July 24, 2018

Episode 113: Establishing a Sales Team – Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp

Predictable Prospecting
Predictable Prospecting
Episode 113: Establishing a Sales Team - Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp
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Show Notes

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 113: Establishing a Sales Team - Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp
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Great sales people and effective sales processes are pivotal for any organization to make money. But for startups, it can be difficult to transition from founder-led sales to establishing a good sales team and putting the structure in place for effective sales processes. This can cause some serious disruption in an otherwise good business. Today’s guests understand this problem and know how to address it.

Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp of help organizations build internal sales teams with their company, The Sales Developers. Although outsourcing is a small part of what they do, they built the company with the intent of giving companies the systems, and processes, and methodologies needed to improve their own sales companies. Listen to the episode to hear what Rex and Kevin have to say about what they do, tools that they use to improve efficiency and messaging, and what it’s like to be a millennial in sales.

Episode Highlights:

  • Kevin’s and Rex’s company, The Sales Developers, and how they got started
  • How The Sales Developers help their clients by giving them the tools they need to build internal sales organizations
  • The gap between the startup phase of a company and the time when the company is a fully-formed organization, and how that affects sales
  • How Kevin’s background showed him the difficulty of scaling a sales team inside of a startup
  • How The Sales Developers can make sales people more effective by improving the company’s sales processes
  • Tools that can help companies handle both full and part-time prospecting
  • Why the number of conversations is more important than the number of dials per day in sales
  • How salespeople can focus on the things that are going to bring them closest to revenue
  • The Sales Developers’ Message Builder tool and how it can improve sales messaging
  • The book Rex co-authored, Outbound Sales, No Fluff
  • How getting the messaging right affects the closing ratio
  • Why Rex mentioned that he and co-author Ryan Reisert were millennials in their book

Resources:

The Sales Developers

Rex Biberston

Kevin Hopp

Transcript: 

 

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest, I have two wonderful guests, two, not one, two. Kevin and Rex from the Sales Developers are here to talk to us today about a myriad of things but first and foremost is my misconception of what they do. It’s really interesting when you look at this whole thing of awareness and understanding. When you look at a website, or get an email from somebody, and you’re trying to piece together what is it that you do, and where do you differentiate yourself.

I think I missed the mark on this one, so they’re going to set me straight, and then set all of us straight on how functional they are in a number of different areas. When I looked at their website, I thought they were outsourcers for business development. I understand from Kevin and Rex that that’s only one little portion, right?

Rex: Yeah, that’s a great question. We’re a new company you might say. We’ve been doing this for a long time separately, and then finally came together as a team to build this company. What we have as far as the website was, it was an exciting compilation of all of our ideas of what was happening at the time, and you’ve probably seen one version, and somebody today would see a totally different version. I’m not surprised you heard from that description online that we are outsourcing. Ryan Reisert and I, the cofounder Ryan and I, we originally a couple of years ago, we each had our own outsource sales companies.

To some degree, we were both outsourcing sales development, lead generation, that sort of thing. We’ve experienced what it’s like to run one of those agencies, and when we came together after writing our book called, Outbound Sales, No Fluff, we wrote a book together just kind of as friends in this space, and compadres––people who understood what it was like to need to build outbound sales, we said, “Look, we don’t want to build an outsource sales agency again.” We don’t want to struggle with the same kinds of mistakes and challenges that happened with a typical outsourcing operation.

We don’t want to be a black box where clients don’t have any clue of what’s happening, we even tried to solve this in our old companies but the clients don’t really know what’s happening, their expectations are totally different than what they’re actually getting, and there are some real challenges of outsourcing.

In fact, we started the company, the whole goal was to give teams who want to build internal sales organizations a leg up on the competition by giving them the systems, and processes, and methodologies that are going to make them more successful, having more, and better conversations with their ideal partners.

