put on top of whatever we’re using for follow-up. But at the end of the day, there’s a conversation in there that has to happen. 

I’m curious as to your approach, what’s working, and if you could share some conversion rates like if you talk to a hundred people, how many of those actually start moving and advancing on average? If you have numbers like that, I’d be really curious. And also, lastly, has COVID affected any of this methodology of yours or has it only enhanced it?

Simeon: For us as a business that tracks online businesses, COVID has obviously greatly accelerated things because bricks and mortar stores closed, more online businesses opened, and even as bricks and mortars’ doors are opening now, we’re still seeing a huge influx of new online businesses opening every day. I think businesses and consumers are definitely adapted in that respect. The online ecommerce market is showing no signs of slowing down at all. 

I think that in terms of an approach, I would be always thinking about the customer and having a customer-centric approach, so thinking about what’s important for them. Ultimately, you want to tie that into the solution that you have and the product that you have, but I think really getting into the mindset of the client is really important. 

I’ll give an example. So we work, as I said, at the beginning of the piece with a lot of logistics companies. There’s one very global business everyone would have heard of. They actually came to us a few years ago and said that we want to transform from being just another service provider to being a strategic partner to our clients, both at top and bottom of funnel. So once they eventually converted clients to being a genuine account manager in terms of being a strategic partner, but also at top of funnel winning new business. 

They’re using our data to actually talk to their clients about things that are completely outside of normal logistics business. Trends within certain markets from an online perspective, what kind of keywords are driving traffic to their competitors, things that would be very much outside the remit of a general sales conversation, but very much at the heart of helping to grow their client’s businesses, so it’s obviously a huge interest and a massive differentiator between themselves and competitors. 

Now logistics, as a lot of industries are very competitive and very commoditized, it can be very difficult to differentiate yourself from a competitor. But generally, what will happen is that you’ll start talking about what you do and then your prospect will kind of drive you straight into a conversation around price, and then you’ll happen to undercut very quickly.

For example, if you went into a conversation and said, hi, I’m calling from company X. We offer the widest range of this. We’re the fastest and most reliable. Prospect will think, well, I’ve heard this pitch 100 times already today. Let’s just get straight to a conversation about the price. 

Whereas actually, what a lot of our clients are doing very successfully is they’ll open a conversation with, did you know that X, Y, and Z is happening in your market? I can see two of your competitors are accelerating in this area. This is what’s working well for them. This is what we do and how we can help. We have a conversation that just completely transforms how you’re communicating with your clients and very much puts them at the forefront of everything that you’re doing. 

I would say, to your question, thinking about genuinely what is important for your client. What are the key challenges? You might need to ask them that obviously in the conversation you have with them, but really trying to get to the crux of that before you start talking about your own products and solutions. Unfortunately, I don’t actually have any stats on me on that. But there are plenty out there to talk about how our consultative approach will help with conversions.

I was reading one of the reports from Salesforce recently saying that about 78% of B2B buyers are now looking for a trusted advisor rather than just another salesperson. Sports I think or other companies are talking about how sales are really now rapidly and moving a lot more to be kind of data-driven. This is definitely the kind of motion that companies need to move into to really get ahead of the game because if you’re just stuck in your ways of talking about your products and solutions, unfortunately, your competitors are going to be taking a different angle and probably going to be a lot more successful in it than you are.

Marylou: Does this also mean that when you become this trusted advisor, I want to get into that term because it’s so scary for so many people to know what the heck that really means, and can you quantify it or is it behavioral-based? But I’ll set that aside. 

The question I have is because you are consultative because you are approaching the conversation as a trusted advisor, are you naturally finding that you’re going up the hierarchy in the company and talking to more directors, C suite, VP level? Because a lot of times, even now with the SDR role, they’re finding themselves way too far out in that circle of influence. They’re way at the tip of the edge that are people that are going to maybe be project owners, but they don’t have the big strategic picture in mind. They have their little piece of the pie and all they want to know is can I get my stuff done? 

So tell me about that. Has that actually changed your approach in terms of the corporate hierarchy and approaching people?

Simeon: Massively. So I’d say from a top of funnel perspective, what you’re enabling yourself to do is multithread very effectively and speak to a broader range of people. Going back to the logistics example again, initially, when we speak to logistics companies, they’re quite wary about why do I need to be speaking about keywords, website traffic, and things like that? Because these aren’t the people that I’m generally speaking to. I’m speaking to slightly more technical shipping people. 

Actually, what they’re doing is that they’re then speaking to this person, but then that conversation is generating or opening a door to another department and another department and another department so then the opportunity grows. That’s definitely effective from a top of funnel perspective.

Then from an account management retention upsell perspective, what you said is absolutely spot on in terms of moving up the chain, speaking to more senior people because if you’re offering strategic guidance in terms of how they can grow their business, companies are going to want to invite you into meetings. We are seeing this happen. Account managers are getting invited into more and more meetings to talk about these kinds of strategic processes and how they can grow their business. 

Then ultimately, what will happen is you get to that gold standard for any company, which is where your customers become your advocates. They’re then promoting me to their network, which is ultimately where every business wants to get to. Without a shadow of a doubt, it really does move you up that food chain very effectively.

Marylou: To that end, another objection I hear a lot of concern is, well, I don’t have the industry experience or I don’t have the tenure to have these conversations. I always push back on that because I think if you have this insatiable curiosity to understand what makes them tick in their business, plus if you love your craft, and you’re a student of the business side of what makes things better with your product and how that’s applied strategically to the growth of your client’s business, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in sales for five years or 50 years. 

You should be able to have a conversation at least at a certain level and then and only then when they say, you know what, this is something that I think would be super important. I want to bring some of my folks in. Then you easily segue to, great, I’m going to now introduce you to my people because they’re going to get down into bits and bytes of how all this works. That bottle still is okay, but I think a lot of people are just not comfortable with the fact or they think you have to have an account executive, an associate account executive, or someone that’s a little bit higher up in the sales knowledge in order to transition to a trusted advisor sale. What do you think about that?

Simeon: I think it goes back to what we were saying at the start of the piece where, as a salesperson, you do want to be the expert in the room, and it’s only natural. You want to be comfortable with what you’re talking about and coming out of your comfort zone makes you feel vulnerable, and that’s completely understandable. But I think what you said there is absolutely right. Actually, in my experience, showing a bit of vulnerability actually goes a long way. It shows quite a lot of genuineness, I think. 

Marylou: Yeah, definitely.

Simeon: You have to be open and actually going into things that you’re not necessarily an expert in, and being honest and just saying, look, I’m not necessarily an expert in this field, obviously you are, but this is the data to show X, Y, and Z. You’re not presenting yourself as knowing all the answers. You’re just going by what the data says. You can kind of hide behind that a little bit. 

I definitely think showing—and this probably goes into another topic—a bit of vulnerability in a meeting is actually perfectly okay and maybe even encouraged as well. […] show that you’re underprepared or whatever, it just shows that actually, in this particular topic, I’m not an expert. What do you think of this? Can you elaborate a little bit more? 

I think actually, what it does as well, my experience has been with other sales reps makes your role a lot more enjoyable rather than just talking about what you do day after day, week after week to different people. Actually diving into different areas and talking about different things, different markets, different trends, and actually thinking of yourself as a consultant is fun. It just adds a bit more variety to your role, I think, as well as (I would say) elevating and generally making you a better salesperson.

Marylou: Absolutely. At the end of the day, if we’re selling products, it’s a given that we love our product, right? Now we need to figure out ways we can apply the differentiated claims of our product to the business models of these clients that we’re servicing to figure out if we’re a good fit or not. Because that’s another thing you mentioned at the top, are we a good fit? 

The only way you can determine whether we’re a good fit or not is to dive into more of the day-to-day workflow life, what their goals are, what their future is, what they see as an upward path for them, whether it’s in their job role or in the company strategically, how that looks. We get into all those types of questions that have absolutely nothing to do necessarily with the product feature or the benefit of the product and everything to do with the person. 

The consultative role includes the person, and I think that’s the main thing that we’ve lost sight of, especially with all these tools, all these things, and all these emails that I still get to this day—our product is this, isn’t our product great? It’s like, no, it’s not great. How is this helping me? Why should I care? What does it do for me that I should stop what I’m doing and listen to what you have to say? 

I think that gets into that area of trusted advisor. I mean, that term is so difficult to get your arms around, and so I’m curious from your perspective, knowing that you specialize in ecommerce and ecommerce companies, what does that mean—trusted advisor—to your people? How do they define trusted advisor?

​​Simeon: They would define that as someone that is, as we said earlier on the piece, having a customer-centric approach, putting the customer at the center of what they’re doing, and just take it very literally. You are advising them on certain areas of their business. You broaden the conversation from just what your product does to actually why they might potentially need it and then how that will help them long term. 

I think what you were saying is really important about the product fit. I think that particularly, for businesses like SimilarWeb that works on a renewal basis, so it’s not a case of making one-off sales and then that’s fine, […] speak to the customer again. If you’re working on a retention basis, you’re only going to get bitten down the line if you’re selling something that isn’t a good product fit. You’re going to have unhappy customers, you’re going to get a bad reputation, and you’re going to have a high churn rate. 

Now, obviously, there are issues in terms of commissions and things like salespeople are targeted on the sales they make. Why should they necessarily care about whether it’s a good product fit? That’s the account manager’s job. Or maybe there’s something that needs to be looked there in terms of commission structures and how salespeople are recognized, but it’s definitely an important part of it.

What you were saying about consultative selling being about the person, it’s all about the person. So to change lanes a little bit and talk a bit about behavioral psychology, I find this really interesting. The webinar with a company called […] last year who were kind of experts in this field. They were talking about the fact that as human beings, we have two sides of our brain. We have the system one brain and the system two brain. 

The system one brain is like the dominant force. It’s the one that we’ve evolved over millions of years. It’s the caveman-type brain, which is very reactive. It’s very effective when you’re running away from saber-toothed tigers and having to hunt your food, but not particularly geared for 21st century living. And then you have your system two brain, which is kind of the more 21st century living brain, but it’s the much smaller part of the brain and it evolved a lot later than the system one brain.

The way that it kind of boils down to sales is that particularly when you’re selling an expensive product or you’re selling a product that requires a long term commitment, it basically requires your clients to be really having to think about it properly before they make a decision. Generally, B2B decisions take six or seven decision-makers anyway, so it’s going to have to go to different people anyway. 

But when you’re engaging that side of things, you really need to be talking to the system two part of the brain because the system one brain is very reactive. It makes very quick decisions. So if you’re trying to sell a four-year contract or something, you can’t be speaking to the part of the brain that’s only designed to make very quick, very snap decisions because that’s when they will just drag you into a conversation around price. […] cheapest, right, let’s go. 

Whereas the system two brain is the one that’s a lot more rational, it thinks more, and it is more calculated. The only way that you can really engage that side of the brain is through consultative selling approach, by engaging them more. If you were just talking about your products and services, that’s going to be engaging system one brain. If you’re speaking on a more consultative basis, that’s engaging system two brain, and that’s why it’s an effective approach particularly for expensive products and products that require a long term commitment is that you’re speaking for more rational side of the brain, which is essentially what consultative selling is doing. 

There’s definitely a method behind just this term consultative, I think it gets thrown around a lot, and it is definitely important, but that’s certainly one of the theories behind actually why it’s so important.

Marylou: And that’s a good delineation, I think, because the term trusted advisor is a term that’s so vague. I’m a process person, systems person, so I’m always trying to get things into a repeatable, consistent type of process. 

If there is a fork in the road with system one-system two and system two is a series of behaviors, a series of experiences that you can weave into your talk track for selling, then I think practice will get you to a point where, like you said, they’re going to be clients that are like-minded that are in similar industries that you can reuse and repurpose your talk tracks, your sales conversations. But the original build of it all does take some time, takes finessing, takes practice, and you’re going to fall on your face. Put your ego in your pocket because you’re going to just need to talk to the next guy about this to improve. 

Like you said, have fun with it. You aren’t going to be the expert. I’m not an expert. I flub all the time with things, but it’s like, I’m here to learn too. If we’re not learning, then we should be retired, I guess. We shouldn’t be still in this industry because it changes a lot and you’re always learning something new from your clients and prospects, so you have to look at it that way.

Simeon: It’s absolutely a skill. Being consultative and being a trusted advisor is definitely a skill. Like with any skill, it takes practice. Make a game out of it. Make a competition with yourself about I’m going to step into my next meeting. I’m genuinely from a consultancy firm, I’m coming in as a consultant. What is the kind of mindset, what are the processes that a consultant would have? 

Obviously, they’re going to ask lots of questions, the why questions. They’re going to really need to dive into what this business is all about, what the problems are, what the opportunities are because otherwise, they can’t do their job. So really go in and pretend you are a consultant really. You are, you can be, essentially. Like we said before, just challenge yourself to the next meeting, I’m going to ask two more questions or three more questions. Keep pushing yourself. I’m going to speak a little bit less. I’m going to speak a little bit less. Push yourself.

Marylou: Like we say, smaller improvements. Just micro improvements over time mean massive results.

Simeon: Yeah, and I do think what you were saying before about it being a behavioral skill, it is. I think that there’s definitely a value in recognizing that from the sales management perspective. With things like commissions, it can be very much tied to quarterly numbers. Ultimately, you need to hit your numbers, and that’s the be-all and end-all. I completely understand that. But the problem is, if as a salesperson the only thing you’re worried about is your quarterly numbers, you’re kind of chasing your tail a lot of the time. You’re not able to really think that far ahead. 

These are behavioral skills that will, in the long term, have a massive impact. You might not see that immediately because it might even prolong the sales cycle a little bit because you’re elevating conversations for different teams and having bigger conversations, so the sale itself might be bigger, but it might prolong the sales cycle because it’s going to be a more meaningful relationship you have.

From where I’ve seen it being really effective is when salespeople promote it to do that, whether it’s through monetary or just recognition, as well as this is your quarterly target, this is how much […] get the money you bring in. I actually want to see from the proposals that you’re sending or the conversations you’re having you exhibiting behavior X, Y, and Z. Asking these questions, being more consultative, taking this approach, and actually rewarding salespeople that way because that will encourage them to do it more, and then long term, I think that will then have benefits in terms of how much revenue you’re bringing in.

Marylou: I agree. In fact, one of my clients in Denmark, the CCO there, she’s amazing. She put together what she’s calling a maturity index. It’s rated on eight different areas of sales maturity, and some of that is how engaging you are with the client. How often you’re having a dialogue with them about certain topics. Whether you bring them together for business reviews, things like that. So it’s definitely looking towards the skill aspect and not really concerned about did you close this business in Q1 or Q2? She’s been incorporating that slowly over time. 

What’s happening with that company is the enablement side of life is not just training, it’s training and then coaching. The coaching piece is what is elevating all of our reps into trusted advisors really. It’s getting to that point. They stay longer, they’re happier, and they’re branching out and making recommendations. 

We have different levels of maturity just like Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, but it starts with a newcomer and it ends with an expert. The newcomer is someone coming straight in from maybe out of college or second job and sales, and then the expert is actually challenging the products that we deliver, the delivery mechanisms, whether or not we should have additional feature sets. I mean, they get into the weeds with the product growth and product alignment because they know the businesses so well of their clients. It’s super exciting. 

I haven’t seen that here in the States, but she’s from Europe. I think there’s a little bit more emphasis on the quality—I’m sure I’m going to put my foot in my mouth here—of the sale in Europe than here. It’s more like get the deal in and we’ll worry about it later. 

I would like to end this by giving people an idea of SimilarWeb up there. We’re on video. It’s the first time. This is kind of weird, but I’m excited about that. How can they get a hold of us, Simeon, and where should they start if they want to go down this path of leveraging metrics, leveraging this trusted advisor, or behavioral, where would you point people to start?

Simeon: People can simply reach out to me directly. Happy to have […] conversations. Go to similarweb.com, obviously to get more […]. Definitely happy to speak directly.

Marylou: Okay, very good. Very much appreciate your time. Sorry, your earbuds ran out. I will make sure that on the webpage that we’re putting together for you, we’ll have all the contact information for you. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye now.

Natasha Hemmingway is a sales coach with an interesting background and a lot of experience with the middle and bottom of the funnel. In today’s episode, she will share some of her background and expertise in creating successful sales where everybody wins. Listen in to hear Natasha discuss how she developed her sales processes, the importance of negotiating, and common mistakes in the pipeline. 

