Building, training, and growing a sales team can be expensive and time consuming. New businesses and especially growing businesses will need a team to move the sales and business process foreword and generate revenue to continue the growth. Our guest today is someone who has come up with a solution to the problem of creating and growing a sales team.  

Today, I speak with Stephen Hayes the founder of Inside Sales. Which is a group of on demand sales professionals that assist growing businesses with the sales process and with additional sales team help. This process is cost efficient with ready to go sales professionals that also bring tools, techniques, and technology that can be plugged into a growing business to accelerate the process.

Episode Highlights:

• How companies were struggling with building an inside sales model
• Stephen noticed the need and created the service solution for inside sales help
• They will often augment an existing sales team and help them scale
• They also help businesses that have no team or a sales bottleneck
• Demand generation, lead generation and opportunity generation
• With new companies they help build the entire go to market and playbook
• Importance of having systems in place to measure if the strategy is working
• They only work with products they like and believe in
• How being in too much of a hurry causes false starts and loss of credibility
• Having a full program up and running in 45 days is the timeline
• Sales cycles and learning curves could extend the timeframe
• It’s important to treat SDRs well and keep them motivated
• Tools used are multi touch, multi channel including phone and email and social
• They also have micro and macro events and direct mail
• Customized landing pages and video and animation are also used
• They also focus on great data sources that allow them to work at scale
• Revisiting lost leads
• Rewarding and empowering all representatives

Resources:

• Inside Sales
• Inside Sales Team Careers

Episode Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week I have a guest, Stephen Hayes. He’s the founder of Inside Sales, and what’s really cool about Stephen is that we’re gonna talk about supplementing sales teams. His organization is all about – some people call it the agency model, but it’s a sales agency model. It’s focused on the sales conversation. Some people call it outsourcing, and some people call it sales augmentation. I’ll let him describe what it is that they do.

                    This is a great conversation for us because a lot of times when we’re either in hyper growth mode or we’re starting up and not quite sure about the types of sales roles we want to have in our organization, it’s sometimes very helpful to have a third party come in and help us supplement our team, grow our teams, and get to a point where we have a consistent engine. Stephen, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

Stephen: Good morning Marylou. Thank you for asking me to join you. It’s terrific to be here.

Marylou: Wonderful. Tell us. What got you going down this path of creating an agency that really works on becoming an extension of a sales organization?

Stephen: Well back in 2010, we actually offered technology and sales operations as a service, and we didn’t include the people part of the salesperson part in the actual offering itself. But in 2010, when we were helping a company build their technology stack and helping them innovate within their technology stack within their companies, they were hitting a wall on their outside sales team. The economy crashed in 2010, if you remember. Companies were really eager – and aggressively eager, I would say. There was this sense of urgency to change the way they were going to market, and many of them needed to change from a pure outside-sales model to a hybrid model, which includes inside sales. They really didn’t have the people or technology or operational capabilities to do that inhouse quickly.

                    Many of our customers were asking us to help with that transformation. Finally, enough of them asked that we built the offering to include people, and we turned it on in 2010. We launched insidesalesteam.com. Our parent company at that time was Be Relevant Group. What started off as really answering a demand in the market has skyrocketed ever since, and the Inside Sales Team offering has really taken off. It’s become the majority of our business. The majority of our business used to be technology consulting and implementation, and now this whole service agency model has just really skyrocketed and inside sales as a function has also skyrocketed. We were at the forefront of that and have really enjoyed a nice surge in growth and name recognition across the country as a result.

Marylou: Wonderful. My first thought is – I work with a lot of clients, various shapes and sizes, various tenure in the market. Is there a sweet spot of a client that is going to immediately benefit from having a conversation with you, or are there various flavors of offerings that clients might want to consider in looking to a service like yours in order to help bring in opportunities? Then the third question is, is it opportunities that you work on, when you say “inside sales,” or do you actually do inside sales, prospecting, closing as well? What is the main emphasis there?

Stephen: I’ll try to answer them in order. We work with two types of companies. One is a company that’s already having tremendous success. They’ve really already figured it out. They have product market fit. They know who wants to buy their products, and people truly do want to buy their products or software application. They look to us to scale that effort in a way that’s very hard to do internally alone.

                    We’re often an augmentation to an internal team. Someone might have 10 inside sales people, or 20 inside sales people. They might need to go to 40, and to have 20 of those people in Buffalo, New York with an engine that’s ready to go makes a lot of sense for companies. The first version is one that’s already figured it out, and we’re helping them scale like crazy in a very disciplined way.

                    The second version is someone who has something really interesting to bring to market. They know that it should be successful, and sales and marketing is the barrier to their success currently. They don’t have an engine, or maybe the engine that they built is not performing the way they need it to. We can help them figure out: will people buy the product, what types of people will buy the product?

                    In that scenario, we’re helping them really build the go-to-market strategy, execute in a very disciplined way that gives them the feedback that they need to change the product, change the product positioning, change the product pricing, make the iterations that they need before they scale the business.

                    We work successfully with both types of company. As long as everyone is really transparent about which one they are and where we are in the evolution of the company, we can have tremendous success and add tremendous value in both of those scenarios. A big part of our business is demand generation, lead generation, opportunity creation; and a smaller part of our business is full-service, full-cycle revenue, so actually taking a sales cycle from start to finish.

Marylou: Here is the devil’s advocate in me because when I work on clients that are the second bucket – the people who have a great idea, they’re suffering from lack of marketing and sales. Either there’s not just enough bodies or they really haven’t had the time to put together a good plan. How do you come in and get them up to speed because I find that sometimes they don’t even know why they matter: why change, why now, why us? I’m going all the way back to the SWOT 6 to try to get them to understand and articulate their position in the marketplace, so the devil’s advocate in me says, “Boy, until we get our ducks in a row internally, how can we outsource this? How can we get someone else to do that for us, when we don’t even know what we are doing?” How do you address that?

Stephen: Together we’re usually building a go-to-market and a playbook. That’s very disciplined and very rigid. Because when you’re testing, you have to be somewhat rigid and disciplined with your measurements, so that you can offer feedback to say, “What should we change, when should we change, then how should we change, how will we measure it again next time when we change it?” I think it starts with “Do you have the aptitude to build those kinds of go-to-market and playbooks?” You have to have that.

                    We offer that as a service to our customers because we feel like we need to control our own destiny, too. If we’re going to take on the accountability and the responsibility of success, we also want the responsibility of having the input to build successfully on the front end. We’re probably wired a little bit differently than most companies in our space to have the aptitude and the passion for doing that. It’s a very exciting process to be a part of, and it’s an honor to be given that responsibility, so we take it very seriously.

                    Then the back end of that is “Do you have the systems and processes and place to measure whether something is working or not? Are you disciplined and rigorous with your measurement? Do you have the technology in place to measure? Do you have the database in place to measure? And then do you have the people in place that are willing and able to do the things day in and day out that are required for accurate measurement of whether a campaign or a go-to-market strategy is working or is not working?”

                    From the differentiation standpoint, we’re probably wired a little bit more consultative on the front end. We have really great expertise in that area, and then our people and our processes are very disciplined to measure the back end. That’s what allows us to do that. Then the other thing is we don’t do it with just anyone. We have to truly believe in the product. We have to see that the product has legs. We have to get excited about it. We’re also pretty selective with where we are going to devote our energies in that regard.

Marylou: That’s interesting. I like that. I’ve heard a couple of things that I want to make sure that our audience listened and heard, too. There’s specificity around the actual process that you put in place. Let’s face it, folks who are listening in, we’re not all great at looking at our analytics and then deploying the learnings from those analytics right back into the marketing and sales conversations. It sounds like you close that loop as part of just your standard offering, which is leaps and bounds beyond what I’m seeing out in the field a lot.

