Troy Kirby is a sports business consultant who builds relationships and revenue for sports organizations. He is the owner of Tao of Sports where he consults for B2B vendors, professional teams, and college athletic departments. He also hosts the Tao of Sports podcast.

We have a really interesting conversation on today’s show. Troy comes from the world of sports, and he is an expert in sports sales. He is going to share some of his great stories in the area of sales, education, where he came from, and what he was trained for. He is also going to share his sales experience from the perspective of focusing on engaging people and getting them to come to his events.  

Episode Highlights:

• When people give you time and opportunity it is a gift, and you need to give back.
• Stand up comedy and open mic night helped Troy become relatable.
• If you have a speaking opportunity. Go and screw up. The whole idea is to get practice relating to people.
• Listen to other people and be interested in what they do. Build a relationship that way.
• People want to do business with people who listen to them not talk at them.
• Change your mindset and have a yes mentality.
• Troy ended up having a great conversation interviewing the Octomom and allowing her to talk more and treating her with equity and respect.
• Qualifying people by how much money they have, yet they might be a great source of referrals.
• If someone tells you not to do something, they probably don’t know what they are talking about.
• Troy is known in the sports industry as the sales ticket guy.
• Take an active investment in other people, but also take a chance on yourself.
• Play the long game and really knock the cover off the ball. Plan for the long term.
• Do the work in advance and build your contact over time. Don’t use other people as an excuse for not achieving.
• How we are overly entertained. Put the time in your business, and it will yield out so much more.
• The importance of the daily commitment to the process. It takes time to build relationships and work and work that system.
• Thinking outside of the box and getting people to come to your events. Troy shares his red turf story where the turf could be seen from space.
• You have to be able to tell a story, sell a narrative, and believe in yourself. Take risks and don’t be threatened by what you are doing.

Resources:

• TAO of Sports
• Troy Kirby on LinkedIn
• @SportsTao on Twitter
• Robert Cialdini
• Matt Harper

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a great guy. His name’s Troy Kirby. He is the solo entrepreneur, founder, CEO, [00:00:30]. He’s coming right now to us from a sports [00:00:36] and I thought it would be a really interesting conversation with Troy because I’ve spoken at one of his conferences and learned a lot about sales in the sports area and how it’s implemented. I really wanted Troy to share a lot of his stories. He’s got some great ones for us in the area of sales, in the area of education, where he came from, as far as what he was trained for versus what he’s doing now. This give us some idea of his experiences as it relates to sales but not actually really diving into process. It’s all about focusing on engaging people, getting people to come to events, what he does in his world in order to build his book of business. Welcome, Troy, to the podcast.

Troy: Well Marylou, first of all, thank you for coming on my podcast originally and also coming to my conference. If I didn’t have people like you that were invested in me enough to do that, I don’t think that I would be as successful. I think that’s something that as we start out this kind of conversation, it means to really talk about how other people, when they give you their time, they give you that opportunity, they’re really giving you a gift. You have to be respectful of that and you have to be ready to give back.

I think if there’s one thing in sales sometimes that’s infuriating is at networking events and other things. People just want to hand you business cards, “Give me money.” Well, that’s not how relationships work. That’s not how people view anybody else when they want to deal with them and when you do that, I thinking you shut down the idea of conversation and you shut down that idea that you’re ever going to actually make a sale form it.  

Marylou: Let’s expand on that. We met probably through a cold interaction. It’s been a while. I can’t remember how we actually connected. But obviously, I’m coming from a whole different way of life than you but yet, there was a spark there. There was something that you did on your end to engage me. Is it science that you do? Is it just who you are as a person or you practice? Do you study everyday on how to start these conversations? What is it about you, Troy, that allows you to start and follow through conversations with people you don’t know on a regular basis?

Troy: What I would first of all say is I’ve always been outgoing as a child. But now as a grown up, one thing that actually did help me out of the blue to be able to be better at the stage and really working with people I don’t know was to do some stand up comedy. I was not very funny but it was that open mic night of getting up there a few times and actually having to make the audience care what I said and be relatable to them that I think helped.

I would always encourage that. If there is any type of speaking opportunity, go where you know you’re gonna screw up. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t care if I screwed up in front of a stand up comedy crowd or whatever because it was an open mic night. Everybody was horrible and you’re going to tell groaners. The whole idea is to get practiced in the idea of relating to people. Whether or not it’s digitally online, which is how initially we met, plus me reaching out to you. Because I was looking for people outside the box for my podcast that could talk about things like prospecting, that could talk about thing that were really not utilized as much as they could be in the sports industry because I have enough of an audience with my own podcast. I get about 15,000 listeners a month that are all in the sports industry and sometimes, I want to be able to feed them that spinach with the cookie.

Sometimes, I’m gonna interview their friends but I also want to interview the people that provoke them. I always see that in networking events where people will [shuttle 00:04:36] with their friends, the people that they already talk to anyway and then they go, “Well, networking didn’t work.” That’s because you only talk to the same people you’ve talked too all the time. Get away from your friends for about 30 minutes and own the room. That means going out and being fairly aggressive with everybody you talk with to make sure that you’re invested in what they care about, which means listening to other people.

A lot of people won’t do that. A lot of people will resist hearing anybody else’s story. One thing I’ve learned over my time is I’m pretty boring when it comes to being interested in myself. I know me. I’m kind of bored with me. I’m more interested in who you are. The amount of stuff that you do might be more fascinating to me because it’s like getting a new book, or getting a new movie. You’re entertaining me in a lot of ways with your stuff and we’re building a relationship that way. I want to give back to it, come and converse with you but I think it also matters that you feel that somebody is actually listening to you. Because people want to do business with people that listen to them, not people who talk at them.

Marylou: You know it’s funny I’m reminded of Robert Cialdini, who way back in the dark ages used to teach his own classes in persuasion that I was allowed to go to in Phoenix. I remember him standing up and saying, “You know the biggest mistake we make is we go into a room and we say to ourselves, who can help me? Who can help me in this room? Instead of saying, who can I help? Who can I truly add value.” Like you said, engage in conversation. Listen to what it their story is and play off of that.

Your open mic stand up really does train that muscle of listening and reacting and finishing a sentence of someone else. Would you say you honed that over time or if I were listening to this podcast, I’m just cringing, thinking I’m the one who’s standing on the corners or on the side of the wall not wanting to go to the center unless I really know the person or can anticipate how they’re gonna react to me. What do you say to that?

Troy: Number one, change your mindset. It should be a yes mentality. Anything that you can do that is not going to necessarily take your arm off, try it. By the way, I don’t know if anybody even remembers me doing stand up comedy. I don’t know if any of those people probably even glanced at it that were in the audience at that open mic, those few open mics that I did. I don’t care. This is actually where I will tell you actually get started with a podcast.

I did not get started with a podcast with own idea of saying, “Jeez, I’d like to do a sports business podcast that talks about sales.” What happened was I had a person that I met at one of those open mics who said, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast and I’m interviewing this woman and I need your help because you seem to ask good questions.” And I said, “Well who is this woman?” And they said, “The octo mom and yes, that’s the same one.” But the difference was instead of asking her questions that were I guess dismissive of her or derogatory, she was only gonna give us 15 minutes, I ended up getting 45 out of her because we asked her being a mother, things that she had done in her life that were totally side step. From that, I started going, “Wow, this is a great conversation.”

What’s funny about that is I had people that actually reached out to the comedian friend who were like, “That really changed my mind of her.” I don’t know. I’m not here to change anybody’s mind about anybody. But if you can take a person who has been annihilated by the press, change that mindset just by allowing to talk more, I think that that’s a powerful thing because it means that you invested in the conversation with them and you also treated them with equity and respect.

I have nothing for or against that lady. I don’t know her very well but I do think that I have the right to treat her as a person. Too often, I think that’s one of the other things sales does incorrectly. We qualify people based on how much money they have. The thing I would say is there are plenty of times that I have met people, especially in college athletics, to where they didn’t have much more than a dollar to their name but they happen to know about 10 people that had about a $100,000 to their name. That, to me, is one of the things that really a lot people make mistakes on, is they don’t want to take investment because they see your wallet instead of maybe the fact that you might have a referral that might help them, etc.

Coming to that, that’s where I started going, “Wow, I really want to build the conversation. I’m going to do my own podcast on sports business.” Here’s what ended up happening. I did one podcast with my friend, Matt Harper, who has a yes mentality. In everything that I do he says, yes, he’ll be a part of it. Much to his detriment. We recorded a 60 minute conversation. It was just about sports, sales, etc. I threw it up on LinkedIn. I had an associate [00:09:55] at West Virginia who reached out to me. I’ve never known him a day in my life. He goes, “Wow, that was great,” blah, blah, blah.

I also had a colleague that I knew for many years, who worked in Seattle, called me up and said, “You need to take that down. The sports industry doesn’t do that. You’ll get black balled, this synonymous thing. You’re going to get black balled. That’s just bad for your career.” A year and a half later, he’s asking me how to do his own podcast and how to be a guest on mine.

That kind of tells me as well people don’t see what they need to see until after it’s already done sometimes. When you have those moments of doubt, just remember, a lot of people who are speaking to you are speaking from their own inexperience. If they tell you not to do something and it really doesn’t change the fact of the world, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I would be reticent to say don’t just not take chances because somebody else might not agree with you. So what? Do it. Try it. If it doesn’t hurt anybody, go for it.

What’s funny is about that podcast has over 150 episodes but it’s really built over the past 5 ½ years to where now I’m known in the sports industry as the sales guy, the ticket sales guy. People place things on you because they hear your voice often. They hear who you are. They kind of invest in you and there’s other things like an email blast that I put out that has its own kind of readership because it’s a news paper. It’s not just me trying to sell you on me. I think that that’s important as you move forward. Whatever the sales initiatives are, you need to take an active investment in other people. But once you take a chance on yourself and project those things, you have the opportunity to make so many more contacts and so much more money.

Marylou: Yeah. With all the tools that are out today, the social tools that allow us to become our own mini CEO of our own company, which means we’re commenting on group discussions where you’re creating a blog post maybe, talking about the benefits of some feature of a product or just reaching out to your second level connections and asking how you can be of service, all those things, just mini types of tasks that you do everyday will start to build. Like you said, you’re now known as the guy in sales for sports.

That was built over time but you were consistent in it. You were courageous in giving your word out there. We all make mistakes along the way. It’s just the way it is. The more you put yourself out there, the more authenticity you actually portray, the more people get to know you and they feel comfortable with you. That’s one of the biggest issues I have with email and texting, is that we kind of hide behind these levers of technology and we don’t necessarily communicate one to one anymore. It’s one to many, which doesn’t work.

Troy: I think it’s even beyond that. I think we have a lot of people that like to use convenient excuses. I always feel sorry for the spouses or children of some of these people that will tell you that that’s why they don’t do something to their spouse, they have kids or whatever. I was thinking that’s not their fault that you cannot find that 5 minute to 10 minute time commitment just for whatever you are doing. Using that as an excuse almost sounds like you‘re kind of resenting them for the fact that you would have done this stuff had they not been around and we know that’s bogus. We know that’s not true. That’s you being complacent that you can find the extra five minutes. That means you wake up five minutes early.

I always find it really kind of disparaging that somebody would think their spouse or their children would prevent them from having that 5-10 minutes to do those things. That’s part of the issue, is a lot of people aren’t playing the long game. They play the short game. They always want a pot and that’s why they miss. Instead, they need to play the long game of being able to really knock the cover out of the ball long before it’s due. Let’s say you decide you’re going to do XYZ, you need to plan it out. You need to do it long term.

I have a person that I’ve helped. He has a wife and two kids. He didn’t know where he’d find the time but he really loves this game called Floorball. I said to him, “Okay, if you really want to set this up, here’s how you set it up. You write all of the blog posts for a year before you even launch one. Every time that you launch one, you replace it with an extra five minutes of your time.” He griped and groaned about it for about two months but he got it done and that was in May of last year, in 2017.

He is now already in January, the end of January, has the NHL talking to him. He already has other folks talking to him because this game of Floorballs, adaptive to injury recovery but also national hockey league and their efforts of going over to China in 2022. He didn’t even know that he had the potential audience. A lot of it became because he refused to do the time management beforehand or just didn’t know it existed.

But the difference was once he got on the ball, he did not use his children. He did not use his spouse as an excuse for why he wasn’t doing anything. What’s amazing is he goes, “Yeah, I write a blog post once a week now for five minutes.” It’s easy once you get started. But I think it affects your relationship to also your spouse or your children because of the fact that you’re making these excuses. I think it rubs off that eventually you do start blaming them for things that really have nothing to do with them.

If you are actually in sales and you’re like, “I can’t get it together,” and blah, blah, blah, you’re not putting not only the time in, but you’re not putting the time in ahead of time. If that means that you are going to invest in relationships, if that means you’re going to invest in contacts, don’t do it the day its due. Don’t do it two days before it’s due. Do it five months before it’s due. Build that contact overtime. Do it in a way that actually allows you to have more time, not less time with your family or whatever.

I’m a big family first guy. I’m not married or have kids myself but I don’t really subscribe to that idea of leveraging an excuse. That really ends up hurting your relationship with other people simply because you didn’t achieve.

Marylou: Yeah, but it’s also about sustaining your work. You mentioned your friend who sought you out. Was it for advisory? Was it for coaching? Was it for accountability? What was it that kept him going? Did you need to prod him on that or did he, as he started to get momentum, just naturally stepped up and kept going on his own?

Troy: To use an analogy, I’m the guy that puts the gun on the counter. I tell you exactly what you can do and then if you don’t achieve it, that’s not on me. I give you the really hard lesson upfront and say, “If you really want to achieve this, this is what you have to do.” I’m always giving other people when they want to do this. Some people have taken me up on. Some people have not. When they have not taken me up on it, they’ve used that coffee session, they end up seeing the results from other people achieving what they don’t. That does not mean that you have to charge them for that knowledge, that’s not what my deal is.

I’d look at it as success shows success and once you start to see it and you start to have the reaction from people that were now subscribing to his automatic newsletter that always came out that he had set a year ago, he had set that like March or April for 2017, for now. That those blog posts, that stuff is being released. Now, it makes it just absolutely easy when you just update once in awhile and you’re not scrambling.