Episode Highlights:

• What got Natasha interested in sales
• How Natasha developed her sales process and whether her biology background factored in
• How Natasha envisions sales process and strategy
• How sales reps get it wrong
• Training salespeople to correct the wrong moves
• Whether Natasha starts by focusing on the clients or the physical setup of their pipelines and processes
• The importance of negotiating by looking for a win-win
• Whether the size of the account matters
• How COVID has affected the pipeline
• Common mistakes in the middle of the pipeline
• Chat bots vs. live customer service
• Top of funnel gaps and issues
• The need for slow sales
• Selling with heart

Resources:

Natasha Hemmingway

Natasha on LinkedIn

Natasha on Instagram

Natasha on YouTube

Transcript

Marylou: Hey, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Natasha Hemmingway. She’s going to talk to us today about her career in sales and give us some pointers, not necessarily a top of the funnel but the middle and the bottom of the funnel. I know you guys are going to love this because I have bombarded you for years with top of funnel stuff, and it is great having some experts attend and be part of the show who have the rest of that pipeline for you. 

Welcome, Natasha, to the podcast. 

Natasha: Thank you so much, Marylou. I’m so excited to be here and honored to serve and pour into your listenership, so I’m excited. Honored to be here. 

Marylou: Great. I’m so glad you’re here, too. We don’t get a lot of women on my podcast, so yay. Let’s celebrate that. 

Natasha: I’m super excited because you’re exactly right, we don’t see a lot of us in the sales industry. 

Marylou: I know. It’s crazy. I’d like to start off by asking you, as I ask a lot of folks, what got you interested or what pulled you into sales as a career for you?

Natasha: I graduated from college with a biology degree and I thought I didn’t want to go to med school. My mom’s a nurse practitioner. I have an aunt that’s an OBGYN. I have an uncle that’s an orthodontist. It’s just in my family. I grew up around that and I thought, I want to be an OBGYN.

As I got to college, I was like, no, I actually do not want to go to school for that much longer to have all of those loans. I was like, no, I don’t think that’s what I want. When I graduated with a degree in biology, I knew two things existed about me and that’s just me to my core, a) I love people, and b) I wanted to be able to help people. How can I help people? How can I be around people in conversation? 

I’m just a people person and so I knew that I could not go work in anybody’s lab, okay? I could not be a biologist in a chemistry lab or a biology lab with no windows, lab coat—that’s not for me. I started discovering and finding out. 

In college, what I also started doing is I went into physical therapy. I started getting my hours to apply for physical therapy school. At that point, they come out with a doctorate of physical therapy and I’m like, ah, this might merge the two things—helping people in a science biology-based kind of related way. Then three, being able to still have a doctorate of some sort. 

At the time, that was the career to go into and I knew I did not want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I applied to two physical therapy schools, then I also started looking into how to break into the medical world industry of sales, both pharmaceutical sales at that point was the hot thing. It was the thing to go to, it’s super popular, a great opportunity, but it was really hard to go into because, to be honest, Marylou, at that point, they were only mostly hiring male pharmacists with the company that I was looking into. Because I wanted to be with a reputable company that has been around for years, that has a proven track record that I can really learn from. 

As I went into that, I was like, I am an African American female. This will be interesting. Let’s definitely not put all our eggs in one basket because it was a white male-dominated pharmacy industry. I was like, okay, again, I need to have a backup plan, so I applied for both. At the time, I just prayed about it. I was like, you know what, whatever comes first, I’m going to trust it, that’s the path that I should take. I ended up, surprisingly, getting into pharmaceutical sales, I moved to a new city right after college, and I started and never looked back.

I have literally spent 16 years in corporate sales on the rep side, the management side, and eight years in both companies so very much a loyalist. I spent eight years in pharmaceutical sales and then I went to a higher level of medical device sales, a lot faster paced, a lot more money, and a lot more cutthroat. 

That’s kind of how I ended up being there because it married the two things. One, being able to be around people and using my science background, my biology degree, and two, being able to support and help people in regards to what I was selling because I’m a firm believer in you need to believe in what you sell in order to be successful, in my opinion.

Marylou: Given the fact that you’re coming from a bio background, do you feel that that prepared you from a sales process point of view and then you needed to learn the what to say part? Or do you abandon the process side and just focus 100% of your time on learning the sales conversation? What would you say your path was? When you made that decision to go into sales, what was the very next thing that you’re like, oh, goodness? 

Natasha: I think you have to actually know both. When they start you in sales school, you’re learning just the message, the niche, the product, and all those things. I think in order to be an excellent sales rep, you have to know the process and you have to know the strategy. It’s one thing to follow the company’s process and strategy, but then how do you actually make it unique to you? Because you’re out there with 400, sometimes 500 other reps. You’re ranked, you have quotas, and all these things. 

I think as you grow, you really start to understand, wow, if I’m going to really master this, get promoted, and be a lifelong salesperson, I need to know process and strategy just as well as obviously the messaging, the what to say, the how to say. I think as you advance and you grow, you start to understand deeper really what’s going to make you an excellent sales rep that allows you to be promoted to lead teams and things like that. 

I would say starting out, messaging niche, knowing what to say, then really starting to understand that no, to be excellent, it’s the process and strategy and how do I make it unique to me. 

Marylou: Interesting, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the process and strategy. My first love is understanding two things. I’m a programmer so my whole being wants to program something. If I do something more than once, chances are it should be programmed. That’s my mentality. 

As I started looking at the sales process and the way my rhythms were, I started noticing things that I did repetitively by hand and look towards ways that I can leverage whether it’s technology, or pre-prepare things ahead of time, wherever it was, to help me so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. How did you envision process and strategy? Where was your first move there? 

Natasha: I think that is exactly it. When you are a sales rep and you’re in a corporation, the company gives you the handbook, the bible, the training, but it’s for you to actually understand your clients, your territory, opportunities, gaps, churn, you need to know all of these things. You’re exactly right. That’s what happens. 

I’m a very type-A perfectionist type of personality. My thing was how do I maximize opportunity and reduce time? My brain is kind of like yours, Marylou. If I see something that I’m doing over and over and over or I’ve noticed something that’s working for three of my key accounts, what and how do I actually make that a process to actually implement it or duplicate it in these other accounts to help them grow to be a key account? 

I think you understand very quickly that you’re doing a lot of the same behaviors and as you start to find rhythms, trends, and strategies that are working, it’s like, why wouldn’t you start to go, see, and test that to say okay, I did this here. What does this account that’s over here in this other city have the same potential? Does it make sense to be there and put this type of process, strategy, attention, and time all of that there? If so, do it, test it, and figure out what works or doesn’t work. 

Marylou: You said a key phrase that I think in my travels, I have been beating my head against the wall about this, but you naturally just said, I am looking for things to help my clients grow, to help my clients. You’re putting the client in the center of this whole equation. 

Natasha: One thousand percent. I think we often get it so wrong as sales reps. 

Marylou: So wrong, Natasha. 

Natasha: We’re so focused on our goal, what we need, growing, quotas, making money, and hitting bonuses, and that’s literally why my business sits under the umbrella to the point that it’s trademark selling with heart, not hustle. When we do that, that’s the hustle part. You’re worried about yourself, but really as sales reps, we’re a service-based industry. 

You may be selling a product but you’re there to serve the client and advance their growth. The minute that you start flipping that and you make what you do and what you’re selling about the heart of the client, what they need, why they need you, and then you explain or can articulate to them why you have the best solution or why you’re the best person to bring a solution to their problem, the money comes, the growth comes. 

It’s like we get it so backward where it’s like hustle, hustle, hustle and it’s no slowdown and really tap into your account because every single thing that you do if you want to know a process or a strategy, know your customer. Do you want to know how to grow them? Know your customer. You want to know what they need? Know your customer. 

It always goes back to them and actually helps you develop the process in this strategy where you no longer become a sales rep, you’re actually a partner, and there’s a sense of trust that’s built from that. There’s no resistance around like, I don’t know if I can trust doing that, or I don’t know if we should go that route. It’s like, oh, no, we are in partnership with Natasha. She is thinking about our best interest, our bottom line, and what growth we need, and so when she says something, we trust it. 

Marylou: Is this idea that you have, naturally I would say and you say we get it wrong, is it coachable? Is it trainable to flip that with any sales rep that you’ve ever taught or mentored?

Natasha: Absolutely. What’s so cool, Marylou, is that I don’t care if they’re male clients of mine, female, introvert, extrovert love it, this style of selling around selling with heart, not hustle is literally flexible to any personality. It’s just that is the person willing to trust it? Because when I start breaking down simple things and I reverse engineer them why this way works, it’s like ah, I never thought of it that way. 

Sometimes it’s just revealing it to them because there is this certain amount of energy that you have to constantly put in check and in place when it comes to selling. The hustle, the money, the goals, the quota, the expectation, the outcome, it’s so much that we just get spun up into it, but it absolutely can be coached. I don’t care if it’s a company and if it’s a small business if it is a person. We’ve seen it happen with other corporations who do it this way, and even in their marketing, they’re shifting towards that where it’s really forward-facing.

The bottom line is we are in a world where we’re dealing with conscious buyers. They’re very, very conscious, they’re very aware, and they want to know, do you care or you don’t. To some level or degree, they want to know. Yes, it is. It’s duplicatable, it is flexible, it can be taught to anybody. 

Marylou: When you go in and work with companies and sales organizations or teams—with a process and a strategy in mind—do you look physically at the pipeline and start attacking certain areas? Or do you, first and foremost, take a look at their existing account base if they have that? When you step over that threshold to a client, where are you focusing first? Are you focusing on the clients, or are you looking at the physical setup of their pipelines and processes? 

Natasha: I would say first, it’s about the customer and the client. What is currently going on and what do they perceive are their gaps. Then I think looking at the client base like digging in deeper, but I think no matter what, both have to exist if you want to take a holistic approach. 

Sometimes I think as consultants, we can come in with this is how you fix it, but it’s like, although that can yield a short term win or you can completely miss the mark, again, if you’re starting with finding out as much information that you can from the client, it’s going to actually help you better develop a customized process or strategy for that set client that meets their needs because that’s the goal. 

Like you said, we’re there to help them grow, not hit our agenda, but what is growth to them? What do they want, or what do they perceive as gaps? Because a lot of times, they can’t see what they can’t see. The more information when we come in with an open mind and we’re willing to kind of start mining and pulling back the layers, we’re going to have a better understanding of what we see that’s going on, then what they perceive, and then what needs to then be done that you can come to an agreement of what actually meets that solution that they’re looking for. 

Marylou: Okay. Now, you said the light shines on the middle and bottom of the funnel, negotiation. I love the fact that you love negotiation because that’s kind of an anomaly. I think people are just so fearful. A lot of reps are in this sort of hope mode and just going in. With negotiation, you’re going in. Let me answer my own question and you can correct me or not. Because you’re so focused on the client and you want them to win, then you go into the negotiation looking for that win-win. It comes naturally. 

Natasha: That right there, you hit the nail on the head. That’s why it has to start with the customer at the beginning because you automatically gain trust. I tell people when they come on a strategy call with me. One of the first things I do after welcoming the calls, I let them know, newsflash, I am not here to sell you me. 

I’m not here to sell you me, my business, my team, my corporation, or my solution. No, I’m here to find out two big things, what you need and why you need it. Then out of integrity, if I know that I have the solution to help you, I will invite you into that opportunity, but if I don’t, out of integrity, I will let you know that. 

Disarming that and closing the negotiation, why I love it so much because I’m such a people person, it’s a lot of EQ. It’s a lot of really shifting your mindset, having confidence around how do you just simply communicate because that’s what sales is. It’s serving and communication. I say the three pillars of sales success are communication, energy, and then the strategy. The sales process and the strategy sit under that. If we don’t understand that, we get caught up in our emotions. I’m like, relax. You’re there to provide them a solution. That’s why they’re there because they believe that you have what they need and they want to advance the conversation with you. 

A lot of times, we trip ourselves up by getting in our own way. When you shift that energy and the focus to the client, not what you’re going to say, not what you’re going to negotiate, not what your pricing is, not if they’re going to say yes or no, not how badly you need them to love you, buy you, are you scared? It’s not about that. The minute you start flipping to their focus and what they need, that’s a switch. 

Marylou: Definitely. I’m assuming that these could be small, medium, or large deals that you’re negotiating. It doesn’t really matter because the “playbook” or the way that you approach it would be the same or similar, but you have more people to deal with more personalities. 

Natasha: Right. You’re exactly right. It really does not matter. It doesn’t matter the size of the account. Obviously, the size of the account may require other people that handle certain arms or other team members that are needed. We were talking about contracting in where it’s like, I’m bringing in Marylou. She is going to focus on the top of the funnel. She is the expert. She’s the strategist. I’m going to take middle to bottom.

Sometimes I think in bigger contracts, it’s smart. Bring in more experts so that you get to the goal and you get there quicker, and that’s understanding capacity. Then I think the smaller businesses, usually those can be taken on a little bit easier, one. But still, there might be an opportunity to bring it in. I think at the end of the day, it doesn’t change. It’s just my approach and if they’re open to doing that. 

Marylou: Let’s talk about some of the gaps that you’ve found. In generic terms, the middle of the funnel, what are the common either mistakes or trends that you’re seeing that seem to be ubiquitous? We’re in the middle of COVID here still, has that impacted some of your strategies as far as the middle of the pipeline is concerned? 

Natasha: No. I think if anything is highlighted the focus of how much you need to be focused on middle of pipeline. So that pipeline advancement, middle of pipelines. The biggest trend that I see and the biggest issue is companies not really having, I would say, authentic genuine follow-up processes. You know this, we say it in sales all the time, the fortune is in the follow-up. It’s one of the biggest gaps where people drop the ball. 

One, they don’t have a system, process, and strategy in place to make sure the follow up happens, the ball doesn’t get dropped; or two, they’re so busy trying to move so fast and generically automate the process that we don’t also have some kind of organic touch process in there and we miss that because again, we’re dealing with conscious buyers. 

Let’s say it’s a SaaS company, or I don’t care what the company is but they have inbound outbound. Hello, there is a lot that can be done in that middle advancement where we can ensure by having a process and a strategy that we don’t drop the ball when it comes to follow-up. 

I would also say again, the follow-up is where I see the ball drop, but also not having an actual process and strategy for your said company team to follow, or if it’s there, something is not working. I think sometimes we get so fast or we want to churn, turn the sale, and we […] about this high touch low tech model. I think there’s a need for both. It’s great. We have high tech, low touch. Great, that works, but there’s a subset of customers too that you may be missing out on that need high touch low tech. 

Is it a thing or does it exist? What does the process look like? How are you unique? Because we have so much technology at our hand and we forget we’re communicating with humans. 

Marylou: Yes, and as my CCO loves to say, rubbish in, rubbish out. Even if we have this follow-up engine and technology in place, the conversations that we’re putting in there have got to resonate and have got to feel as if we care and that we are addressing the needs and what resonates instead of these bots. It’s almost like you get these messages. Yeah, they’re timely and there’s a lot of them. 

Natasha: That part, I was just going to say the whole bot chat thing and not having a live person that I can talk to. I know the platforms and the services that I use on the backend for operations for my business, I would much rather pay more money for a platform that if I need to escalate something that I get a live person, or that they will send me a […] and they will walk me through something because you are wasting my time when I’m trying to get to a solution.

I have to go through 15 million chats or it’s a live bot chat, and then somebody emails me two, three, four days later and I can’t even still get it. You cannot do everything through tech. That is a huge, huge, huge issue I see in that whole midline.

Then closing, it depends on is it web base, inbound, outbound? Or is it face-to-face or is it phone? Whatever it is, that varies. That goes back to that mindset, this kind of like, I just want to close the deal. It’s like, no, we actually focused on that person and what’s best for them and actually meeting their needs because when people feel that and see that, they’ll buy from you all day. The price point doesn’t matter at that point, literally. It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. It’s about how you made them feel and did they feel like they have a solution and that you actually care? That closes them.

I am curious, Marylou. On your end, what do you see at the top of funnel gaps and issues?

Marylou: The main thing is we feed, I call it the rocket ship with banana fuel. We haven’t done the work with clients. It’s all the same, Natasha, with the client in the center. We haven’t done the work to say, is this an ideal account for me? Is this account one that I would chase manually? I do want to have as a client because I feel that we can best serve them and really understand at a deep and meaningful level the people within those accounts that are going to benefit from a conversation. 