                    A lot of times we have issues with compliance to actually track the right data and then take that data and actually analyze it, whether it’s qualitative or quantitatively in order to feed that back into the marketing engines and the sales conversation messaging, so that we can continually improve and optimize our frameworks. How do you pull this information out of the teams? Let’s take again that second bucket, then we’ll talk a little about the first bucket. The second bucket, where literally we’re herding cats in some cases. They are scattered, they’re busy, multiple hats. How are you able to grab them and actually get them to talk with you about what this thing is and how to put it into play?

Stephen: I think it starts with mutual respect and understanding that if we’re going to do this, we’re going do it right. When we build this business, we wanted to build a business that could attract the types of people that spend their own money and then aren’t just checking a box. The bar is high. The enthusiasm is high. The commitment is high. I think our customers sense that our commitment level is so high that – theirs is too – but we really don’t have that problem.

                    I think when you are attracting the right types of customers and building the right type of service that attracts truly committed people, it seems to work. I think the other thing is people don’t come to us when they’re not excited about an idea or a product. They come to us when they’re incredibly excited about an idea or a product, and they can’t imagine not making the most out of the opportunity. I guess people are almost wired that when they are coming to us, they are pretty darn committed. It takes care of some of that.

                    Then we have a really great process. We have a customer success team that has a very robust onboarding program, that is detailed and structured, and really the right balance of a great process that is a process that affords the opportunity to bring in the creativity, the culture of our customer, to incorporate what makes our customer different, but also leverage the standardization that we are bringing to bear, to get things done effectively, efficiently, accurately in a way that scales like crazy, once we crack the code. Those things typically are coming together pretty darn well for us and for our customers.

Marylou: Let’s talk a little bit – so my audience gets a feel of timelines. I can share with you the timeline that we put in the books, and it’s typically to get from crawl to walk stage that they’re actually producing qualified opportunities. Is anywhere on the short end for them doing it – this is a six-week to nine-week type of timeframe, twelve weeks on the outer reaches of producing qualified opportunities that might not yet make goal, but are pretty darn close to goal. That’s three months of their life that we’re in assembly and activation mode. How are we cutting that down, or is that analogous or similar to what you’ve experienced with your offering?

Stephen: It’s similar in that there is a perception that people are in a hurry, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what we find is if you are in too much of a hurry, you’re going to have violent false starts, and they’re very expensive. The one cost of a false start that some people don’t measure truly accurately is credibility. If you’re in a company and you have a violent false start, you lose credibility. You lose momentum. It’s very hard to get that back sometimes.

                    The other challenge you could have with doing it too fast and doing it the wrong way is you can get a false negative. If you do something the wrong way, it’s very easy for someone else to say, “That’s never going to work,” and that’s a false negative that’s also very hard to recover from. Because a lot of times, you get a false negative and people say, “That won’t work,” but no one has another idea of what will work either. So now you’re in a really bad spot. You’ve lost credibility, and you have a false negative.

                    So we really encourage people to do the right things in this onboarding, set-up phase so that we can have great success and accurate measurement of what is and isn’t working. A lot of times people change on half-measures, and you don’t really know the answer and you’re chasing your tail on the wrong answers.

                    In our world, our brand commitment to the market is that we will have a program fully onboarded, up and running, producing opportunities within 45 days, and believe me, people think that’s a long time. It’s 45 days. It goes really fast. There’s a ton of work that gets done in that period. It’s very disciplined and rigid and organized, but it still takes 45 days. It’s a monumental effort to do it in 45 days the right way.

                    Just to give people out there perspective – we have tremendous resources. We have amazingly talented people with great experience, and we have the world’s best technology. We have an inhouse ad agency to support these efforts, and it still takes us 45 days, and we are running hard that whole 45 days. If you are looking for some perspective on how long it should take you to do it internally without all those resources, give yourselves a break, when it is taking 4 or 5 months because that’s probably the right amount of time.

Marylou: It’s usually double or triple from my experience. Now does this matter – because another question I’m sure my audience is asking is “Does it matter – the sales cycles or is it…?” With segmentation, when we’re talking about tiers of accounts we have in our innermost circle, probably our dream accounts that we want to go after, that maybe have a longer sales cycle. The next tier out – maybe what we call ‘extended universe.’ These are accounts that are not quite sweet spots, but there is still quality. And we really want to close those guys, but there may be some issues where they’re not in the sweet spot and then there’s everybody else. “Does it matter what type of accounts we throw at you to get that first opportunity? Or is there also a sweet spot on the sales cycle side?”

Stephen: I think it does matter. There could be an extension. You have learning curves. Learning curve could add a month to the program launch. It takes truly a month longer to learn the product, the market, the used cases, the competitors, the verbiage, the technology and terms, so that can extend.

                    The other is “Who are we going after and how many touches does it take to get that person and what’s the cycle and the rhythm of touch in the campaigns?” so I absolutely should take those things into account of how long it’s going to take you to launch a program internally. Then it’s this idea around “What are we measuring in the first six months for success?” Those things are different in a really large account with C-level targets versus medium-sized accounts with manager level targets. I think the answer is different in every program. It’s just really important to keep score in an honest and transparent way.

                    A lot of times if you’re keeping score in a way that there’s an ultimate goal that six months away, the way you keep score in the short term can seem like excuse-making. You can seem like a wimp, if you are not willing to take on the task, so I think honesty and transparency is really important in that period of time.

                    If you are building – which we build account-based marketing programs for customers. If you are building an account-based marketing program and you’re only keeping score on appointments set, then that’s a disconnect between the goal of the program and how you are keeping score. It’s a disconnect between the resource allocation and how you are keeping score. I think the program design, the goals of the program – all of those nuances have to be taken into account to come up with an accurate way of how you should keep score because people deserve to feel good when they’re doing a good job. And if you’re doing a great job in month 3, but you’re keeping score as if you’re in month 9, you’re not going to feel good.

                    As you know, the SDR function is wildly important in the ABM world. How you train and treat your SDRs that are running a sophisticated ABM program is really important to keep them motivated, to keep their education up, to keep their enthusiasm up, to keep their connection with their AEs at a very high, intimate level that is strategic and not only tactical. All of those things are super important, so that’s a great question you asked. There is a lot of nuance.

Marylou: I know that I hear way too often that we lump types of accounts into one bucket. I’m not a fan of that, so I wanted to make sure the audience understood that it’s gonna depend based on sales cycles, based on the type of account, and, as you’ve mentioned, the personas or stakeholders within that account. These are all variables that need to go into the calculator, if you will, to start working on how long things are going to take.

                    The other thing I wanted you to talk about with this bucket – and probably works with the other bucket too – is what are these touches look like? What is the blend of touch? The use of phone – do you use direct mail since you have an agency there? Do you do phone and e-mail? I know it depends on the client, but what are the various tools and the toolkit that you use in the actual structure of a sequence and the cadence of that sequence to help your clients?

Stephen: We do believe in multi-touch, multi-channel. We do use phone extensively for sure, but it’s a piece of the puzzle. Phones, emails – and email, we use cadences to outreach, so we’re building sophisticated cadences and playbooks. Those are persona-based account-specific programs. Then we are using social touches as well. We do a lot of event series for our customers. We come up with micro-events and macro-events – large events that are vertical or association type events, and then events that are specific to companies that could simply be a lunch and learn for one department within one company.

                    We also do direct mail. Our in-house team does a lot of great design work. Our direct mail is getting more and more extensive as we grow that and integrate that into the program in a smart way that honors the fact that everything still has budget considerations, and when and how do you do direct mail needs to be justified for sure.