It really came from the perspective of, “We don’t want to outsource.” Now, as we engaged with more early stage companies that were struggling to build their sales organization and their sale stack, all of these things, there were some cases where we realized, we’re building this and they need support, they need somebody. They’re not ready to hire just yet. They don’t have the staffing available, they don’t have the resources to do this. We’ll go ahead and continue the execution we’ve been doing to prove that the system works, that we built for them, we’ll just continue to execute on that, and eventually that became a more fully baked out, we call it STR service offering. The goal has always been that the client gets all of the knowledge, sees all of the reporting, with just way more transparency in your typical outsource shop.

Marylou: Okay, to encapsulate what you just said, you have been in the trenches developing the perfect process for clients in your former life, and I love what you said because you said, typical mistakes and challenges. I bet you, people listening on this call do not know what those typical mistakes the challenges are, and they plop into an outsource arrangement not having really this checklist. It sounds like you guys have not only the process, but a checklist of all the things one would need to do in order to be able to consider outsourcing.

I come from the old school of, if you can’t figure it out in-house, how the heck are you going to manage an outsourced entity who’s going to do it for you. I know that you’re coming to the table with experiences across a variety of business development platforms, business development sales messaging systems, and different companies, different verticals, different prospect personas, so you have a lot more umf in figuring out, let’s take a little from here, a little from there, a little from there, it’s like you’re the master chef, I totally get that.

That’s why I cringe a little bit when I hear people start up to go outsource. I also understand that if they can’t get the FTEs, the full time employees, or get that whole side of the HR thing figured out, then what you do is a very viable option to get the numbers one needs especially if they’re going for funding additional realms and be able to say, “Hey, look at our dashboard, look at our ramp, look at how we’re doing consistently, and repeatedly so that we can scale, but we need money to do that.”

Rex: We found that time and time again for early stage companies, this happens across even later stage companies that still kind of consider themselves a startup, there’s this big gap between founder-led sales, and a fully baked sales organization. I wrote an article on LinkedIn a long time ago when I was just doing consulting individually about a lot of startup founders think that they can just put out this, “Hey, I’ve got this cool thing we’re selling, we’re really excited about it. I’m going to hire a sales rep for a low cost, they’re going to come over, and they’re going to build the process, and actually execute sales, and train people in the future, and manage a team.” like they’re trying to hire a VP or director of sales and they’re willing to pay them an STR salary. That’s the gap that we see all the time.

Our goal here is really to say, for founder-led sales teams or early stage sales teams, you don’t really have the time, bandwidth, energy, and knowledge to look at all the tools out there. I mean the sales stack is growing at the same rate that the marketing text stack grew. We’re getting into the hundreds and eventually thousands of vendors in sales technologies. I was employee maybe number 350 at insidesales.com. I really cut my teeth on sales exploration technology earlier in my career and I love it.

I love what it can do, but there’s just so many competitors out there nowadays. It’s hard as a founder, or an early sales leader to say, “Which technologies do I need to use? Well, I probably need to take a demo with six different vendors to see which one really fits our processes and, oh, wait, what’s our process? I don’t actually know. We’ve only sold to a few friends, and family, and coworkers.” There’s all kinds of things you have to figure out.

We try and provide the foundational elements, and whether the actual sales execution from an STR kind of top of funnel activity happens in-house or with us, the knowledge, and the learnings, and the systems are all the same.

Marylou: Okay. Kevin, tell us about your background and how you fit into this puzzle of helping salespeople do more than just selling.

Kevin: Yeah, good question. I joined the Sale Developers because I lived all the pain points that we’re trying to solve. I’ve been in a number of early stage startups and faced these same issues. The number one experience that I pulled from, that kind of help me realize, “Man, Rex and I really get it.” Let me just say that I have the book, read their book, and had followed Rex and Ryan on LinkedIn for over a year before I joined the Sales Developers. I’m kind of working with my heroes here in a way.

I love the way that they think, I’ve followed all of their thought leadership and said, “Man, they’ve you’ve got to really do it the right way.” I was part of the early stage startup that raised a series A round of $12 million. They have actually bootstrapped for a number of years. The staff went from 40 employees to 65 very quickly.