He had an issue to where one of his pets died. He had the entire two weeks where he was just out of commission. He didn’t worry about it because the thing was automatic. He has a full time job. He’s a [00:18:48]. But here’s the thing, he’s now getting enough calls. He’s now getting enough interest. He’s starting to look and go, “Wow, two years down the line I might be able to take this the full breadth.” The problem is that people aren’t willing to take those first few steps. Whether that’s even as a sales business development director or not, just because they want to have that extra time to themselves. I always question what people are doing. I think we’re overly entertained.

If you look at Netflix. Netflix is putting out a ton of awesome stuff every single week. You’ll see people, even your friends talking about how they just binged watched for 10 hours The Crown or Orange Is The New Black. My thought is if you put that 10 hours into something else, that 10 hours that you put into your business will actually yield out probably about 20 times. Whereas that Orange Is The New Black once it’s done, you’re not gonna watch it again or maybe you will but you just wasted time and you stayed up all night and whatever.

I’m not against entertainment. I just think that we are being way too soothed with the entertainment options that we have and we are not willing to do the little things. I’ll give you an example of something that bugged me in the industry. As a college ticket director at UC Davis back in I think it was 2013, 2014, we didn’t really have a ticket association. If you go to NACDA, which is the Athletic Directors Association Conference, they will house every association under it.

Tickets was always thrown into marketing and not viewed as different. I would go to some of the meetings to where they would have these breakout sessions for ticket people. There will be about 100 people there and I was like, “Why don’t we have our own track, our own sessions that talk about tickets or the things that we’re doing.” Everyone just kind of looked at me kind of odd, whatever. I finally asked the question of the organizers, “What does it take to get a ticket association?” And I said, “You know, you got to fill out a form. It’s like $30.” They made it sound so arduous.  

I filled up the form. I paid the $30 and then I went around and I called as many people as I knew within the industry and a lot that I didn’t know. We got it founded. They said, “Nobody’s gonna come. You’ll probably get 25 people. Nobody is gonna sponsor.” You know what? I found the sponsors. I found the relationships. I had a good two, three people helping me. I don’t mean to suggest like I did it all on my own but you’ve got to be that aggressive person.

The fist conference that we had, we had over 100 people and by the way, they’re now in year four. They have now more money as an association from sponsorship by far than any of the other ones that are established, even though they have only like a twelfth of the attendees. The reason why is putting that aggressive thing forward to where I’m no longer part of that organization because I’m not in college athletics. But once you start momentum and you start that snowball, other people see it and other people want to be a part of it. Once you do that, it allows people to get energized and do it and then they’re just a part of it.

Same with the conference that I had you at, Sports Sales Bootcamp was one that didn’t exist a few year ago. All I did was ask the organizers for a room. They said, “Sure.” I sold the sponsorship to it and then I set out to make the conference that I wanted with risk mitigation of not having to pay any kind of conference hotel fees or anything else. I made it really applicable to what I thought young account reps or young professionals might want. I got rid of the majority of the powerpoints which to some people was to a chagrin that they didn’t have 30 PowerPoint slides and they didn’t have 70 minutes or 700 minutes. Some of these people want to take 30 minutes or less. Give it to me and then guess what? There’s video on the back end.

Marylou: Right.

Troy: Once you start doing that, all of a sudden, I start to have people like yourself that were willing to invest in it, but other people even in the industry that were vying to be a part of it simply because they could see it at that point. If I have not put the time in a year and a half prior to the first one launching, it wouldn’t have filled up, it wouldn’t have been something. You’ve got to do it a long time ahead. Once you do that, you’re gonna win.

Marylou: It’s the daily commitment to the process. I think a lot of what I’m seeing now is immediate ratification is the order of the day. A lot of times, we don’t have that luxury, especially in prospecting into cold accounts or people we don’t know. We’re not going to have this instant rapport. It takes time to build relationships. It takes time to work the system so that by the time we do have that first conversation, they know a little bit about you. They know what you stand for. And yes, it’s still a cold conversation but you’re warming them up with information, with content, with things that matter to them along the way. A lot of people think you just pick up the phone and get an appointment and that’s it. That’s all you got to do.

Troy: A lot of people think that you can hit a baseball out of the park. Kevin [00:24:19] who’s assistant basketball coach at UC Davis said something so poignant to me once and I repeat it all the time. He goes, “Talent without drive is just another word for underachiever.” He goes, “I met plenty of talented people, they just never really accomplished much because they didn’t have the drive on that behalf.” Once I heard that, I was like you know, that does have some kind of merit.

What I’ll say is with my podcast if I died today, Like drop dead right now, people, unless they knew who I was, they would not know that I was dead via the podcast for at least 10 episodes. That’s three weeks. Because I’ve loaded up that many episodes, I always stack the amount of episodes I have because you never know when somebody’s gonna drop out from a commitment. Somebody has some type of issue, whether I have an issue. It’s all that preparation and it makes it so much easier to be able to do stuff because often, there are so many people that are challenged with time because they’re seeing it from what they are doing immediately, not what they’re doing 5 weeks, 70 weeks from now.

I’m launching my own conference in Seattle–we talked about off-air–I talked to Amazon’s PR actually today about them bringing out some stuff. They we’re like, “You’re ahead of the game. You are this far ahead, nine months ahead.” I said, “Actually, it’s only 257 days.” They went, “Wow.” I said, “We’ve been looking at this since July last year.” Getting everything else. You have to look at it as when you walk into that facility, if you’re selling something that that other person that’s walking in doesn’t know how much time it took, they only see what they see, you have to be as ready as possible. That comes to everything. You cannot wait to the last minute and when you do, that’s when screw ups happen.  

Screw ups are gonna happen. I’m not saying that everything is gonna be perfect but you can mitigate the amount of screw ups if you actually avoid certain things. I had screw ups. Everything I’ve ever done has had screw ups. It doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna happen. “I can’t do it 100% perfect.” So then it’s 0% perfect if you don’t launch it.

I just rather to be 85% and try to short up that last 15% that’s gonna happen. Plus, people don’t see your mistakes as much as you think they do.

Marylou: Right, my motto isn’t continuous to be from my friend, Aaron Ross. “Don’t worry, be crappy.” Get it out there because your crappy is probably is someone’s wow. Because you’re always further along than somebody else on the path of success. What you know right at this moment is a lot more than people coming onto the path. You have to keep that in mind, especially when you’re developing intellectual property and do a blog post or whatever it is. Just get out there with heart. Put yourself out there. People are gonna comment, people are gonna comment negatively, but it’s all about starting the conversation. Our whole being for prospecting is to be able to start conversations with people we don’t know or people that are warming up that chill. We’re in that world of not everybody’s gonna love us, it’s just that’s the way it is.

I think the more we can embrace that and go with it and get stuff out there and be real, the more fun we’re gonna have at our job, first of all, and the more successful we are going to be. You overlay that with what Troy has been talking about. It’s not a today task, it’s planning over the long haul. It’s the one, three, five year trajectory that we’re looking towards. We’re just chugging away, chunking away at that goal every single day and we’ll get there.

Everybody knows I’m turning 60 in May and I have a goal to do, a 60 second handstand halt. I did my first one last night and I held it for one second, which means I have 59 seconds more to go. But it’s the journey. It’s getting there. I’m excited that I can even hold it for that length of time. That’s the thing. That’s what keeps us going. It’s that we know we’re gonna get there but it’s enjoying the journey of getting there too, that’s a big point.

Troy: I would also say, Marylou, that you also do not act like somebody that’s nearing maybe what I would call retirement. When you came to my conference, you were heavily active in everything. You were participating. You were sitting in the back. You were doing things with other people. That was beyond what a lot of people do. You were cultivating relationships that long term may yield out, I think way too many people act like they’re about to bud to retirement. They just show up to anything.

I’ve had social media folks who are speakers. They show up to their speaking thing and then they walk right out to get to the airport. I’m like, “Woah, you just cost yourself.” They don’t understand that. They think that that should be enough. I always think that’s the entry point to somebody seeing you as a peer, somebody seeing you as somebody they want to talk to. When you don’t make yourself available, it’s really killing you long game.

I think that some people get it, some people don’t, but it comes to also how you cultivate. I’ll give you another example of something that was outside the box thinking. At Seattle University, when I started there in 2006, we had 16 fans come into our men’s basketball games. Our last basketball game of the year was 16 fans. Meaning parents didn’t even show up to support their kids. That’s how bad it was. It was D2. We only had one guy that was buying the season ticket, he was buying it for both men’s and women’s. Nobody else cared. There were free tickets all over the place.

We took over. I was really young at this but I just decided I’m not going to focus on sports fans at all. That really bothered some people to hear that. I said just hold off. Seattle University, at one time, was one of the major division ones in college basketball. In 65, had more players, had more alumni who had been in the NBA at that time than any other college. It was renowned for having African-Americans play when a lot of colleges especially in the south and on the east coast wouldn’t.

It was really well known. It played Kentucky for the national title in 58 and lost. Here’s the thing. It dropped down to division two in 1980. All of that stuff was gone by 2006. Nobody cared and everyone thought that this was so ridiculous especially when we told everyone we’re going Division 1. They said, “What are you talking about? There’s nobody coming to your games. There’s no way you’re going to be at the same level as some of the other big, top teams of the country.”

What we did was I focused especially by calling our alumni folks on campus. I said, “Who’s coming to our campus?” They go, “What do you mean? For sports?” I go, “No, anything but sports.” They have the crab feet. They had all these other things that were happening. I said, “Okay, these people do not have a problem with us. These people like us. These people are going to the Costco breakfast every fall.” Guess what? We started targeting those folks. You know what a lot of folks said? “That sounds like fun.” They’re buying season tickets. You know what’s funny about that? Once we packed the house, all of those other people that were the die hard sports fans that wouldn’t show up because we weren’t the best or whatever, all of a sudden, they were angry that they couldn’t get in.

We transitioned that to two and a half years later, we are at a capacity situation to where we had a standing room behind both benches. Literally, they’re hovering over the players as they’re playing. We have a coach call a timeout halfway through the game. We hear this moaning sound and we’re like, “What the heck is that?” Here’s the bleachers starting to buckle because they were old wooden bleachers that have been carted in in 1980 from a 1940s Jesuit high school. It’s probably dangerous. We have probably about 1,500 to 1,600 people in the gym. The capacity was about 1,000. We had the fire marshall that had been threatening to shut us down over it.

We loose on the last second shot to our archrival, Seattle Pacific. In the back, our basketball coach gets all [00:33:19]. He says, “You know, the problem with this is our players aren’t used to this type of crowd. This was just too much pandemonium.” We went out and got shirts that said, “Quiet please so our team can concentrate.” The point is that you can build it and it surprises people. It surprises the basketball coaches. It surprises everybody.

We even did that at Eastern Washington University. Nobody cared about my alma mater, Eastern Washington University, when I was a student there back in 2003. We went into tailgate. Tailgating wise, the cops would show up if we were there two hours beforehand and go, “Come back 15 minutes before the game.” We don’t do that here. When I went back there in 2008 as their ticket manager, we said, “Let’s change the culture.” We started selling tailgate passes. Everyone said, “Why would somebody buy a tailgate pass for $30 when you can buy a regular pass just for $5.” “Well, they get to stay overnight.” “Who’s gonna do that?” You know what’s funny? We had a lot of people that suddenly wanted to do that.

Everyone was worried that they were gonna cause all this pandemonium and havoc. They treated it like a campground. They respected it. The argument was some of these people have these RVs that are even bigger and more expensive than your house. They’re not gonna mistreat it. They’re adults. We get to the point where we put red turf down and we announce it. Everybody has a problem with it. Everyone suddenly becomes an interior decorator that says, “It’s gonna mismatch our track. It’s gonna look ugly.”

Here’s the thing, nobody gave a crap about Eastern Washington University football even though we had won before that time. We were in the ESPN, we were in the New York Times, we had Japanese TV stations coming out to cover us because we dared put red turf down, the only turn that you could see from space. We’d always make these jokes that birds would see it from the sky and not land on it because it was like a lake of fire.

We had fun with it. Here’s the thing. Before that period, we did not have the bookstore even carry jerseys. They didn’t really even like render that we were the Eagles, we were anything. After that point, it galvanized us. It galvanized us to the idea that we had imagery that if somebody else didn’t like it, “Hey, that’s my school. You don’t say that.” Compounded with that, our first game on red turf in 2010 was gonna be against our archrival, Montana. Montana would usually buy out our stadium. We would usually consign them tickets and they would hold up signs that said, “Washington’s Grizzly Stadium.” Because we were in Washington state, and they were Grizzly stadium. They basically owned our turf. We didn’t allow them to do it in 2010.

We held back. Even though I had the city manager upset at me, calling,  threatening my job which she couldn’t get, she was upset because her Montana friends couldn’t get in and this was going to cost us. We had it to where all of these Montana fans thought that somehow I as the classified staff member who was a ticket person, person of one, was somehow responsible for this looking around the room. I remember that we had several deans and the university president that were on board with this idea of restricting tickets. We restricted these tickets to season ticket holders and donors until the last 15 days before the game was played.

You know what’s funny? We had more donors invest in us, more donors actually buy tickets because of the fact that they didn’t want Motana fans there. But also, we had people that bought season tickets before. Before that period, we only had about 200 season tickets sold. During that season, we had 5,000 sold. The reason why was because people have never gotten to experience our product. We never cared about what what we were selling and whether or not it was to the right people. Sometimes, you can sell to the wrong people simply because it’s sold, but it’s empty calories because it sells to people that aren’t going to buy it again or they’re only gonna buy every two years. You want that person that’s gonna invest in you.

What was amazing was that when Montana actually did have the ability, all their fans, to call for tickets when that on sale came public, they flooded the Montana ticket office, they flooded the NCAA offers with complaints, even the conference office and they shut down TicketsWest in general. Now, before that period, we only had about the average of 3,000 people in our stadium for a 10,000 seat stadium. Once you think about that for a moment, we caused to where people became so furious that they couldn’t get in to a place that nobody wanted to be into.

I actually won a contest from the Missoulian. They had the newspaper and they called me the most hated man of Montana. They asked me what I thought of it because I actually beat out one of their despised head coaches who had left, [Bobby Haut 00:38:35]. I said, “Well, every time you make a Grizz fan angry, an angel gets its wings.” The thing is that you have to be able to tell a story, you have to be able to sell a narrative but you also have to believe in yourself. I even had a few death threats, which is silly. We had a guy on campus who is our detective who said, “I’m tired of having conversations about you with people that are taking this way too far.”