                    All of those things are part of the program, and then we build customized landing pages, personalized landing pages. We build videos. Sometimes we’ll build videos even for one account that we’re going after, with unique research on that account within that video. We have an inhouse animation team and videographers, so we’re doing video for customers that’s really awesome and very creative.

                    Then we have great data sources like DiscoverOrg, as an example, that allow us to personalize at scale, that allow us to do great marketing programs at scale, that still are intimate in nature and personalized, so that when you have a data provider like DiscoverOrg, you can really rely on – you can get creative and leverage all your tools and technology in a way that you’re comfortable with knowing that the data’s of high caliber and accurate. It’s going to enhance your relationship and not hurt your relationship by using bad data.

Marylou: Definitely. For the second bucket – that’s really the Soup to Nuts story. Let’s go to the first bucket, where they’ve got success. They’ve really done a great job in understanding who they are, why they matter, why people should care, why the sense of urgency. What are some of the common mistakes when they go to you and say, “Okay. Here’s our open kimono. Here’s our playbook. We’ve been successful here.” What are you still finding as the quick wins that you can get for them because they’ve missed the boat?

Stephen: I think one quick win is revisiting lost opportunities. If you think about why people buy and that people still buy from people. I did a keynote a few months ago about – in the SAS world, the product and the person you buy it from are intermixed. It’s very hard to have an experience that’s delivered through a sales person for a product. It’s very hard to separate those two, so it’s very few people that buy a product and say, “I’m buying the product, even though I don’t like the salesperson.” That happens once in a while, but the experience that’s delivered by the salesperson is often – your opinion of that often goes to the product as well.

                    If you’re a company that is generating thousands of leads or hundreds of leads, you’re going to trade shows, you’re giving your salespeople lots and lots and lots of it back. Your product might be a good fit for the customer. The person who is delivering the experience might not be exactly the right fit for that specific person, or at the time they were looking at the product, it might not have been the right time. Or the person you are showing it to – the customer – switch jobs, and now there’s a new person, and you continue to market to that other person. They’re not even in the job anymore. There’s lots of leads. There’s lot of opportunities that need to be revisited in a very professional way and also in a way that’s different maybe from the person who they were involved with originally.

                    That’s one area that our customers – we usually always incorporate into our programs, the reliven program. It generates a huge spike in revenue. It plugs into their ongoing programs. It’s a way to drive tremendous value without additional cost, because the cost of the lead’s already been done. They’ve already spent the money. They’ve already spent millions of dollars to generate those leads and run through sales cycles that gets stalled, stuck, or lost. Absolute great way to get started in a program. If you’re new to a job, new to a position, don’t forget to revisit your lost leads and opportunities.

Marylou: Wonderful. Good. Where else do you pick up and help augment an existing force that’s got a pretty good message out there and really wants additional assistance?

Stephen: I think another way is the ratio. You might have an SDR team that’s simply too small, and that’s a common mistake. You have not enough SDRs. You don’t produce enough meetings. Your AEs are running meetings, but their meetings are here and there. There’s not a rhythm to the program. Also, you might have a lot of turnover in your SDR team, so that it’s hard to get momentum. Your AEs lose faith in the organization being able to produce enough meetings that are of high enough caliber. Sometimes it can be as simple as, “I don’t have enough SDRs.”

                    And when you don’t have enough SDRs, sometimes the other thing that happens is they’re supposed to be outbounding, but they end up taking inbound. As you and I both know, the percentage of inbound leads that are a good fit are very low. You can actually get way out of whack on your SDR team, and I call it mission creep. You build an SDR team to outbound. You build an SDR team to run strategic programs against very targeted accounts, and they end up managing inbound. They end up managing chat streams, and it’s just mission creep.

                    I think another area of opportunity is to have enough SDRs that are committed to out-bounding, to support the sales organization and really hit the number. I think that is just another area of opportunity – is to look and say, “Do I have the right number of SDRs? Do I have them focused on the right accounts? Have I equipped them and given them the programs, the technology, and the skillset to go after the accounts that I am declaring I want to win?” Because sometimes we don’t have the right SDRs, or we haven’t equipped them properly to go up market, which is a common thing these days of going more up market. I think revisiting that is another really smart thing to do as well.

                    Then that leads into – have my SDR sat down with my AEs and done account plans? Which accounts are we going after? How are we going to do it together? When you do that, you’ll see that you’ll keep your SDRs longer, too, because they’re more strategic, they’re more involved. As humans, SDRs want to be involved in the planning. They want to be involved in the outcomes. I think that’s another great internal opportunity – is to revisit how you think about your SDRs and treat them as strategic partners in the sales cycle, and you will be wonderfully surprised with how they respond because they have a huge appetite for that type of inclusion and for that type of professional development.

Marylou: Totally agree there. I’ve seen it in action, and I’ve seen it when you can take the SDR and have them help with the account planning – we call them value grids for essentially working and marching those accounts from opportunity down to close even. It’s a great team effort, and I really love that notion.

                    From a standpoint also, a lot of times SDRs come into the role with the idea of going into the account executive role at some point. Not everybody wants to stay in the SDR role, so when you can see this upward mobility, so to speak – and we talked about that a lot in predictable revenue of the career path of going from a marketing account role to SDR to AE. And then finally if you want to go and manage and grow accounts – to do it that way. I love that idea. I think a lot of people, too, need to look at the revenue and work it backwards, as you were alluding to, Stephen.

                    Am I working the right types of leads to get to the revenue objectives that I have? We had a call a while ago, Daniel Barber, and he talked about how he sees this over and over again that we’re not looking at revenue, working it backwards to see what types of accounts drive that revenue, what the sales cycles are that drive those accounts, and what the leads that drive the sales cycle. You nearly need to work that math all the way back up, and it sounds like your organization can help with that, as people are looking to supplement or augment or create a sales machine, but not necessarily all internal sales, by actually having people like Stephen’s group help get that going. I want to be respectful of people’s time, but go ahead and tell us what you think about that.

Stephen: I think it’s perfect. I think one way you can get started doing that today is every win that you get as an AE that is the type of win that you are thrilled about – the kind that if you are a child, you would go home and put it on your refrigerator for your parents to see – go sit with your SDR and together find 10 accounts in your territory or in your assignment that look just like the win you just had. Teach your SDR why you won, why the customer loves you, and why all of these other 10 companies should consider interacting and engaging with your company. Just every time you get a win like that, do a 10, just like it, exercise with your SDR.

                    You will be amazed at what they will bring home for you when you invest that amount of time with them, and it will be a thrill. Mark it, when they come in – when that SDR sets a meeting, have a special category for 10 just like it and celebrate together, however you do that in the office. You guys will have tremendous success with it. and it will be a lot of fun. I would encourage every AE and SDR to get together and start doing that, refrigerator 10 just like it exercise, and it’ll be a blast.

Marylou: That’s great advice. I love the idea of this rhythmic, constantly looking at how do we get more like these and make it part of your workflow. I think that that’s another thing that you bring to the table or any agency like yours is the concept – I know you kept using the word “discipline,” but it’s actually even better as “habit” because you’re doing something habitually that you don’t have to grit your teeth and get it done. To me, discipline really means you’re still doing a little bit of teeth grinding, whereas habit – it’s part of your DNA. You’re coming in. You’re doing this first 10 thing. You’re working on these value grids. You’re doing your calls. It’s all part and parcel to your daily rhythm. It’s like an athlete, who’s gonna get out there every day and do something to eke out that percent improvement on their performance.

                    Stephen, how do people get a hold of you if they want to further these conversations? I’m hearing that you’re very picky on who you select as clients, so how do we go about that process, if we want to learn more about you?