With the $12 million that they raised, they went and hired 15 STRs, they said, “Hey, we’ve got all these things, time for the hockey stick.” It does seem like this idea like, “Okay, we’re just going to raise a bunch of money, and then throw a bunch of people at a sales problem within roughly about 12 months, they had hired and then fired/laid off/let go/ people and left about 30 sale people.

I watched this all happen, and I was part of the wave of getting laid off, and what we are all in there trying to do our STR work, getting good meetings, not getting enough meetings, meetings not converting. The bottom line, I watched what a startup with venture capital backing try and scale a sales team from the inside. I saw the issue.

The real big issue of what we work with all of our clients on is the map of sales. The map of sales doesn’t lie. Ryan, our CEO is kind of the guy who creates this awesome formula that we that we walked and found us through that really show, you need to understand how many activities lead to how many meetings lead to how much pipeline.

Everybody has a sale target, but not enough people spend enough time working all the way backwards. That’s where Sales Developers comes in, we not only help you understand what your map of sales is, but we show you that you probably don’t have a people problem. You probably have a process problem, and you’re probably not doing enough of the right things enough times.

If you can focus granularly on those little thing, whether it’s phone calls, emails, LinkedIn connections, having the right messaging, it’s all about earning more conversations and better conversations, and that’s either going to help you go to market really quickly, and have a lot of success, or it’s going to help you iterate to find out really quickly, “Hey, this isn’t working.”

Our systems are designed to make any sales person using them four to five times more effective than what they can do on their own, and that’s based off those averages––industry averages, so that’s why I joined the Sales Developers, and that’s kind of a big problem that we’re solving, helping people either figure out really quickly, this is going to work, or, “Hey, this is really working,” and then they can add fuel to the fire and we can help them do it with the outsource model, or we hand off the systems happily and kind of hope to maintain them.

Marylou: Okay, this is not only for those listening, for startups, or for founder-led, I work up market, usually bigger enterprises, and a lot of times, I’m going into organizations that have the traditional legacy type of sales selling methodologies in place, and they’re thinking, “Wow, we should probably start looking at lead generation and opportunity management what have you, and we want to put this thing in,” and have no idea how to go about it. A lot of the reps have been there for a long time, they do all roles, so there’s this whole issue of separation of roles. Do you guys believe in separation of roles, or do you think this could also work for the account executive that’s out there that is also prospecting 20% of his time? Do you have models for both full and part time prospecting?

Rex: Yes, I’ll fill this one because I am a huge ticket for those account executives who want to be filling their funnel, they should be able to. The average account executive is being forced to prospect based on a number that their sales manager is making up. You’ve got to handle all inbound leads, and you should probably be making 40 dials a day. There’s a number thrown out there, and that’s what they’re expected to accomplish. At 3% contact rate on average, they’re probably having one conversation a day or fewer, if they’re even doing their dials, if they’re even sending their emails.

There’s all this work that they have to do, but the numbers are being set at random. What we advocate is using technology to add fuel to the fire as Kevin said. If you’ve already got a process that you know, we’ve got inbound lead, meaning they’re closing at a good clip, if we went outbound, or if we started to accelerate the rate at which we contact those inbound leads using our full cycle reps, we believe that technology can help to simplify that and make it happen faster. We use tools, we always share the tools we use, we use Outreach, ConnectAndSell, there are some other great tools that we are looking to partner with in the future.

We use video as well, like GoVideo from Vidyard. We use these technologies to accelerate the rate at which we can have those conversations. For example, connect and sell, a sales rep who’s got half an hour between meetings, he or she are probably either going to twiddle their thumbs, maybe prep for the meeting, go talk to a sales manager and say, “Hey, I’m really excited about this call,” and then they’re going to sit down to get on the call.

What we would advocate for in a half hour, use ConnectAndSell, or use our system that we build including ConnectAndSell, have five conversations, have two to three conversations with prospective buyers in between that time, and make that half hour as effective as you possibly can be. I think it’s a huge win for full cycle sales reps. I love specialization because it allows people to improve on those skills. If you can iterate at a fast enough clip as a full cycle rep, I think this also provides huge benefits to you as well.