Those thing are gonna happen but you cannot feel threatened by what you’re doing. You have to take those risks. You have to be that gambler. You know what, sometimes you’re going to fail. I failed tons of times. I have not always been the best at winning but the thing is that I will pick myself up and I will keep going. All of these sales people out here who may be listening to this think about it from that angle. Do you have an entire state that hates you? Actually they still talk about me. I feel kind of blessed that they care. The thing is that perpetuated a sellout streak to a place that had never sold out their venue before on a consistent basis to where they have now the sellout streak over, I want to say about 10 years or 8 years, something like that. That’s not just me. That’s other people. I don’t want that to sound like as me, me, me. But if that continues with a goal, continues with what you’re doing, that’s how you’re gonna win.

Marylou: Right.

Troy: People don’t win by just doing it immediately. They do by playing that long game and you’ve got to play that long game, otherwise you’re not gonna win.

Marylou: Be memorable, it sounds like for you, Troy.

Troy: We hate it. Yes. Here’s the thing. At Seattle U, I had the reputation over the nickname Captain Controversy because I was willing to go into the mix and I didn’t care. People are like, “This person might now think blah, blah, blah about you.” I said, “This person is not really thinking about me.” That’s the other thing that’s so biopic. It’s like people that think they’re gonna survive the apocalypse. How myopic that you think you’re gonna be the 1% of the people that actually survive. People do not think about you long term. In that sense of, “Wow, you really did this.” A lot of times, they have a variation of it. Some of them may have had an interaction with you but if they had a great experience, who cares?

We’re launching here in my hometown [00:41:17]. We’re launching a soccer team. It’s an elite men’s soccer team. There is a controversial thing around here called the pocket gopher issue which the EPA [00:41:27] has closed off to where you can’t build on certain parts without getting a fine because it’s an endangered species. It’s become a device of issue that everyone knows about. Of course, we called ourselves the lazy pocket gophers. As we’re launching, people are like, “Jeez, that’s a controversial issue.”

You know what’s funny? I’m having two mascots built right now and every time people see them, they laugh. We’re gonna hand out a $42,000 fine to one of our lucky persons that comes to the gate. We’ll have a county commissioner that’s agreed to relieve it. We’re just gonna have fun. The thing is that way too often, people forget that fun matters in that experience with you.

Let’s say you’re insurance, and I realized that insurance salespeople have to talk about death or car accidents or whatever. If you talk about that stuff or you talk about that kind of disenjoyment, people are gonna go away from you. They’re not going to buy from you. Talk about fun things, talk about interesting things that make them want to buy from you because it is a lot more fun to talk about the ways that you can sell insurance.

I think insurance could be a lot more fun than people actually make it out to be, but instead, they make it like this Gregorian chant and that’s why people don’t want to invest in it. Whether it’s lazy pocket gophers or whatever, affiliate your brand with fun. Nobody has a problem with fun. Everybody wants more fun, as we talked about with entertainment. They want more fun. The last thing they want is really to think about those horrible things that might happen to them.

Marylou: Exactly. Troy, this has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to share these stories and hopefully, give someone that incentive to have a great time doing what you’re doing, think outside the box, try to find alternative solutions. Don’t always stick with the status quo. Just the stories we’ve heard from you over the last few minutes talk about all the different things you did. Just going around, and through, solving problems and having fun while doing it. I hope people take this conversation to heart thinking, “You know? I’m gonna change some things out. I’m gonna do some things differently.”

Also, the other message, very, very strong message is that planning for the long term. It’s not an immediate gratification. We’ve really gotta work towards what can I do today to meet those goals that I have set for six months a year plus out.

Thank you so much, Troy, for being a guest on the podcast today.

Troy: Thank you very much, Marylou. My lesson is stop giving a crap what people think because a lot of times they’re not thinking about you. Just go do it. Try it. See what happens. I appreciate both your friendship and the professionalism that you bring to stuff. I’ve really started to become a big admirer of yours, of how you carry yourself and I learned things from you and just how you kind of do things that make me better. I think that that’s the lesson from that is we’re learning from each other and I appreciate your time as well.

Marylou: Thank you. For those of you listening, I’ll put Troy’s contact information, his podcast, all of those links will be on his page if you want to get a hold of him and listen to him. It’s a really great podcast. It’s very enjoyable and you’ll learn something every time you listen, for sure. Thanks again, Troy.

Shimon Lazarov the CEO of LiveCoach is here today to talk about you as a person. I focus on sales and spend a lot of time focused on the ins and outs of the sales process, but the person behind the sales matters too. Shimon is here to shed some light on coaching and the importance of having a coach.

Coaching can increase productivity, success, and life satisfaction. Ongoing coaching is usually more useful than a one-time coaching session. Finding and connecting with the right coach for you isn’t that easy. Shimon created LiveCoach to connect coaches and clients through an easy to use online platform.

Episode Highlights:

• Business coaching versus life coaching. People work with coaches to accomplish something that they don’t know how to do or to be held accountable, so that they follow through or to aspire to new horizons.
• People usually prefer a coach over a peer to help them be held accountable.
• Some people only need specific help for one thing. Other people want accountability or they want their life to be better.
• There is a link between something in life bothering people and their work success and productivity.
• Personal and professional success are interrelated.
• How coaches have neutral objectivity and your best interest in mind.
• The more neutral a coach is the better and more effective that coach will be.
• The LiveCoach platform can help you find a coach by describing your situation or you can be matched through their algorithms.
• You can talk to several coaches for free to help find the best coach fit for you.
• When you start talking to people, you will be surprised by the amount of insights that you will get.
• Shimon suggests talking to as many coaches as you can.
• Many coaches do a questionnaire or a review as prep work. Some part of the initial work will be reflection about what you want to achieve and gaining clarity.

Resources:

• LiveCoach
• Shimon Lazarov

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week we are going to talk about you as a person, the whole person. I have a very, very wonderful guest today, Shimon Lazarov. He’s the founder and CEO of livecoach.io.

It’s funny. When I started teaching at university, I realized that it’s not just about teaching you guys the process , it’s activating, it’s doing, it’s getting a further understanding. I quickly realized that just teaching the material wasn’t enough. That I really needed to have office hours, I really needed to be at my students’ disposal so that if they had any questions.

Sometimes we never talk about the process. Sometimes we talked about life at the company that they were working at, or maybe they were in that kind of role where they were there for a short period of time, and then they went off, went to another company because there’s a lot of those programs at university that do that now.

I thought you know what, I need to get an expert on here to talk about coaching. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure which questions to ask Shimon because of the fact that I really focused so heavily, head in sand, on a process that only recently did I come to the realization and awareness that coaching’s a big piece.

Welcome, Shimon, to our podcast today. Thank you so much for sharing your information and enlightening us on what this thing called coaching is all about.

Shimon: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Marylou: Wonderful. Naturally, there’s a difference here. I just did a survey of my list which is a combination mostly of sales people and a smattering of different roles. I have business developers, I have C-Suite leaders. I got some marketing people who love content and follow me for that. But I asked the question on the survey, “Would you prefer to have peer coaching as part of this class or would you like to have a coach, a mentor, someone who is there, you can ask any question to, who uphold you accountable,” and it was staggering the difference of results I got based on the sales role.

If you’re in the business developer closer role, you’re all over the coaching thing. For those who did all roles though, they prospected, closed, and serviced, the percentages were wildly different. Can you speak to, not just the roles, but what types of coaching, or what is the difference between coaching that we think of when we think of coaching which is usually business related versus the life kind of coaching goals and coaching process?

Shimon: Yes, that’s a great question. I think it’s a relatively new industry. The definitions are still kind of being decided upon. There’s no standard. It’s not like when you go to a dentist you know exactly what training dentists have, what exams they’d have to pass. When you go to a coach you don’t really know, anyone can call themselves a coach.

But basically, what we’re seeing is that there’s three main topics that people work with a coach to solve. One of them is just when they want to accomplish something and they don’t know how to do it. In a business setting, this can be, “I want to get a promotion but I don’t know how to make it happen. Maybe my boss isn’t communicating clearly with me what are the expectations for me getting a promotion.”

In your personal life, it could be, “I want to buy a house but I don’t even know how to get started.” It can be also in relationship issues like, “Something’s not right with my spouse. What do I do about it?” That’s one thing where you go to a  coach to get a plan of how to do something. We have many coaches on the platform that are great for that.

The second aspect is actually following through with your plans. Whether you have worked with a coach to formalize a plan, or whether maybe you know what you need to do, but you just need someone to hold you accountable. That’s where the survey that you’re mentioning, it’s very interesting, because you could ask, “Who is better to hold you accountable, is it a friend, is it a colleague, or is it a professional coach?” We can talk about those things but that’s definitely something that’s necessary.

The third aspect is working with someone to really understand what you want out of life. Even if you don’t have a current problem, you’re happy at your job, you’re happy with your relationships, and you have those issues. Someone that can open new horizons to you and really give you something to aspire to. Many times, those three roles can all be performed by one person. Many times, one person can fulfill all of these roles. Many times, you need to work with different people to accomplish those things.

Marylou: Right, right. Well, it’s funny that you say that because this follow through is definitely what we were leaning towards the accountability questions on that survey.

Now this is my list. It’s not representative necessarily of the universe out there. But if there were leaders who responded to the survey, not by a big margin, but they prefer to have peer, colleagues, friends, influencers hold them accountable slightly over having a coach.

But, everyone else, when I combined the roles, they were definitely in favor of what they consider a coach. Now, of course, I didn’t drill down into how they defined a coach, but they prefer the coaching over the peer. Primarily, some of them the gap was pretty big, and some was just really small, a couple of percentage points difference. I was surprised at the number of people who wanted this type of accountability, this follow through as you’re calling, just never had an idea about that.

Shimon: Yeah. You’ll be surprised at how many times we know that we need to do something in life but we don’t actually follow through. There’s many good reasons for that. Biologically, we’re very much wired towards the immediate and the things that grab our attention right now. Sometimes it’s hard for us to think long term. Having someone that forces us to really get the longer perspective on things can be super helpful.

Marylou: When we think of coaching, is it better to think about yourself, the whole person when looking for a coach or can you be pretty effective if you’re just focused in on one aspect, the business side of things for example? The accomplishment of a goal, being a better business developer, or making my quota versus being a good family member, having a more balanced life, exercising, whatever else.

What are you seeing the trend is? Are we trying to combine all these things into one sort of life coach type thing or do we separate out, for business I’m using this person, for athletics I’m using that person, and for my life, there maybe even a third person in the picture. What’s the trend that you’re seeing?

Shimon: I come from a background of building marketplaces in Silicon Valley, so very, very data heavy. I always like to look at the data and slice it, and dice it in many different ways to see if insights comes from it. We’re seeing basically that there’s two segment of people.

One, the segment that only need help with the first topic that we spoke about, which is like, “I need something very specific and I don’t know how to get it.” If that’s someone’s situation, they can totally work with a coach only for that thing. Get a plan in place and start executing it.

But everybody else, whether you know what you need to do but need accountability, or whether you just know that your life can be better, but you don’t know exactly how to make it happen, can be a big link between a personal goals and professional goal. That means, many times, if there’s something in your personal life that is bothering you or something that you know that could be better, it will radiate into your performance at work.

That’s something that wasn’t very trivial, because the research, usually the academic research around coaching just focuses on productivity. It’s like, “Yeah, we have data showing that working with a coach on improving your sales or on improving your communication or whatever it is, is more effective than not working with a coach.” But there’s not a lot of research showing the kind of combination of working on your personal stuff and how it affects your professional stuff.

I started looking at our data and very interesting things are starting to appear. For example, if you improve your relationships with your family, over 90% of times, your work performance also improves which I found to be very interesting. I also like to look at people holistically. When we think about what we want to achieve in life, in general, it made sense to me that those two terms are connected.

For example, if we want a promotion, it is probably to make more money to increase our prestige at work, but why do we really want that? Many times that is not disconnected from our family life or from our personal life. It’s the other way around also, if we want a great family life, why do we want that? We want that maybe so we feel good. Then we can focus on really achieving really amazing success at work. The connection between those two things, I think it’s fascinating. I think people should do some more research on it to figure out what’s the best way to improve someone’s life holistically.

Marylou: One of the top questions that always come to mind is at what point in life is a coach worth considering? Say we’re in college, we have our teachers, they’re kind of our coaches, sort of our T.As or coaches, then we get out into the working world, we look immediately towards our managers for coaching, but sometimes that’s falling pretty flat. I think a lot of what we’re seeing now is with all the tools that are out there to help, I’m talking sales, with all the tools that are out there to help us in get into the door and have those first conversations, we’ve got a lot at our disposal now to be able to leverage technology that help us, but there’s still that lack of confidence, that lack of tenacity, that lack of persistence. Where I think of coaching or if the manager’s quick coach and role play would be helpful but that doesn’t seem to be happening in corporate America.

At what point are you gonna say, “You know what? I’m important. It’s about me. I’m gonna go ahead and figure out how to do this.” But at what point do you think that lightbulb goes on that they should seek out external help?

Shimon: Yes, you’re right. Ideally, your manager should be your coach in an ideal world, because a good manager wants to develop their employees. But, sadly, we know that in corporate America or in just in general, people, they’re more focused on the short term results than the long term results.

Many times the manager will ask one of their employees to do something that is really good on the short term, but knows that it’s not necessarily the best thing for the long term career development of that person. A classical example of that could be let’s say one of my employees is really, really good, and I know that I can develop them and then they’ll get a promotion and stop reporting to me. As a manager, it’s not necessarily the thing that I want to optimize, or even if it’s just subconsciously, or even if it’s I’m a good person but I’m focused on delivering those results, maybe I will not push my employees to develop as much as they can, especially the good one.

You probably heard this term where people get promoted until their level of incompetence. You’re good at what you do, you’ll get promoted. The place where you stop being promoted is the place where you’re not very good at what you do. That’s a sad fact, because I’m thinking how many people are just stuck at doing something that’s not the best thing that they could be doing.