Stephen: The great way to learn more about us and get a feel for our culture and our capabilities and whether or not we would be good to work together is to go to insidesalesteam.com. Our inhouse agency has built a beautiful website, and our amazing customers are on the site telling their story of what it’s like to work with Inside Sales Team. If you like to be in Inside Sales or an SDR and you’re looking to get a job with insidesalesteam.com, our Careers page does a great job of telling the story of what it’s like to work here. Yes, we are growing like crazy, hiring like crazy, and we are excited to meet new and exciting companies to work with, and eager and motivated new employees.

Marylou:      Wonderful. I’ll be sure, everyone, to put that in the show notes in case you’re driving somewhere and can’t write down and can’t remember that – all of Stephen’s contact information. I think this is something to explore for everyone, at least to have those conversations, to understand the process behind a successful and consistent sales machine.

                    Machine – I use that in a loving way. I don’t mean it as a way of saying, “You are just a brute force getting it done.” But you’re getting to this high performing assembly line that consistently generates the revenue that you’re looking for as a company, so that you can grow, you could scale, you can go into different verticals – whatever it is that you’re looking to do with your growth path. Having that machine in place, having that assembly line in place, and constantly feeding it with quality is gonna get you to where you want to go.

                    Stephen, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Stephen: I did too. Thank you, Marylou.

 

Without prospects, there will be no sales. Yet, companies can struggle with incorporating prospecting into the sales process and getting people to balance the time spent prospecting compared with the all important task of closing the deal. This issue can be especially prevalent with leaner bootstrapped companies. Today, we will learn about an innovative method of solving this problem and attracting new sales talent.  

Today, I speak with Patrick Rodgers who is VP of Sales at LearnCore a leading sales training and coaching platform that combines technology with people for optimum results. Patrick is leading and building the sales organization for this bootstrapped company. We talk about the idea of prospecting as a sales function and some of the challenges when expecting AEs to close and prospect.

Episode Highlights:

• Challenges of scaling a bootstrapped company
• Difficulty of finding AEs who would go through the entire sales cycle
• Starting a 9 – 12 month sales training focused on prospecting
• Learning the process from start to finish they became top producers
• The program allowed growth acceleration and attracted talent
• Getting a perspective from different sales representatives
• Sales roles in the sales funnel process
• Shadowing into different areas and hitting sales goals
• Opening doors for the team and making it an easier path
• Challenges getting AEs to value the meetings set up by SDRs
• Having a blueprint for AEs so that SDRs and AEs work together
• Moving from sheer will to habit when changing roles
• Breaking down the training perspective into a career path

Resources:

• LearnCore
• Patrick Rodgers on LinkedIn
• Patrick Rodgers on Twitter @P_Rodge

Episode Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest is the VP of Sales at Learncore. His formal on his LinkedIn is Patrick Rodgers. Do you like to be called Pat or Patrick?

Patrick: Pat is usually what comes out but I tell everybody whatever you can actually remember is probably the best.

Marylou: Okay. We’ll go a little formal introducing him as Patrick today. Patrick Rogers is with us. Again, he’s the VP of Sales at Learncore. He’ll tell you more about what Learncore does. He’s also involved with the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals. We may touch on that a little bit because for those of you in the Chicago area who are listening to this, you may want to ping Patrick about that chapter. There’s a lot going on there. Just wanted to throw that out there. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you very much for having me.

Marylou: You are the VP of sales at Learncore. We talked a little bit before this. You have definitely embraced the idea of prospecting as a function of sales. Tell us exactly where you are in your journey of blending, prospecting, selling, servicing into your types of roles that you offer at Learncore and also what you’ve learned along the way and maybe there are some things that you’re doing now where you started down a path and then said, “You know what, this is just not working for us,” and then pivoted.

                    We’d like to hear about not only the perfect situation of what you’ve established now but some of the bumps and bruises along the way of you getting to where you are right now.

Patrick: Absolutely. Probably the best place to start is just mentioning that we’re a bootstrapped company and that presents a number of challenges as you scale. One of those being headcount and how many folks are we putting on just prospecting versus actually closing. I think that a big challenge that we all face is what roles are we actually asking a salesperson to do in terms of the overall process.

That piece became a challenge as we add additional AEs that may or may not want to be prospecting. There’s always the time allocation piece and so, early on, having them do both roles worked for a while but once you get a certain level of deals under your belt and your pipeline grows, the time is always going to lead to closing deals as opposed to finding new ones.

                    Our big challenge in that sense was figuring out a way to make SDRs, business development reps, whatever you call them in your organization, less of a claw center and more of a potential scale driver as we grew the company.

Marylou: Okay. Give us a sense of the sales cycles that you’re dealing with on average. I know there’s probably segmentation going on in your company as with most companies in the products and services timelines but give a sense of the average deal size range and also perhaps that average deal size that we’re talking about as we walk through what you’re doing now with your prospecting folks.

Patrick: Absolutely. We’re looking at somewhere on the length of time, somewhere between 50 to 60 days in a lot of cases is our average as well as then the size of the deal is somewhere between the 25 to 30 range on average and that’s across what we consider SMB in our mid market teams. From there, you see the variation across the board. We have very, very large clients that may take up to a year and we haves some that have used us before, call in and they’re ready to go in 10 days. The variation is always an interesting challenge to face as well when planning but on average, it’s called $25,000 per deal in about a 50-day sales cycle.

Marylou: Okay, great. Based on that, walk us through how you decided to end up where you are today knowing that we’re always pivoting, we’re always testing, we’re always iterating, but you’ve obviously found a formula that’s working for you, your organization, and your team. Let’s start at where you were, what you’ve been doing, and how you came out the other side of setting up your teams.

Patrick: I think where we were was a number of eight years that essentially, when we close a number of dollars, we are able to add head count. The challenge that we faced then was what kind of head count was that and we wanted to be AEs but finding good AEs that one, are willing to go in the end of the sales cycle where they’re actually doing their own prospecting all the way to closing that deal and in our case being able to demonstrate software. Those were few and far between here in Chicago that we were finding that were willing to come to a smaller company and actually lead that sales cycle in the end.

                    What we decided to do was build a career path that was bringing in folks that may not be from a software background as well as those straight out of school and setting it up where what they were going to be doing for the first 9 to 12 months was that prospecting piece but throughout that entire journey, they’re going to be sitting in on the discovery calls that they set. They’re going to be understanding and sitting in our strategy discussions about the deals so that when they come out the other side of that 9 to 12 month program, they not only have been prospecting and setting meetings and know how to hunt but they also learned how we do things at Learncore. They’ve learned them the way that we’d like them to do that from start to finish.

        What we’ve seen out of that is they end up being some of our top producers very, very quickly because they’ve had that time to acclimate not just hunting but also how to drive the process, how to close deals, how to understand, how to uncover needs and pain points, and thus become very, very strong reps right away who are hunting for their own deals because that’s what they’re used to.

That’s been the big journey in setting up that program. It has not only allowed us to accelerate what we’re doing from a gross standpoint, but also attract talent who doesn’t want to wait in line for either two to three years. You may need to wait for a big company to be out there in owning your own accounts.

Marylou: I come in, I’m a prospecting role. Am I assigned an Account Executive that I work with or am I getting the love from all the different Account Executives that I’m setting appointments and things for? How did that work? Are you pairing people up, or potting people up, or are you spreading the love around the entire teams?

Patrick: When you initially come in, you are paired to a geographic market. Currently, you’ve got two reps within that geographic market that you’re working with, one from the SMB team and one from the mid market team. You do get a collaboration of perspectives from those two reps. And then as we continue to grow, that usually rotates some of those SDRs around every few months and thus, they get to see another perspective from another rep.