Marylou: I love the idea of, I call it on demand prospecting because for lack of a better term. When I was in the call center, I managed a large call center of 50 agents that did outbound prospecting. When there was that idle time, we would fill that with learning materials. If they were sitting there idle, and this would pop in, “Oh no you’re not going to sit here, you’re going to learn something new,” or something for a client for compliance reasons.

I love the idea that you can just switch this on while you’re waiting, get three to four combos in a day, that would be so great for the folks that are in all roles because of the fact that they don’t necessarily have this block time rhythm or habit yet. They’re getting there but not quite, and it’s difficult.

Like you said, I was just at a conference last year where I almost cringed sitting in my seat when the sales managers got up there and said, “It’s all about 100 dials a day.” I’m just like, where have you been? This is not the case. Things have changed.

Kevin: What was interesting about the experience that I’ve had, I’ve had a situation where it was, my daily goal as a salesperson were based off of conversations. My manager said, “You need 20 conversations a day.” I was like, “Wow, how am I going to get 20 conversations a day?”

Rex: Kevin, you walk to a mall and you stop people and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk to you about this tool.” There’s no way to get 20, man.

Kevin: Not with the typical methods. What we did was high velocity dialing and they took away the chairs so we had to stand up. We’re standing up, headsets on, and we were punching numbers all day, just dialing and dialing. When you got two or three good conversations in a row, you had to go back and you have to get to 20. It was very interesting, but that’s once again, we’re using tools that make 20 conversations a day doable, but you’re going to have to spend a long time before you get there.

With everyone who’s not familiar with ConnectAndSell, it takes away all the pain, the hassle of actually dialing, of losing the gatekeepers, you put in a lead list and they only connect you to the person when they find that lead. So, if I’m trying to reach Marylou, it’s only going to connect me if it’s Marylou on the line, so it’s conversations on demand, and we’re huge advocates for flipping that model like you have been saying. It’s not about the number of dials, it’s about the number of conversations, and earning the conversations in the right channel, at the right time, and the right place.

That’s why we don’t just lean on only phones, and we don’t just set up email campaigns, it’s all together, but then the message needs to be there as well, and messaging is something that Rex is a wizard at. It’s really interesting working with Rex so far.

Rex: Well, talking about the numbers, Marylou, I don’t know if you saw the recent report, the 2018 report from the Bridge Group, did you have a chance to look at the state of STRs?

Marylou: Not yet, no, I quoted Trish in our book, so I love what they’re doing.

Rex: She’s fantastic. We love their data, we rely on it every day, we use it to have conversations with clients and prospects about sales, and how it all functions, there’s a really sad and kind of scary number in there that the average rep is in. We’re talking about STRs, so their entire job is to have conversations with qualified buyers every single day. They’re having 5.1 conversations on average, 5.1 which means, if you’re having five conversations, you’ve got to have 20% conversion rate to meetings just to get a meeting a day.

If your entire job is that, boy that’s frustrating, what are all the other non selling things that you’re doing, what are the things that are getting away? How much research and how much time did you spend on it? That’s when we talk about more conversations with qualified buyers, it’s to think that these poor STRs out there are spending right hours a day, having five good conversations, and maybe converting one or two on their best day.

I’ve been that guy, I’ve dealt with that as an individual contributor, and it’s really challenging. I get up earlier, and stay later, and make more calls, and send more emails than everybody else because I knew I had to hit my number, like we’re talking about for most reps as a dream, that they can get all this technology, have those process put in place, but they’re not in charge of it. For those individual contributors out there who are thinking about this, “Well, how can this impact me?” What we recommend is to look at the things that you can control in one effort and where do you direct that effort?