That planning upfront is absent in so many. Why? Because we can buy lists, we can throw them into an automated system, and we can just churn the heck out of it, blast all these touches to people, and upset them because they’re not relevant. The biggest mistake I see is that we don’t take the time to plan. We don’t put that client at the center of our universe and understand what is important to them. What can we do to express and get them to fully understand and be able to articulate back to us why we’re different, why they should change this whole emotional component we’re missing.

Top of funnel, it’s more about emotion, less about the logical, but we have to segue then to you in the middle of the funnel to a bit of the logical so they start putting the pieces together to say, oh, I really need this and they do it differently. I can actually tell you how it’s different. I don’t know how it all works yet, as I learn more from them because I trust them, then I’ll work through the actual logistics and the logical reasons why this is a better fit for us. 

I think that’s the biggest thing I see. It’s frustrating as heck for me because these systems are, like I say, rocket ships. They basically will send out as many messages before you get blacklisted. If you put the wrong ingredients, it’s like making a soufflé in your kitchen. If you put the wrong things in there, if you use baking soda instead of sugar, you’re going to get a very ill-tasting chocolate soufflé. 

Natasha: Absolutely. That’s so interesting that it’s pretty much the same. You know what it makes me think about, Marylou? I don’t know how this came to mind, but go with it. You know how In the fashion industry right now there’s a lot of small business designers who are really into slow fashion, they call it? Slow fashion where it’s organic, it’s equitably sourced, it is not just mass-produced, it’s more unique to their customer and client, and they are blowing up. They are blowing up.

I have a client that is like that. He’s a designer. It is unbelievable. It’s almost like we need to have a little bit, and I’m not saying that technology is not helpful, but I feel like we also need to have these slow sales. There needs to be this segment of yes, we have these things, but then how do we segment out of that and really start having high touch, low tech. 

Marylou: I had a friend and colleague who used to describe technology as allowing us to spin multiple plates. You got them on your feet, you got them on your hand, you got them on your head, they’re all spinning around and it’s all these different types of accounts, these different ways to serve. Technology allows us to manage them all very easily and remind us when it’s time to do the high touch or when it’s time to get on a blog post or whatever it is. 

We have a bunch of little series now that can remind us to do things in the right order so that we have the best experience laid out for our clients. That’s what technology is designed to do, but we have to know, to your point, what the process and the strategy is by putting that client in the center of our universe and understanding them at a very deep level—how they function, how they do their workflow? If I’m sitting at the desk, what does my day in the life look like as a client? What are things that are keeping me from getting to finish a project, to do a project that is done well, or to start a project? 

What are those things—through the lens of our product—that highlight the fact that we’re not there yet? We need to be able to just get a little bit further into our knowledge and highlight something that we know can take us a step further to solve our problems.

Natasha: Yeah, that is so good and I think it’s so interesting that the problem that you’re seeing is the same that I’m seeing bottom. I think there’s so much there, which is why we exist, right? We get to help lead these companies and these small businesses and really making sure they don’t get lost in the technology because I think the convenience is easy to be like, oh, this is so much more convenient than doing it this way so let’s go that way. 

I think a lot of times, companies have good intentions, they just don’t have the awareness. They don’t have that, but that’s why we’re needed to be able to come in and help them realize actually wait, we need to pull back the layers and really understand on a deeper level. Because when we do that, we start aligning ourselves with the right customers who actually not just pay, but they will also stay. 

Marylou: Right, exactly. That we can leverage technology to emotionally stimulate, intellectually inspire, and positively improve their condition. It’s just that we have got to be able to feed this engine with those messages in order we think we’ll allow them to absorb it, believe it, and trust us to then advance them. They advance themselves through the funnel. It’s like they sell themselves at that point.

Natasha: That’s so, so true when we do that right. I love that. 

Marylou: I’m speaking with Natasha Hemmingway. Natasha, thank you so much for your time today. This has been absolutely a great discussion and so heartwarming. I think one of the things that I know for me personally is that I tend to think of people that don’t get this as “lazy at times” so I’m tainted. Where you’re like, no, we’re selling with heart and we’re teaching people. I think that’s such a great attitude. I’ve learned from you today that I should stop. When I get to that point where I’m like ugh, I should just realize these are multiple humans.

Natasha: That’s it, and they also don’t know what they don’t know. What’s beautiful is it gives you the opportunity to come in and be able to provide a solution to them. I think when we think that way in our business, we’re selling with heart, not hustle. We’re focused on what are they struggling with? How can we bring a solution to them? How can we partner with them? How can we bring value? But then also, helping them duplicate that in the way that they show up to their clients and customers as well, it becomes this ripple and everybody starts winning. 

Marylou: Absolutely. Empathy, empathy, empathy. How do we get a hold of you to learn more from you? What do we do? 

Natasha: You can find me on my website at natashahemmingway.com. On Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, everywhere is Natasha Hemmingway. The website honestly gives you if it’s a speaker interest form, workshop, training, consulting, or coaching, it’s all on the website. 

Marylou: Very good, and I’ll be sure for the listeners that we have a page for Natasha. All her links will be on there, so you can go to any of the sites and they’ll direct you to maryloutyler.com and there’ll be a nice page with all of her info on it. 

Thank you again, Natasha. I really enjoyed our conversation today. 

Natasha: Thank you so much for having me, excited to serve and pour into your community, and look forward to continued conversation. 

Marylou: Wonderful.

Contact management matters, maybe more than you already know. Today’s guest knows it, which is why he goes out of his way to learn and understand even more about the business he’s in on a regular basis. Today, you’ll hear about Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. Listen in to learn more about his history, what Nimble does and how it can help, and some of the many things that Jon knows about CRM and content management.

Episode Highlights:

• History of CRM and contact management
• How long Jon has been running Nimble
• Nimble’s relationship with Microsoft
• Where sales professionals are today
• Tools and processes for building relationships
• Why you need a process for serving others
• Nimble’s discount code: JON40
• How a Twitter comment shifted into LinkedIn, email, and Jon’s calendar
• Working on staying top of mind to prospects, customers, and influencers

Resources:

Jon Ferrara

Nimble

Transcript

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest, I bet Jon doesn’t remember, but I’ve met Jon probably in 1986 or 1987. It was when you first started GoldMine. When you were in that little office and you had a headset on. It was you and I can’t remember your partner at the time but in southern California, not in Santa Monica yet. Not at the beach where you guys at the top, but you were somewhere else. I can’t remember the name of the city.

But with me today everybody is the CEO of Nimble, Jon Ferrara. We have known each other off and on for, it’s going on, 30 years, I think.

Jon: Isn’t that amazing? 30 years.

Marylou: Is that right?

Jon: They say that marriage that gets past eight years is doing okay. You know what, first off, thank you Marylou for that kind introduction. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come on your stage and have a conversation with you where I hope that it leaves people with some inspiration and maybe some education. I also love that we share such a similar background. You and I are computer science undergrads who worked our way out through system support and then made our way into sales. I think that’s relatively unique for most salespeople.

We have a stronger knowledge, stronger product background for the things that we sell. But also a stronger love of process that helps us to be more successful in sales.

Marylou: Yes, and that by far I think is the love of process, the love of finding ways to leverage technology where it makes sense, especially when you’re doing repetitive tasks. I just remember GoldMine was the best CRM, and you’ve spoiled us for life because we had that experience early on as sales executives. It’s really never been replicated in terms of the ease of use, the navigation, just the intuitiveness of it until now with Nimble. You’ve taken all that knowledge and then some.

Jon: Well, Marylou, I think it would help to give a little history of CRM and contact management because I think if you know history, you better understand the present and can predict the future. Can I share my vision of that?

Marylou: Yes, I would love that.

Jon: Okay. You’re right, Marylou, organization is critical to managing relationships at scale. I remember the story about that agent in Hollywood. They had an assistant next to them. In every meeting, they took notes on every conversation and they basically created a process for follow-up and follow through. It was all paper-based. That really started with the Rolodex. Just being able to manage the cards that you’re getting from people. A Rolodex is just a collection of names. It doesn’t give you any organization.

Then some genius developed something called the 6×9 index card method. Have you ever heard of that?

Marylou: I have.

Jon: The 6×9 index card system took those names and organize a follow-up process where you can create an index card for anybody that’s important to you, then log a note of the conversation, then write down the recall date, and file that in the future in that little index card system for when you’re supposed to follow up. Because I think it’s the basics that win games. Most business people, salespeople don’t follow up and follow through. That’s because we’re human. We could only manage 100 to 200 people, I had at one time, and today we have thousands of connections.

That 6×9 index card system was the way people rolled for a while until computers started, and I think that the early pioneers of sales might have used spreadsheets. Act started out as an add-in to Symphony, which was a Lotus spreadsheet, sort of […]. It was added to the Symphony so an individual salesperson can manage contacts, notes, and tasks for the contacts. But what it didn’t have was the ability to manage a shared group of contacts and to electronically tie email and calendar to contacts, and provide simple pipeline management and nurture automation marketing.

That’s where I came into the world of CRM and automation. There was no CRM. There was no contact management. Outlook didn’t exist. I grew out of a systems engineer into a sales position in a Dallas field office for Banyan Vines, and I had to manage leads, pipeline, and forecast. I looked for a tool to do that. I found TeleMagic, which essentially automated the index card recall date system. I found Snap, which automated the pipeline management, and Act which was plugged into Symphony.

But I didn’t find something that really rolled all together, which integrated email, contact, and calendar sales market automation for teams. I quit my job and started GoldMine to do that. But when I built GoldMine, there was no Outlook or Salesforce, no contact management or CRM. We were really the first one that was not workable for teams. I didn’t design it for management reporting. I designed it for myself because I was a salesperson. As a salesperson, I need to build relationships at scale and turn those relationships into revenue.

The earliest CRMs were really designed for salespeople and that’s why they love them. They loved Act and GoldMine. They love them because they’re built for empowering them. What happened was Outlook was created because Microsoft doesn’t innovate, they iterate, and they built their contact manager which was in the CRM. Act and GoldMine shifted more into the CRM bucket and people started living and managing relationships in Outlook. Then Siebel was created because enterprises wanted command and control at scale of those contacts, and they were afraid that salespeople were going to walk out the door with their Acts and GoldMines.

Then they basically built CRM, but not for salespeople. They built it for management. All future CRMs are built for management. CRM stands for customer relationship management. It should stand for customer reporting management because it’s really more for management. That’s why anybody who’s listening to this today should have their own personal CRM. They should have some tool that unifies contacts from all the siloed places they are. Their personal email productivity system, which might be iCloud or Google. Their corporate email productivity system, which might be Microsoft 365 and Google—whatever they call it these days—G Suite.

For whatever applications they might be using because if you don’t have a contact database that’s clean, that you can easily segment and outreach, and have the ability to do basic notes and follow-up tasks, then you’re going to struggle. Even if you’re forced to use a CRM at work because you want to bring your network and your brand with you to work every single day. That’s the beauty of CRM and contact management. That’s what I got back in the business. As I started using social, I saw it was going to be the way we work, buy, and sell.

I started looking for a relationship manager that was social, I couldn’t find it. I saw that contact management in G Suite was broken. Then I saw that CRM really wasn’t about relationships, it was about reporting. I got back in the saddle and built them.

Marylou: Back in the saddle. You’ve been now running Nimble for how long?

Jon: Too long. Almost 10 years. I think that I was early to the game. I kind of pioneered social selling and social CRM by building the first team relationship manager that automatically builds itself from the contacts you have. Back in those pioneering days, I actually got access to the public and private APIs of LinkedIn. Nobody has ever gotten those. I got them and I built Sales Navigator before it existed in what should be, what it isn’t today.

I integrated Facebook and Twitter, effectively built the first social CRM, and pioneered social selling before people really saw that social was a way to get to know, engage, and stay top of mind with your prospects. When everybody shut down their APIs for various reasons, I pivoted and became a simple CRM layer, not just on G Suite, but on Microsoft 365 as well.

Because if you think about it, G Suite is a Novell of its era and Microsoft 365 is the anti-server of its era. In other words, Microsoft 8 Novell after Novell pioneered workgroup networking. Microsoft 8 G Suite after it pioneered cloud email productivity things. That’s the way we scaled GoldMine out of the apartment and partnered with Novell resellers, and we scaled it to $100 million-plus in revenue a year by partnering with Microsoft to help drive their first-party solutions because nobody would buy a single server without GoldMine to drive it. That’s how we really scaled $100 million.

We did the same thing with Microsoft, and did I tell you that Microsoft signed a global reseller agreement with us last year where they selected us as their simple CRM for Office 365? That we’re effectively the simple CRM for Microsoft today?

Marylou: My goodness. I did not know that. That’s exciting news.

Jon: It is.

Marylou: Super. Take us to today. Take us to where we are today as sales executives and the relationship has always been the key importance in generating revenue, in establishing long-term business opportunities. Where are we today and what are we doing wrong? I know we’re still using the command and control reporting engines of the CRM that’s Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, but what about the actual selling conversation? What’s changed?

Jon: I think the biggest thing that we’re doing wrong today is we’re relying on automation to communicate with our prospects. How does your inbox let, Marylou?

Marylou: It’s insane.

Jon: Yeah. In fact, I actually think it’s a product I’m going to develop. I’m going to read the email headers and look for the signature of the automation systems like Outreach and SalesLoft, and it will actually put those messages and spam automatically. What do you think of that? Could I sell that?

Marylou: If a colleague of mine has invented a gated email where you have to pay a penny or more to be a recipient—to be received by the recipient, I mean there’s just a lot of interesting technologies that are being generated to help us manage our inbox.

Jon: Yeah.

Marylou: I can totally relate to that.

Jon: We know when we’re being pounded on. I think that salespeople in today’s world are relying too much on automation to try to break through the clutter to your prospects, your customers, and ideally their influences as well. Because if I want to access sales executives and sales management, what better way to do it than you become their trusted adviser? Where you’re not trying to sell them something, you’re actually there to help them grow. I think that that mind shift is where we’re going. 

We’re short of leaving behind the bag-them-and-tag-them Oracle Enterprise, killing anybody in the way to get the deal. We’re moving towards really where service is the new sales. I think to get there, you need to be much more organized with the contacts that you’re creating, your brand that you’re building, and what you do with it. 

Ultimately, what is your intention as a human being? Why are you here? Are you here to make as much money as you can, or are you here to help as many people grow in the brief period of time that you’re on this planet? Because I think the latter is the truth, and that I am on this planet to grow my soul. The best way I can do that is by helping other people grow theirs. The mindset of sales, I believe, is shifting, but we still haven’t shifted there with it totally.

Marylou: Right. My question about that is I think there’s always been that, especially in really excellent salespeople. This notion of the trusted adviser of someone who is a visionary, but also is willing to take your hand and walk you through the glide path from where you are today to where you know you want to go. But also where you don’t even know about yet, what you don’t know where you want to go. I think that that’s something that we are definitely moving towards.

But my question is always, how can we leverage technology to help us do better at that? How do we look at intent data? How do we look at empathetic conversations and leverage some of the footprints that are now out there for us so that we can weave the conversation that benefits our audience members—whoever we’re trying to reach, our targeted person—in a way that makes them feel that we are personalizing our communication, but yet we’re having technology help us do that.

Jon: Yeah. I think there is a way. You just need to have the intent to do it that way. I think that the key thing is that any—and not just salespeople, Marylou, because I really believe that any person in business today should be concerned about their brand and their network, and then nurturing and building that brand and network on a daily basis. But if you do that, if you do go and build an identity in all the places where your prospects, customers, influencers have conversations and then give your knowledge away. To share content that’s inspirational, educational in and around the areas of the promise of your products and services.

If you don’t write, just identify people that inspire you and share their content. Then follow that up by not just putting fishing lures in the river, but by listening, engaging, and connecting with those people, then to reel in the ones that matter in an organized way, and then follow up and follow through. If you do that properly, that system, then you can’t help but win in life. But I think that today if you do what I tell you to do, which is build identity, share content, listen and engage, connect, not with the intent to bag-and-tag, but to find ways to blow in people’s sales, you’re going to have tens of thousands of connections.