But I think the biggest value of a coach is the neutral objectivity. Someone that can look at your life, look at your professional life, and really have your best interest in mind. Not have any other things they’re optimizing for and in a very real sense, your success is their success. If you get promoted it’s to their credit. They don’t care about the short term team performance but more of your long term career development.

I would advise someone, the more neutral you can get that person to be, the better your results will be. Even for example, some people don’t like working with a professional coach or just within accountability buddy, someone who you touch base with once a week just to make sure they’re on track to achieving their goals. If that accountability buddy is a close friend or a spouse, the results are much worse than if it’s someone who’s maybe a distant colleague or someone who is not so close to you because then they can be truthful. They can say, “You know, you missed your goal, you said you were going to do this things, you didn’t do it.” Push you to really achieve the things that you set with yourself, that you determined that are important to you.

I think anyone could use a coach. You can see this with professional athletes or performers. There’s many careers in which having a coach is a must. I started this company because I really believed that any person can benefit from that. The challenges just quantifying it, communicating it to people, and matching them with the right coach at the right time which is an interesting problem to solve.

Marylou: You have then a place where, if I was considering coaching, I can go to and is there an assessment process that helps, because I may go to the site and not have a clue like you said, I don’t know really what I need or what I want or what’s available. I’m sort of at ground zero in terms of understanding what even to ask for in some situations. It maybe an accomplishment goal. It may be a follow through goal. It may be a lifelong thing I’m trying to work on but I don’t know how to prioritize them. Do you have some type of assessment process or questionnaire that the audience can go and see if they’re curious about how coaching can benefit them?

Shimon: Yeah, absolutely. We built the platform to be as open as possible. Anyone can just go and select what are the things they want to work on to the best of their knowledge. We don’t ask for people to prioritize. We have over a hundred coaching categories and you can just check the boxes of what you’re interested in working on.

Also, we have a free text part of the form where you can just describe your situation. Even if you don’t know how or what you want to work on fits into one of the categories, that’s absolutely okay, you can describe your situation, and then coaches will reach out to you with their solutions. You can reach out to coaches, our algorithms are good at matching you with coaches that have helped people achieve similar things. We’re good at analyzing the text that you write in the free text and also the combination of categories that you want to work on, and then you can start the conversation.

What’s cool about live coaches is that you can, for seven days, you can talk to as many coaches as you want for free. We think that’s one of the barriers which is you want to get exposed to many coaches. I would never suggest someone to choose one and just talk to them and work with them. Talk to many coaches. We also see this, it’s interesting, before this platform existed, the main way to get a coach was through a referral.

You would have a friend who worked with a coach, got great results, and so you would reach out with the same coach. The only problem with that is that it only works if you and your friend want to work on exactly the same thing. If my friend worked with a coach to change their career, that might not be the best coach for me if I want a promotion.

Marylou: Right.

Shimon: It’s just a different skill set, different experience, different motivators. That’s why we saw that many people have this mismatch of I know that this coach is good but not for what I need. I know that the other coach does what I need but I don’t know if they’re good. That’s why on our platform you can just keep reaching out to people until you find someone who’s good, and then you can do this again, and again as your goals evolves. Everytime you want to change your goals you can reach out to a bunch of coaches and see who’s the best person for the job.

Marylou: It’s like you have a community of coaches with whom you can have conversation. Find out if there’s an alignment there between what you think you want, like anything you ever want. The more you have conversations about what your goals are or where you want to go, you get more clarity, you get more specificity. If you are able to have these conversations with multiple people, you’re gonna hone in on exactly your path, or at least pretty darn close at the age when you’re old.

You’re gonna get there. You may have to pivot along the way, but I think like anything, having someone hold you accountable, tough love versus family versus colleagues. Having that independent voice, I think. I know for me, personally, if I ask my husband to monitor something for me athletically or even my business, he’s just so forgiving. I would never get anything done. He’s my biggest fan, therefore, he’s not a good coach, he is a fan. I would be definitely more interested in finding out the neutral objectivity, I love that phrase, I think that’s really what we’re looking for.

And if I go back to my survey, peer coaching or peer accountability has its place. A lot of the my classes are offering that in terms of the people who are in class, are there you can buddy up with, but the independent coaching is definitely something in sales that I’m seeing a very high percentage of people would like to have that accountability through an independent neutral type of coach but may not know how to seek that out.

I think this is a great place for those of you who are listening to head on over to livecoach.io or similar websites. Start talking to coaches and finding out where those gaps are, between what you thought you were getting from your manager. Maybe even as you learn, which was really what we do with prospecting and predictability is that as you learn some techniques and tools, is to bring it into your teams and start working with your peers through the role play environment, and making sure they’re getting the kind of the benefit of your coaching as well. But first and foremost, it’s about you. It’s about working towards whatever goals you have because I think there is a blend here as Shimon said of life and business.

I know for me personally, writing in a gratitude journal everyday, it lifts my spirits. I can see it. I’m more positive. Rejections that come my way through prospecting, I take in, I absorb, I learn from them. I don’t think of them as personal objections to me. My goal is to get up every morning and help as many people as I can. I think with gratitude, I can do that. Writing in a journal gives me the ability to each day get up and say I want to help as many people as possible today.

Shimon, what is the best thing to do than go to over to the website and get a lot form and start having conversations?

Shimon: Yeah. You can go to livecoach.io. We have a special offer for your listeners which is they can go to livecoach.io classics. Then in there, they can get two weeks of the free trial instead of just one week.

Marylou: Okay.

Shimon: But in any case, you can just go, and start talking to people. You’ll be surprised at how much insight you can get. Even if you have a bunch of coaches that are good, it’s the same thing, just different styles can make a huge difference. Some people like a coach that’s more active and tell them what to do directly. Others like a coach that’s more on listening and being there for you. I would just suggest that. Yeah, talk to as many coaches as you can and I’m sure that you’ll find a good one.

Marylou: What about prep work? We talked a lot about planning in my world. I get a lot of my folks to really think through what they’re trying to accomplish and get it down, either on their cell phone, on paper, or however they record. Do you suggest that they go through a self -discovery process before they reach out or is it just as you go you could figure it out as well? What would you recommend there?

Shimon: Yes. I think every goal, every coach will have their own recommended prep work. For example we have coaches that do a very in depth, personal questionnaire in the beginning to expose your personality traits. Other coaches, for example, do a 360 review as part of the intakes. For example, asking for feedback from your peers, from people who reported to you or people who you’re reporting to. Then use those results to really identify the areas where you should work on. Some coaches are just like, “Let’s start with a blank slate. What do you want to achieve? What are your barriers? Let’s work on those barriers.”

I think it really depends on the coach’s personal style, but I would tell you, any good coach will have some portion of the initial work be just reflection. Just really go deep and understand what motivates you in life. What do you want to achieve? Why to you want to achieve those things? Then just gaining clarity on those things, regardless of whether it’s done through a questionnaire, or just talking back and forth, is very, very helpful to people.

Because many times we’ve inherited our values especially professionally just by chance. We started working somewhere and our first boss told us this is very important to be a good employee and just stuck with that. We don’t know if it’s good. Until we do this reflection process, it’s hard to expose those things because many times those are beliefs that are kind of buried deep inside and some work needs to be done to figure them out.

Marylou: That’s a great point. We were talking about this this morning. I was on another call. Sales as a degree is not necessarily ubiquitous in the United States in college. A lot of times we’re going in at sales as quite a newbie or the new comer, as I call some of my folks, is they’re getting indoctrinated by this popping into a position.

That happened to me. I was a systems engineer. I’m an engineer by trade, computer programming, but because we were working in disruptive technologies way back when before the internet. I was trying to get analog telephones to digital telephones, that’s how long ago it was. But I was in a situation where the reps couldn’t really sell because they didn’t know the technology in them. They fired all the reps and put us, the systems engineering people, into sales. We go home one day as an engineer, and you come back the next day, you’re a sales person.

It’s trial by fire, for sure. I think a lot of this audience who’s listening today are probably in those roles. Not necessarily having a degree in any, getting training, and all that skill, and mindset, and process training that you would get if you were in an engineering program, or even a marketing program.

My son is going through marketing right now. He’s getting a very good education in all things marketing. They don’t have all things sales. I think a lot of us are really looking for that next level of performance and with various income levels. This would give us a good breadth of opportunity to search out and work with the coach to improve whatever it is that our goals are.

Those big, hairy, audacious goals that we’ve got. Working to them or just getting through the next quarter. It really depends on where you are in life but the beauty is that these folks are out there. They’re well verse in various member of different disciplines and they’re all aligned to help you. It’s all about you.

Shimon, thank you so much for joining us today. I will put all the links on the page that we have for the podcast so people can get a hold of you, but if they want to reach you, is the best place the website or should they go to LinkedIn? Where should they reach you personally?

Shimon: Yeah, the best place is the website. I’m pretty quick at responding. Wherever you reach out to me, I’ll definitely get to it. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. It’s always fun discussing these topics.

Marylou: Yeah, thank you. Again, I very much appreciate it. It’s a little bit of a soft topic for us, but I think it’s an important link that seems to be missing. The survey says it’s really an important piece that a lot of people are looking for. I think this is a nice way with the crowd sourcing options that you’ve offered here is to find the right person or persons that could help you achieve your goals. Thanks again, Shimon.

Shimon: Yes. Thank you, Marylou. Have a great day.

Carson V. Heady is an author and sales leader that I am really excited about talking to. He is in the trenches when it comes to sales. He is there digging in the dirt making sure that those sales are happening. I asked him to come on the show is because he is diving into an becoming an expert at social selling.

When it comes to prospecting, we are habit machines that block out times to do single tasks, and we get stuck when it comes to integrating all of the social tasks into our process. Carson is going to talk about best practices around integrating social into the sales process and specifically the prospecting side of things.

Episode Highlights:

• How social selling is bubbling up as something that we should pay attention to.
• Sales is still a relationship game, but social will enable us to build relationships and stay top of mind.
• How platforms have caught on and integrated into people’s day.
• These platform enable us to target specific areas and when people make changes.
• We can keep at the pulse of what is going on.
• It also enables to continue the post sales relationship.
• Display etiquette and be succinct and state your desired value that you are bringing.
• It comes down to adding value.
• How social selling allows us to do a lot of experimentation.
• These social tools can help us take the cold out of cold calling and introducing ourselves in a relatively passive way.
• Consistently reaching out to 5 to 10 people a day and stacking it into your daily routine.
• How it takes a long time to craft and cultivate social relationships, but the returns are unbelievable.
• Gearing messages for your audience and understanding what is working and what is not.
• The stuff that works can be transferred over to your email sequences.
• Assimilate social selling into your evolving sales process.
• Finding the right tools that will work specifically for you and using them to be more effective.
• Begin with the end in mind. What your goal is? Social selling is a wonderful way to share and connect with people.

Resources:

• Birth of a Salesman (The Salesman Against the World) (Volume 1)
• Birth of a Salesman: Ultimate Edition
• Carson V. Heady on LinkedIn
• @cvheady007 on Twitter
• Crowdfire

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, I have a special guest, a local mid-western special guest, Carson V. Heady. We are really excited about talking to Carson because first of all, he’s an author, he’s a sales leader, he’s into trenches, doing the dues. It’s not like somebody sitting behind the desk pontificating theory. He’s actually in there actually digging in the dirt and making sure that sales are happening.

The reason why we asked him to come on our show is because he’s also really diving into it, and becoming quite expert at social selling, and its evolution. For us, prospecting, we are these habit machines, we’re really trying to block out times to do single tasks. I keep telling you guys, we want to be on the phone, and do that in a block of time, and then do email.

But a lot of times, we can hear our LinkedIn, and our social things going off, so how do we integrate that? Carson is gonna talk to us today about best practices around social selling but specifically the prospecting side of things. He may take it further into the pipeline because he can go all the way and close but let’s start at the top of funnel, if you don’t mind, Carson.

Give us some background as to what’s happened since you’ve been in this space which is, you said, 20 years now. How is social starting to bubble up to something that we wanna really pay attention to for prospecting?

Carson: First off, Marylou, thank you so much for your time. I know the illustrious guests that you’ve had in the past, I can only hope to hold the candle to some of them with the content that we share today. I love the topic. This is something that we chatted briefly about this as well, is that sales has evolved so substantially over the last few decades.

There are some very traditional methods that I think still hold a lot of merit. It’s still very much a relationships game. Social selling is something that not only will enable us to begin new relationships and broker those new conversations, but it’s also a great way to stay top of mind with clients both from a pre-sale and post-sale standpoint. I’ll compare and contrast my early days in sales to nowadays.

I remember when some of these platforms first emerged. When you first got that request on some of these platforms like LinkedIn and you are like, “What is this exactly?” I was following some people and seeing different posts. Platforms of this ilk really caught on specifically in recent years which is the different ways that they integrate in with different platforms.

A lot of us will login in the beginning of the day and share out or schedule out messaging to go out throughout the day. There are several different platforms that we can do that on. What I’ve definitely seen over the last few years is that with these platforms, it enables to geo target, and find by geography, find by title, look for specific companies, look for specific titles within the organization, different departments, different divisions.

It will also keep you updated when these people are movers and shakers, they’re making changes in their career. It’s giving you every bit of information that you need at your fingertips in order to really keep at the pulse of what’s going on not only with your contacts but also with new potential contacts with different industries, etcetera.

You can take it so far as to follow individual companies and really find the types of prospects that you wanna be able to talk to. We could wax poetic forever about the different types of messaging that you can use to get the best responses, but at the end of the day, social selling really enables you to enhance your probability of success. It’s really what sales is all about.

We, ultimately, are on a quest to have our potential end-user or client make a decision based on the information that we’re able to provide that meets any gaps that they may have in their current process. We, in counter to that, will build our own process and present information, and facts, and statistics, and solutions ultimately, in order to help them make that decision.

Social selling can really help grease the wheel when it comes getting in front of new people and in also staying top of mind because once you’re connected to them or they’re seeing your posts, or you’re able to send them articles that may be hark back to conversations that you’ve had, it enables you to very passively, occasionally, stay in front of them so that you don’t have to be super aggressive and keep revisiting that follow-up as you move toward the close.

But then furthermore, from a post sales standpoint, it enables you to continue that relationship, keep tabs with what they’re doing, and also reach out very easily. Again, sometimes very passively so that you can continue the conversation. I’ve seen social selling evolve substantially over the last several years, as I’m sure you have, but I believe that it is a great medium when it comes to continuing to perfect your craft from a sales perspective.