If there’s one message we could share for those people who have to sell every single day it’s, focus on the things that are going to bring you closest to revenue. If your manager had 100 dials that you have to hit, but you know that you scheduled a meeting yesterday that’s due today, go confirm the meeting first, because you’re most likely, you’re comped on qualified opportunities very likely, and at the very least, it helps the company because they want a qualified opportunity that turns into a sale.

I mean nothing happens really until something is sold, you don’t earn money as a company until something is actually sold and paid for. We would recommend, look at the things that are closest to converting and spend most of your time focused on that, and then back fill with the additional effort. Don’t start by thinking, “Well, I’ve got to do 100 calls today, and then I’ll try and confirm some appointments if I have time.” Because then you’re just going to set more appointments on hold. Does that makes sense?

Marylou: Yes, in fact we use in the book the impact versus effort. Sometimes, some people are visual, so when they see that quadrant, and they are able to prioritize tasks or activities based on that quadrant, it naturally puts it in the order that you were talking about which is the things that are going to give us the highest impact first and then working on down.

It’s almost like the old Steven Covey time management, important but not urgent, it’s sort of related to that, but we use it for activity organizing because of the fact that a lot of times during the day, reps get pulled into a myriad of different directions and it’s sometimes hard to focus.

I mean, I get pulled in a million directions during a day. I have my block time because I am trained, I just believe in block time. I do my whole day like that, but there are sometimes, things happen that you get pulled out.

Rex: I think from a rep’s perspective, it’s chasing that one lead that you found on LinkedIn, you’re going to find all the contact information, you jump on over to Gmail, send an email, it bounces, you call them, you get told to call back. There’s all these things, like what you’re saying, time blocking is a fantastic methodology, but if you don’t have the system in place for where you should be spending your time, and how to use it most efficiently, it can drive you nuts. Even just walking outside for a prospect, I could spend two hours trying to get a hold of five people, it could kill me.

Marylou: You guys mentioned earlier that you are building an engine, and the engine is fed with records, and you mentioned about the messaging piece, and also about––you’ve got to fill that thing with quality. Tell us a little bit about how you go about working with any type of client in readying the engine so that the fuel that’s going in there is high octane rocket fuel as opposed to a concoction you mix in your kitchen kind of thing.

Rex: Well, I think the difference between the analogy with the fuel here is that we can’t get it right or perfect right off the bat. You can certainly use best practices and take your our very best stab at it. We built a tool called the Message Builder. It allows us to interview our clients, get all of the information we need from them in order to build a complete campaign of messaging and either they’re running or we’re running, it doesn’t matter. The concept is the same as we’re going to iterate on that messaging.

If we’re not first of all consistent, we can’t iterate on anything because we’re constantly iterating we have no—it’s like a multivariate test. We’re looking at too many things changing all at once. What I would recommend is start with that consistent messaging even if it’s bad messaging, you’re better off than one in every 10 conversations having—or a great message even and then the rest being kind of average. You can learn more over time by starting with a consistent message. That’s where we started. Let’s say, it’s fuel that we funnel in there and over time it gets higher and higher octane.

Marylou: Right, because my whole big thing is statistically relevant sampling. We want to make sure that we go in and just freezes it, it’s the desire to tweak, that’s the hardest thing.

Rex: Everybody wants to tweak. If that prospect was mean to me, I’m just dying to change my script, or that email didn’t land very well, so I’m dying to change my template that sort of thing.

Marylou: Exactly, you can’t do that. you got to really hit the––you said, everything is math related or least a lot of it is math related, so is the testing piece, especially when you’re split testing, you want to make sure that that term is statistically relevant. Now, that can fluctuate based on your audience size and the actual segment that you’re working on, but if you hold off, put your ego in your pocket, let the data help you decide what you should change next and then score that, I think you’re right.

It definitely allows you to get going on higher quality, high revenue potential clients that will close at a higher rate. Tell us a little bit about the close rates. I know we start off, we’re limping along, and we’re iterating, and we’re testing, and we’re analyzing, and we’re iterating, and we’re designing, when we get to not quite running yet, but walking stage, is what you’re doing affecting the close rates, and are the close rates growing because you’re putting more quality in, or where do you guys fit in that spectrum of closing the actual opportunities?