Then you need something that automatically enriches those contacts with people and company data so that you can effectively segment them, then identify the ones that matter, and then do the basics to reach out in a human way. Because I think the more digital we get, the more human we need to be to connect effectively. Marylou, did anybody ever teach you in sales when you go to somebody’s office, look at the walls, look at the books they read, the degree, the school they went to, the knick-knacks they collect?

Marylou: Yes. At some point in life, yes.

Jon: I used to teach salespeople that. The reason I did is because by doing your homework, understanding who somebody is, what the business is about, and then connecting with them in a human way to share commonalities in order to develop the intimacy and trust you need to get them to open up to you about the business issues, which as a professional you can then solve. After that, to stay top of mind, not because you deliver the best price or product, but beyond that. That you connect in a human way and they’ll remember you, and that’ll get you through the bumps of price and delivery that may occur from competitors.

I think that’s the natural human cycle that’s always been there. I remember when social-first came out, people thought that LinkedIn was a business thing and Facebook was a personal thing and the two don’t mix, or oil and water. But the reality is that people buy from people they like, know, and trust. Especially in this digital world where we can’t go seek—in this pandemic world where it’s harder to go see all the people that we want to see, you need to build that human connection.

That’s why I recommend that business executives, not just build identities on LinkedIn, but across all the spaces where humans connect. Then to share content across them that’s not just business but personal as well because people connect on what I call the five F’s of life—family, friends, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the softer side of things that build those permanent connections that will get you through the tougher times. I think that we don’t do that effectively because it takes work. I think that there should be—that’s why we build tools like Nimble that make it easier to do that preparation. Because if you’re not preparing, then you’re not showing up for the game.

Marylou: Right. To that end, I know you’re a process expert, is this flow that so easily comes off your tongue something that a person who wants to be able to serve their clients in the way you describe? It doesn’t necessarily have that recipe, that rhythm of where do I start? I’m so used to getting a list of names, and I try to organize them by role, what their workflow is, what their day in life is so that I can […] the lens of my product figure out ways to help them, service them, affect them, transform them, delight them, whatever it is that I’m trying to get them to do at some point. 

Is there a process that I, as maybe not a seasoned sales executive, could come in using a tool and actually be successful at?

Jon: There is. It is really simple. If you think about it, it all boils down to a process, and you think about that 6×9 index card method that we talked about. If you think about that agent—I forgot the person’s name, but I’m going to have to figure out that because I love telling stories with real names—that had somebody that logged all the stuff and created the follow-up. It’s the basics that win games, Marylou, it really is. Teamwork wins even more games.

I think that knowing that you need a personal CRM for your personal brand and network is a good place to start. If you accept today’s tools—Google Contacts, iCloud Contacts, Microsoft Contacts, LinkedIn Contacts, Twitter Contacts, Facebook Contacts—these siloed places are not the best place to keep an essential database. If you could build an essential database and keep it clean and up to date, and then for everybody you engage with, log a basic note and schedule the next task. Because Marylou, if you don’t have the next step with somebody, then they’re not important to you.

Marylou: That is exactly right.

Jon: Especially people that you think you might be able to serve because if you could serve others, if you could help others to get what they want, you can have anything you want in life, says the great, Zig Ziglar. The funny thing, Marylou is that there’s a lot of “thought leaders” out there and I can name a few names in sales, marketing, and relationships. But really, they’re always regurgitating the greats—Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, et cetera. 

The communication methods may have changed, but the basics have not. Anybody listening to this today, think about where your contacts are, think about what your process is, forget about what tools they give you at work.

You’ve got to basically bring your own tools with you. You got to bring your brand and your network with you in an organized way in order for you to apply it to whatever business things that you’re doing, and I think to start a good database. It really is about contact management. I encourage anybody listening to this today to go do an audit of where are all your important contacts? What is the daily process that you have with your connections and conversations? Where are you putting your identity? What content are you putting out in your identity? Are you listening and engaging on a regular basis?

Here’s my formula. In the morning when I have my coffee I do some reading because I do what I do because I dig what I do. I hope you hear it in my voice. I dig technology, and I dig its application to people’s success. I think what’s more important to your success than the relationships that you build. I read about content about sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, et cetera on a daily basis and then I share that. That helps to build my brand and my network, and then I do that for 30 minutes when I’m on my coffee each day. In the afternoon, I spend 30 minutes going through the signals of the people who are commenting and engaging.

I build records for the ones that matter, and I build the next step and follow up with them. It’s incredible what that simple workflow does for my brand and my network. Marylou, did you know I sold GoldMine when I was 40 years old and I retired for 10 years and spent 10 years raising three babies?

Marylou: I remember that, yes.

Jon: Nobody knew who Jon Ferrara was when I started Nimble.

Marylou: Not when you came back, no. You had to start from scratch.

Jon: From scratch, right. I started to […] social. I remember I typed in hello, world on Twitter my first time in 2006. I eventually started to use them and build a, what do you call it, a rhythm out of it. That rhythm started building all these contacts and then I had a problem. How do you manage these contacts? This is the same thing that started GoldMine. The funny thing is that I wasn’t the only salesperson that had trouble managing relationships and contacts in the GoldMine days—in the DOS days, believe it or not. In the cloud days, I’m not the only person struggling to manage my brand and my network today.

I think that the pandemic just highlighted how important connections are. You know, Marylou, we may have not spoken for a year or so, but you know me. I think that you like me because you connected with a part of my humanity. You don’t connect with me because I’m an entrepreneur, I am a pioneer at CRM or whatever. You connect with me because there’s a human connection. All those sales thought leaders who basically say relationships don’t matter, I get them. They got to poke the eye. I do believe in things like Jim Keenan teaching with gap selling, all that stuff, but relationships do matter.

In managing, relationships and contacts are critical to your life’s success, so go for that audit. If you find that it’s lacking in a unified platform that you’re using, I encourage you to go find one. You could try nimble.com, and if you dig it, I’m going to give you 40% off for your first three months. Use the code JON40 when you become a subscriber. Connect with me and tell me how I can make it better because I’m here to power your success.

Marylou: It’s really a great tool. I love the signals part that you mentioned. At the end of the day, a lot of what we do in business development is to organize our workflow in locks of time and single-tasking. You naturally do that as an engineer, and I do too as a process engineer because of the fact that that’s how we were taught and that feels comfortable to me. It feels good to do it that way. I love the idea that you can start simply. As you heard him say in the morning, we call it Pomodoro, take one Pomodoro 25 minutes on, single-tasking activity, 5-minute break and do your reading and sharing.

At the end of the day, look to see the signals, which we get a lot of signals now on the internet through a variety of different tools and platforms. Then you can see who’s engaged with your content, and those are the people with whom you would love to continue that conversation.

Jon: Can I share a brief story about a cycle that happened with me that I think illustrates this?

Marylou: Yes, please.

Jon: Okay. As I shared earlier, I share content that’s inspirational and educational in and around the areas of promise of my products and services. Hopefully, you can grasp those words, I know they were a lot. But that means I share content that’s inspirational and educational around social, sales, and marketing, not just those hashtags but there’s an example. Then what I do is I listen and engage to see who’s buying on that. There was a girl, Tiffani Bova. You know Tiffany, right?

Marylou: Yes.

Jon: Tiffani Bova was the CRM analyst at Gartner and Salesforce who’s been hiring every analyst in the world. They hired her and she’s the spokesperson for them now. She said CRM isn’t about command and control, it’s about empowering customer-facing business team members. Somebody replied back to that on Twitter and said, […], it is about command and control. […] the sales manager is going to loosen the grip. Isn’t this what Jon Ferrara has been teaching, preaching, and building with GoldMine and Nimble? 

Nimble basically listens to my signals and then reaches that contact with people and company data, sees if it matches people that matter to me, and surfaces those signals in the application. It said, Jon, go check this one out. Nimble automagically built a record for the guy and his name was Rand. Well, who the heck is Rand? That’s just his name. But Nimble turned that into his full name, title, company, email, and phone number. Thank you, Nimble.

Marylou: Very nice.

Jon: I saw that he was the head of data and in CRM at Disney, Walt Disney. Of course, that would be somebody that would be interesting for me to connect with. I was more able to effectively respond to that Twitter comment, and in the background, right in the Twitter UI because Nimble lives in any app or any place you’re at, so Nimble was sitting there on my right-hand side called the Nimble prospector. It enabled me to send him an email that was templated and trackable. I was able to say, thank you, Rand. That was really kind in the comment and I would love to connect and get to know you more. Here’s my calendar link.

He then reached out to me on LinkedIn and we built a connection out of a further conversation where I found out that he not only lives in my town but his daughter goes to my school. I figured let’s just meet up for breakfast because the more digital we get, the more human we need to be, and I invited him for breakfast. 

That simple Twitter comment shifted from a soft place in Twitter to a firmer place in LinkedIn messaging where Nimble was actually still there, then into my email inbox where Nimble was still there, and to my Calendar for that appointment where Nimble lives there. That is the natural cycle of connections and conversations today. They start in a soft place and move to firmer places. If you do it right, they turn into a mutual, beneficial, manageable outcome, but more importantly, you should shift them into your software connections for the people you dig.

In other words, in the old days, we took people to a restaurant, to a ball game, or to our home to connect deeper. Today, we can take them into places like Facebook and Instagram where you can connect on the areas of commonality in a deeper way. 

A lot of people dig my barbecuing, backpacking, my family focus, photography or whatever it is. That’s the natural cycle of business connection, conversation, and networking. It’s just that today’s CRM’s aren’t designed to do any of that. They’re designed for you to go to it and type in who you’re connected with, what you know, and what you should do next. Nobody does it because you have to go to the CRM to do it. You work for the CRM and have to go to it to use it. You should have a CRM that works for you by building itself and then works with you wherever you’re engaging. We call this the nimble way.

Marylou: That is a beautiful thing and it’s definitely the way that—I know for me personally, I prefer to transact that way. I like to build long-term relationships with clients and prospects and share my information as well as teach. I think a lot of us are natural teachers and enjoy educating. 

This is the way of the future and it really came out pretty heavily, I think, and was very much in our face with COVID. Because we had to adapt to a way to continue building relationships, but doing it on a remote basis, which for a lot of people is really difficult. I think having those social connections and having the ability to watch and also to be a part of the conversation online, some of the teams didn’t skip a beat.

They just transacted instead of using the telephone, which went away in the United States if you had only brick and mortar telephone numbers to make connections. It went to the social world, and it was favorably received. I’m really happy that your software does that naturally. He says magically. It’s magically and naturally.

Jon: I call it automagically. By the way, do you use Teams at all?

Marylou: Yes.

Jon: We’re launching a Teams integration in-app experience where before a meeting goes on, you can prepare during a meeting, you can log and schedule, and after meeting, you can follow up and follow through. We’re one of the early in-app experiences with Teams. 

I think that what you’re saying about COVID just emphasizes the power of connection because you may have not seen people for a while now, in fact, we haven’t, but they’re going to remember you if you’ve invested in that personal relationship and you’ve nurtured it. I love to tell stories that help people to remember what I’m saying. Did you know that a car uses most of the fuel to get to 60 but to stay at 60, it uses very little?

Marylou: No, I didn’t know that.

Jon: Did you know a rocket ship burns most of its fuel to get up into orbit, to stay in orbit it takes very little?

Marylou: That I would anticipate, yes.

Jon: Did you know that relationships take most of the energy in initiating the relationship but maintaining the relationship takes less?

Marylou: Less time and effort.

Jon: A physical example that’s visual is that person, the circus performer with the plates on the pencil. You’ve seen that before, right?

Marylou: Yes.

Jon: It takes a lot of work to get the plates spinning.

Marylou: Right.

Jon: But to keep the plates spinning, it takes a nudge to stop, a little touch, right?

Marylou: Yup.

Jon: That’s what relationships are like. That’s the power of social. If you could just go do with a little touch and they’ll remember you. I’ll leave you with this little saying about a woman I admire. She was a famous actress, but also unbeknownst to many, an entrepreneur. Her name was Mae West. Do you remember Mae West?

Marylou: Yes, I do.

Jon: She had a lot of great sayings, I won’t say some that are off-color. Light them up and see me some time. She had a saying that I love and a guy named Jim Cecil taught me this. I don’t know if you know Jim Cecil, but he was the father of Nurture Marketing. She used to say, out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money honey. And that’s what you should work on doing is staying top of mind as the trusted advisor to your prospects, customers, and ideally their influencers as well so that when they need you, they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends with them.

Marylou: Yes. Jon, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you again. Thank you so much for sharing all this wisdom with us. It makes perfect sense that we follow your lead here and learn more about what you’re doing, what Nimble does, how this tool can help us become better at our craft that we all love. 

At the end of the day, you’re right, we’re building relationships with people. Some short term, some long-term, but the name of the game here is that with that consistency of the touch, we’ll be able to meet the goals that we’re setting for ourselves, but also, more importantly, our clients are achieving the transformation that they are looking for because we’re helping them get there.

Jon: Amen. One last piece of advice as an entrepreneur who has built two global software companies and sold them for hundreds of millions of dollars, you’re not on this planet to make money. I think you’re on this planet to make memories out of moments. Do your best to be present with the people around you. 

When you’re at the supermarket, put your phone down. Actually, look the checkout person in the eye and give them something even if it’s as simple as your smile and your presence because people deserve that. When you invest in that thing, your presence with the people around you, your heart softens and your soul grows.

Marylou: We will end with that. Thank you much, Jon. A pleasure to have you on the show. We’ll put all your connections in the show notes so everybody can find you and follow you. I very much appreciate you taking the time to share with us today.

Jon: Thank you, Marylou. It’s a real pleasure. I appreciate your friendship.

Word of mouth recommendation has always been an important part of sales. Testimonials are vital. So of course, if you can find a way to leverage customer testimonials in your sales process, you can sell more effectively and close faster. Sam Shepler’s company helps you do just that. Sam is the founder and CEO of Testimonial Hero, and in today’s episode, you’ll learn more about that company and what they do. Listen in to learn why Sam decided to start Testimonial Hero, why video testimonials are so important, and what the Testimonial Hero process is like. 

Episode Highlights:

• Why Sam decided to start a company dedicated to testimonials
• What Sam was doing before Testimonial Hero
• Why Sam specializes in video testimonials
• How COVID changed things for Sam’s company
• What the process is like after testimonials are sent in
• What kicks a service like Sam’s into high gear
• Who can benefit from Sam’s service
• The specific benefits of video
• The process and timeline for Sam’s team
• How listeners can learn more about Testimonial Hero

Resources:

Sam Shepler

Testimonial Hero

Transcript

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Sam Shepler. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Testimonial Hero. Now, some of you in the audience are probably thinking, testimonials, that’s the thing that we’re supposed to be doing a lot of for social proof, for all this advancement into the pipeline. Well, Sam has a company that specializes in leveraging customer stories so that you can close deals faster, so that you can add more qualified opportunities to the pipeline if you’re doing business development, or so you can expand your base of accounts so they stay longer with you, higher lifetime value, higher revenue potential. That will make everyone in the company or in your business very happy.

Sam, welcome to the podcast today.

Sam: Thanks so much, Marylou. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marylou: Very good. You’re the founder and CEO, what was that a-ha moment that you said, I need to stop what I was doing and start up a company that is dedicated to this particular part of the sales process?

Sam: Yeah, that’s a great question. It was a couple of things. One was I had an experience at a private company and I realized as it pertains to video content, the projects that our buyers, our customers always were the happiest with and saw some of the most results from were customer stories. Video testimonials specifically, and also just personally for me was something that really resonated with me because it’s fulfilling to tell those real stories.

You can write scripts for ads and that’s fun. That’s a different type of creativity but I love just the authenticity of the fact that we’re building a story from a real customer experience and it has huge value for the buyer.

Marylou: What were you doing before? Were you always in sales and then realized that there is this missing component to what you were seeing out there in the tools that you had? I’m curious as to how this one piece, although hugely important, was what you gravitated to? What was it about testimonials and video testimonials, in particular, because that’s what you specialize in? What was it that got you to the point where you’re saying, this would be something that I would get up in the morning and absolutely love to be able to help others master?

Sam: Yeah. It’s a great question. It was a mix of just an observation and seeing the opportunity. We now live in a world where marketing content alone just isn’t enough to sufficiently accelerate deals. You really do need customer stories and I’ve felt that as a seller, as a founder. I could feel things were shifting and I could feel the opportunity. It was a problem that I wanted to solve for myself as well. I didn’t really feel like anyone was solving it. 

