Sometimes old school sales people forget the importance of data. Nothing can help shape and guide the sales process better than having the right types of data. I have a wonderful guest today, who challenges the sales status quo and the ideas of what types of data are important and how to apply that data to the sales process. Then we dig even deeper into the data side of sales.
Jason Vargas works in the trenches as the Managing Director of Sales Development at Datanyze. If you aren’t familiar with Datanyze, you should check them out. Especially, if you are doing business development. They specialize in helping to find data for tracking, analytics, prospecting and more. Jason is on the rocketship of data analysis, and it shows as he shares new insights and more with us.
Episode Highlights:
- Identifying the rights types of companies and accounts to target
- Segmenting by other methods besides demographics
- Leveraging technology data or technographics
- Prioritizing segments by how sophisticated their sales methods are
- Finely tuning who we want to go after and target
- Maximizing everyone’s time by prequalifying accounts
- Focusing on the pre sales conversation instead of finding prospects
- Focus on the first meeting and taking that meeting to close
- Offloading the data finding process including accurate phone numbers
- Customization is important with large companies
- Automation and sales templates can save time with small companies
- Utilizing a database for mass personalization
- Having reps record and transcribe a call to use for an email template
- Hitting send and transforming a prospects day
- Metrics for outbound 20 emails and 20 phone calls
- Focusing on quality over volume
- Patient and persistence persuasion
- Outreach and finding out where people are on the ladder
- Startups should not have sales territories, but account profiles
- Looking outside the box and leveraging technology, process, and people
Resources:
- Datanyze
- Jason on Twitter @jasoncvargas
- Jason@Datanyze.com
- Jason on LinkedIn
- The End of Solution Sales – Harvard Business Review
Episode Transcript:
Marylou: Hi, it’s Marylou Tyler. I have a wonderful guest this week, Jason Vargas. In the trenches, this guy is the 4th employee of Datanyze. If you don’t know Datanyze, go ahead and look it up. They’re a really great company that you’ll probably want to get to know, especially if you’re doing business development.
Jason is the Managing Director of the Sales Development group over there. I’m hoping today’s talk, and it sounds like from our little precursor, that it’s going to be full of messaging and full of teachings for you guys that maybe challenge the status quo, which is really what we’re looking for.
Jason’s world is more into the analytics side of things, letting the data drive where we’re going and I think his outlook, his views, plus doing this as a job, and really getting into the trenches is going to give you guys a 20-minute blast of a lot of knowledge. Sit back and let’s introduce Jason. I’ll let him take it away.
Jason: Thank you, Marylou. It’s an honor to be in your podcast so thank you for the invite. I’m excited to chat with you today.
Marylou: Yeah, it’s wonderful. In the last few weeks, it’s been really fun. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now. Not that I’m sitting on my laurels or anything like that, because I’m a data person too so I’m really looking to get the data to tell me where to go and how things are changing. But you’re on the rocketship of change over there so I think what you have to say today and just in our pre conversation about the differences and what’s changed is going to be so helpful. You pick where you want to start and we’ll go flow from there.
Jason: Why don’t we start looking at how do you actually identify the right types of companies or accounts to target. I think it really starts there. That’s a foundation for a lot of things. That’s a foundation for the effectiveness of the SDR, setting meetings. It helps with the AEs, on the call with them, that they are targeting the right accounts. If you know that you’re targeting the right account, it could impact your sales cycle, things of that sort. Why don’t we get started there and then we can see where the conversation takes us.
Marylou: That sounds goods. Targeting, or what I call segmenting into accounts, is just wonderful. Let’s go. Tell us what we should be knowing about that piece of the framework.
Jason: The access to a lot of data out there, I think companies really start looking at the term ICP or ideal customer profile. I think it’s something that really, really needs to be honed in. Most companies I talk to, when I sit down with the companies, they primarily segment their accounts based on firmographic data. There’s nothing wrong with it but it doesn’t tell the whole story whether an account can be a good account.