Marylou: Some of the things that I want to ask you are around the ability to, the fact that we do have these first level connections say on LinkedIn. What is the, I guess, ethical is not the right word, but what is the best practice around touching these people? I’ve been told a number of different things.

What feels right for me, Marylou Tyler, is to do more permission-based touches, help-based touches, and really only very soft asks in the form of, “Hey, get back to me if you wanna know more. I’ll send you a link.” As opposed to sending them a link. Are there some guidelines around that that you wanna share with the audience, especially top of funnel? This is kind of starting conversations with people that we don’t know side of things.

Carson: I would agree with you, Marylou. I think it’s very important that you’re cognisant that while this is a platform where you can make these connections, that you also want to display some etiquette. There’s a lot of articles that are out there as far as etiquette to utilize on social media platforms including LinkedIn.

I agree. I think it’s important to be succinct and to state the desired value that you want to bring. I’m sure you and I have both seen a tremendous amount of these initial requests where maybe somebody is very opportunistic and sends you a laundry list of different types of things that they could do for you or want to do for you. I think that a lot of times we may be dismissive of that. I think it’s a reaction or reflex that we may have.

I think it’s important, especially as sellers, that we’re cognisant of the golden rule, treating others as we would like to be treated on these platforms. What kind of messaging would work effectively for you or what has worked well? I think it comes down to the same fundamentals that govern our sales processes.

Our sales process is adding value, if I believe that I can add value for a potential connection wherever that may fit, whether it’s my day job, whether it’s kind of my side hustle as I call it where I write these books, obviously I have’t sold enough to retire but it’s a fun endeavor for me. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people. I think we’re looking to add value.

Intrinsically, how can I add value for this potential contact? I would never wanna reach out to anyone unless I felt I could add value for them. I agree with you. I think it’s imperative that when we’re reaching out, we’re giving perhaps a brief explanation as to why we’re connecting even if it’s basic as, “Hey, based on our mutual interests or mutual groups, I felt that you’d be a great person with whom to share ideas or that I could learn from. I’d be honored to be connected with you. I would love to have a conversation if it’s of interest.”

Something even that basic can garner quite a response. I think that it can lead to some wonderful conversations. I think, again, I liken this actually to dating as well even though it’s been quite a long time since I’ve done that. You don’t wanna seem too opportunistic.

Let’s say you make a new friend on one of these platforms, the last thing you wanna do is jump right in the second that they accept and send them this multi-paragraph litany on what your product or service can do for them. In fact, exactly what you want to do, and I don’t care if you’re trying to sell a product or service or if you’re looking for a job or whatever it is, the best approach is really to propose a meeting around where you may be able to add value for them.

Perhaps you have some suggestions, some brief ones. I also find it important to make that personal connection. You and I were talking about this briefly before as well, there’s a lot of times where, especially if we’re sending this copy paste form, you can come off like you’re not a real person in this day and age. I think it’s very important that you have a personal touch and that you don’t just send some copy paste.

Make reference to something that you saw on their profile. Maybe you went to the same school. Maybe you are in a similar group or you have similar interests. Perhaps you ask them about their current role or there’s something you’d like to know more about what they’re doing. I think those are the types of end roads that you’re looking to make.

In fact, even if I’m looking to sell into a different vertical or to a new client or maybe I have some experience in that vertical before, I may send them a note and say, “Hey, I spend a little bit of time selling in the manufacturing, or in the retail, or in the healthcare…” whatever it is. “I’d love to just have a conversation and get some advice or your feedback on where this vertical is heading from a technology standpoint,” whatever your vertical is. Just having those types of conversations – same thing with asking for a job.

If you’re looking for a job and you’re trying to meet a hiring manager, it’s great to even just send them a note, “Hey, I’m looking to parlay my experience into your industry or into what your division does, would love just to have a conversation as far as where do you think my skill set may land best.”

You’re really looking to sell a conversation upfront. Don’t put the cart before the horse, don’t try to sell your product because you haven’t developed any type of rapport, whatsoever. Sell a conversation around the value that you believe that you can add to that initial conversation. That’s the first step in the sales chain.

Marylou: Exactly. I remember, I sent out, we talked about this, an email. It was a little note to my first level. I found I think it was 100 different ways to say the word opinion because I want people’s opinion for something. I just change that word up. It was interesting to see some people laughed like, “Why did she use that word?”

But it was really fun to get creative in that sense too and try to reword things in a way that is meaningful for them. As you said before, the tools now that are available even on platforms such as LinkedIn allow you to geo target, you can get really specific.

I’m doing a seminar here in Des Moines. I am searching on the people in Des Moines who are in my first level and I’m gonna send them a little note, first level note saying, “Hey, I’m your neighbor in Des Moines. I’m doing this workshop. If you’re interested, hit me back and let’s see if we can get you signed-up for that, if it’s something of interest. I’m gonna be talking about these topics.”

I’m constantly polling my audience to get their opinion on things. It’s engaging. So many people wanna help, that’s what’s amazing to me. Of the 100 I send, I have great response, and maybe yes there’s a couple of sour apples here and there, so I gently remove them from my connection because even though they’re connected to me, they obviously don’t really wanna hear from me.

Then I have the option of saying, “You know, if it’s not a good time, great, let’s not converse then any further than we just did now.” I like that part of it. It allows us to do what you and I talked about, just imparting the knowledge, and really finding out what is the population of people who connected with you or you connected with.

What’s the nuisance, what’s the challenge, that’s the hot topic right now. As a writer, and you are, obviously about 268 articles on the LinkedIn, some huge number, you’re constantly looking for a good content that will resonate and that will be impactful for them. Social is a great way to do that. They get to see a little bit of your personality as well which I think is great.

Carson: I think it gives you the chance to mix it up too, Marylou. I think it’s brilliant as far you’re changing the working a little bit on the word opinion. I’d love to see the statistics as far as the response rates. There’s so much stuff you can do to really analyze, because at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is enhance the probability of success of each leg of the selling process.

Prospecting, inherently, has a success rate. I’ve worked in divisions where, back in the day, I managed a call center group where we called on different types of leads and I spend a lot of time analyzing which leads had the highest propensity for the customer to even pick up. I think there’s a lot of different analysis that we could do specifically around that type of experimentation.

Social selling allows you to do a lot of different types of experimentation, from the way that you target, all the way to the messaging that you send. I’ve evolved my messaging many times over the last several years. I found myself in a predicament years ago where I was laid off and I was looking at how to land a job.

I never thought that I’d have to look for one in my life, going traditionally, and applying to these search engine type jobs online was not getting me interviews, I had to teach myself how to use social selling eight years ago whenever I was looking for a new role. Those practices have evolved but the fundamentals stay the same.

Again, to your point, we’re always looking for what’s the most effective messaging to land, who are the types of people that we want to talk to, what are the best ways to be approaching them. When you’re looking at a different project, I’ve used this in different roles, different jobs that I’ve had, ways to stay top of mind with not only my customers, but also my employees.

Just different ways that you can share content whether it’s add on LinkedIn, whether it’s in groups, or whether it’s on Twitter, or just different platforms. There’s so many different ways that you can engage people. The beauty of it is there’s no silver bullet, there’s no one way that’s necessarily right or wrong, there’s a lot of different ways that we can utilize these methods and mechanisms to enhance our chance at success.

One thing that I’ve taken from your message is the fact that we wanna take the cold out of prospecting, wanna take the cold out of cold calling. These tools can make the prospecting and that ‘cold call’ a lot warmer because we can find ways to introduce ourselves in a relatively passive way where we’re not calling them and forcing them into a conversation necessarily that they don’t wanna be in right at that moment.

But this will allow us to reach out to them, state very quickly how we think we can add value, try to sell that initial conversation. As I’m scrolling through my feed on a daily basis, I think here’s one last point that I wanna make on that part of it, is that a lot of people think that this is a process where, “Oh, man. If I wanna add social selling to my repertoire, I’m already so busy, I’m working 8, 10, 14 hour days, I don’t have time to do anything else.”

I think people will be shocked if they knew that I literally probably spend 5, maybe 10, maybe 15 minutes at most per day on social selling. I found tools that have enabled me to load my deck where there are messages going out throughout the day and then it’s just literally maintenance from that point.

But as I’m scrolling through my feed, I can see articles that may hark back to a conversation that I had with a client or a partner or a business associate whoever that I had last week. As I see that article, I can send it direct the person and say, “Hey, this made me think about of our conversation, what are your thoughts on this article, or what do you think about these trends that have been pointed out about what’s transpiring in your industry?”

It’s a really great passive way to not only show the customer that you are thinking of them and that they were top of mind so you could stay top of mind because marketing statistics will tell you you’ve gotta have several touches before you ultimately get to the sale. Things like that will jog their memory that they may owe you a response and it will keep you moving in the right direction with some momentum toward the close. I think these tools are tremendous and they do a great job of helping you enhance your chances of success but also making that relationship a little bit warmer.

Marylou: As you mentioned, it’s a matter of stacking these tiny habits. Just start with five minutes of social a day. I used to teach in our classes prior to the tools that they have. By the way, everyone listening, I know they’re like, “Okay, what are the tools that Carson uses?” It will be shared. I’ll put that in the show notes because that was my kind of, “I gotta find out what he’s using,” because I have tool stack, people.

I just love looking at different applications that are available. We’ll put that on the show notes for Carson’s page, so don’t worry about that. But what I was gonna say was I first started teaching what’s called first in 10 which I borrowed from real estate which is when you come in the office in the morning, maybe you get your coffee, you sit down, and you just reach out to 10 people, and it should take no longer than 5 to 10 minutes.

 

If you do that everyday and you’ve consistently 22 business days a month, you are now reaching out to 20, 10×22 is 220 more people in a month. It adds up. All we’re asking you is to stack this little tiny habit called social selling in with your daily routine and put it with a habit that’s a good habit. You’ll reward yourself in your brain, “Oh, I got coffee. Great. I can do my first in 10 now.”

It starts to become habitual which is really what we need to do to embrace adding new habits like this to our schedules. I was with you guys on social. I was resisting because I’m doing cold calling, I’m doing my email, I even did direct mail in my world, and then I write. There’s a lot of stuff going on. How could I possibly add yet another lever but I found a way to do it and I started very small.

Now, I’m loving it because I’m getting all these great conversations going with people who need and want what I have to offer. It’s just a really wonderful experience. I’m sure, Carson, you’ve been keeping up that rhythm on a daily basis or maybe it’s a couple times a week if you’re doing all sales roles and not just prospecting. But there’s a rhythm in there that you’ve gotta keep up in order to be able to seeing results with social. Would you agree to that, Carson?

Carson: I really do. It’s amazing the world that it can open up to you. I think it’s important to point out that social selling by no means will replace any of the components of your process because here’s the thing, yes, I will use social selling to meet folks, I will use email, but really, at the end of the day, nothing compares to getting out there face-to-face or on the phone if you need to pick up the phone and call.

But I think that the social selling will open doors that you could’ve never found otherwise. Within roles that I’ve had in the past, I’ve had reports where maybe a prospect showed up and I was able to go straight out to a social platform, find the business, find people that worked there, send them requests of some sort, I’m trying to sell that initial meeting.

I tried to exercise strength in number, maybe reached out to 10, 20 people that I thought will be valuable to have a relationship with there, 5, 10 maybe accepted. I started having conversations and they would point me toward the ultimate decision-maker and I got in there and was able to ultimately work toward crafting deals that would’ve never existed without social selling. But today, those relationships take place mostly in person or over the phone.

Social selling can get you in the door. It’s also a great way to continue to share content. But yes, Marylou, to your point, this is something where you spend a few minutes a day or maybe something sparks attention where, “Hey, I’d like to find this prospect,” and you go out and you spend a few minutes looking. Plant those seeds and they will pay dividends.

I opened my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts probably 10+ years ago and I’ve got over 330,000 followers between the two platforms. It’s something that has taken a long time to really craft and cultivate but the relationships that I’ve been able to make with people all across the world have been unbelievable.

Marylou: That’s a great story. A friend of mine had a company called Pebble Storm, put a pebble in the water, and then the waves just keep getting larger, and larger, and larger. It’s the consistency of habit that will get you there. The other thing too, going back to my experience, I crafted a message, I changed the one word, everytime I send something I try to shorten it, make it more succinct, make it more specific, until I got it to a point where no one asked me, “Hey, are you a bot sending this thing out?” They really think it’s geared towards them.

This is another way, for those of you who are thinkers like me, to really fine tune your message and get an understanding of what’s working and what’s not as you’re crafting your message for social. The stuff that works is great to then transfer over to your email engines and put into your sequences.

There’s just an abundance of upside in order to be able to take 5 to 10 minutes, and maybe you do it at the end of the day or when you’re not in your productive prospecting times to put this little task in there. But be consistent and try to do it actually at the same time for a while, until you start realizing just like we did with the phone the best time to call, just like they did with the email the best time to email, we wanna know the best time to social because we wanna make sure people are there so when they respond to us we can respond right back.

Carson: Couldn’t agree more. Consistency is key with anything. You’re not gonna have consistent results without consistent application of process. Again, you’re looking to assimilate this platform which obviously has many merits. You’re really just looking to assimilate it into your evolving sales process. If you do it, and you do it effectively, and you continue to evolve as you perfect your craft, you will find success because of social selling.

Marylou: Carson, we’re nearing the end of our interview time which is very sad. What is the best place for people who are right now got the social vibe and that they, “Alright, alright. I’m gonna start this.”

What do you recommend, where should they go, is there a place that you write regularly that they could learn more, or how would you, if you were instructing, since you’re a sales manager, if you’re instructing your folks, “Okay, we’re gonna start learning social,” what would you say to them to get started?

Carson: I’m in a unique situation because I work for Microsoft. Obviously, we purchased LinkedIn, so I cannot endorse one platform over another, but I will tell you that, obviously, we’ve talked about a few different tools. You can always go out to the web and research different tools that are available to, number one, schedule tweets or schedule posts.

I use, personally, one called Crowdfire. I like it because it integrates into several different platforms that will enable you to share content. It also cultivates content. It will find some of the things that people that I’m following or sharing, things that are of interest. There’s a lot of really good articles in there. It will show you people that are following people that you follow. It’s probably very similar connections in nature. I like tools of that stature, but we’ve hit on a few of the good tools.