                    We try to not do it too often so that they know their market, they know their messaging, but we also want to make sure that they get that perspective from different reps because that’s really what’s going to make them much better sellers to build their own path and be able to see how others are doing it.

Marylou: When you’re walking in from a funnel perspective and we’re looking at relative position in the pipeline, I’m coming in a prospecting role. Am I trying to get all the way through to setting up the appointment with the Account Executive and then attending those meetings or am I also trying to train to do demos or anything like that? What’s the d-mark that you see with these different roles?

Patrick: What we’ve done is to actually set up a path where within the first three months, your entire goal is to get meetings set with your Account Executive. You are sitting there on those meetings, learning from them and really just focusing on that discovery aspect of the process. Once you get past that, assuming you’re achieving your goals, which we have set at 13 to 15 meeting a month that are held by those SDRs, in those cases, when they start to hit those goals, then they have the ability to sit on the actual demo process as well.

                    They start to be a shadow through the process because if they’re hitting their goals, we can then assume that we can give a little bit more time to training because they are able to handle both things. Once they start to get through that process, then they’re seeing it end to end, and after six months, then we start actually training them on how to demo behind the scenes. We were able to actually use Learncore to do a lot of that which helps out in terms of the time management perspective. But it is all about continuously increasing their knowledge and their ability to lead that process before they actually have to.

Marylou: I love this idea of shadowing. I also love what you said about the fact that they’ve got to hit goal, which by definition, frees up time if there’s time left to do other activities and to increase their knowledge and to shadow into different areas. You’ve been doing this for some time. Can you budget in your timeline pretty easily now you know it’s going to take x number of months for someone to get up to speed on their average and then move them through that assembly line or is it based on the person who you hire?

Patrick: I would say it probably always comes down to the person you hire in terms of the range because we’re looking at your nine months if you’re a person that’s a rock star and picks it up quickly. And we’re probably looking at 12 months if it takes you a little bit more time. I think the number one piece of all that is business acumen and their ability to understand why questions are being asked and what questions to ask throughout the process and align that to value. But at the end of the day, we know what it’s going to take to get them from point A to point B.

The beautiful thing is that when I’m hiring an AE from the outside, we’re looking at three months to first sale, six months to full quota attainment with one of these individuals that’s moving from an SDR position into an AE position, and looking at 30 days to first deal and potentially 60 days to 90 days to full quota, which is a significant improvement. It proves out why we’re able to invest more heavily in SDRs if we know that they’re ultimately going to scale the business faster.

Marylou: Plus, I would think, coming in as a sales person, there is still a psychological thing going on about this is a junior role if I’m an SDR. I know that those of you out there listening, who are like me, eternal SDRs because I love that top of the funnel, I love starting conversations with people we don’t know, and then my eyes glaze over when it gets to opportunity to close. But there are many people who come into a company and they’re looking for that upward path. They’re looking to grow. They’re looking to try other things within the company to see where they fit best.

                    What happens in the case of an SDR who says, “You know, I’m liking my gig here. Can I stay here? Is there an unwritten rule that no, when you come into this role, we really want to move you?

Patrick: No. I would say those individuals, gosh, if I can find more of them, that’s fantastic because at the end of the day, the life blood of the organization is going to be those new opportunities, those new prospects, and bringing those into the funnel. Now, in those cases, absolutely, they can stay as we can see the growth since we are a small company and we can make adjustments quickly, they have opportunities to be team lead, they have opportunities to be managers over the SDR team.

                    One thing we talk about is if you are going to be a manager here, you’re going to still be doing the activities and actions that other are going to be doing. Not taking it all the way to a player coach rule, but in order to coach, you got to know what’s going on in the market and stay up to speed on that. Definitely, they have that opportunity. Shawn Shepard was here talking to our team a little bit ago and mentioned that he’s the founder of his company but said he promoted himself to SDR. I love that.

Our job as head of sales and team lead is to open the door for our team, make this an easier path. Anybody that loved that role and can stay in it, absolutely stay in it.

Marylou: The other thing I like about this, I know these are very soft the metrics but just being out there in a field working with clients, I’m sure your handoff percentages from a sales qualified lead to an accepted lead by the outside teams are probably way high as opposed to some of the things I see when I’m running around with clients and that is the lead quality. There’s this constant battle and that handoff is the toughest part. Things like that probably don’t even exist or they’re very small issues in nature because of this model that you’ve implemented. Is that a good assumption?

Patrick: I would say at this point, yes. Initially, not as much. There was a big change we had to make. AEs, when they’ve been doing it themselves, now somebody else is bringing them leads, they don’t always cherish them as much. I think that’s going to be true across the board and thus, we’re preparing as well for those conversations.

                    And so, an adjustment we made is that there is a requirement if an SDR sets you a meeting, you two together have a pre call prep session 15 minutes before the call. You go through what that SDR uncovered to actually set the meeting, the conversation that happened. The AE brings any research that they did to the table so that going into that conversation, they’re on the same page and you don’t have an awkward handoff.

I think that’s very, very important, is to make sure that that handoff, even if you get them on the phone and it’s going well, that there shouldn’t be any awkwardness in that call. It should be smooth for the buyer and you shouldn’t have to restate a lot of things. That pre call prep change that we made has definitely increased our ability to convert faster and ensure that those are converting to actual opportunities.

Marylou: That’s great. We have implemented what we call a one sheet which is from the entertainment industry, which is to really put all the main points and there’s like five buckets, I think, most of my clients use, of being able to encapsulate from the SDRs point of view, where things are in the project, the major stakeholders, the pain points, or challenges, or initiatives that they indicated on their calls so that the Account Executive almost got a small little blue print of where to drive the conversation so that they feel good about creating the opportunity.

                    We also created one for those opportunities that the timing parameter was a little bit outside the AE’s comfort zone but yet they were a qualified opt. What that does is it gives the SDR and the AE a blueprint plan to follow. The SDR stays involved but not as much because of the fact that it’s a longer sales cycle. It doesn’t just get dumped in the AE’s lap.

They work together on a plan of how they’re going to bring that timeline in or stay involved because the SDR has more of that habit of follow up embedded in their psyche and their DNA. They help the AEs in terms of the follow up pieces on those longer accounts. But it all starts with that one sheet of okay, how are we going to go after this thing together?

Patrick: Right. Absolutely. One thing we’ve done there too is SDRs get a percentage of the deal if it closes. When we have team meetings, I push my SDRs early on to stay on their AEs. Apply a little pressure, “Hey, I handed you this gift basket. When is mine coming in?” That definitely helps to build not just that motivation but also a lot of camaraderie where they actually feel like they’re in the trenches together, which I think has been, in my experience, one of the things that is missed in that connection between the SDRs and the AEs.

Marylou: Yeah, definitely. I want to be respectful of our listeners’ time but I have to ask the behavioral aspect of an SDR versus an AE is something that I hit home a lot about and write a lot about. It’s this concept of moving from sheer will to habit. We pass through desire, we pass through determination, we pass through drive and we end up with the habitual way of selling that is successful for the SDR.

What happens to them when they move into that Account Executive role? Are you seeing that same sort of diligent daily consistent workflow coming out of them when they move into these roles or do they slack off a bit? What are you seeing?

Patrick: So far, what we’ve been seeing is that they’re bringing that and more because once that’s ingrained, you shouldn’t say you’ve got a sales DNA unless you’ve been an SDR because that’s where it’s imprinted on you. That’s the time where those general skills you’re learning not just from rejection handling to being perseverant and continuing to grind and have that ability to do time management to achieve those goals flows through. In a lot of cases, I’m now motivated even more so because I’m not handing these off and getting a small percentage. I’m owning this from start to finish.