For example, I talk to other organizations and they segment their accounts, SMV corporate or enterprise, typically by the number of employees. Here’s the interesting thing. As an example, if you classify an enterprise company, whichever has between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, that’s classified as enterprise and your corporate accounts are classified between 500 and 999.
Here’s the interesting part. If the corporate account moves from 999 to 1,000, you just add one more person, all of a sudden it’s classified as enterprise. Nothing really changed other than adding another person. Again, firmographics can help you but it doesn’t tell a whole story. The other component I think folks want to start looking at is technographics. Basically, the technology landscape or all the technology or softwares that a company/organization uses.
I don’t know if you knew but most enterprise organizations, the average enterprise organization uses over 1,030 technologies across the organization. That is insane.
Marylou: It is.
Jason: A lot of companies are incorporating technologies into other processes, from HR to finance, to sales and marketing. Marketing stats are getting really big. Sales stats are becoming a lot larger than it used to be. The sophistication of organization is skyrocketing. You want to be able to leverage technology data or as we call it here at Datanyze, technographics, you want to be able to utilize that when you’re creating your ICPs. That way, you can understand the sophistication of your buyer.
If you just use firmographic data, all you’re going to know is they have certain revenue ranges, certain employee ranges, and you’ll know that’s just a phone number. Not too telling, right? But if you can see your organization move from using a marketing automation system like HubSpot and a CRM, then all of a sudden, you see that it purchased SalesForce and Marketo, that is much more telling than simply they added one or two more employees. It tells you that okay, this buyer is moving from a less sophisticated group to a much more sophisticated type of organization. As a sales rep, I’m going to prioritize those companies more.
Circling back to the ICP, you want to be able to begin to segment tier however you want to define it using technographics and firmographic data so that way you have a much clearer picture and you can understand who you should be prioritizing, what will it cost, how you can really classify enterprise in the market and then how do you curate each of those segments.
That’s step number one for me. Anytime I’m talking to a company or I’m teaching a new sales rep, I’m really trying to understand why we came up with our own classification tier and why we call enterprise company enterprise company here, or how we define it here at Datanyze.
Marylou: In the new book, Predictable Prospecting, we actually don’t even use the term ICP. We call it an ideal account profile, IAP. The reason being is because we have, as you said, the firmographic and the equipment and technology but we also are looking at some operational overlays like purchasing policies, the decision making process and situational factors that we can overlay to that.
Yes, I agree with you. Since we have such rich databases now, it’s getting to the point where we can really finally tune who we want to go after and target and then obviously, if we’re in an organization where business development is 100% of one’s time, then we have to make sure that we’re giving them enough companies to work so they’re occupied and they’re not spinning their wheels. I agree with you 100%.
Given that, what is next? We have the new ideal account profiles with more layers of segmentation that we can apply than the old ICP. What other things have you seen that directly impact performance in this concept that I’ve been throwing around called Maximizing the Return on Effort?
Jason: It’s a great segway and kind of adding to what we were just talking about. One of the things that we’re able to do, and this is something that other organizations can do is once you’ve really identified what those accounts look like, this should be done by management, we don’t allow any of our SDRs to prospect for new accounts, look for new accounts. Management is taking care of that. All of our accounts are pre qualified.
What we’re able to do to maximize everyone’s time is that an AE or an SDR can no longer say whether an account is qualified. What this does is that the moment an SDR books a meeting with the right persona, right title, with that prequalified account, when that person shows up to the call, it’s an automatic sales accepted opportunity by the AE. No longer is it, “Okay, we have to bant.” Or if the AE gets on the phone like, “I don’t know if this is a fit.” No, management has determined based on the account criteria that we’ve specified it looks for. It’s a pre-qualified account and the title shows it to the phone call, it’s an automatic sales accepted by the AE. This has accelerated our sales cycle dramatically.
Marylou: Yeah, I am still working with clients who let the AEs decide who these target accounts are and they populate the CRM with those accounts and there’s a reserve of accounts that don’t make it into the target ones. If the target ones fall out for some reason, then they can petition to have these extended accounts thrown into the target but it’s driven by the account executive, not management. That’s quite a culture change.