I had been running a previous company. To make a long story short, that company got acquired and I was looking for a new problem to solve and this was the problem that I was the most excited by. I’ve been doing it for three years now on. Every day especially with COVID now we do fully remote customer testimonials. It’s proved to be very rewarding and very exciting.

Marylou: Let’s hone in on that. I know for me, it’s like, where were you when you got the message that said you better get home. I was in Denmark and got the call from one of my associates in the United States saying, book a flight now because they’re going to close the airport. You’ll be stuck in Denmark forever. That’s where we are today, one year into the pandemic. How have things changed for you?

What really gravitated me to want to talk to you was when I think of video, anything, I think of you got to go to a studio, you got to get everything set up. It’s a face-to-face kind of thing. Sometimes COVID could be a decent thing for people because it makes us think outside the box. Tell us how things have been going since this happened? What specifically has changed for you, as a company, in rolling out your service to potential clients?

Sam: Absolutely. I would definitely say at first it was a big challenge and then it really forced us to innovate and turned out to be a silver lining. At first, we were really focused on this in-person model and then we actually have a network of videographers all over the world. Basically, how our company-operated pre-COVID was, we have one of our clients who needs a testimonial filmed in Berlin, Germany. They need one in San Francisco and they need one in Toronto.

We have the crews to do that and keep it a cohesive style. Of course, COVID hit so that was all on pause. The next thing that we thought about was, will people still need video testimonials? Honestly, more than ever. We’ve since seen quite a good amount of recovery, but more than ever social proof is essential to just reduce friction in all of our sales processes. We work from first principles around like what is the best camera that everyone has on them. The answer for sure was everyone’s cellphone.

Marylou: Cellphones, definitely.

Sam: At a high level, what we have created is this process where one of our producers interviews the customer and actually coaches them on how to self-film themselves with their own smartphone. Then they get the footage. We just work off that cellphone footage with so much higher quality than, for example, a webcam which you may be subject to internet or bandwidth issues.

Marylou: Right, not to mention lighting in some places like my house. The sun is blinding in some cases where my computer is, then at night, it looks like I’m in a dungeon. It’s not necessarily conducive to a pleasurable viewing environment.

Sam: Absolutely. That’s exactly one of the big challenges that we ran into—how do we turn just average Joe’s or Jane’s into video pros. We have that basically 30-minute slot with our customers’ customers. For the first 5-10 minutes, we figure out all of those lighting details, sound, where’s the best place. The last 20 minutes were actually running the interview and diving into their customer story. But at the same time, we have to be really respectful of the customers ultimately doing our client a favor. There’s always a relationship there that maybe we could ask them to completely move, but maybe that’s just too much. You have to leave the room. It’s all about figuring out what’s the best, most reasonable situation, given the social, political, and practical dynamics.

Marylou: Right, but it sounds like that you have figured out a formula that is global now because of what you just said. When you’re working with them, they’re using their cellphones. Cellphones now do have a very high-quality video output. If you filter them with—we’ll get into the process in a bit—but you actually send them questions that they can ponder. If they can answer and record themselves answering those questions, and then what happens? Do you get it and then you put it together into the finished masterpiece? Is that post-processing, I think, or post-editing, or something?

Sam: Yeah, post-production. Yes, that sounds exactly right. About 90% of our customers are B2B software companies. What we actually can do is insert some product user interface shots and apply some nice branded graphics. In that way, we can cut away from the speaker. One of the biggest challenges is when we used to go to people’s offices, we could film all this great B-roll when you’re filming someone walking down the hallway.

Now, we’ve really had to also innovate on those other aspects. Honestly, the best way to describe it would just beؙ, if they’re curious, the last one of the videos. But we’ve figured out some really good ways to leverage the product user interface to allow for the natural cuts that need to be made to tell the best story.

Marylou: Right. Let’s talk about the ideal client for you. We’re in the right world now because a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast are selling mostly B2B, there are some B2C as well but mostly B2B products. Is there a size of companies that works better for you, or do you have the mindset that it doesn’t matter how big you are? It’s important for social proof. It’s important for authenticity that you have. You have these videos available because we are watching more videos now because we’re home.

As you mentioned before, content is out there but weeding through the content assets and reading, it’s more entertaining to actually watch a video and you tend to watch it for a longer duration. I’m curious, is there a point where you think of a service like yours that really kicks it into high gear? Or is it a mindset of as soon as you get good clients that you think would be great to record could make that road map happen? What do you suggest there?

Sam: There’s a couple of ways that I would look at it. For one any questions, fears, or doubts QFDs, that your prospects may have can be addressed through the voice of the customer. Even more credibly than from your own reps or from your own marketers because as buyers we want to hear from our peers. There’s just that credibility. That’s really the biggest benefit. Because of that credibility and that social proof, the result is just decreased friction, you’re able to move things along faster, and close deals faster.

As it pertains to who can benefit from it, as you said, there’s really no one who can’t benefit from social proof. It’s more about making sure you use it at the right time. Specifically, that you don’t use it too early in the buyer journey. What I mean by that is in my experience, most buyers that are early in their buyer journey might even be in denial that they have a problem.

Marylou: They are in denial.

Sam: Yeah, they are in denial. You can hit them with the best testimonial, but there isn’t that fertile ground for that seed to take hold in their mind yet because they don’t admit they have a problem. The main thing is their testimonials, especially video testimonials, are amazing and I can get more into why specifically in a video, not in the text. If you use them too early when the prospect is still in denial, it’s not really going to catch on yet.

Marylou: Well, it’s funny you say that because a lot of times—now I’m speaking more text-based so it would be interesting to hear what you have to say of text versus video, a text meaning digital conversation, not a text as in text from the phone—but what I’m finding is that if we pull together should-ask-questions series and embed, where it makes sense, customers talking about overcoming these objections, what they originally thought, even though testimonies talk about, primarily, results and the biggest benefit. But there’s also this other side, just as you pointed out, they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know they have a problem.

But if they hear something from a peer or colleague that they’ve been wondering and then they realize that they’re thinking the same thing. They weren’t sure about whether this will work or not for them or whether they should even worry about it being a problem. I’ll push back on you a little bit in that I think sometimes upfront, high up in the funnel, there may be a place where you can introduce a should-ask question in the form of an objection and then link them to XYZ company who bought this and link them to testimonial that they could view.

I think those also have the ability to enhance the relationship and build trust and rapport early on that you would normally not get because you’re telling them about the objection. You’re telling them that it was overcome by XYZ company versus hearing it from the other person. Sometimes, I think that would also be a place that’s further up in the funnel that would probably be very valuable.

Sam: Actually, you’re absolutely right. That’s a key distinction. We’re seeing the best companies start to do this more. The best B2B SaaS companies are really taking more of a full-funnel approach whereas it’s used to be, in the old days, customer case studies. A written PDF case study is what you’ve got where you find it really late in the funnel. Absolutely, we’re seeing it throughout. I totally agree with you. I think the distinction when customers’ stories are used earlier in the funnel, just like you said, they can’t be so much about ROI metrics necessarily because it’s forced about getting them to admit that they have the problem and getting them aware there. But you’re exactly right. I don’t usually get into the full-funnel approach but it’s such a good point.

Marylou: I have spent 30 years now getting people to hit their head saying, oh my gosh, I never thought of it that way. Part of that is to get to the emotional side. We’re not into the logical ROI side of things. Remember, at the top of the funnel all the time. We’ll get there for sure. Don’t get me wrong. But we’re starting with more of the emotion-based approach. It’s sort of like the hero’s journey. There’s a problem that has to be solved. I read somewhere on your website that you have seen 40% faster close, the shrinkage of time to revenue. It’s amazing how fast it can accelerate time to revenue. I read somewhere, I’m pretty sure it’s your website, about 40% faster closing.

Well, this is the same thing atop a funnel. It’s around 40%, 30% or so, where in order to get the initial conversation started, if we front-load that with some emotion, in this case, a video that explains I was there, too. I was a doubter about this thing but look what happened. Then you go into the results and the benefits and things but it’s done in a way that is like, I was there with you. I have been on that journey. Here’s my success path, but I started very skeptically.

We’re finding that that really works well. It’s worth building, especially the most common objections that you’re constantly getting is worth putting the time into creating these video scripts and maybe you just put him on your website. Maybe you send them out in a series of touches overtime continuum when the timing is right, or maybe it’s newsworthy. Maybe there’s a compliance reason why you want to do the compliance, like right now, the vaccinations. Everybody’s like freaking out about where do you go? How does this work?

I was there, too. Here’s what you’d do. You go do this, that, these, and those. Those just build trust and rapport, not at a human-like but you’re trying to do when you get further into the funnel, but at least it opens the willingness to listen and the willingness to have a conversation to take it perhaps to that next step. Video, I think, is the vehicle that can do that better than anything else.

Sam: I totally agree. Another thing to that point of why video, is that I do think especially in SaaS, sales, and marketing, we have reached a point where a lot of people see quotes written on a website or a testimony of a quote in a PDF. They know that they probably went back and forth on this legal, okay you can say this, you can’t say that. Then by the time the quote actually comes out, it’s lost a lot of the authenticity and become a little bit watered down. It’s like the true voice of the customer. It’s not like they wouldn’t approve if they didn’t agree with that but you lose a lot of that humanity. On the video, you can just literally see this is the person right there. This is exactly what they said and that is very powerful as well.

Marylou: I actually took a video scriptwriting class just a few months ago because I was just so enamored with the shorts, doing something in three minutes that takes us six weeks to do in terms of convincing somebody because again, I am working at the top of the funnel, where I’m trying to persuade people to love them and leave them, persuade them very quickly so they want to have a conversation with us and then pass them along to somebody else to close.

I was trying to figure out how can I compound challenges that I know these people are going through? This whole threat-payoff, threat-payoff, plus linking their desire could be done in a video with a client casually mentioning the threat and how they were able to overcome it. They found this threat and they were able to overcome it that way and direct, in this case, the client to go in that order. I found it was extremely profitable for us in terms of getting more conversations because there was a believability that, oh my gosh, they’ve gone through the same thought process that I’ve been thinking about and they figured it out. Maybe I should try it, too.

Video, more than any other medium right now is the way that we can explain that and then put it into the voice of someone who’s been there, is believable, and we naturally trust. The title underneath there when you put their title or their role, it’s like, they’re me. That’s me. I identify with that person. I just am so happy that you decided to do this because really the hardest thing is how do we figure this out? How do we put this all together?

That term B-roll is very scary. What does that mean? Is it like an hour and you got to dwindle it down to three minutes? How does that all work? Tell us about the service. Let’s pretend we’ve got a project together and I’ve got a couple of clients that I would like you to interview. Walk us through what the normal process is for your team to get started, and then in the post-production phase, when can we expect our video from you on average?

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The first thing that we start out with for every project is the strategy. We have a strategy document that asks about 10 questions such as who is the client, what is their relationship, what is the goal for this video, what does the perfect message sound like, what are the three things that we want the audience to absolutely take away after watching this, what is the actual action that we want the audience to perform.

Marylou: Very important, that call to action.

Sam: Yes, exactly. It’s all about beginning with the end in mind and understanding the outcome that we want to achieve. From there, we work backward. The first place we work backward to is the actual interview questions that we’re going to ask the testifying client because with good questions, you get good answers and with okay questions, you get okay answers.

It is so important especially when you have a limited amount of time with the client. You want to be respectful of their time. But you also want to capture as much content as possible that can be extended in multiple videos down the line, social media. Once we understand the strategy, our producers figure out—to achieve all these goals in a 20-30 minute interview—what are the 15 absolute best questions that we can ask?

It’s usually around 15-20. That is the next step there. It’s actually getting to those interview questions. There’s also just scheduling. Our customers just introduce us via email. If it was a client of yours, you would just introduce us via email. We’d schedule with your client and we conduct the interview. It’s about a 30-minute total as,k. We try to keep it pretty short just to make an easy ask for you or your clients. We don’t want to be too crazy to ask because it’s just harder.

We conduct the interview. We get the footage. Then usually about two weeks after the actual remote interview happens, the first draft of your video will be ready. We really pride ourselves on that first draft because it’s practically done. There’s been probably, I would say once or twice a month, we get a project that is just approved on the first draft and they’re like, alright, done.

Marylou: Nice.

Sam: Thank you. That’s what we strive for because no one has additional free time to babysit the vendor. No one wants to do that. We really just try to take the responsibility for that and say if we can really understand the strategy, we can get you something on the first draft that should be basically perfect. Obviously, we do offer multiple revisions, three rounds of revisions if needed. By default, we include a 90-second version which is a great general-purpose length. Great for a customer’s page, but we also include by default a 30-45 second version that is really great for social media. Also, great for a little bit earlier in the buyer journey as we’re talking about.

Marylou: Yes, definitely.

Sam: Then we have some customers who, to your point earlier, create entirely custom packages and they might get a 90-second video, the 30-45 second video, and then four different topicals, we call them objection crushers, based on specific themes or objections. From start to finish, a typical project is about 30 days, from when we actually conduct the interview. It usually takes about two weeks to get it on the calendar with the client and write the interview questions.

Marylou: Very good. That’s a pretty quick turnaround. It’s great. Usually, when we do stuff internally, campaigns and things, I like to have six weeks to just get the campaign figured out and copy-written and things like that. That fits right in a nice schedule for a campaign. Where do we go next, Sam? What do you suggest we do? Should we go to your website and look around? What’s the way you would like us to connect with you if this is something we want to know more about?

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. It’s just testimonialhero.com or you can Google Testimonial Hero and it will pop up. I would encourage anyone whom this sounds interesting to have a look. We have tons of examples on our site from a lot of SaaS companies that you would have heard of. Definitely go check it out. We have both on-site examples which are less common but we still are doing some of them especially in Europe. Then, of course, we have a whole page of these fully remote ones. I would definitely encourage anyone who is remotely interested to just check it out and see the examples in action.

Marylou: Okay. The other thing, audience members, there’s a blog on the website, and for those of us who listen to me and love process, and numbers, and metrics and all that good stuff, the blog is filled with some metrics so that you can work your numbers and justify putting a solution like this embedded into your touch sequences or series just like in prospecting.

I like the idea of objection handling, helping. Even if you’re starting out, you don’t have a lot of clients, there are ways to produce videos that will help get people over that initial objection of why should I care or why should I talk to you about it. If you really embrace this as another channel of communication in the multichannel environment that we work in, I think you’ll be very pleased that you came across Sam and his team at Testimonial Hero.

Well, thank you so much, Sam, for all of your time today. I very much appreciate you sharing with us how we can leverage video.

I’ll put all these links in the show notes. For those of you who want to get ahold of Sam, all the information will be there for you. Thanks again and I very much appreciate your time, Sam.

Sam: It’s been a pleasure, Marylou. Thank you and hope to chat again soon.

Compelling presentations are always difficult to create, but they’re an essential part of sales. And now there’s something that can help you organize and curate your various slides and get them ready to become a compelling presentation. Today you’re going to hear from James Ontra, the creator of the presentation management platform and communication strategy hub Shufflrr. Learn how Shufflr works, the different ways that it can help, and what inspired James to create Shufflrr in the first place. 

Episode Highlights:

• Whether presentation management is a part of pitch decks
• How things are changing with COVID and how Shufflrr helps
• Why people need a library of slides
• How the speaker notes work
• Getting metrics from slide usage
• How to get started with curating slides
• James’s favorite onboarding experience
• Whether marketing drives the collection of assets
• Getting copies of a presentation
• What inspired James to develop Shufflrr
• How to check out Shufflrr

Resources:

James Ontra

Shufflrr

Transcript

Marylou: Raise your hand if you’re a person who has multiple pitch decks, multiple versions of PowerPoint presentations. Each time you have to make that one influential, one-of-a-kind presentation, you either start from scratch or you’re frantically looking on your multiple computers for the perfect slide to add to your decks so that you can present your solution, your service, or yourself.

Today’s guest is James Ontra. He has put together a solution called Shufflrr which is a presentation management platform and communication strategy hub. Basically, all your business decks, all your assets, whatever you have that you use to present yourself, your product, your service are in one beautifully organized file cabinet so that you can pull together this presentation. You can enhance them. You can have the most recent version available at your fingertips. Doesn’t that sound great? Without further adieu, welcome James, to this podcast. Let’s get started talking about Shufflrr.