I think the key is to find a small group of tools that you find that are successful in bringing you what you’re looking to achieve from a social selling platform. Because there’s other tools that I’ve used in other roles where it maybe a mechanism that would show me the size of companies, mechanisms that would show me who the stakeholders for a companies, and they weren’t necessary tools that were mentioned on this call.

I would do some active web searches to yield what specifically you’re looking for. Just know that the tools are definitely out there. But when it comes to scheduling your posts throughout the day, there are several platforms that you can choose from, like I said, I use Crowdfire, not an endorsement, but it’s a great tool that I’ve used, and I’ve used a few others over the years. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts as well.

I can be found on LinkedIn, and always up for a dialogue over on social selling, very passionate about it and about selling. I would love to hear what other tools folks are using. But I think, at the end of the day, we’re always looking for what’s the optimum way to integrate these type of tools into our acumen and continue to evolve that craft. How can we use them to be more effective?

I think, with that in mind, those are the types of things we wanna think about as we look to find the platforms that we’re going to use and to integrate into our process.

Marylou: In response to the people, the roles, where to start, for the prospectors who are listening, we’re gonna think about that bullseye that we talk about, the decision maker in the center, the direct influencers of that decision maker, the next ring out, and then the indirect people, a ring out from that.

It really depends on the goal that you’re setting for that call to action. Is it to get your foot in the door? Is it to get your toe in the door? Is it to get that first meeting? Is it to start qualifying, because you’ve met some people and you need to get the rest of the team to figure it out before you can actually do the qualification. Begin at the end of mind of what your goal is, and then from there, you’ll be able to do your searches on the type of person with whom you wanna have that conversation.

I have multiple spheres of influence in my world. I talk to different people, marketing people, sales people, sales officer people, CEOs, and leaders. I have them all in different areas because the dialogue is different. The stuff they like to consume is different, how they like to consume it is different. I keep track of all of that in these tools. It’s just a wonderful way to share what you know, to learn from others, to impart knowledge to people, and just goodwill all around social selling.

Carson: Great. You’ve cast a wide net. You may have your hopes set on meeting the VP of sales, or the CEO, or the CFO, or the CIO, but they may not be responsive. Connect with other folks that may be connected with them that could be part of the decision, or that maybe you can have a great conversation with that could say, “Hey, you need to talk to this person,” and they’re the ones who’d make a warm introduction into that person that you ultimately want to connect with.

Think about that as you’re prospecting, because really you’re trying to sell the meaning and you’re trying to sell getting to the right place before you can sell any type of product or service. I think these types of platforms give you a tremendous ability to start that pursuit and you can make some great relationships along the way.

Marylou: We know how to find you, Carson V. Heady on LinkedIn, and in Amazon, you have a book which we really didn’t get to talk about, but there’s a book out there, a novel. Are there any more books that you’ve written since that one?

Carson: Yes. Birth of the Salesman was my first little foray into writing, and that was in 2010, and then I’ve written two sequels, but I actually re-released the entire anthology last year on an ebook platform. It was The Salesman Against the World is the second one, A Salesman Forever was the third. Basically what it is, it’s a sales book inside of a novel about a fictional character who is the ‘fictional author’ of that sales book. It goes back and forth between being chapters of the sales book but it then flips back to the protagonist and how he learned the lessons that he writes about.

Marylou: That sounds great. I love books like that. Because it’s a real life lesson but it’s embedded into a novel in a good juicy story that’s been the key to reading through it. The books that I write, you have to really be concentrating when you’re reading about sales process. If I would’ve been embedded in the story, I think it probably would have been an easier read.

Yes, go on Amazon and look for Carson’s books there, LinkedIn, and then I’ll put all these different links in the show notes so that you guys can, to your heart’s content, study tools. Carson, thank you so much for visiting us today, we enjoyed the conversation.

Carson: Marylou, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you for having me. It’s absolutely a thrill to talk to you about these fantastic topics.

The telephone is a vital instrument for us to use when having sales conversations. Telephone sales expert Art Sobczak is here today to share some of his amazing telephone sales knowledge. I consider Art Sobczak a mentor. I have been following him since 1985. He is the president of Business by Phone and the author of books like Smart Calling, Sell More in Less Time, and Telephone Tips that Sell. He is an expert in utilizing the phone for sales conversations.

Art shares how selling is the greatest profession in the world, and how he wakes up everyday knowing that there are people out there that he can serve in this profession. A lot has changed over the years, but people still buy from people, and aside from face-to-face, voice-to-voice is the best way to sell to those people. This is a great conversation, and Art shares tips and selling knowledge from his 35 years of selling experience.

Episode Highlights:

• Art wakes up everyday knowing that there are people out there waiting to be served.
• Making a difference through the greatest profession in the world which is sales.
• How a lot has changed over the years, but people still buy from humans and the most effective way to sell is by speaking with people.
• Other than face to face, the best way to sell is voice to voice.
• How sales enablement tools can be distracting if not used correctly or effectively.
• The importance of examining what your sales process looks like and who you are selling to.
• How using the phone is a permission based tool that can cut through a lot of the clutter.
• How fear of the phone stems from a lack of knowledge.
• The importance of having relevant and targeted messaging.
• Different calls require varying degrees of preparation and research.
• The problems of disguising call avoidance as research.
• When you get voicemail, your purpose is to leave a question in that person’s mind.
• The importance of call quality and investing in good equipment.  

Resources:

• Business by Phone
• Smart Calling
• Books by Art Sobczak

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everybody! It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a gentleman who I consider my mentor. I have been following Art since probably 1985. Art Sobczak is our guest today. He is the president of Business by Phone and I’m sure many of you have seen his books. In Amazon, he is the guy that wrote Smart Calling, Sell More in Less Time. Oh gosh, Telephone Tips that Sell, he is the expert in utilizing the phone for sales conversations.

Art, welcome to the podcast today!

Art: Marylou, thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor and pleasure to be here.

Marylou: You know I am a gigantic fan. I think it was 1985 when I first stumbled upon your work. I know that I had followed you even in your move from the Midwest to Arizona, where you are now, and have all of your books. I am enrolled in your courses, and the reason for this is because I believe the telephone is a vital instrument for us to use in having sales conversations. I just wanted to give the audience an idea of who you are and what you’ve accomplished. I did some research, I know that you have 29 years or so of doing a telephone prospecting in selling newsletter, 13 years of your weekly sales tips, you’ve done over 1500 customized workshops, training sessions. It’s incredible, the work that you’ve done.

My first natural question is what keeps you going after 35 year plus of doing this? What is it that keeps you passionately involved in this industry?

Art: I guess it’s the only thing that I know and the only thing I could do. That’s an interesting question, and as I sit here and think about it, every day I wake up, thinking that there are people out there who are waiting to be served, who can make a difference in the world through the greatest profession in the world, which is sales. I’m a lifelong learner myself and I’m constantly looking for new ideas and tips and techniques and I still get no greater thrill, actually a couple great thrills. One is still selling myself, which I still do all the time. But then also, seeing other people succeed, saying and doing the right things in the sales process.

                       You mentioned the phone, of course, that’s all I’ve done over the past 34 years now. Granted a lot of the things have changed over the years, technology has certainly changed, our ability to get information has changed, sales enablement has changed, other things that you teach using email in the sales process, but bottomline, what hasn’t changed is that people still buy from humans, and the most effective way to sell is when two humans actually speak with each other. Aside from face to face conversation, the best way to do that is voice to voice, whether it be over the telephone or conversation through voice over IP, or the computer lines like we’re doing right now. I guess that was a long answer to a short question.

Marylou: No! When I think about it, you’ve been in business as long as some of my CEO’s are old. Think about that. That’s amazing.

Art: Thanks for making me feel good.

Marylou: I’m going to say but you are. I am casually involved with sales process for about as long as 35, but around 30. I know how it is to wake up in the morning thinking who can I help today? I hear from people all over the world still stuck in certain areas. I’m happy to be able to help.

With your particular area of expertise, there’s just a lot of this ability to feel comfortable that you’re not going to blow it when you have that first conversation. Could you tell us, where does the phone fit now? Another way to ask that is do you recommend or do you still see people utilizing the phone for the initial conversation and follow up? Or do we start using different types of leverage now that we have more tools at our disposal? What are you seeing out there now?

Art: I see a mix of everything. Some of it is effective, some of is not, and it all depends on the skill and the ability and the knowledge of the person who’s doing it. There is no doubt that social and email and everything else that you want to put in those categories, this whole thing called sales enablement, all of these are tools that can help us facilitate a more informed, more relevant, more value-filled connection with an individual that we want to speak with. On the other hand, all those things can also be distractions, and like a tool that is placed in the hands of somebody who has no idea how to use it, it can be destructive, and I put myself in that category because I’m not very mechanically inclined.

For example, using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is obviously one of the greatest things that’s ever come around for sales people but every day, you probably experience this, there were people who were abusing it because they’re using it to spam people just because they get somebody to accept the connection, they think they now have the right to pitch somebody as opposed to using it to gather some information about a prospect that they want to speak with to figure out how their proposition may be relevant and of value to the person at the other end of the line, and using that information to tailor an initial connection, whether it be through InMail, email, maybe interacting with them on a post in something that they put on their profile, or maybe just picking up the phone and having an initial conversation using that information to tailor that call so that they can stand apart from all the noise out there.

People can use it in a variety of different ways. There are people out there that we know who are leaders in our business, in the sales training business, who are big on go out there and pound the phone and make a bunch of calls, you don’t have to do that much research. There were people on the other side that say, “We can really warm this thing up by engaging in a lot of social in advance.” To me, I guess I smile at the whole notion of social selling because what is social selling? Isn’t all selling social if you’re doing it the right way?

In my mind, what I recommend is you really need to examine what does your sales process looks like? Because somebody who is doing more of a transactional sales isn’t going to be investing as much time in doing all the things that somebody who’s more of an enterprise sales rep, who has a very complex sales process, who might be selling to a committee, is going to be investing more time in the pre-approach and be a little bit more creative than the person who might just do a quick Google search, LinkedIn search, come up with a couple points of commonality and then place that call. Both those people can be extremely successful.

Again, I don’t see a one size fits all. I see a whole menu of things out there for sales people that can take advantage of. My gosh, you remember back when we first started in sales, we had the phone and we had a phonebook and we can go to the library and look in some directories and get some intelligence and maybe work from a list. And today, with a couple keystrokes and mouse clicks, we can get a tremendous amount of information that can really position us as somebody who’s done their research and put together a very relevant message that’ll cause somebody to sit up straight, lean forward, and say, “Huh? It sounds like that person’s really got it going on. I wonder what they have and how they can do that.”

Marylou: I’ve heard a couple things. One is that, for those listening, complex versus transactional, we talk about that a lot. There’s also the relative position in the pipeline. Whether you’re doing an introductory phone call, if your goal is to get to a discovery call, where you’re going to be qualifying that person more. The phone I think is a very viable tool for just cutting through all that clutter, and getting down to the nit of the matter. But as you said, it’s a permission based tool, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be spamming on the phone and just trying to dial up the dollars as they stay. You’re really looking to take the tools that you have at your fingertips now and craft this compelling sales argument or sales conversations so that when you do talk and you do get through to the decision maker or the influencers, you’ll have something of value to share with that person, so that they do lean and they do want you to tell them more.

The phone, I think, is a great tool for that. We used to say back in the dark ages that we used to do mail and phone. We would do the mail, and we would chase the mail to see who responded or who got the mail. A lot of times, we prepared even for those phone calls to be able to have a conversation that opened up into a more curiosity based or inquisitive based or something that allowed the person to grab hold to the fact that these people really are thinking about my needs, my wishes, my desires, my anxieties, my nuisances, whatever it is, and suggesting that next step to get to know them, the product, the service better. I like that, I like that a lot.

My biggest thing with the phone is that I’ve got a bunch of people who don’t like to use it, I know my children don’t really use the phone, they prefer texting. What do you do in your rhythms, Art, to get people to embrace and start loving the telephone?

Art: For some people, they just never really have used the phone that much and I would put the younger people in that category not to indict an entire age group but I think that does tend to be true. But what I see in general, the fear of the phone stems from a lack of knowledge, and therefore confidence in what to say. And what to say does not operate in a vacuum, it needs to operate within a process. There are too many people out there looking for the easy button. I’ll get probably a few emails a week where somebody will say, “What can I say right at the beginning of the call that create interest?” My answer to that is say something interesting.

If somebody is going to ask me a general question, I’ll give a general answer. Now within that, there are a lot of best practices. There’s a lot of things that go into how to do that effectively. I know in your book you talked about that and how to identify where somebody possibly might be in a buying process, if at all, and then understanding who is this person, what’s going on in their world, what have they done in the past. Anything and everything that can help. There is so much information available to folks.

Again, to answer your question, I would say if somebody has hesitancy to use the phone, number one, you can’t argue with the fact that it is still being used effectively despite what some people might say out there that phone was dead, and phone calling is dead. What I have to say to them is you are trying to argue that electricity does work. If it is working right now, it therefore works. There is no doubt that it is more difficult than ever to actually to get through to people simply because people are being bombarded depending on which study you read by about 300-3000 sales messages a day, almost all of which we have to ignore.

Therefore, our messaging has to be more targeted and more relevant. And then we need to put it in a process and use some best practices and avoid the mistakes that people make that cause them to get shut down in their messaging. All of their messaging, whether it be email, InMail, voicemail, or if they actually get somebody live on the phone, because there are definitely things that will cause you to get deleted or hung up on versus the ones that will cause somebody to say, “Okay, that sounds like there might be something here.”

Marylou: Another objection I get all the time from my folks, because I’m a proponent also of what’s called the Call Planning Form, where it doesn’t take that long to fill it out, and once you get in the rhythm of it, this process becomes more intuitive. But when you’re first starting out, there are some objectives to think about for the plan a, if the call goes this way then I want to do this, plan b, if it doesn’t go the way I wanted, etc. The push back I get is, “We have so many people to talk to, we can’t possibly do a call planning form for everybody.”