Jason: When you talk about maximizing time, you want your SDRs to book meetings, qualify meetings. You want them to be working into an account but meetings. With AEs, you want them to be focusing on closing. If they’re spending half their time prospecting accounts and determining whether they think it’s a good fit, that’s a lot of consul that you put into the hands of those individual contributors for the success of the company.
They should be focusing on what we hired them to do. No longer do my SDRs prospect. You can spend 40%, 50%, 60% of your time prospecting versus you take that 60% of that time you’re spending doing that on booking meetings. They talk about maximizing your effort and your output. If we have AEs working two accounts, we’re going to give them a set of pre-qualified accounts, not have them go scouring across the web to find an account that they think, just based on their own intuition or maybe some subset of prequalification data that they need to find, I strongly believe that that should be done by management.
Marylou: For those who are listening, just to get clarity around this, in some instances the SDRs are also tasked with net new records where they have to actually go out and figure out how to add to their list with net new names. What Jason is talking about is that they’re pre-fed with the right number of accounts and the right type of account and contact records. Their focus is on the pre-sales conversation and actually getting that first conversation going. They don’t have to worry about trying to feed the beast. That really takes a big admin time off of the SDR in order to be able to perform his function.
The next thing Jason said was the AEs, who sometimes create the demand of which accounts to go after, that’s taken out of them as well. So then all they have to do now is focus on that first meeting opportunity and taking that to close. Is that a good way to summarize where you’re at, Jason?
Jason: Yeah, that was perfect.
Marylou: Okay, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I could just see, I could feel my body, it’s like, “Okay, what? Which bucket are we going into now?” I just wanted to make sure they got that. Go ahead and continue now what you’re going to say.
Jason: You can stop me anytime. Like I said, I start blabbing.
Marylou: You were talking about the fact that you’re really focused on maximizing return of effort and so you believe that having management responsible for selecting the accounts to begin with is the way to go.
Jason: Again, going back to what I was saying earlier, when you can do that, then you begin to accelerate your sales cycle. The number of meetings you can book and then the number of deals that you can close. If SDRs are booking more meetings, it’s naturally going to convert to more deals.
I would rather them focusing that 60% of time being used to prospect of 50% of time used to prospect. If I can book two or three more meetings within that time, that is so valuable. Those activities that they’re doing to book meetings is way more valuable than them spending time to scour the web, trying to find these accounts and then determining whether they get qualified or not. Again, going back to maximizing time, you got to look at where should they be spending their time and make sure they’re doing that 100%.
Marylou: Perfect. Let’s pretend now we now have a universe of accounts that have been pre-qualified and we are ready to go. Where’s the next area that you see that you’re going to debunk the myth for us?
Jason: When it comes to contract data, not a lot of SDRs will go and look for new contacts, things of that sort. Again, that should be management’s role or for organizations with sales operations, they should be responsible for doing that. That doesn’t mean that I, myself or our sales ops person, he shouldn’t be looking for those contacts himself.
Maximize other tools that are out there or things like Upwork which used to be oDesk, get some help from oDesk workers. Have them get those contacts for you. Give them the parameters. Give them the title. Give them the accounts and say, “This is the data I’m looking for.” It’s really inexpensive. You don’t want to put an expensive hire, especially here in Silicon Valley, SDRs, they can be expensive. You don’t want them having to look for contacts.
Sometimes it’s fine, but again, you want them to have a predetermined, pre-qualified set of accounts that they’re working on. And you want to give them the contacts with their email and phone number as well. That way, again, they’re going everyday. Here’s the set of accounts I want to focus on. I want to reach out to these many individuals within these companies and just have them execute. Again, it’s all about executing, executing, executing.