That’s been interesting to see because now, I’m even more motivated and there’s not usually a slow down there because now, these are my deals. That’s been really helpful. In terms of that habit, in a lot of cases, we should make every step of the sale process a habit. By picking the habitual nature of being an SDR and applying that to every step of the sales process, they then become a machine. That’s really the big thing that we’ve seen. It’s the ability to replicate that over time.

Marylou: I try not to use that word machine but that’s really what it is. It’s really just getting up in the morning and you have a routine. You have a dance, you have a rhythm that you do everyday. We learn that and we become that in that SDR role. I’d like to think it’s because we’re working so many records that we really need to have that discipline but also discipline is not enough. We need to actually bring it all the way up to habits.

I’m happy to hear that those ingrained brain patterns are still moving through because that’s another area that I see that it’s sometimes difficult moving from that role, is that you get lazy again and we don’t want them to do that. We really want them to take the best of the best of what they ended up becoming habit in the SDR role and taking that with them as they move into the Account Executive roles knowing that we’re moving from a dating environment, so to speak, to an actual getting engaged and married environment. We’re not going to be working with as many people but it’s still that drive, that discipline, that habit still has to be there for that follow up.

                    Have you seen also, and I don’t want to feed you this, but have you seen a reduction in the lag in the pipeline by doing this type of stepping stone model?

Patrick: I would say so. I think the biggest thing is that we can now be more predictable about our headcount. At the end of the day, as I’m looking at what does the pipeline look like, what’s our ultimate goal, we can be more predictable and knowing that if I move somebody from that role up into the AE role, that that timeline is going to be something we know and much different than bringing somebody in from the outside. That’s definitely a big piece of being able to make that something that we can expect as opposed to hope for.

Marylou: That’s so funny you say that. I was at a conference just recently where a gentleman got up, shared his numbers and metrics. They had it down to how many records they need to feed in at the top of funnel in order to generate the revenue that they’re looking for. It just felt so easy, so soft, so wonderful.

It sounds like you’re getting into that rhythm where you really know what you need to do to generate revenue from the standpoint of the pipeline. Sometimes, you can’t guess what’s going to happen at the industry or other factors that you have no control over. But the ones you have control over, it sounds like you’re definitely on your way to being able to create a model that’s predictable in nature.

Patrick: Absolutely. That’s the ultimate goal. I don’t know if any of us will ever have that silver bullet or else we wouldn’t be in sales anymore but constant innovation will help us get there but definitely for a few of the roles and targets we have, we can be very specific about how we get there.

Marylou: Wonderful. Let’s help someone who’s listening to this call and says, “Wow. I kind of want to try this but where do I begin?” What would you recommend for someone who’s thinking along these lines, that this is something they’d like to give a shot, put into place? How did you begin?

Patrick: The best way to begin is looking at what does it take from your training perspective for a new AE to get them to where you need them to be and then breaking that down into essentially a career path and saying that, “Okay, over the time that I have this individual in this role, here are the steps that they’re going to need to learn and how do I include them in a way that it is incremental but consistent in order to ingrain some of those habits, get some of those questions out early so that I’m not having to invest a ton of time upfront to train a brand new AE. I can do it over time while still driving that overall SDR production.

                    I think you have to start with your sales process, understand what they’re going to need to learn along the way and then outline those steps along with the timeline you want them in that role.

Marylou: Okay, but it starts with the Account Executive role itself, not the SDR role, correct? Is that what I heard you say?

Patrick: Absolutely. We need to know exactly what an AE is going to need to be successful, map that out, and then take that basically map and align it to the timeline you have with your SDRs and implement those trainings along the way.

Marylou: Okay, very good. Last question I have for you is in terms of tracking. It’s more of once again, at the SDR level, we are a lot more savvy about how important it is to track meaningful conversations. Since you’ve got them now habitually having more conversations that are meaningful in nature, are they also carrying their good tracking skill as they move through to the AE role in order to be able to feedback the sales conversations that they’re having for marketing, or product development, or whatever it is? Do you see that that compliance is still coming through as well in the AE role when they move?

Patrick: I would say for the most part, I think the biggest area that we’re going to continue to improve upon is once they get to the backend of the cycle, we end up having a lot of conversations, negotiations, IP checks, you name it. Knowing how to monitor and drive those aspects from both the compliance, am I asking the right questions? Am I tracking that information?

That piece is one where we’re going to continue to work on because there’s parts of the SDR role that are detail oriented, but as far as the conversation and data points, that’s the piece that is probably the biggest hurdle, is getting them to understand, hey, there’s a lot more here that you need to juggle and be sure that you’re tracking it and asking those questions early and often. That’s probably the biggest area that we’re going to continue to work on, to make sure that they have that compliance throughout the process.

Marylou: Wonderful. And there are tool now that I’m seeing popping up that are helping with that follow up process so there’s less reliance on manual data entry and allowing technology to help us, what I would call wrap up a conversation so that we can take the intelligence of that conversation and feed it back within the organization for marketing purposes, for better sales conversations, to shorten the pipeline lag, etc. etc.

                    Patrick, how can people get a hold of you if they want to learn more about what you’ve done at your company?

Patrick: Learncore Online, you can definitely hit me up at that direction. LinkedIn, I’ve got it constantly up. And then if you want to hit me up on Twitter, it’s @p_rodge. Happy to connect with everybody on the process and how we’re able to streamline that as well.

Marylou: Okay, great, I’ll put all this in the show notes, everyone. You’ll have all of his contact information. I do recommend that you have a conversation here because we know we’ve talked about a lot of different ways of setting up a sales organization and not all the rules work the way the books that I’ve written and collaborated on, are saying. There are different strokes for different folks, so to speak.

I think a lot what I’m seeing and what we’re learning is that we have to look at these different models and then apply it to our culture in our company to see if this model will work but these numbers sound great, of shortening the timeline to get someone up to speed so they could start generating revenue. It feels like it’s a really great model to at least explore in more depth.

Thank you so much for your time today. I very much appreciate you sharing your setup and learning more about how you generate revenue for your company.

Patrick: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Great time.

 

Sometimes old school sales people forget the importance of data. Nothing can help shape and guide the sales process better than having the right types of data. I have a wonderful guest today, who challenges the sales status quo and the ideas of what types of data are important and how to apply that data to the sales process. Then we dig even deeper into the data side of sales.

Jason Vargas works in the trenches as the Managing Director of Sales Development at Datanyze. If you aren’t familiar with Datanyze, you should check them out. Especially, if you are doing business development. They specialize in helping to find data for tracking, analytics, prospecting and more. Jason is on the rocketship of data analysis, and it shows as he shares new insights and more with us.

Episode Highlights:

• Identifying the rights types of companies and accounts to target
• Segmenting by other methods besides demographics
• Leveraging technology data or technographics
• Prioritizing segments by how sophisticated their sales methods are
• Finely tuning who we want to go after and target
• Maximizing everyone’s time by prequalifying accounts
• Focusing on the pre sales conversation instead of finding prospects
• Focus on the first meeting and taking that meeting to close
• Offloading the data finding process including accurate phone numbers
• Customization is important with large companies
• Automation and sales templates can save time with small companies
• Utilizing a database for mass personalization
• Having reps record and transcribe a call to use for an email template
• Hitting send and transforming a prospects day
• Metrics for outbound 20 emails and 20 phone calls
• Focusing on quality over volume
• Patient and persistence persuasion
• Outreach and finding out where people are on the ladder
• Startups should not have sales territories, but account profiles
• Looking outside the box and leveraging technology, process, and people

Resources:

• Datanyze
• Jason on Twitter @jasoncvargas
• Jason@Datanyze.com
• Jason on LinkedIn
• The End of Solution Sales – Harvard Business Review

 

Episode Transcript:

Marylou:       Hi, it’s Marylou Tyler. I have a wonderful guest this week, Jason Vargas. In the trenches, this guy is the 4th employee of Datanyze. If you don’t know Datanyze, go ahead and look it up. They’re a really great company that you’ll probably want to get to know, especially if you’re doing business development.