Is there a shortcut way or do you teach your folks a way to synthesize the information that’s necessary to collect prior to placing the phone call? Or is it more that you’re looking at role specific needs, and then when you got Betty, who’s the IT list on the phone in that role, then you know what script to play in your head and what to say on the phone to Betty. What do you do with your folks to ready them for these types of conversations?

Art: Here’s the thing about preparation. Like we had touched on earlier, depending on the type of call you’re placing and what you’re selling, and what your whole process is, it’s going to require varying degrees of preparation and information collection. I had this discussion thousands of times with people because quite often I’ll hear, “I just don’t have time to do the preparation because I have to place x number of calls.” My answer to that is would you rather place an uninformed call and wing it or would you rather place fewer calls that are of quality and therefore have a greater chance at success? Because at the end of the day calling time period, what really matters, all that matters is the end result. Not how many times you dialled the phone but how many successes you received at achieving your primary or secondary objectives.

Here’s something else to keep in mind, if somebody is indeed prospecting or smart calling, you’re doing the bulk of your preparation prior to you first outreach. How many attempts does it take on average to reach someone? There’s all kinds of numbers out there ranging from 5-20, depending on who you listen to. Are you having to do all that preparation every time? No, you’re doing it once and then when you’re placing your follow up attempts to reach that person, you’re just reminding yourself, and you’re looking in your notes and your CRM whatever you had collected. You don’t have to do all that preparation every single time. Also, by the way, high calling activity and doing research in placing quality calls are not mutually exclusive. There are many people out there who disguise their research as call avoidance. That’s really the problem.

Marylou: That’s interesting. The other push back I get is on this whole concept of voicemail. That voicemail is no longer a viable tool, and I am a fan of it’s because we’re not doing it correctly rather than it’s not a viable tool. What are your thoughts on voicemail? We’re not going to go into specific techniques on this call because people can research your information, I’ll put everything in the show notes. But what is your stand these days on voicemail and how do you use it effectively?

Art: My stand on voicemail is that you really have one purpose for voicemail, and that is to leave a question in somebody’s mind that they want the answer to. It’s not to give a pitch, it’s not to ask for a decision, it’s to simply make somebody curious and wonder, “Hm, I wonder what that is.” So that the result will be the next time you call, you’ll have a greater chance of actually having it be picked up because they might recognize the caller ID and go, “Oh, that was that Marylou who told me she had some ideas here that potentially might help us reach an audience at a lesser cost than what we’re doing right now.” I think I’ll pick that up or they might tell their assistant to put the call through, if we do happen to reach the assistant, which also one of my strategies.

Also, you already have prepared, because if you’ve done your job and your call preparation, and you created a good interest creating opening statement, the voicemail message is almost identical to that. The only difference there is the ending of it. If you have the opportunity to leave a brief message, why in the world wouldn’t you?

Marylou: Exactly, exactly. It’s funny, the other thing that I see now is when I go into client’s offices, they’re in these workflow rooms where there’s long tables, they’re sitting at their computer, and they’re using their cell phones a lot of the time for conversation. I remember when I started following you, one of the reasons that got me really interested is I was running a 250 seat call center at the time, and we are having major headset issues. I remember that you had a lot of good suggestions for that. Do you, even in cellphone era, what do people need to do now with headsets that are going to be making phone calls so that the quality and the clarity sounds really good?

Art: This is a pet peeve of mine. I would suggest that if your livelihood depends on your messaging and what you’re saying to people at the other end of the line, if you can help it at all, do not use a cellphone. Cellphones are great for almost everything but talking. I am just a huge believer in that, and matter of fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that a lot of voice over IP systems are still not as reliable as they should be. I’m a dinosaur here but I have a landline and I always will, because I will not trust my livelihood in speaking with someone else who is going to be making a decision on something that they’re going to be paying me some money, I want to make sure that my communication is coming through crystal clear.

Again, if you control this at all, this will probably apply more to business owners and solopreneurs, invest in good quality equipment. Number one would be the transmission, which would obviously be a landline. Number two, invest in a great quality headset. I happen to have a relationship and give a plug here for my friends at headsets.com and they have absolutely the best quality headsets. Don’t scrimp here. If you were going to go out and meet the CEO of a Fortune 100 Company and the results of your meeting, that face to face meeting, could potentially mean big business for you, you wouldn’t go in wearing your Saturday clothes and look like you just rolled out of bed. If somebody’s using a cellphone for a very important phone conversion, you might just be giving that impression. Granted, I’m not saying every cell phone call does not sound good but I’ve just had too many, not reliable calls getting dropped. Again, you can tell I’m passionate about this.

Marylou: And the quality like you said, especially it takes so much effort, and we all know this, to get somebody on the phone and to speak to them one to one, which is what we’re trying to get to. Don’t bundle that by having equipment that won’t let you continue that conversation.

Art, thank you so much for joining us on today’s phone call. I will put in the show notes all the locations and all your books, but for those listening, businessbyphone.com, that’s the mothership, correct Art? Where all of your great content is?

Art: That is. And the blog is smartcallingit.com. If you want to go direct to a lot of free tips, you can go there as well. But you can get there from the main site, either way.

Marylou: I do stress that Art’s work, 35 years plus now, is all about helping you guys say exactly the right things by phone. It doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize this information that you’re learning to put in your emails because we’re trying to make emails more conversationally oriented and less market being oriented. The conversation that Art teaches you for the phone, with voicemail, also will work in some of your persuasive emails that you’re writing when you’re trying to get your foot in the door.

Again, Art, thank you so much for your time today. I’d love to have you on the podcast.

Art: Marylou, thank you so much. Like I said, it’s an honor and let’s do it again.

Henry Schuck is the Co-Founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg a platform for finding, connecting, and selling to more prospects using a accurate high-quality contact database. The company was founded in 2007, and Henry has led it through rapid growth going from the original three employees to over 500 today.

Henry is the list expert, so put your seatbelts on. We have a great conversation about lists. In this episode, he shares the story of how he and a friend founded DiscoverOrg and how they grew the company. They even had to refine their product to meet their own sales needs. Once they got the process down, their sales numbers went through the roof.

Episode Highlights:

• DiscoverOrg is a sales intelligence tool that profiles who’s who in about 175,000 corporations.
• They use a mix of proprietary technology and a team of 300 human researchers.
• Maintaining the data is one of the most difficult aspects.
• It takes 70 hours to count to a million. They profile almost 3 million contacts across their database.
• Henry has been in this space for more than half of his life. He began with a small intelligence company called iProfile.
• Then he went to law school.
• In 2007, Henry and a friend from iProfile started DiscoverOrg and grew it organically.
• They were missing projections by 6 million dollars in 2010. They started thinking about how to plug that hole.
• Working backwards to reach a goal. They found the resources they needed, but they needed to build the list datasets for themselves.
• They realized they needed a team of English speaking humans to solve their information gap in their lists.
• They would score fits on a scale of 1 through 5 using what they called fit rank. Then they would have the human team build out the lists of the companies that fit.
• Knowing what companies and people to talk to and their contact information and what tools they use and then target the approach to them.
• Once they got the processes into place to deliver high quality information, they blew their sales numbers out.
• The biggest lever you have to pull is the data you feed your SDR team allowing them to focus on messaging and follow up.
• You want your datatool to cleanse and maintain the numbers, emails, and contact info.
• This is an investment that pays off through everything in your organization.
• They looked at performance metrics to see how many calls needed to be made to hit sales numbers and then worked backwards to provide that amount of contacts.
• If a company doesn’t respond, you still continue to call them. They are still in your market. Organization priorities are constantly changing.
• List fatigue and a 30% attrition rate. Refreshing the lists is absolutely critical.

Resources:

• DiscoverOrg
• henry.schuck@discoverorg.com
• 360-783-6800
• Henry Schuck on LinkedIn
• @HenryLSchuck on Twitter
• Salesforce
• Marketo
• HubSpot
• Pardot
• Outreach
• SalesLoft
• PersistIQ
• Yesware
• Steven Covey
  

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This is the podcast that I know I’ve been waiting for forever. In fact, I think I pinged Henry probably a year ago, asking for some of his time to talk to us today.

Henry Schuck is the co-founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg. He is a list expert so put your seatbelts on because we’re going to have a great conversation today with Henry, all about lists. Welcome to the podcast, Henry.

Henry: Thanks, Marylou. Thank you for having me. I’m sorry we made you wait a year.

Marylou: That’s okay.

Henry: For what is to be anticlimactic.

Marylou: Right. As my mom used to say, great things are worth waiting for. I put you in that category, Henry.

Henry: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Marylou: I’m just going to turn the mic over to you because everybody has probably a gazillion questions. I know that you wanted to share a story of your journey and what you needed to do to get from point A to point B in leveraging the list. I’m going turn over to you.

First, tell us about your role in your company and how you got interested in this particular part of the pipeline and then the story that I think would be very enlightening for a lot of our listeners today.

Henry: Again, thanks for having me. At DiscoverOrg, what we do, we’re a sales intelligence tool where we profile out who’s who within about 175,000 corporations across the globe. We’re profiling who the people are in IT department, the marketing department, sales department, the legal department, the operations department.

                    We’re doing that through a mix of proprietary technology that we’ve built, that gathers names, titles, and contact information. But then the big differentiator between the way we gather and cleanse data and how anybody else does it is we have a team of about 300 researchers who are in our Vancouver, Washington offices.

After the machines go and do all the work to create what is an okay dataset, we put that in front of 300 researchers to cleanse, to make sure that people are still there, to add direct dial and mobile phone numbers, to make sure the emails work, to make sure we can gather descriptions on what the person’s job function is and then, to keep that data maintained.

That tends to be one of the most difficult pieces of what we do, gathering a net new contact today. When it’s fresh, it’s great. Six months from now, the person has gotten a raise of left their job. And so we’ve created a large engine that also maintains that data. Yeah, it’s a pretty big operation at this point.

Marylou: Sounds very daunting.

Henry: Yeah. I wish I would’ve written it down but I googled the other day how long it takes to count to a million. What do you think is the answer to that?

Marylou: Oh my gosh. Two hours? An hour? I don’t even have a clue.

Henry: If you did it without any breaks, then it would take nearly 70 hours just to count to 1 million.

Marylou: Oh my God.

Henry: You could come into work every day for two weeks and just count all day. It would take you two weeks to get to a million. Today, we profile almost three million contacts across our database. You think about the effort that it takes to make sure those three million records are up to date and have phone numbers, titles haven’t changed and they haven’t left, the reporting structure is still accurate. You just need a big machinery behind it.

I got in the space, actually, I’m young, actually next youngest, but next year I will have been in the space longer for more than half of my life. I got started in 2001 when I was in college and needed a job. There was a small little sales intelligence company called iProfile that was based in Henderson, Nevada. I took a job and we were building really high quality dataset of information technology decision makers. I worked there from 2001 to 2006 where the company grew from about $300,000 in revenue when I got there to close to $5 million when I left.

The company had a successful private equity exit. I left and I went to law school at Ohio State in Columbus. In early 2007, a buddy of mine called me who I have recruited back at iProfile and said, “Hey look, I see a lot of value in building a company that provides this type of data to corporations and I’d like to start one. I don’t want to compete with iProfile but I want to start something like it.”

        That was 10 years ago. We started DiscoverOrg and grew it really organically until 2014 when we took some investments from PA Associates and Goldman Sachs. We have been bootstrapped until then and sort of figuring things out as we went along and we brought in these institutional investors in 2014. All of a sudden, when you do that, one of the things that comes with it, and there’s no illusion to this, but one of the things that comes with it is a lot more focused on numbers and forecasting and what are you going to do in 2015 or 2016? How are you going to get there? Let’s think through all of those things so we don’t miss a number and we have these high projections for the business, how you meet those.

We went from a company that was growing fast and profitable and didn’t spend a lot of times thinking about those things which is sort of like organically, we’re growing and so there was less of focus on that. A company that needed to plan for growth.

That brings me to late 2015. We had an offsite meeting with all of our executives and one of the things we realized in that offsite meeting was with the current staffing level and what we were doing, we were going to miss our projected forecast by $6 million.

Marylou: Oh no. Okay.

Henry: Not a great transition to be in. And so we started thinking about how do you get there? How do you plug that $6 million hole? I saw, Marylou, some of the notes from one of your previous podcast about how you work backwards to figure out how you plug that hole. The way you do it is you go, “Okay, you need to do $6 million in ACP. And so how many wins is that?” You just take your average contract price and divide it against the $6 million. And then once you get that, you go, “Okay, what’s my opportunity to deal closed ratio?” You figure out that. You figure out how many opportunity do you need.

Marylou: Right.

Henry: And then you say, “How many demos do I need in order to get that number of opportunities?” What’s the ratio of demos to opportunities you go up against. Once you get to the demos, you figure out, “My current people who set demos, how many can they create a day, a week, a month? And then how many of them do I need?”

                    We did that. It wasn’t a resource issue. We’re like, “Okay, we need x number of people. We need 15 more SDRs in order to do that.” You knew the resources you needed but the next thing that our Chief Revenue Officer said, remember, we solve a problem for our customers around knowing the people at companies they should be selling to and knowing the company they should be selling to.

                    For example, at this point, it’s 2015, we’ve been doing it for eight years. And so here we are, we know the number of people we need, we know how many demos we need, we know how many opportunities we need, we know how many wins we need to back into the $6 million number. Our Chief revenue Officer says we still can’t do it.

                    Why can we still not do it? We’re going to give you the money for the headcount, we have an HR staff that’s going to go hire these people. We’re going to tell them to go set meetings and we’re going to do it. They said, “We can’t do it because we don’t have a list clean enough that list out our accounts and our prospects at those accounts to be able to do that.

Marylou: That’s saying the cobbler who has no shoes.

Henry: It’s just this moment I’ll never forget because here we are at the time solving this problem for 2,000 customers and the trick here was we had never built the data sets for ourselves, we’d always built it around information technology decision makers and large corporations only. And so you have this great dataset but it just doesn’t do anything for us.

                    Our CFO said, “We’ll, that’s a problem this group is really well suited to solve.”

Marylou: Indeed.

Henry: And so we did. Before that moment, what we had been doing was sort of in a willy nilly sort of way, we would find companies that we wanted to prospect into. We would extend a list of companies to an outsourcer in India and we’d tell them to build us a list of contacts that we would then use in our sales process.