Kevin: It should absolutely play into the closing rates right? A lot of companies that we work with, what’s interesting is, there’s this book that Rex and I wrote called Outbound Sales, No Fluff, our focus is outbound.

For companies that come to us, it might be the first time that they’re seriously going to try outbound. Outbound as we all know, opportunities can be a little different than inbound opportunities. If you have a lot of lead gen going on, and you kind of maxed out the marketing in your space, then all of a sudden, you’re not going on a hockey stick, we’ve got to go outbound.

It should absolutely affect the closing ratio if you’re having the right conversations with the right cost, and at the right time. We don’t really track exactly how it goes into effect with the closing ratio.

If you’re really working on your message the way that we described at the top of the funnel, you’re not going to be putting bad leads in and the efficiency of our system is going to make sure that you’re going to talk to everyone on your vessel market in a shorter amount of time and get the right messaging in the front of them. Anything you want to add, Rex?

Rex: We think about the formula for prospecting as the right target with the right message at the right time and the right channel. It all starts with targeting. Of course, if we’re going outbound, if we’re focusing on the exact right buyer personas and we know that we can solve a pain that they’re most likely experiencing, which is the only thing they care about, is solving a problem for them. They don’t care about the article we just wrote on Forbes that we got featured on such and such, or our data has been used for this other cool thing.

Nobody cares about the funding we’ve received. If we know we can solve a problem for them, it definitely impacts the closing rate because we can identify that problem earlier, we’re having the conversations around that. It’s not about the eBook that they downloaded and trying to eventually get to prime. If they don’t think they have a problem we can solve, we’re not earning the next conversation.

It definitely impacts those closing rates. Of course with outbound, it’s not the same kind of timing signal than it is with inbound. In inbound, if you get a qualified opportunity, it’s likely that they are looking for a solution today or they are investing a solution for the future. With outbound, they might take a meeting because they’re experiencing a problem, but they’re not ready to buy because, “Well, this is something that’s on our radar for this quarter, we’ve got it slated for next quarter.”

But imagine if you could talk to everyone in your target demographic, everyone you’re trying to sell to today who’s an ideal buyer, just a perfect buyer, and they could tell you when they’re going to be ready to buy, that’s better than an inbound lead because you’ve confirmed timing from them telling you from you actually seeing what their priorities are today.

It definitely impacts closing rates, we couldn’t say broadly, “Hey it’s an X percent increase.” It definitely depends on the market, the targeting, and all those good things. That’s how we look at it.

Marylou: I think because of the fact that we’re targeting, so we’re not casting that wide net, we are focused and narrow. Narrow as much as possible, by definition if we’re targeting the right people which the assumption is we are with outbound, then our close rates will be higher because there’s more quality going through. The other thing to note is the hand off between the business development team and the account executive should be higher quality and those conversion rates should be 90% or more.

For every 10 we hand off, one may come back floating over because we’ve done such a great job in the disqualification process, we’ve worked through who the ideal folks are, we know the stakeholders, we’ve mapped through their pain points, we’ve aligned the product, and the buying scenario with each. We know their levels of awareness––all that has to happen for the outbound to work properly, and once we get it to opportunity stage, those are going to close at a higher rate, and they’re also going to convert to opportunities of forecasting. The forecasting is more accurate as the result of all the work that we do preparing to get the right leads in the engine to begin with.

Tell us now the book, Outbound Sales, No Fluff, the second portion of it says, “Written by two millennials who have actually sold something this decade.” Why did you put that in there?

Rex: I think because we’re young folks, since we’re only a couple of millennials that have really broken through in terms of consulting or an expertise, people that actually respect what they have to say, like Morgan Ingram is a young guy who has been very successful in putting his name out there for example. Ryan and I want to emphasize like look, “We may be what everyone terms a millennial, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t done something worth listening to our thoughts on.”