                    Jason is the Managing Director of the Sales Development group over there. I’m hoping today’s talk, and it sounds like from our little precursor, that it’s going to be full of messaging and full of teachings for you guys that maybe challenge the status quo, which is really what we’re looking for.

Jason’s world is more into the analytics side of things, letting the data drive where we’re going and I think his outlook, his views, plus doing this as a job, and really getting into the trenches is going to give you guys a 20-minute blast of a lot of knowledge. Sit back and let’s introduce Jason. I’ll let him take it away.

Jason:            Thank you, Marylou. It’s an honor to be in your podcast so thank you for the invite. I’m excited to chat with you today.

Marylou:       Yeah, it’s wonderful. In the last few weeks, it’s been really fun. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now. Not that I’m sitting on my laurels or anything like that, because I’m a data person too so I’m really looking to get the data to tell me where to go and how things are changing. But you’re on the rocketship of change over there so I think what you have to say today and just in our pre conversation about the differences and what’s changed is going to be so helpful. You pick where you want to start and we’ll go flow from there.

Jason:            Why don’t we start looking at how do you actually identify the right types of companies or accounts to target. I think it really starts there. That’s a foundation for a lot of things. That’s a foundation for the effectiveness of the SDR, setting meetings. It helps with the AEs, on the call with them, that they are targeting the right accounts. If you know that you’re targeting the right account, it could impact your sales cycle, things of that sort. Why don’t we get started there and then we can see where the conversation takes us.

Marylou:       That sounds goods. Targeting, or what I call segmenting into accounts, is just wonderful. Let’s go. Tell us what we should be knowing about that piece of the framework.

Jason:            The access to a lot of data out there, I think companies really start looking at the term ICP or ideal customer profile. I think it’s something that really, really needs to be honed in. Most companies I talk to, when I sit down with the companies, they primarily segment their accounts based on firmographic data. There’s nothing wrong with it but it doesn’t tell the whole story whether an account can be a good account.

                    For example, I talk to other organizations and they segment their accounts, SMV corporate or enterprise, typically by the number of employees. Here’s the interesting thing. As an example, if you classify an enterprise company, whichever has between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, that’s classified as enterprise and your corporate accounts are classified between 500 and 999.

                    Here’s the interesting part. If the corporate account moves from 999 to 1,000, you just add one more person, all of a sudden it’s classified as enterprise. Nothing really changed other than adding another person. Again, firmographics can help you but it doesn’t tell a whole story. The other component I think folks want to start looking at is technographics. Basically, the technology landscape or all the technology or softwares that a company/organization uses.

                    I don’t know if you knew but most enterprise organizations, the average enterprise organization uses over 1,030 technologies across the organization. That is insane.

Marylou:       It is.

Jason:            A lot of companies are incorporating technologies into other processes, from HR to finance, to sales and marketing. Marketing stats are getting really big. Sales stats are becoming a lot larger than it used to be. The sophistication of organization is skyrocketing. You want to be able to leverage technology data or as we call it here at Datanyze, technographics, you want to be able to utilize that when you’re creating your ICPs. That way, you can understand the sophistication of your buyer.

If you just use firmographic data, all you’re going to know is they have certain revenue ranges, certain employee ranges, and you’ll know that’s just a phone number. Not too telling, right? But if you can see your organization move from using a marketing automation system like HubSpot and a CRM, then all of a sudden, you see that it purchased SalesForce and Marketo, that is much more telling than simply they added one or two more employees. It tells you that okay, this buyer is moving from a less sophisticated group to a much more sophisticated type of organization. As a sales rep, I’m going to prioritize those companies more.

Circling back to the ICP, you want to be able to begin to segment tier however you want to define it using technographics and firmographic data so that way you have a much clearer picture and you can understand who you should be prioritizing, what will it cost, how you can really classify enterprise in the market and then how do you curate each of those segments.

That’s step number one for me. Anytime I’m talking to a company or I’m teaching a new sales rep, I’m really trying to understand why we came up with our own classification tier and why we call enterprise company enterprise company here, or how we define it here at Datanyze.

Marylou:       In the new book, Predictable Prospecting, we actually don’t even use the term ICP. We call it an ideal account profile, IAP. The reason being is because we have, as you said, the firmographic and the equipment and technology but we also are looking at some operational overlays like purchasing policies, the decision making process and situational factors that we can overlay to that.

Yes, I agree with you. Since we have such rich databases now, it’s getting to the point where we can really finally tune who we want to go after and target and then obviously, if we’re in an organization where business development is 100% of one’s time, then we have to make sure that we’re giving them enough companies to work so they’re occupied and they’re not spinning their wheels. I agree with you 100%.

        Given that, what is next? We have the new ideal account profiles with more layers of segmentation that we can apply than the old ICP. What other things have you seen that directly impact performance in this concept that I’ve been throwing around called Maximizing the Return on Effort?

Jason:            It’s a great segway and kind of adding to what we were just talking about. One of the things that we’re able to do, and this is something that other organizations can do is once you’ve really identified what those accounts look like, this should be done by management, we don’t allow any of our SDRs to prospect for new accounts, look for new accounts. Management is taking care of that. All of our accounts are pre qualified.

What we’re able to do to maximize everyone’s time is that an AE or an SDR can no longer say whether an account is qualified. What this does is that the moment an SDR books a meeting with the right persona, right title, with that prequalified account, when that person shows up to the call, it’s an automatic sales accepted opportunity by the AE. No longer is it, “Okay, we have to bant.” Or if the AE gets on the phone like, “I don’t know if this is a fit.” No, management has determined based on the account criteria that we’ve specified it looks for. It’s a pre-qualified account and the title shows it to the phone call, it’s an automatic sales accepted by the AE. This has accelerated our sales cycle dramatically.

Marylou:       Yeah, I am still working with clients who let the AEs decide who these target accounts are and they populate the CRM with those accounts and there’s a reserve of accounts that don’t make it into the target ones. If the target ones fall out for some reason, then they can petition to have these extended accounts thrown into the target but it’s driven by the account executive, not management. That’s quite a culture change.

Jason:            When you talk about maximizing time, you want your SDRs to book meetings, qualify meetings. You want them to be working into an account but meetings. With AEs, you want them to be focusing on closing. If they’re spending half their time prospecting accounts and determining whether they think it’s a good fit, that’s a lot of consul that you put into the hands of those individual contributors for the success of the company.

                    They should be focusing on what we hired them to do. No longer do my SDRs prospect. You can spend 40%, 50%, 60% of your time prospecting versus you take that 60% of that time you’re spending doing that on booking meetings. They talk about maximizing your effort and your output. If we have AEs working two accounts, we’re going to give them a set of pre-qualified accounts, not have them go scouring across the web to find an account that they think, just based on their own intuition or maybe some subset of prequalification data that they need to find, I strongly believe that that should be done by management.

Marylou:       For those who are listening, just to get clarity around this, in some instances the SDRs are also tasked with net new records where they have to actually go out and figure out how to add to their list with net new names. What Jason is talking about is that they’re pre-fed with the right number of accounts and the right type of account and contact records. Their focus is on the pre-sales conversation and actually getting that first conversation going. They don’t have to worry about trying to feed the beast. That really takes a big admin time off of the SDR in order to be able to perform his function.