I used to be a big fan of SDRs prospecting for accounts and contacts and just realized how much time that was taking. It wasn’t worth it to me anymore. The next thing to debunk, I guess you can say, is part of what we were talking about before but really don’t have them spend time looking for contacts. When they are clear about who they’re going to reach out to based on the contacts you provided them, then I want my SDRs to go to LinkedIn and look at that person so they get context with them. Now, that gives them more time crafting messaging, doing the important work.
Marylou: Exactly. I think the other thing about that concept of offloading the data look up process, one thing I see a lot still to this day is that the databases are not rich with direct dial phone numbers. We’re still seeing 1-800 main switchboard numbers that are in a lot of lists. Having a person not only find the perfect email address, but also dig deeper and try to find some direct numbers, that also will eliminate the number of manual calls because you’ll have to call a switch board, have them transfer you. This way, you get directly in. That’s another byproduct of having an outsourced type of lookup service that can get you these quality contacts with phone numbers that are direct to save you time when you are doing your block time.
Jason: Direct dials, those are the ultimate piece of data that people want. Direct dials are hard to get these days especially with a lot of executives. They don’t have phones at their desk and so you’re trying to find their cell phone numbers, essentially.
The database that people can tap into, zoom info, if there’s specific verticals they’re going after in IT, DiscoverOrg, they have the best direct dials data out there for those verticals that they cover. Again, Upwork, getting someone on Upwork to look for that data, a lot of them have accounts or access to certain databases so you want to leverage those as well.
Marylou: You opened the pandora’s box of messaging and you said personalization. There’s a lot of hype online right now from colleagues about when to personalize, how you should personalize, in what form you should personalize. What have you seen out there, Jason?
Jason: There are companies that do things different ways. I don’t think there’s one way you can do this. What I always recommend and how we think about it here, this goes back to curing or segmenting your accounts, for dealing to your one account, I’m very high touch, very customized messaging, very cared to that person. Everything should be a manual step. There’s this wave of automation that took place, that’s still here, that’s being pulled back just a bit. I think automation is powerful but under the right circumstances.
When you’re dealing with two accounts, there should be a lot of customization. When you’re dealing with marketer corporate size accounts, I like to have the first email be manual because that’s always the foundation of our cadence. Maybe a couple automated steps are fine. That’s how we do it here. We have one or two automated steps within our sequences.
If it’s SMB, again, maximizing your time, you don’t want to put right there that are smaller companies, lower ACVs, lower contract value, things of that sort. If you want to use more automation there, always hop into it. Automation and templates, go for it. They don’t have a problem with that. But again, if you’re dealing with large companies, you don’t want the same message. You don’t want to use a template and use the same message across. If you’re talking to the VP of Sales versus the Demand Gen person, the messaging should be tailored specifically to what’s the problem you’re solving for each of those individuals and title.
Marylou: A lot of what we teach is I look at it more record sizes because again, I’m a database geek person but what I do is I look at those tiers like you talked about but I also look at the number of records that we’re working within those tires. That helps me decide when and how to apply mass personalization which is utilizing the database to populate the email engine for us versus hyper personalized which allows us to look in various social sources and find information about our prospect, our target and be able to include that in the body of the email.
We still, though, like to have the sales messaging, the why change, why now, why us embedded in template format that the reps can use so that they’re making sure that sales argument is there for that particular persona. We do spend time by persona, putting these together in template format. What’s nice about that is once they record which one they’ve selected, we start to get some analytics so that we can optimize not only the email itself but the placement of the email, what resonated when and where in the sequence it resonated so that we can start moving these things around like lego blocks, just getting the most impactful messaging upfront to reduce the lag.
Jason: That’s perfect. You bring out a good point in terms of having some level of structure. We teach frameworks here and overtime, the framework that we have, they end up developing their own templates for each persona.
We used to give people a template and say hey, just use these. We notice that some messages wouldn’t work doing this thinking anymore, so we developed a framework for them to actually think about why are you saying this to this persona, and then we’ll work with them on developing templates that match their style, writing or speaking. That’s been really effective.