                    That wasn’t good enough for us. The data that was coming back would get old very quickly. It would bounce and when it bounces, it would hurt our email deliverability. We’re having trouble getting into inboxes because we were using lists. We’re buying from a bunch of different list brokers and that tended to cause us more trouble than it was worth. At one point, we had been blacklisted against three different servers, doing nothing outrageous. We’re not a big spamming house or anything. We’re just sending prospecting emails to prospects and then getting blacklisted because we’re sending too many emails that bounce, too many emails to people who weren’t there anymore.

                    We said, “Okay, the only way to solve this is the same way we solve it for all of our customers. But it’s expensive.” You have to do it with researchers. You have to do it with human beings. They have to be English speaking. They have to mainly be in the US. And we’re going to need our own team of that. What we did was we said, “Okay, if that’s the way we solve this gap, then let’s solve this gap.”

                    We stood up a team at DiscoverOrg in Vancouver. We call them DiscoverOrg. We built a process where our SDRs and then our third party outsourcer would do something called a fit rank of account. We could find big lists of accounts. We’d pull accounts out of our Salesforce system. We’d pull accounts that we had previously prospected to. We’d pull list of accounts from the Inc. 5000 listing. We’d pull fast growing company lists. We trained all of our SDRs and we trained our third party outsourcer to be able to what we call fit rank these companies.

                    On a scale of one to five, how good of a fit are they for us? I wanted to home run. It’s like B2B sales, more than 100 employees in the United States has a VP of Sales, has sales reps. That’s a great fit. That’s how you fit rank them. We trained everybody how to fit rank one through five. All of a sudden, we had this really great list of companies that were ranked one through five based on how good of a fit they were for our product.

                    And then we gave those lists to our team here in Vancouver, the DiscoverOrg for DiscoverOrg team. We said build us out the VP of Sales, the VPs of Marketing and the CEOs of these companies. And put that data into DiscoverOrg where we’re going to consume it with a new team of SDRs that’s going to call on it and bridge that $6 million gap.

                    We solved two problems. First, we solved the problem of we don’t know who the companies are, we don’t know companies that fit. We know our ideal buyer profile, we don’t know the companies that fit that ideal buyer profile. Let’s get to that with a fit ranking.

                    We don’t know who the people are at those companies we should be talking to so we need that. Once we know who those people are, we don’t know what their emails are, we don’t know what their phone numbers are, we don’t have a way to get in contact with them and so we need contact information.

                    And then, we layered on top of that. By the way, if they used Salesforce and Marketo or HubSpot or Pardot, those are even better fits for us. If they use Outreach or Tellwise or PersistIQ or one of these SDR tools, that’s another great fit for us. From now, we can look at a universe of fit rank one companies that are using Outreach, Salesloft, Tellwise, that are using Salesforce, that are using Marketo and then be really targeted with our approach to them. That’s what we did.

                    The first four or five months, we were getting our act together in 2016 and the back half of 2016, we absolutely blew out our number. It was because we put these systems and processes into place that were able to deliver really high quality information on our prospects on our accounts that allowed our SDRs to be leveraged more fully.

                    The SDR model works. Having people do outbound calling to set appointments and send emails, that’s a model that works. It works in thousands and thousands of companies across the globe. But there are varying levels of effectiveness of those SDRs. The biggest lever you have to pull is the data you’re speeding your SDR team because you can either live in a world where we live in where data goes into a dialogue, data goes into email sequencing tool, the SDR comes in, stitch down and the phone is dialling direct dial phone numbers for them all day. They’re able to focus on their messaging. They’re able to focus on being personalized. They’re able to focus on doing really good follow up to the people they’re reaching out to as opposed to wasting large parts of their day doing research on their prospects and research on their accounts. That all starts with really high quality data that’s set into the system and then it’s maintained.

                    That’s how we came to this. I would say if you’re looking for a data tool to drive your sales and marketing efforts, one of the things you want to make sure of is that the data being cleansed and maintained, that it has direct dial phone numbers, that the emails are not just guessed based on a formula but are being validated and verified for you in some way to make sure that you’re not bearing the brunt of deliverability issues.

                    And then you should invest in this. It is an investment that pays off everywhere throughout the organization whether it be in marketing campaigns, or SDR calls, or territory mapping. Really, everything you’re doing is driven by the account in prospect information you have on both customers and prospects.

Marylou: You know, Henry, one of the things that, this is way back in 2011, when we did Predictable Revenue, I had done a personalized benchmark or AB split test, if you will, of lists from vendor A to vendor B. The net result was I maximized my return on effort by going with the vendor who had a 5% undeliverable rate versus a 30% undeliverable rate.

                    Part of the shopping around and figuring this out is like you said, the cleansing portion is one of the biggest problems to keep on top of, that and the original sourcing. I love the way you said for planning your fit rank is that you looked at various sources that weren’t necessarily list per se of contact information but they were lists of companies like you said, I think you said Inc. 5000. You looked internally into your house list. Previous customers is another gold mine if you’re an existing company already and have what we used to call dead accounts. The accounts that you had conversation with, to update them.

Henry: Previous leads, people who didn’t convert could be a pretty good gold mine too.

Marylou: Me as a sales rep, when I went into any new company, I would always go to the turn away lead bucket to start my work because it was a pretty good deal to have a higher probability and closing those accounts.

                    The other thing I heard you say is that you really focused on the ideal account profile and you had a one to five ranking. That’s a great idea for those of you who are thinking about how can I segment out my accounts. What did you decide? Were there like three or four parameters that made it to number one or did you have more loose guidelines as to how to score these one to five?

Henry: People will create their own rules around this but the way we thought about this was there was a certain size component so there was the size of the company component. There was a company type component. Like for our IT data sets, this piece was more qualitative. Could you look at the website and get a sense that they were selling to IT buyers or marketing buyers? One of the datasets that we sell to. That’s more of like is there a product stick there? Do we have a product that fits for them? Do they have a vice president of sales or a vice president of marketing? That’s an indication that the organization is mature and making investments in these types of tools. Those are some of the parameters that went into the one to five rank.

                    I think for a lot of companies, it’s actually probably easier. What you can do in DiscoverOrg is say show me all the companies that are financial services or insurance companies with over 1,000 employees based in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut that are using Oracle, or Salesforce, or any technology and then let me see the VPs of information security there. That’s just a couple clicks away to creating that buyer profile.

Marylou: Exactly. Like you said, when you were working through the planning of the actual ACV and working backwards, I did the same thing with the actual list because we basically want to know if we have the luxury of having clients but some are more established companies, go to your companies that you closed and find out the ideal companies that high revenue potential, high lifetime value, highly likely to close. Profile them if there’s a good percentage in your win rate and then work backwards as to the ideal account profiles from there and also the ideal prospect personas, who the people that were involved at top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel and make sure that as part of the discovery process that you’ve got this people entering into the CRM or your database, whatever you’re using in order to be able to have a more holistic approach to your sales conversations at the various stopping points in the pipeline.

Henry: It’s a really great advice, Marylou. It’s a really, really great advice. One of the things I used to do was after we’d close a deal, I’d Google the company and then I’d take the first line at the descriptor in Google. It would be like DiscoverOrg will say like sales intelligence. And then I copy whatever that descriptor was and I throw it back into Google and then I just look up all of the other companies that use that kind of phrasing in their description.

Marylou: That’s great advice. You know Steven Covey, Begin with the End in Mind. Go to the end, the desired result and work your way backwards and you’ll have, it’s not perfect but you’ll have a better start than just putting your finger up in the wind and see which way it’s blowing kind of thing. It’s not going to be as scientific and as pleasurable for you when you’re banging your head against the wall because you didn’t pick the right ideal account profile.

                    Another question that I have is, I don’t know if you have a sense of this, The DiscoverOrg for DiscoverOrg team, did they have some benchmarks that that they had to meet in terms of net new growth on the list or were you just letting them do their thing? How did that look? I’m interested in list update and net new. Were those metrics for you with this team? And if so, how did you decide per rep what that look like?

Henry: A lot of that was baked into the performance metrics we have for the other team, on our research team that were already doing this but I think that we looked at it was once you got to how many demos you needed. We broke it down one step further. So then you knew you needed to get this many demos and so say an SDR needed to set two net new demos a day, and so then we went back and we said, “Okay, the SDRs who are setting two new demos a day, how many calls are they making each day in order to do that?”

                    We worked back to that point and we said, “Okay, there’s a certain number of contacts that we’re going to need each week, each month, each quarter that we’re going to need, that DiscoverOrg for DiscoverOrg team to deliver in order for these additional SDRs to make the number of calls that they need to make in order to get the number of demos that they need to set.”

                    One of the things to keep in mind, because it’s a pitfall to fall into, that if you need to bring on, call it 200 net new customers this year. In order to get net new customers, you need to have call it 1,000 opportunities in order to bring those 200 on. You don’t need 20,000 accounts to prospect to get to that 1,000 because what ends up happening is just because you call a company between the month of January and March and they didn’t respond, it doesn’t mean you don’t continue to call them from March to June.

                    Your total addressable market is going to be something that doesn’t change. And so if you didn’t get a hold of them between January to March, it doesn’t mean they’re no longer in your addressable  market. It probably just means like timing wasn’t right. You probably want to bench that company for three months and then go back to it.

                    One of the things you realize is that organizations are constantly changing and so their priorities are changing and so their needs for your tools and services are changing. Something that’s not interesting in January, if DiscoverOrg is not interesting in January, it may be really interesting in April when a new VP of Sales comes in and decides that he’s going to close that six million dollar shortfall by hiring SDRs and going to market in a different way.

                    Just keep in mind organizations are dynamic changing things. Just because you didn’t close Wells Fargo today, doesn’t mean it’s not an opportunity tomorrow.

Marylou: There are trigger events, like you said, with movement of employees. There are also times of the year like I know, for me, Marylou Tyler, I can spend February in content creation alone. I can build all my classes. Because everybody is still in lala land over the fact that it’s first quarter and life is good, but as the year progresses, it gets crazy busy. I know that so I know to plan my list advanced and also triggers I watch for with the internet now, we get all this wonderful triggers when people move around, especially people who have been clients of mine that moved around or other events that come up that I know would be interesting for me to start again with my sequencing. Those are the other things that with the list, you can definitely take advantage of.

                    The other thing I wanted to mention was as you said before about contacting an account, I can remember just like it was yesterday that I sent three emails into City Groove for an account that I was working on at the time, two people responded back with we don’t give out information. I was asking for referral like the the Predictable Revenue model.

                    The third person said that I am so happy that you found me, Marylou. You never know. You gotta work that bullseye of indirect and direct influencers as well. You can really thread an account over the year, just by changing out the ideal prospect personas that you go after as well.

Henry: Absolutely. So many examples within 10 minutes of sending an email out exactly that. One person says this is totally uninteresting. And another person says this is exactly what I’m looking for.

Marylou: Right. The convention approach. I get it. “We never do that. We’re not interested and we’re never going to change.” And then you get the guy around the corner and says, “Oh my gosh, this is the best thing since sliced bread.” You never know and you got to plan out for that, that’s why I was curious about the list replenish and whether you think about not only the decision makers but the people who influence the decision makers.

                    The other thing that I’m really curious about is I came up through call center ranks. Early 90’s, I was running a 250-seat call center. We did a lot of calling, obviously. We set appointments. List fatigue, that term was really important to us. Is that an important term now? And if so, are there some metrics around that that you can share with the audience?

Henry: What was the term, Marylou? I missed it.

Marylou: It’s called list fatigue. It’s essentially how do you blend in net new names with existing names to create a dataset that’s fresh every time?

Henry: That’s a great question. One of the things that we realized across our datasets is that there is a 30% attrition rate year over year. You get a new list on January 1st. you can count on 30% of those people having switched jobs by the end of the year on average. And so, your ability to remove those 30% and refill in the next 30% of people, whether they’re at those organizations or at others, I think it’s absolutely critical to your success there.

I think the thing is list fatigue if they’re getting the same messaging over and over and over. And so, your ability to create content that’s valuable and interesting and having a unique approach to reaching out to buyers becomes even more critical because think about the fortune 1,000. Every technology company is trying to sell to the IT department of a fortune 1,000 company. They’re doing it through calls, emails and in person meetings. You have to get your timing right and you have to stand out.

Marylou: The attrition rate 30% and then you add on to that if you’re having meaningful conversations, they’re moving into the pipeline. They’re not moving out necessarily. They also have to be added into that number. I think we came up in the new book, in Predictable Prospecting, a 40% number to play around with. For every 100 net names that you have in your membership list, in your dataset, at the end of the sequence, you can count on 40 of those records out of 100 out the door. Once you let that thing incubate and when you bring it back into the fold, there should be 40 new names now that you’re going to stick in there. They could be names from other datasets that have gotten too small. There is a little bit of secret sauce to creating your datasets so that you have a fresh list each time you run a sequence.

                    And as Henry pointed out, having a messaging, because you’re getting smarter now, because you’re having messaging, you should be able to wrap up those messages with more specificity around what the buyer responded to for a pain point and caused them to want to continue to having a dialogue with you. All that information should feed into the next sequence so that your ordering the problems and pain points accordingly so that you’re reducing lag.

                    Having all these wonderful tools with the list, the list becomes really fun to work with. It’s my favorite part of the pipeline because you do live and die by that list in terms of your revenue.

Henry: That’s right.

Marylou: Definitely.

Henry: I couldn’t agree more.

Marylou: Henry, I want to be respectful of your time. We’re running out of time. We’re running towards the end here. What can people do to get a hold of you or the work that you do or to understand more about this magical thing called the list, how would they start researching or getting smarter about this?

Henry: We have a ton of resources at discoverorg.com so you can visit discoverorg.com if you’d like to see some data on some of your target accounts. To get a free list of leads, there’s a free data button there to fill out. So discoverorg.com is a great place to see resources. We also have a checklist for when you’re looking at a data vendor, what things you want to make sure they have or do. But lots of great resources there and if you want to see some leads on your own account, fill out the free data form and we’d be happy to respond to you and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Marylou: Very good. I will put the link to the checklist because I’m sure people just perked up when they heard that because that’s one of the things, that where do I begin, how do I know that I’m not forgetting something, so having a checklist like that would be great.

                    Henry, thank you so much for time. I very much appreciate you coming on the show.

Henry: Thanks a lot, Marylou.