While we may not have the credibility of an enterprise seller who’s been doing this for 30 years, we’ve sold something, we know what buying looks like today, we know what selling looks like today because things have changed over the last 30 years.

A book that was relevant 30 years ago, maybe not so much today because of the specifics that they get into. We were trying to make the statement, “Look, it’s relevant, it’s worth reading.” The emphasis is no fluff and we get some feedback from people, it’s all just way too short. The fact is, most people don’t read the books they buy, most people don’t take any action on any of the books they read, so our goal here was just to say, “Look, it’s something worth taking a look at.”

Of course it’s a little controversial because we’re in a space of, if you’re in sales consulting obviously we’re not competing necessarily, but we’re playing in the big leagues with people who have been doing this for dozens of years, and whom we respect by the way. That was the other thing, we didn’t really want to call anyone out because at the end of the book, you’ll see we have thought leader after thought leader who of course are maybe 30 or 40 years our senior who are experts in their space who we trust in and have learned so much from. The idea is really, “Look, don’t just count us just because we’ve got young faces,” that’s not something that we expect.

Marylou: Okay, because you know what I thought? I thought it meant, here we hear a lot of chatter about millennials not knowing how to sell. They’re not comfortable with the phone, they’re not comfortable with…

Rex: Right, millennials don’t dial.

Marylou: That’s the way I looked at it, I looked at it as, “Here we are guys, we don’t have to do this. We’ve cracked the code and we’re millennials.” That’s the way I look at it.

Rex: I think we used the #millennialswhodial on LinkedIn for a long time. I got somebody who emailed me from reading the book and I think they forgot the subtitle to include the word millennials in it because he emailed me and said, “Hey, I’ve got a whole team of millennials, and they won’t call. These darn millennials.”

So I get on a call, we’re having a conversation, I don’t think he realizes how young I am, and he’s just digging into millennials, and I give him some advice, and I’m friendly with him. This wasn’t going to happen there, the fact is, you can’t blame it on their age, you can’t blame it on a bracket of any—it has to do with coaching and learning. Are they the right the right kind of person anyway? I know 50 year olds who won’t dial, it doesn’t really matter on age. I think, definitely in part, we wanted to say, “Look, we make calls and we love it.”

Marylou: Right, so to everyone listening, the website is thesalesdevelopers.com. I’ll put all the links to the book, to the site, and then Kevin and Rex, if there’s anything you want to pop over for me to add to the page, feel free to do that.

It’s really about preparing and understanding what to feed these engines, and if you’re in the position where your hands are tied of what to get with the stack, or you can’t purchase, like some of my folks have to go through years of getting IT to approve things, still in this day and age. There’s another option here that allows you to supplement your existing sales team with the actual heavy duty engine in place that I think is great.

I love the idea of supplemental because sometimes, I have clients for example who have a rush of time, where they need to ramp up for an extended period of time, and then when it’s over, they go back to their core group. That’s another way you can utilize these services, is on demand type of thing over a period of time.

I’m sure you have a multi month/year contract or whatever. That’s another way to look at this, sometimes, when you’re pushing new products or you’ve got a window of opportunity, if there’s a compliance change where you want to maximize the market by getting out there ahead of everybody else, these are great systems for that.

If you can’t put that stack into place, all the ones you’ve mentioned, I think are very helpful once you understand that sales conversation canvass of how you’re going to start that dialogue, how many touches you’re going to have, what types of touches you’re going to have, so that’s great. I really like what you guys are doing, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Rex: Well we appreciate it and you know, the funny thing is, we’re not always selling our services just because we always love talking about sales. If anybody reaches out, we’re always happy to point them in the right direction, share with them thoughts we’ve got, or people that we respect who have expertise in a certain field. Don’t hesitate to reach out if it’s something not directly related to buying our services, we don’t mind, we love it.

Marylou: I know, it’s all about helping our community, and we’re all about that, well thanks a lot you guys, I really appreciate it.

Rex: Yeah, thanks Marylou.

Kevin: Thank you.

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