Marylou: We do an exercise very similar to that where I have the reps actually record a conversation, as if they’re having it with Betty, the prospect. Record it on their phone and actually transcribe it. That becomes the basis of the email, that body. Obviously, it’s in conversational format but it does a number of things. It allows me to see, “Do they really know how to have these sales conversations?” Or is there a skill issue here that we may be up against as well? I’ll get somebody on the phone and then they’ll fall apart.
I use it for that and then also to take the framework that I have which is compell with content and apply it to their voice and see how well they’ve met all of the framework components in order to get that email.
The last thing I always say is, “When you hit that send button, are you transforming this prospect’s day by what you’re sending?” That always like, “Oh.” Yeah, I’m with you on that as well. I think personalization has a good role in its place and it’s a good rapport and relationship building exercise but I think if you’re sitting here as an SDR and you’re working a ton of records where you can’t possibly do 40 emails personalized a day, then you got to figure out the blend of how you want to personalize for what types of accounts and then use automation to help you get that the rest of the way. Do you have a number that you work with your folks on as to what they should be personalizing per day?
Jason: Number of emails that they should be personalizing a day?
Marylou: Yeah, hyper personalizing. I’m just curious because you know how we used to say in Predictable Revenue, we just talked about five meaningful conversations a day in a two hour block time. I’m just curious if there’s a formula you guys are coming up with for hyper personalization emails. How many they can crank out and still be meaningful. Like you said, before they hit that send button, that it’s really going to be meaningful for their prospect.
Jason: We don’t. The metrics I require, and I’ve never required hundreds of dials and emails per day. Inbound is a little bit different. 20 emails and 20 phone calls is my minimum. I’ve required this since the very beginning. 20 contacts a day and emails. When we first started out, they didn’t have any more than 5 to 10 meetings a week per rep. Instead of the volume game, we focus more on…
Marylou: Quality.
Jason: On quality. That’s been really effective for us. We’re a bootstrap company, we don’t have large amounts of funding sitting in our bank account. The quality does work for us. It’s not like, “Oh my God, we just have to throw everything in there and see what stays.” We kind of started with that. We tested some other stuff in the past but you just end up burning through accounts and we don’t want to do that. My reps are only given 150 accounts and then we go from there. Just 20 and 20.
Just to clarify, personalization isn’t we’re researching their whole background and where they went to school, and adding an email. When we say personalization, we are personalizing that based on what technologies we think they’re interested in, what aspects of a product we think they will be interested in and tailor specific to their role at the company and how it can impact their role to what we do. We don’t really put very much fluff in our emails.
We don’t say, “Oh my God, I saw you went to this school. That’s great.” Or, “You leave here. Have you ever been to this restaurant before?” We don’t use any of that but we customize it in a sense using that framework. Once they learn the framework, they can actually develop the email quickly. It’s not like they’re spending 15 minutes on it. Surely, they can crank it out in five minutes. It becomes very personalized and customized.
Marylou: One of the callers I spoke with recently talked about the fact that they do this writing in block time. Do you have some set times that the whole team works on writing or is it just when they’re doing their emails, they’re writing?
Jason: When they do their emails, they’re writing so we don’t have any block time. I don’t set anything like that. That’s a good idea though. The reason why I like using this framework and I don’t mind them spending time doing that because you guys have them record an example call first and then write the email. We actually have them write out the email first and then that becomes the call suite.
Marylou: Okay.
Jason: It kills two birds with one stone. When they’re done sending the email, they can just jump on the call and just you know, “Hey, I just sent you an email.” They know the talking points because it’s on the email. That’s been really effective for us as well.
Marylou: That’s a great way to do it. I think the blending of phone and email, because emails need to be conversational, we have this tendency as folks to get this imaginary quill behind our ear when we start writing and I think it’s because we all were fearful of our English teachers in high school and college, that we would do a sentence incorrectly.
Our emails really need to be conversational. It’s like we’re talking so that’s why we have people talking to the phone because first of all, they have to sound coherent and they have to not use all the jargon-y types of words and they have to have a lot of clarity around the why change, why now, why us, all in a very short, concise, sweet little message. I like the idea of using phone to help email and email to help phone. I think that’s a great way to get people up to speed and onboarded quickly and get your meetings like you’re talking about.