Let me tell you about my audience—salespeople, business development people, CEOs, more of round B but A in there as well, financing. I’m trying to get more people, trying to build market share, trying to build product share but mostly market share so net new. I’m seeing the value of this thing called pitch decks. I don’t know if presentation management is part of that. Is that a component of it?

James: It is in a way. 

Marylou: How is this all changing with COVID?

James: There’s been a lot of things—A, 1/3 of the market dropped out and 1/3 of the market dug in deep and invested heavily into it. The market that jumped out were people who did conferences, travel, cruise ships. A variety of people who relied on heads and bets had a hard time keeping it together. I shouldn’t say it that way, but they went into hard times. 

The pharmaceutical companies who rely on business compliance and assembling presentations in a consistent branded message suddenly had a new value in using presentations to communicate amongst the high-end academic community. Especially in the race to find drugs for COVID, they wanted to come together. 

Many of these big organizations communicate through slides and presentations. What we do is just a way to make it easier amongst your whole enterprise. Presentations have always been this one-and-done app that lets you do a presentation and you dig out what you need. 

Shufflrr is a way to address presentations on the enterprise. Everyone gets it faster, quicker, more compliant, up to date, while having the flexibility to make it on your own. I’m pitching Marylou today. Marylou Tyler is on the title page. That’s not in every corporate presentation, but it’s important to me. You might give money to the girl scouts in your local branch, not in your corporate pitch deck, but it’s important to you today. If you can’t get it, you bring in the revenue. That’s what it is—if that makes sense.

Marylou: Yeah, it does. We did things in a certain way prior to the pandemic. I, personally, on airplanes averaged 250,000 air miles a year. Now, we’re home.

James: Big changes.

Marylou: At first, I was pissed off at it but now I get it that we have to up our game in being able to engage people looking through the screen now. We can’t get that face-to-face anymore.

James: I look at your eyes on the screen but then I look down knowing your eyes are on the camera. It’s an odd thing. You have to train yourself differently to communicate through these different environments.

Marylou: Right. How do you instill that engagement, that excitement that you get when you can feel the energy? It’s more difficult to feel that in a remote setting. Also, I’ve been struggling with this because a lot of my world is impromptu. I’m a process person. I need to draw my thing. 

James: You need to communicate. You want to be there. Sometimes, it doesn’t come out of your mouth. It comes off your fingertips. 

Marylou: Right. Behind me, I don’t know if you can see, I’ve got a couple of cameras on testing. One that projects downwards so that I can grab a piece of paper, write, and hit a button. 

James: The overheads from the early-day school days. I know what you’re talking about. Go ahead.

Marylou: Exactly. It’s interesting that with Shufflrr, it sounds like you’re keeping the value proposition—why people should change, why now, why us. But you’re giving people permission to choose from a library of potential talking points and share that more than once. Everyone feels as if you’re communicating to me on an exceptional basis, that you’ve done this for me personally and you bring in the things that are important to me but in essence, correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s like a catalog where I could pull from certain topics, genres.

James: A library of slides—who you are, what you do, how you do it. A slide might be a video. A slide might be a meme. Believe it or not, every meme out there is really a slide. If you had five memes and you put one up, you could talk about it for a while. 

Slides are made in PowerPoint. A PDF might be a slide. If you need credibility, the FDA report from the government might be a better slide in and of itself in a PDF than something you build in PowerPoint. We treat it as content management where all files are formatted to present. PowerPoints being specialized. After an album of slides, you see 20 slides. Because you can see it, you can drag and drop it into our slide tray which is like an SKU in Amazon. You put it in your shopping cart, hit save, and you’re out the door. We know how to buy stuff. It’s the same thing. You have a library of slides that is up to date, you get to see them, drag and drop, hit save, and you have a new presentation. You’re ready to go. 

The person on the frontend doesn’t have to be a PowerPoint jockey or a PowerPoint Mozart to get off the door. They can focus on the client. It brings up the different issues. The big from-to that goes on in presentation management is yesterday, a presentation was about Thursday. We’re all getting on. It’s a fire drill. We’re all getting ready to be on the podium and everyone’s getting the slide. Five minutes before, you get a message. The numbers are new when you get them. It’s given to you and you get on the podium. You say, yeah, I’m giving the slides. You do it all. Then, you go.

Where are we going to get much? We all get to the hotel. Then, you go to the next place. A week later, you’re like, remember last week at the Marriott, you were supposed to do this slide and you got it at the last minute? Where is it? They go, it’s on the podium at the Marriott. You don’t have it. It’s a one and done. It’s a fire drill. The person who has the best team around them, supporting them gets the best presentations. No one knows who, what, to whom, when, where, how often, or what’s going on. 

In a presentation management environment, if you thought of your company as a one 250-slideshow—who you are, your history, your founding, the bios, locations, what you do, your process plans, where the thing is, your services, your expertise. In case studies, they’d be in different folders and there’d be slides on each one of them. But instead of 250 slides in one presentation, you would have 25, 10-slide presentations that address all these issues because they’re bite-sized. You can build them in PowerPoint, each one with a nice animation. 

The speaker notes can teach you how to speak on them. Then, when you treat these slides as a published medium like in Shufflrr and presentation management, that’s now your slide library. That’s your shopping cart. The first day you’ve come in, you can come in and say, I have a 20-minute presentation. Go in there and say, I need the overview of the company. Oh, there are people in London, let’s pull in the London plans. Oh, there’s a video on London, let’s do this case study. You hit save. Tomorrow, I’d go to the meeting, I’d start talking to you and you say, yes, we have London, but we also have a big plant in Brazil. You know you have a slide on Brazil and it’s part of that 250 but you didn’t plan it for today because if you were that smart, you wouldn’t be giving presentations. You were already talking about tomorrow.

But you can jump out, go to that slide instantly, and talk about it. We think of it as the presentation following the conversation versus the presentation forcing the conversation. Right now, we pick 10 slides and I’m going to talk about A, B, C, D. If you talk about F, wait. Now, if you want to talk about F or anything else in the whole realm of my company, I can jump out, bring up that slide, and start addressing it because sales happen when you start conversing, not when you’re just pitching someone and they’re sitting back on thank you, throw the words at me. But you actually say, I heard what you said and by the way, our printing plant in London does that special impact. Here’s a slide on it and here’s a video showing the impact on the press. 

I don’t need to say anything. I’m already into it because the video is part of the slide. The animation of the numbers is a part of the slide. The slide library might be your quarterly numbers on 20 slides and every quarter, they get updated automatically. You never have to worry about it. 

We have another concept we use in Shufflrr. We call it the genealogy of the slide, meaning when you manage your library, everyone in your audience picks and chooses from that library. Inherently, every slide chosen is a duplicate or a child presentation. That connection from parent to a child creates a genealogy that you can track and creates business intelligence of who’s doing what, where, and when. 

Additionally, if you did something as simple as spelled international wrong on slide 52 of your overview presentation, some salesperson’s going to see that. They’re going to go, oh, I got it. Then, they’re going to type into that. No different than a social media post saying, you know, Marylou, you spelled international wrong. You’ll get the message and you’d go, oh, I did. You’ll be able to change it, upload it, it’ll overwrite it, and anyone who dragged that slide in now gets an update saying, hey, there’s a new update. It came from Marylou and here it is. They’d look at the images slide by slide. They either accept it or break the link. All that knowledge becomes business intelligence. This is presentation management.

Marylou: It sounds like you can actually get metrics on slide usage. My whole thing is we’re trying to simplify the conversation in a persuasive conversation. Which point? We never know where that conversation is going to go. We can guess 50% of the time.

James: We always guess. That’s going into every meeting, you’re guessing beforehand. That’s the whole point.

Marylou: We don’t like that. We’d rather do what you said. I’m sitting here as you’re talking thinking I have a hard drive with 20 years of slides on it. I’ve got a Mac. I have a Windows computer. That’s just me. I’ve got stuff on my hard drive on each of these discrete systems. Then, my company, when they used to travel, would do something on their hard drive. There was no central repository to store slides or to even store impactful conversations that will demonstrate the idea of a slide deck of some sort of a multimedia presentation. 

James: Essential archive of sorts. That’s what it’s all about. It takes a little effort to clean it up ahead of time. Sometimes, that feels like a barrier for most people because quite frankly, we’re all lazy. But the benefits are huge and they ripple through your entire organization. I find that when the senior management—the C-Suite—finds out there’s a tool for managing presentation communications, that they can get metrics, as soon as that happens, all of a sudden is why aren’t we doing this? What are we doing? There has to be an answer.

That same question happened for sales enablement four or five years ago. They said, oh, my God. Why aren’t we doing that? Everyone scrambled but that’s what presentation management is. Once people get that presentations are all one and done and you’re all on your own, yet they’re probably more critical than all the other mediums combined when making the sale because if you don’t trust me when I’m sitting here speaking to you and the information I’m giving you, the ad you saw on the Super Bowl isn’t more convincing than me making you feel bad.

If I’m sitting with a presentation, we talk about the funnel, everyone looks at it online, what people say, then they go to your website. They know it’s your pitch. Then, they look at your product and then ultimately come to a presentation and an SOW or something.

That is one of the most valuable points of that funnel. That’s why presentations are so important. I can go into something a little more historical about presentations quite frankly. Presentations through mankind have been critical from writing on cave walls to every religion created stained-glass memes which are slides on the walls of their areas of worship so that the uneducated mass could walk through and understand what they’re saying about their religion and whether it’s a church, a synagogue, a mosque. It brought you through.

Those are forms of presentation. That’s a form of presentation management ensuring that it communicates and teaches people going forward. As we get further along, we’re in a day where images come and go by the billions yet the critical ones help convince, persuade, make viewpoints. Hence, the growth of memes nowadays.

If you have a great meme, you’re almost the star nowadays. But each slide is a meme for your company. If you’ve got a series of images that are thought-provoking, that talks about who you are, what you are, how you do it, what your product value is, and why someone’s stupid for not doing it because there’s a cartoon about it, you don’t have to go through your points. You could just pull that up, talk about it, and move on. That’s a little bit of an exaggeration but it’s not far-fetched. 

Marylou: You mentioned that the curation of the slides can be daunting and I’m sure you’ve thought this through. For example, I’ve been working on a project to try to codify our sales conversations. Not unlike writing a research paper where you’re doing a bunch of research and you’re trying research content keywords, long-tail, short-tail, phrases, do you have—I’m sure you’ve thought of this—ways for people so that that barrier doesn’t seem so daunting? Because I’m sure probably the biggest objection you get is, oh, my gosh, I have thousands of slides, where do I start?

James: It’s relatively easy at this point. Yes, we stumbled with that. Yes, I can say we’ve lost a dozen clients that probably should’ve onboarded faster, cheaper, better, and been blooming with it along the way because it does feel daunting. It feels like, God, do I have another job?

Basically, with this system, you just drag everything into one folder. You drag this folder into the site, and it’ll process all of them. Once they are in there, it’ll easily whittle out duplicates because you visually see them all. You can drag them down because you can see all the slides that are used in different ways. This doesn’t take us long as it seems but we’d go with the five Ws—who we are, what we do, how we do it, products, services, case studies, and then you start picking them out. Suddenly, you’ll realize this is the same structure as your website. You look at your website and it talks about products, services, and stuff, and explains them. This is the same stuff but in slide form and it starts building on its own. The people managing it need to understand it a little bit that they’re going through this hierarchy of information because you can’t introduce it to anyone until you have enough information.

Salespeople are ADHD. If you want to introduce something to them, you better have sugar on it, delivering right at this second. Otherwise, either you’re out the door and you failed. If you’ve made enough slides where they go, oh, that’s a slide library. Next time I have a presentation, I can get it there, you just made their day happy. You just became a success and you jump-started the whole thing.

If you tried to avoid that little effort of putting it in, you’re just going to take the mess that is the reason why you contacted something like this and recreate it somewhere else. In all SaaS models, every online business, there is a from-to that people get. People know that when they look at Uber, I went from, oh, I’m getting off the plane and there’s a long taxi line in a city I don’t know, to, I’m not off the plane and I got my phone. Oh, he’s waiting for me at terminal C. You heard that once and no one needed to be told twice.

On eBay, same way, you went there, you auction it off, you figured it out, that’s it. There’s no number two in that game. Amazon, there’s no number two. Who’s number two to Google? Everyone is a leader in that fashion and it’s always a wow moment that it happens that way. Salesforce owns CRM and it was a bit of a wow moment.

In a way, Shufflrr is a bit of that type of category where when someone sits down and they’re the ones who get 200 calls for presentations every month—I need this one, I need that one. It’s always the top salesperson whose biggest account is on the line tomorrow morning and it’s your fault if you didn’t do it. You’re under that pressure and your boss doesn’t know how much pain that is. Once they see they can do this and it’s free for single users, they can just start doing it, going out there, and using it. When you add more, that’s when it is. That’s when the value equation comes in. There’s the learning equation—from-to. From one and done to an enterprise presentation system.

With that, there’s real ROI value across the enterprise and the data business intelligence actually gets pumped into the senior KPI decks at the highest level once it’s in there because quite frankly, it is a medium of communication and there’s only five or six of them. That’s huge.

Marylou: Tell me about your most favorite onboarding experience with a client. Tell us what the before picture looks like, what their journey was with you, and then where they are today in terms of usage of the product. I’m like, wow, this would be great for someone like me who’s got 30 years of slides all over the place in various different formats. It will be best to get a consistency of brand because right now, I’ve got things in different formats, in different colors.

James: That makes a whole difference. I can use some names right here. I’ll use one that just came back this week, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. Knowing COVID, you can imagine the challenges they’ve had. They came in several years ago. One of their things was they had different categories of stuff. They have cruises in the Caribbean, in the Mediterranean, in Alaska. They have several ships in different areas. They have celebrity cruise lines, Azamara cruise lines, and several cruise lines. All those different brands.

Each ship has different entertainment, has different rooms, has different times and dates, has different ports of calls, has different schedules, and calendars on them. Each one of the ships needed a full presentation to talk about—what restaurants are in there, what entertainment is there, what shows are going to be performed, can you get a mid-shipment room or cabin suite or one with a balcony, whatever it is. They were able to put each one of these ships into a presentation management-type hierarchy.

As such, they had it for the Mediterranean and the celebrity. They had it for Royal Caribbean in the Caribbean. A local business representative, let’s say someone in Iowa, who was going to the local Liberty Travel to say what trips are available through them could walk in and say, oh, what are you talking about? They would say something, well, I have a group that’s looking to go to Alaska. As fast as they said Alaska, they can go in and the slide library is there and say Alaska, oh, we have the Anthem of the Seas that goes out on March 7th. The port of call is Juneau. In Juneau, there are these events going on. On the ship, there are these restaurants. There’s a bowling alley. There’s a live show. There are magicians. Each one representing a slide of what’s going on.

You can say, God, these people are interested in the show, but they need a ballroom because it’s a business thing. You say, oh, we also have convention-type ballrooms and they can go into it. At that moment, they could suddenly stop and go, that’s excellent. But if they don’t have their 12 executives getting to the private trip to the high-end port of call in Rome in the Mediterranean, I can’t book the deal. Okay, in the Mediterranean, we have this Silver of the Seas which happens to start in wherever it starts from and goes through whatever. The point of it is each one of these sections is managed by each marketing director of each ship. They maintain it so the people on the frontend always have a live library to pull from.

During the COVID, they whittled down a lot and we basically didn’t bill them for a period of time. As such, beginning this year and things looking right with the shot—with the vaccine coming up, I thought this is one of the biggest endorsements—they thought enough of our product to be one of the primary drivers of their revenue as they get back on their feet. They’re back on board and we’re rolling it out very nicely 

Marylou: Wonderful.

James: That’s one client who’s been with us for a while, but the need is the same on several levels that way. 

Marylou: A lot of the work that I do is multinational. There’s the USA, the rest of the world, different languages, different compliance issues that may work—maybe forged in Germany that don’t exist in the United States.

James: We have many pharmaceutical companies who require presentations in many localities—Portuguese, everything, Mandarin. It’s the same drugs, same human beings, just different communication on how you can use it, plus different regulations in each country.

Marylou: Do you find marketing drives the collection of assets? Tell me about the relationship between marketing and sales in terms of building this together or separate domains.