Jason: Keeping it conversational, you’re right on point. We have a different philosophy on messaging that I think a lot of companies do. We don’t actually talk about ourselves directly in our emails. We don’t ever mention Datanyze. I get emails all the time that say, “I can help to increase your pipeline by x. I’ve done this with these three companies.” They try and use social proof. I don’t know if that’s really that effective anymore because the conversation in email is now all about that company and it’s not about the actual prospect they’re reaching out to.
We don’t ever use our name in emails. Some of my reps started doing that but I put a stop to that because we want the focus to be on them. We oppose and we ask more of a question kind of approach. One of our most campaigns we did for awhile, there was more of a competitive play, competitive angle.
If one of my reps email you, let’s just for example say you work at Marketo, you’re VP at Marketo. One of my guys would email you and say, “Hey Marylou, if you understood which accounts or which companies were adding and dropping technologies, would that data be valuable to you and your sales team?” Just simple, but we pose a question. Didn’t mention Datanyze. Oftentimes, people respond like, “Oh my God, yeah, we’d love to understand who’s adding and dropping my competitors. That’s super valuable.” We would get in.
Our philosophy, we don’t talk about ourselves. We don’t tell them how we can do X. We just want to have enough contacts to the company we’re dealing with to say that we can do that for them, right?
Marylou: Right.
Jason: We approach it with a question based selling approach and that’s been really, really effective for us.
Marylou: I think that hits one of the teaching points that I like to discuss with clients. That is that there are certain levels of awareness that your prospects are in. You cannot make the assumption that they’re already comparing and they’re at that interested or evaluating stage. A lot of times, in our work, we get people who are unaware of who we are, don’t know they have a problem, don’t really perceive that there’s problems aligned with what they’re working on.
We have to jolt them a little bit or gently persuade them that all is not good in their world. They need to understand that, but you have to gently, and patiently, and persistently, and pleasantly, and delightfully let them know that they’re wrong.
Jason: We always look at our messaging, will this provoke them in any way or uncover some kind of thing that they’re unsure about? How can we provoke our prospects? There’s a great article by Geoffrey Moore. They wrote an article on the Harvard Business Review called Provocation Based Selling. It’s really fascinating. They encourage anyone to look at search data in Google and read the article. It’s really, really fascinating. We try and provoke people in our messaging, in our calls. To your point, they might not be doing something the right way, or might not be thinking about something in the right way.
Marylou: It’s awareness. It’s figuring out where they are on that ladder of awareness because we can’t make assumptions that they’re further along than they are especially when we’re doing outreach. I’ve had so many people over the years thank me for contacting them because they had no idea. Citibank, these large accounts. They just don’t have time to go run around on the internet finding stuff.
They’re just grateful when you can hit home with something. Next week, I’m doing a little tiny workshop here in De Moines and I was actually talking with someone at the supermarket, of all places, about what I’m doing. He was like, “Oh my gosh, we are just getting ready to look at reorganizing our sales process. I can’t believe you’re here and that you’re going to be over there.” You never know where people are. They have no idea what they really need to do and how urgent it is until you start talking to them.
But you have to meet them where they’re at in their head, in their purchase intent. That’s great that you do that. We only have a few minutes left so let’s talk about one more thing to debunk so that I can get my group all hot and bothered about, “Oh my gosh, everything I read is all different.” Which is good. It’s where we are. It’s just technology. It’s why we love what we do, because we’re constantly iterating, we’re constantly optimizing. What’s another one of your favorite things that you would like to share with the audience today?
Jason: Geez, let’s think of another one.
Marylou: Anything on metrics or any analytics.
Jason: The idea of start-ups that has sales territories.
Marylou: I think every one of my clients has territories. Do tell.
Jason: This doesn’t come from me. I was having a conversation with Daniel Barber.