James: They’re separate domains and this allows them to communicate on a single platform where they know their roles. Meaning if marketing has done their role and provided the library and it’s up to date with all the information, there is no reason sales should be bitching at them for not having done it. Sales can’t use marketing as a scapegoat because they both have the same goal of making money but they have different goals of getting there.

Salespeople are mercenaries who will drop the presentation and get the sale, and cut the deal, and walk out of the room. Marketing needs to look right. It needs to say, right. They need to understand how it’s going down. You used it right. We’re in the process. Everyone loves us. I’m bleeding blue and gold. We’re all going through that. It’s a slightly different thing and having a central library where salespeople can go in and take what they want. If it’s wrong they have the means to speak up to say, hey, I don’t have this. They have the means to ask for approval and workflow and stuff like that. Can I get this approved to go out the door? My meetings next Tuesday.

If marketing doesn’t do it, it’s up on the site, it’s been there for four days. It’s marketing’s fault. Do you know what I mean? It creates a platform of communication that allows sales in marketing not to be so abrasive with each other but actually work on the communication, on top of that sales.

Marylou: It’s the triangle of product, marketing, and sales, especially, in these companies where a product is being driven by what the salespeople are asking for, marketing is trying to get their language around the product. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between what marketing thinks the product is used for versus how sales is communicating the usage of that product. I see that this is bringing together, not only the ability to cross-pollinate communication but make sure that we’re all saying the same thing and the intended use of a particular aspect of a product or an attribute of a product is communicated correctly. Do you find that the business to business applications are equally interested in this as business to consumer? 

James: Almost all business to business within a consumer product. We are a Slack-type product. An individual can get it for free and start using it, organizing their slides, and I can do it locally. As it gets used by multiple people that’s where there’s the value equation to us and that’s where we start billing the client. Enterprise clients are based on the larger the enterprise, the larger the value equation.

Marylou: Okay. Let’s pretend I pulled together a presentation for a big company. My client would be a biotech company and I pulled the presentation together and said hey, can we have a copy of the presentation? Is there an ability to pull out the order in which I did things and crafts like an app or something?

James: Every file is converted to a PDF. It’s converted to PDF with notes. They’re also available in PPT and PPSX. You can control the way that the people get it. There is built-in enterprise file sharing, where you can have them share it and see it online or share it and allow them to download it or what have you. When they view it online, you get more data on how much time they spent on each slide and things like that. The concept that you get an update when someone clicks on it.

You send out a proposal and they don’t click on it, four weeks later someone clicks on it. These are the standard types of things but built into the presentation knowing that they finally got to it. They got to slide three, but didn’t get any further, your follow-up has knowledge that makes you better equipped to make a sale.

Marylou: Alright, my world you know where to pick up the conversation because you have a history of what they were interested in. The next conversation is where they left off in their brain as to where they were. That’s valuable for people like us. We’re trying to build that rapport trust and not sound too sales-sy but have the fact that we do know where they’ve been so that we continue where they left off.

James: We just built in something, we call it audit history. It’s an audit trail of the slide itself and that’s the file end. In some respects, PowerPoint is a file and it’s an album of slides. If you think of these photo-sharing things, you have a photo and then you have a photo album. PowerPoint is just an album, our file management system treats them, especially as 20 individual files. You can view and see them and all that type of stuff. When I refer to a file, it’s also a slide, and a PowerPoint is just an album of slides. I say that just for clarification.

Marylou: Okay. Did you wake up one morning saying we got to do this? Tell me about what got you to the point where you developed this product. This is so great. I love what you’re doing.

James: I’ve been doing this since CD-ROM days. Right there is a CD-ROM for James Bond in the 90s that was connected to the internet. That was really new. I’ve done NBC Olympics presentations for American Express, ABC, NBC, South Park, BET. I’ve done high-end presentations through the years for the biggest and best companies managing sales forces with high-end media when computers couldn’t handle high-end media. We were specialized, a very high-end consultancy, and did very well that exhibited an Epcot center and things like that, at the highest end of stuff .

As YouTube democratized the concept of high-end movement in video, our business fell into the ground overnight. We took the expertise of what we knew and turned it into a product called PPT Shuffle. It was just a PowerPoint slide library. That’s it and it worked. We had a bunch of clients and it worked through but as devices came up and the concept of live data going back and forth and HTML-5 and responsiveness, that’s when we said, we need to build this as a multi-user repository slide library and take this 25 years of experience in presentations and build it into a product.

One of the hardest things in the world is diving off of a consultancy that pays you very well to try to build someone $10 a month. You don’t start with volume. That’s the whole thing, you go from what is impossible to now it seems inevitable. But at that point, it’s a totally different world. This is a long-term type of development and I was part of web 1.0 with a funded company here in New York and CEO of it and all that type of stuff. Then I was tarred and feathered and removed. I went through all that is highs and lows of what they consider the tech world. With them, wisdom carries with me and we have a nice stable business which is the most important issue.

Marylou: Yeah. The audience listening is thinking, alright this is great. What’s the next step? Where do you want to point us to learn more? I know you […] single user but should we go right to the website?

James: Yeah, go right to shufflrr.com. You can set up a site right on the top. Put in your name. You’ll have your own username, myname.shufflrr.com. That’ll be your own private library and then just take your marketing folder and drag it into the upload box and upload. Well, you do want to think about the top level. It’s the root of what’s going on. If you put five folders there, the world is going to see five folders. You want your different sections.

Let’s say you’re a bank or you’re doing this for a bank, your top-level is going to be treasuries, retail, merchant accounts, trading, whatever the bank is into. Then under treasuries, you’re going to have the different sections for your different divisions that do that. Retail, you’re going to have different sections. Retail is going to have the actual presentations that go on the screen behind the teller and run all day.

Marylou: Sure, yeah.

James: Because that is part of presentation management. What is bank teller 973 doing? What slides are going up during what time and how often? That’s all part of it. If you go to the site, you can set up your own and it starts working right away. It’s free for single users. You can get it, run it and maintain it. As you grow, that’s when there are fees involved.

Marylou: Do you have webinars on the website we can look at for some blueprints of how to do this correctly or you just think it’s getting in there and playing around is the best way to go?

James: We are available 24/7. We include onboarding and training with our service at any time. We will take you through the whole process. We will have scheduled training just for being a client and going through that. There are also videos that take you through it right on the page and teach you the process of looking at your slide saying, okay, the first thing isto just drag all your stuff to one folder.

I know it’s a mess, don’t worry about it. Just drag it in there. Now that you got it, drag it up here. You’re going to see everything up here. Now, do you see it, get rid of duplicates. Think about who you are. What does a who-you-are page look like? We’re founded. We’re built here. We’re in New York and LA. We need an overview page. There are templates in there for you but within literally a half-hour to an hour, you have a structure that’s very strong. When you start realizing that a video is just another slide, you start going. We have more content than we ever dreamed of.

The CEO realizes you spent $50,000 on that video two years ago that quite frankly should be in every salesperson’s presentation. Now, there’s an ROI for all that unused media or marketing that never went through.

Marylou: Exactly. Like you said one and done. You can choose once and the people forget about it. The biggest issue is, I think two years ago, we did whatever.

James: Yeah. There’s a lot of wasted marketing dollars that never get reused on so many levels. Think about posters that get printed that never get reprinted that one of your local offices could print them out at Kinko’s and put them up because it’s marketing material. Now, it’s budgeted locally on the printing from it. It makes a big difference that way. But just getting in there, getting it going. You can watch the videos for a little time there. Give us a call, we’ll sit with you and bring you through it.

Marylou: Okay. Let me pull up the site. I know that you and I are looking at each other, but it’s not that intuitive. It’s Shufflrr Presentation Management. Go over there and look at James’s stuff. It’s amazing. This is like a game-changer for people who utilize a presentation platform to continually either start conversations with people they don’t know, continue conversations, bring people back around for renewals. That’s a big customer experience, customer service. There’s a lot of things that we like to do to educate people as they’re rounding the corner for renewal.

I don’t know about you, but I hate getting 11th hour, 59 minutes. We’re going to charge your cart with no other correspondence or anything leading up to hey, there’s this great feature. Look at this presentation deck on how to use the feature, how to apply it to your business. This seems like a good way to keep the pulse on how to engage our clients, to keep them loyal to us but also to utilize it in the selling situation to convince people to come to join us. Also, to advance them into the pipeline.

James: It makes a difference.

Marylou: This has been a great discussion. Thank you so much for your time.

James: Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. It’s been wonderful. Happy February at this point.

Marylou: Happy February 2nd. We’re still in COVID, people.

James: I’m happy to be here today. I thank everyone.

Marylou: Yeah, very grateful for sure. Well, thanks so much, James, for your time. I very much appreciate it.

James: Take care, Marylou. Bye.

What do farming and sales have to do with each other, and why would you want to read a sales book written like an almanac? Today’s guest has thoughts about the connections between harvesting and sales, which is why he wrote the book Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Guide for Planning the Perfect Year. Listen in to hear more about Nigel’s work, where he gets started with his clients, and why he decided to write his book the way that he did.

Episode Highlights:

• What Nigel does
• What equity-backed means to Nigel
• Nigel’s international clients
• Where Nigel gets started with advising companies
• How well the companies that Nigel works with know their audiences
• How long Nigel works with clients
• What prompted Nigel to put sales advice into a book that reads like an almanac
• The problem with taking a short-term view
• Where to find Nigel online
• Nigel’s six-step hiring process

Resources:

Nigel Green

Revenue Harvest

Transcript

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. It’s been a while. I admit I’ve been a little bit on the nesting side of life trying to get ready for spring. It’s 2021 as I’m recording this introduction. This week’s guest is a great friend of mine by the name of Nigel Green. Nigel Green is also an author of a book called Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year. 

I really want you to listen to Nigel. He’s more on the sales side, but he covers the entire pipeline as many of you know, my heart, my soul is focused on top of the funnel, starting conversations with people we don’t know, or re-engaging people who have been dormant in the pipeline.

Nigel specializes in super growth—high-growth companies, and he also adds predictability and consistency to the pipeline, but he’s doing it from the standpoint of managing those more complex sales. He handles prospecting, closing, and servicing. He’s a great guy and I really love for you to take some time today and listen to our conversation. We’re going to be talking about some of the principles that transcend that pipeline all the way from the tippy-top of the initial conversation through the close one and beyond. Welcome, Nigel to the podcast.

Nigel: I am a sought-after adviser that helps executives and sales leaders build best-in-class sales teams. In its simplest form, the author of Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year, which you’re very familiar with. I typically work with mid-market, equity-backed companies that can’t afford to miss their number.

Marylou: When you’re thinking about that segment of equity-backed companies, this is something that is intriguing to me because equity-backed could be angel investing, it could be round B or above where you have a team in place. There are more working parts. There may be actually the beginnings of a cross-functional demand-generation type of setup where you have the product, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got sales, you’ve got service, you’ve got delivery. But even though it’s a small company, you’re starting to see these roles pop up. They’re not all worn under the same hat by one person or so.

Elaborate a little bit more about what that means to you—equity-backed. Are there certain puzzle pieces that you like to see in place before you know in your heart of hearts that it would be a good fit to work with you?

Nigel: Yeah. I’ll tackle that in two parts. What does equity-backed mean to me, and are there certain things that I like to see in place? I’ll let that be the second piece. Whether it’s angel investing or later stage private equity investing where the equity partner comes in as the majority shareholder in the business. The common thread between those two ends of the spectrum is that there was a thesis for the investment and a promise made by the leadership team around how we’re going to go to market, the economics that drives this. And then typically, around some timeline for liquidity because all investors that go in an equity situation, they want their money back and some stated return on investment. 

For me, what makes those situations unique is that you can’t try everything as a consultant. There are constraints that will dictate what the team is able to do, and those constraints are driven by the covenants that they made to their investor around this is how we’re going to do it. This is what we think the upside is. This is the timeline by which we’ve committed to delivering these promises to you. That’s very different than, say, an entrepreneur that self-funds her own business or it’s a family business.

You don’t have the pressure around capital constraints, investment horizon, liquidity events, all of those things are very interesting dynamics that limit optionality for the management team and for me the consult it. The second piece of that is what of my looking for? When I go in, I look for equity-backed ideas that already have a proof of concept, already have a customer base that provides insight on how receptive the market is to the offering, and speak to some degree the scale that still exists for that company.

I also look at how well-capitalized is it? Is it a situation where they are in the mid-cycle of the investment and things haven’t been going well, so the equity partner is not happy, less likely to invest more into ideas or strategies that I think will work? Have they been hitting their revenue and EBITDA numbers in the past? 

Those are two real drivers for me to determine whether or not what I can do will be helpful because most of what I do, Marylou, is an offense. An offense requires capital. It’s expanding into the novel markets. It’s expanding the portfolio to some degree or making subtle tweaks to the offering that might allow us to go deeper with some of our existing relationships, and all of that is heavily predicated on the ability to reinvest in the business.

Marylou: Interesting. Growth companies, not necessarily companies that are trying to figure out how to cut costs or not really looking at their core competency or why they’re in business to begin with with their product or service, but that focuses on the growth engine. Whether it be going to the base with more product share growth or growing with net new. As long as there’s a growth component to it, then that’s good business for you. Is that correct?

Nigel: Correct.

Marylou: Cool. Are there certain verticals that you think are more thrown into this type of growth mentality? Let me just share with you really quickly what I’ve been experiencing, that is European companies appear to be more open to the idea of independence coming in and assisting in the growth process where I find that sometimes companies in the United States feel like they’ve got a handle on it. They feel like they have the support they need from their investment base, through mentors or board membership, and things like that.

Do you experience that or do you think it’s really focused on, look, we’ve got an agenda here? We’ve bought into the agenda. We’ve promised a certain outcome. Who we bring in to help us get it is immaterial as long as we get it over the goal line.

Nigel: I don’t know that I have experienced that. I’ll say in my current portfolio, I have three international clients. One is in London, one is in Ireland, and one is in South Africa. I think that they are limited by the amount of expertise that they can go get locally around sales specialization. They are met with the same pressures and an even growing amount of pressures that some of these American companies are facing, but they don’t quite have the bench of talent available to them.

For instance in South Africa, even in a big city like Johannesburg, the notion of a sales development rep is completely foreign. No one does it. Never even heard of it.

Marylou: I could totally attest to that because it’s funny, I’ve been working in Denmark and Europe for a few years now. Most of the folks who are on my teams that started fresh out and started learning business development are now independents that are doing consulting work and doing very well. They moved into management because it is a foreign concept. 

What was great about our relationship together is that they have the cultural knowledge of how to swim within the lanes of culture as it relates to the European culture. But also introduce this repeatable, systematic process of demand generation and how that is used to create a predictable stream of revenue for the company.

It’s one lever to pull, but it’s a lever that these companies are not familiar with necessarily in Europe still to this day, but the United States has built-in, well, we know how to do that. It’s been around forever, which really is not the case but it’s interesting how the culture here because they know the terminology, the words. They’ve heard it. They’ve heard STR. They’ve heard hand-off. They’ve heard separation of roles, but to actually implement it correctly here is an uphill battle trying to fight for, look, you’re not doing it right. Here’s how you fix it.

It’s interesting that you mention that there is a knowledge gap, but there is also more of a receptive mindset to trust that you’re going to deliver a process that’s authentic because of a very community-orientated Europe versus here. Also, that will produce the scalable and predictable revenue that they’re looking for.

Let’s pretend you’ve got someone in here, they meet the criteria for you, as an independent consultant, where do you focus first? What is your recipe for going into companies like this? How do you get started? There are so many I’m finding cobwebs everywhere. Is there a magic hierarchy of detective work that you do in order to pull together a good project plan for them?

Nigel: Magic, detective all seems a bit far-fetched for the work that I do. You mentioned cobwebs. I guess a good analogy for what I do is I just have a good duster. I bring the duster in and remind them that underneath this cobweb of nuance, politics, bureaucracy, and turf guarding, there are actually some things they’re doing really well so let’s focus on them. Where focus goes, sales grows. We focus on things that they have been doing well. 

The thing to remember, like I said, part of my criteria is that they have an established customer base. It’s not like they’re out banging a gong for some product that the market doesn’t want. Typically, we just start by looking at transaction history over the last 12–24 months and seeing how it has shifted or moved over time. One of the first things that I like to do is really challenge them on how they allocate resources. Resources, not only being financial resources in terms of sales and marketing budget but literally numbers of FTEs, types of FTEs into the marketplace. 

What I found to be largely universal, whether it’s a geographical territory model, they have sales specialization around the product, they’ve done your work of specializing top of the funnel from account executives to customer success on the back end, the market has moved but the go-to-market strategy stayed. They built their budget for the selling year based on historical facts and figures that may not play true in the current year. 

I challenge them to redeploy their sales team in ways that are going to create a more meaningful lift in the business. For example, you may not need three reps in Dallas because there’s no competitive threat. You have most of the market share. You need to redeploy them into other markets in adjacent geographies that you could land and expand or do a hub-and-spoke, open up a new offering. A lot of what I do is very much still brick-and-mortar driven.

But for even those that have a SaaS offering or something that is largely accessible to anyone, I still find it that they have resourced the selling year based on what last year did, not what this year needs to do.

Marylou: This is one of my pet peeves too. Do you find that companies who have clients already and you mentioned this Texas model of wait, there’s nobody here that’s competitive, so it sounds like there’s some market analysis, market share analysis, total addressable market, the total serviceable market that is done, being done. They have something they can hand you that doesn’t have three inches of dust on it that you can look at and help them align the salespeople. I love my chief commercial officer—where the money is—so you can align people where the money is.

Do you find that some of what you do is going through that and reorganizing, or do you find that some people don’t have that? What has been your experience in going to companies that meet your criteria? How well do they know their total addressable or total serviceable market?

Nigel: Interesting question. The truth is that probably half of them know it. They know how to go get the data. Where they fall short, Marylou is that the data exists in some disparate system. Sometimes, if it’s a healthcare company, you may have all this really great customer and patient data that’s on the electronic medical record but doesn’t ever get back to the sales team. Marketing has this entire tech stack of really great tools to tell you how you acquired the lead and none of that is again making it to the sales team to make informed decisions. They have it, they’re just not doing their part to go and get it. 

The other half of them don’t realize how easy it is to go get the data. They already have the tools—they have a hub spot or they have even a third-party data system like Seamless.AI or ZoomInfo. They’re not in very measured cadences extrapolating how they’re interacting with their customers and testing different things to see what’s working, what’s gaining traction, what seems to be falling behind pace.

I guess the point here is that data is not at the heart of the sales organization. The company is data-rich but the sales team is data-poor.

Marylou: We are finding very similar, which by the way, everyone listening to this call, drives me insane. I’ll be the first to admit this. Let’s call it an outbound campaign, which is what I like to do in life. That’s my favorite thing, trying to start conversations with people we do not know. How can we plan an effective campaign when we don’t know the universal size of the list?

Can we afford to spray-and-pray—we don’t do that anymore, I know, but can we afford to sort of test the market out and see if there’s a variety of accounts that meet certain criteria that may not be in our sweet spot, but we want to experiment to see if that’s something that could be a consistent revenue generator for us to contribute to the overall picture? Or do we have to be extremely careful because, in our universe of accounts, we can count on our hands? There are not that many of them. It’s funny because my life revolves—I always say this, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this, we live and we die by the list.

What that means essentially is there is a universe of markets out there that our product or service probably works for. But there’s a subset of that called a total serviceable market. That is the market that we can use for these types of campaigns in order to generate predictable revenue. It’s really hard to find someone, something, some entity within the company who has a pulse on that. It makes it really hard to build predictable sales programs when they don’t really have a vision of what the total serviceable market even looks like. 

I was just curious when you come in, I know you’re a fixer. You come in and you have the luxury of looking at all the different channels of revenue generation—those that are predictable and those that are not—to put together the entire package. But for those of us who specialize in a certain area, it becomes very challenging. 

To this day, there are still some clients that do not have a pulse on it. It’s not like you can go to a ZoomInfo and look because their audience base is not something that’s collected in a database somewhere. The harvesting of records for a list it’s very difficult. You have to find different ways to solve that puzzle piece. I think it’s really fun though at the same time, when you finally get that breakthrough that something that you can rely on that has, what I call the ca-ching machine, that just keeps generating revenue because you have the ability to just set that aside.

Okay, that’s working now. That lever is working. It’s generating the base revenue that we’re looking for. Then we can go on to a different engine and see how we can optimize that. 

In a typical relationship that you have with—think of your favorite client, how long are you hanging out with these people? Is it something that is a very long-term thing for you? Do you see—like my world, it’s love-them-and-leave-them? I like to go in, I have a six-week program, I get them up and running, and I kiss them all goodbye and go on to the next one. What’s a typical engagement for you based on the work that you do for this everlasting growth that you’re looking for with your clients?

Nigel: I have a good mix of long-standing relationships that I’ve worked with since 2017, 2018 when I became an independent consultant. I have some of that going into it, I know it’s just going to be a very discreet offering. You know that feeling. Sometimes it’s your choice if it’s going to be a very quick and discreet engagement. But I would say typically, everything that I do revolves around two productized services.

One is more for the B2B market, which has a sales team that calls on a traditional buyer inside of another business, and the other one is more for a sales team that has a direct-to-consumer component. Sometimes it’s even B2B2C like in the instance of a healthcare practice that you might want their patients because what you do is great for the patient, but your customer—who you’re trying to get to do business with you—doesn’t provide that service to them. It’s a B2B2C.

It starts with analytics with the management team to try to determine where they want to go, what’s important for them, what’s been working, what completely out of bounds, and then setting into motion discreet interventions over the next period of 90–180 days that they take and go and implement. I usually spend 1-2 days in a strategy session giving them very practical things that they can do that will move the lever now. Again, one of those is the sales team review is more for B2B sales teams, and then the patient acquisition machine which is a healthcare-specific strategy session that I do is more for B2C or B2B2C.

Inevitably, during that discovery and pre-workshop analysis and assessment, I bump into opportunities that I find really interesting. That will lead to 12 months, 18 months, like in some instances, multi-year relationships where it’s on and off or I’ve got three clients that love me so much, they asked me to join the board of advisors. I’m now a shareholder in the business and regularly participate in the ongoing initiatives within that company. It’s all over the board. 

I feel like the workshops give me a paid opportunity to learn how helpful I really can be for them and then set out additional engagements if I think it’s something I can enjoy and help them with.

Marylou: I think that’s really nice. The beauty of being an independent consultant is that we have permission to really look at the client and understand the needs of the client. Rather than force-feed them into what we have as an offering is that we work within where they are—where they are in life, where they are in their head. 

A lot of times, clients like to introduce me as an employee of the company. It’s like she’s part of us. That’s great. I mean I think that that really speaks volumes of the trust that clients have with people that they feel are going to be instrumental in whatever goals they set out to be. Whether it’s a growth goal, products share, market share whatever it is. 

Let’s turn now to the book that you wrote. For those of you in the audience, Nigel’s written a book about selling. What really attracted me to help him by writing the foreword for the book was he has a love of nature, farming, almanacs, and getting back to the earth kind of thing. I want you to share with the audience what was the reason or what attracted you to putting sales methodology, sales skills, sales mindset, sales habits into a book that read like the almanac?

Nigel: Well, it does start with a deep love and respect for Mother Nature. I studied geology in college, and not a lot of folks know that about me, but I went to a liberal arts school on a mountain in the middle of nowhere—Tennessee. I didn’t let my studies get in the way of my education, and that was I was just wandering around, looking at the earth, and wanting to be outside. I chose to be a geology major because every one of my classes was outside. School was going to the Grand Canyon for two weeks.

That’s school? Okay, great. Let’s do that.

Marylou: That’s fun.

Nigel: That was at a very indelible time. Colleges for a lot of people leave a lasting impression on you. I’ve always found myself drawn to activities that keep me outside. Fast forward to 2015, we bought a farm in Kentucky and came and spent the weekends here. Then I found myself on Sundays not wanting to go back to Nashville. 

In 2018, we moved here full time. When we found ourselves full-time living in an agricultural community, by the way, the part of Kentucky that we live in is the largest corn producer in the US in 2017. Per capita, more corn comes out of southwest Kentucky than anywhere else.

You go to church with farmers. You see farmers. It became very clear to me that farmers like sales leaders, their identity is intrinsically mapped to did they produce or not. You don’t see many farmers driving the equipment, doing the work without producing a crop. That was one of the first disconnects that I noticed there. There were plenty of folks to call themselves a sales leader, but they’re not producing and hitting targets year in and year out. You see the farmer can’t survive very long in the profession without actually producing the harvest.

I said, well, if that’s true, let’s study the nuance a little bit more. I’ve found that to be a farmer, you can have one growing season. You can have multiple growing seasons. You can plant outdoors. You can work in a greenhouse. There are all these different ways to farm, just like there are all these different types of sales leadership. You can have a sale cycle that is in days or weeks, or maybe you have just one annual sales cycle. It all comes down to one last month as to whether or not you hit your number.

But the one thing that’s true for farmers and sellers is that regardless of the sales cycle, it’s always going to be for the farmer too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, and the markets are always going to be really terrible. For the sales leader, there’s always going to be not enough leads, not enough talent, too much pressure, all these things. But yet despite that, the farmer still produces a crop. 

I said, what is it? How did they do that? It came down to seven discrete principles that I think if sales leaders practice these principles, regardless of where you are in your selling year. This isn’t season-driven, it’s not like there’s a harvest season or planting season. A farmer can be harvesting corn today and tomorrow planting wheat right behind it. While they’re harvesting, they’re prepping to plant. I felt like it’s principles and not seasons that lead to consistency in the result. 

I wrote a book that has seven principles that every farmer—regardless of what they farm—follows without fail, and those that do it produce crops. I think if sales leaders will recognize how to map these principles to their work—again, they’re timeless just like an almanac. An almanac is something that’s been around forever. You’re not going to find any quick fixes, any fads, any pieces of technology in this book. It’s all about do these things, behave this way, pay attention to this, and you’ll be here next year.

Marylou: As you said, there’s probably a lot of common sense in the book, but the way that it’s organized, the rhythm, and the cadence of it I think is something that—for those of you sitting out there, thinking maybe some of this is just inherent the way I do stuff, which is so true. A lot of times, when we look at people who are super good at what they do, they can’t really pinpoint per se what it is about the excellence that allows them to propel in whatever they’re trying to achieve.

But then there are some of us who need to work that into the endurance of our daily life and get these habits formed so that they do become a habit. That’s why I like the way the book is laid out because it does allow you to enter where you’re at and apply the principles over time. It’s like you said, it’s not a quick fix, it’s a journey. It’s giving you permission to do it at your pace but also being mindful of the fact that there is an ultimate goal here and that is a successful crop. That is successful whatever it is that you’re doing in your job.

Being successful at it, however, you define success, but keeping an eye on the areas that you can eke out a little bit of improvement here and there as long as you’re following the process. Your clients, have you found that they get that and you’re attracting the people who are like-minded to you and follow this? Are you working with a combination of people who are super-focused, we got to get this done now and it was due yesterday. Or is it more of a long-term attitude you think that clients that you’re attracting based on the book? I mean that’s how you wrote the book.

Nigel: I’ll start by saying this. I should remember the source but it’s slipping me, and maybe it’ll come to me as I get further into the explanation. The average sales leader, so chief sales officer, VP director that level that’s responsible for did we have the number or not is 19 months. That is shorter than professional and college coaches at the highest level of any sport. What I find is that every company has the latter of what you just said. We’ve got to get this done now. Urgency, go, go, go.

What I find is that it’s misguided. It’s all driven by such short-term, short cycle metrics that planning now for tomorrow, or we’ve got to get this seed in the ground. We’ve got to get these prospects nurtured for next year doesn’t even cross their mind. I’m finding that what this book does is it shows teams how the channel that sense of urgency so that it’s a little bit more future stated. It’s teaching leaders how to be grounded in the present. Yes, now, now, now. Hit this month, but also recognizing that you can’t win the year in the first month but you sure can lose it if you don’t think about the things that need to be done now for later.

I think the seventh principle in this book, and I tell the reader that it’s the one that I suspect most companies will tend to ignore, maybe just close the book after the sixth principle, which is harvest. The seventh is restore. It’s not about rest, it’s about fixing. If you go and plant the same crop in the same piece of the ground year over year, each year the yield is going to be less because you take out of the soil vital nutrients that are necessary to the vitality of that plant. What does that mean?

Well, think about your team. If you just give them a bigger number every year, nothing else changes, and they run from December 31st right into January 1st with a new quota, a new comp plan, they’re like a machine that’s going to break down at some point. If you apply that same thing to your customers. If every year you just ask them to spend 3% to 5% more or you give them a price increase and you haven’t made any meaningful investments into their business other than the value proposition of the offering you represent. 

If you’re not really a partner to them that is helping your customers think about problems and challenges unique to their business outside of the problems that you’re offering solves, they’re going to leave. I think those two things, those two examples of not restoring the business are why sales leaders fail. They are so focused on ending the quarter, ending the year, and then immediately shifting to here are my targets for this year. They don’t think about the people on the team and in the businesses that are real humans that have needs, that need to be tended to in order to make this year another success. They don’t make it.

Marylou: Yeah. It’s relationships. It’s all about the carrying and feeding of long-term relationships and how we can serve. I interviewed someone on my podcast a few months ago—selling is serving. He is also related, this is very interesting, to farming. He’s more of dairy cows, and he is a nutritionist for dairy cows to maximize milk production. That’s where he started. He never thought of himself as a salesperson, but he is. He also has a process that he wrote a book about.

It is based on being of service. I get the sense from the book that you wrote, by the way, everyone the book is called Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac for Planning the Perfect Year. It’s on Amazon in all the various formats. I recommend that you download it, read it, or buy it, read it, if you’re a hard copy person. But I think that’s what it is. It’s all about selling is serving. It’s building relationships over time. It’s slowing down.

Slowing down and looking inward as to why you’re here, how you serve, and who would best benefit from what you have to offer. Then taking that to the level that will end up getting you to your goal over time. Like you do, you work with a variety of different companies. Widgets, you mentioned the SaaS service. There are probably perpetual or premise-based systems that you work with because, in healthcare, they’re still a little behind the times on something. I think that speaks volumes to the fact that having it in the vertical, similar to healthcare, where there are a variety of different methods of service offerings.

This can apply across those. It speaks volumes as to how this book and your methodology would work in a variety of different industries. I really appreciate, Nigel, your time on this call. It’s been really fun.

Nigel: Thank you, Marylou. You know you have a special place in my heart. Your work forever shaped my career. I found this little book called Predictable Revenue in 2014 and I said stop the press. You can do this?

Marylou: Well, it’s funny, it’ll be almost 10 years. It is 10 years. It was released in 2011. It’s 10 years. It was a book that when I first worked with Aaron Ross who’s the main author of the book, it was something that I really gravitated to because I had come from the call center environment—predictive dialing—and we had a lot of volumes. But we also had a lot of good technology and figuring out how to route, disposition, or wrap up a call. When he applied the calls in the context of the internet, that’s what really intrigued me as a user.

It’s been a great journey. I find that people are still learning. People are still trying to figure this out and probably will well after I’m gone and retire, but it’s been really fun. I’ve met great people like you along the way. There’s always great learning. I think most of the people that I feel are successful in this industry and other industries are the ones who consider themselves lifetime students. I think that was something that I definitely, when you and I first met, got that sense.

Now you have a book out. I just think it’s fabulous. Again, thank you so much for your time. How do people get a hold of you in case they’re like alright, I need to talk to this guy? Where shall we look for you on the internet?

Nigel: Nigelgreen.co, not .com, just .co. Green is spelled like the color. If you go to the website, you can find my book. It’s always for sale for at least $10 cheaper than where you’re going to get it at Amazon or anywhere else. You’re going to find other really helpful long-form resources. For instance, coming out next week at the time of this recording so the end of February 2021 is a new long-form piece on hiring. How to hire sales reps in this virtual selling world because no big surprise, virtual sellers are fundamentally wired differently than those that are used to showing up and being in a room.

Marylou: Different skill set. […] be a teacher.

Nigel: I have laid out a six-step process that regardless of what you are hiring for, you need to follow these six steps. If you do that, you will never have a perfect record with hiring, but you will have a better record with hiring.

Marylou: That’s fabulous. I love steps. Steps and data just open my heart. I just love it. Thank you, Nigel, for your time. I’ll make sure we put all these connections in the show notes for everybody. I look forward to hearing from you again as life goes on here. Great to have you on the show. Thanks so much.

Nigel: Thank you.