Marylou: Daniel was on the podcast. He talked to us about planning and how we don’t plan properly.
Jason: We had a conversation about this the other day. The idea of start-ups having territories, it’s an interesting one. When Daniel Barber came here to Datanyze, we quickly restructured our accounts. People do it in different ways. Most of the time, it’s based on region.
Marylou: Geographic.
Jason: That’s not necessarily the right way to do it. I think for startup companies, instead of focusing on geographic areas and having these are our geographic territories, you want to base it more on developing an account profile no matter where they are and base it off of that profile. It’s more about making sure you’re speaking to the right types of accounts versus what region they’re in.
Even at Datanyze, we don’t have geographic based territories. Everything is based on our tiering and segmented tier one, two, and three. I guess we can consider those as our territories. It’s not based on anything geographic. It’s based on trust, tier one is gonna be a company that is most likely a tech company. We classified it as a company that uses SalesForce, Marketo, or Pardot, they have a sales team that’s over 250 and a marketing team above 44 people. That’s what we classify tier one. All those accounts that are in our SalesForce, they belong to our enterprise reps. It doesn’t matter if they’re east coast or west coast, those accounts are evenly split.
Tier two, we classify same technology as SalesForce, Marketo, Pardot, or they’re using Hubspot. Their marketing team is reaching 20 and 48 and sales between 100 and 249 or something like that. Those are mid-market. How people are I think [00:37:05] define territory goes back to the geography of things, it doesn’t really make sense. Why should that really matter?
It’s more of making sure you have the right tiers in the accounts that you say should be your customers at all cost. I think that’s where the focus should be, especially for startups. It’s gonna be like, “Okay, let’s focus on California and New York and drive as much as we can there.” Versus, “Let’s take a step back and identify here’s what our accounts looks like. We’re going to make sure that they’re our customers.” I think startups should start thinking in that regard.
Marylou: That’s a tough one. I’m thinking real estate. I have some clients in real estate who want to branch out nationally. It’s difficult for them to even get their arms around how are we going to do this? In reality, they can move geographically around, they don’t have to have presence and billboards and all the things that they’re so used to doing. I think there’s a mindset there that the beauty of the technology is that we can try to reach out to these other neighborhoods and see what it is that their needs are.
I have some clients too who actually physically go visit their accounts. In healthcare industries, they’re still old style in some areas. I think we really overlay with the ideal accounts, high revenue potential, high likelihood of closing, you want them as customers, and then this factory model that you’re talking about of round robin, the reps get them as they go. When there’s something active, the next available rep gets it. It’s a very different way of looking at things. It’s fun to explore. Maybe, you won’t do it for every tier but I think it’s something that people would probably benefit from especially if you’re allowing people to work with multiple SDRs and do multiple types of partnering up instead of these pod concepts.
I think there’s a lot of change coming down that it’s worth exploring. Don’t be so set in your ways when it comes to organization of the teams because we really need to experiment to see what works for your culture and what works in selling your products and services. That’s what you taught us today, Jason. Look outside the box a bit because technology changes. Like in my real estate, our reach is changing so let’s figure out how we can leverage technology and process and people in order to be able to reach our intended targets authentically and with value. That’s really what it’s all about.
Jason: Absolutely.
Marylou: Thank you so much for joining us today. How do people get a hold of you now that they’re all intrigued by our conversation today?
Jason: They can reach out to me on LinkedIn or if they want to email me directly, my email is jason@datanyze.com. If they want to tweet me, my handle is @jasoncvargas.
Marylou: Okay. I’ll put all this in the show notes, Jason, including that Harvard business review article so that people can at least get there quicker. I very much appreciate you coming in on the show today and talking with everybody. Just to remind you all, Jason is walking the walk. He’s out there doing this type of development. It’s not sitting behind the desk saying in theory how things should work. He’s actually applying all these principles and testing and iterating and optimizing and systematizing every single day. If you’re at a point where you really want some assistance or ideas, Jason’s a great resource for that.
Thanks again for your time today, Jason.