                    The next thing Jason said was the AEs, who sometimes create the demand of which accounts to go after, that’s taken out of them as well. So then all they have to do now is focus on that first meeting opportunity and taking that to close. Is that a good way to summarize where you’re at, Jason?

Jason:            Yeah, that was perfect.

Marylou:       Okay, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I could just see, I could feel my body, it’s like, “Okay, what? Which bucket are we going into now?” I just wanted to make sure they got that. Go ahead and continue now what you’re going to say.

Jason:            You can stop me anytime. Like I said, I start blabbing.

Marylou:       You were talking about the fact that you’re really focused on maximizing return of effort and so you believe that having management responsible for selecting the accounts to begin with is the way to go.

Jason:            Again, going back to what I was saying earlier, when you can do that, then you begin to accelerate your sales cycle. The number of meetings you can book and then the number of deals that you can close. If SDRs are booking more meetings, it’s naturally going to convert to more deals.

                    I would rather them focusing that 60% of time being used to prospect of 50% of time used to prospect. If I can book two or three more meetings within that time, that is so valuable. Those activities that they’re doing to book meetings is way more valuable than them spending time to scour the web, trying to find these accounts and then determining whether they get qualified or not. Again, going back to maximizing time, you got to look at where should they be spending their time and make sure they’re doing that 100%.

Marylou:       Perfect. Let’s pretend now we now have a universe of accounts that have been pre-qualified and we are ready to go. Where’s the next area that you see that you’re going to debunk the myth for us?

Jason:            When it comes to contract data, not a lot of SDRs will go and look for new contacts, things of that sort. Again, that should be management’s role or for organizations with sales operations, they should be responsible for doing that. That doesn’t mean that I, myself or our sales ops person, he shouldn’t be looking for those contacts himself.

                    Maximize other tools that are out there or things like Upwork which used to be oDesk, get some help from oDesk workers. Have them get those contacts for you. Give them the parameters. Give them the title. Give them the accounts and say, “This is the data I’m looking for.” It’s really inexpensive. You don’t want to put an expensive hire, especially here in Silicon Valley, SDRs, they can be expensive. You don’t want them having to look for contacts.

                    Sometimes it’s fine, but again, you want them to have a predetermined, pre-qualified set of accounts that they’re working on. And you want to give them the contacts with their email and phone number as well. That way, again, they’re going everyday. Here’s the set of accounts I want to focus on. I want to reach out to these many individuals within these companies and just have them execute. Again, it’s all about executing, executing, executing.

                    I used to be a big fan of SDRs prospecting for accounts and contacts and just realized how much time that was taking. It wasn’t worth it to me anymore. The next thing to debunk, I guess you can say, is part of what we were talking about before but really don’t have them spend time looking for contacts. When they are clear about who they’re going to reach out to based on the contacts you provided them, then I want my SDRs to go to LinkedIn and look at that person so they get context with them. Now, that gives them more time crafting messaging, doing the important work.

Marylou:       Exactly. I think the other thing about that concept of offloading the data look up process, one thing I see a lot still to this day is that the databases are not rich with direct dial phone numbers. We’re still seeing 1-800 main switchboard numbers that are in a lot of lists. Having a person not only find the perfect email address, but also dig deeper and try to find some direct numbers, that also will eliminate the number of manual calls because you’ll have to call a switch board, have them transfer you. This way, you get directly in. That’s another byproduct of having an outsourced type of lookup service that can get you these quality contacts with phone numbers that are direct to save you time when you are doing your block time.

Jason:            Direct dials, those are the ultimate piece of data that people want. Direct dials are hard to get these days especially with a lot of executives. They don’t have phones at their desk and so you’re trying to find their cell phone numbers, essentially.

                    The database that people can tap into, zoom info, if there’s specific verticals they’re going after in IT, DiscoverOrg, they have the best direct dials data out there for those verticals that they cover. Again, Upwork, getting someone on Upwork to look for that data, a lot of them have accounts or access to certain databases so you want to leverage those as well.

Marylou:       You opened the pandora’s box of messaging and you said personalization. There’s a lot of hype online right now from colleagues about when to personalize, how you should personalize, in what form you should personalize. What have you seen out there, Jason?

Jason:            There are companies that do things different ways. I don’t think there’s one way you can do this. What I always recommend and how we think about it here, this goes back to curing or segmenting your accounts, for dealing to your one account, I’m very high touch, very customized messaging, very cared to that person. Everything should be a manual step. There’s this wave of automation that took place, that’s still here, that’s being pulled back just a bit. I think automation is powerful but under the right circumstances.

                    When you’re dealing with two accounts, there should be a lot of customization. When you’re dealing with marketer corporate size accounts, I like to have the first email be manual because that’s always the foundation of our cadence. Maybe a couple automated steps are fine. That’s how we do it here. We have one or two automated steps within our sequences.

                    If it’s SMB, again, maximizing your time, you don’t want to put right there that are smaller companies, lower ACVs, lower contract value, things of that sort. If you want to use more automation there, always hop into it. Automation and templates, go for it. They don’t have a problem with that. But again, if you’re dealing with large companies, you don’t want the same message. You don’t want to use a template and use the same message across. If you’re talking to the VP of Sales versus the Demand Gen person, the messaging should be tailored specifically to what’s the problem you’re solving for each of those individuals and title.

Marylou:       A lot of what we teach is I look at it more record sizes because again, I’m a database geek person but what I do is I look at those tiers like you talked about but I also look at the number of records that we’re working within those tires. That helps me decide when and how to apply mass personalization which is utilizing the database to populate the email engine for us versus hyper personalized which allows us to look in various social sources and find information about our prospect, our target and be able to include that in the body of the email.

                    We still, though, like to have the sales messaging, the why change, why now, why us embedded in template format that the reps can use so that they’re making sure that sales argument is there for that particular persona. We do spend time by persona, putting these together in template format. What’s nice about that is once they record which one they’ve selected, we start to get some analytics so that we can optimize not only the email itself but the placement of the email, what resonated when and where in the sequence it resonated so that we can start moving these things around like lego blocks, just getting the most impactful messaging upfront to reduce the lag.

Jason: That’s perfect. You bring out a good point in terms of having some level of structure. We teach frameworks here and overtime, the framework that we have, they end up developing their own templates for each persona.

                    We used to give people a template and say hey, just use these. We notice that some messages wouldn’t work doing this thinking anymore, so we developed a framework for them to actually think about why are you saying this to this persona, and then we’ll work with them on developing templates that match their style, writing or speaking. That’s been really effective.

Marylou: We do an exercise very similar to that where I have the reps actually record a conversation, as if they’re having it with Betty, the prospect. Record it on their phone and actually transcribe it. That becomes the basis of the email, that body. Obviously, it’s in conversational format but it does a number of things. It allows me to see, “Do they really know how to have these sales conversations?” Or is there a skill issue here that we may be up against as well? I’ll get somebody on the phone and then they’ll fall apart.

                    I use it for that and then also to take the framework that I have which is compell with content and apply it to their voice and see how well they’ve met all of the framework components in order to get that email.

                    The last thing I always say is, “When you hit that send button, are you transforming this prospect’s day by what you’re sending?” That always like, “Oh.” Yeah, I’m with you on that as well. I think personalization has a good role in its place and it’s a good rapport and relationship building exercise but I think if you’re sitting here as an SDR and you’re working a ton of records where you can’t possibly do 40 emails personalized a day, then you got to figure out the blend of how you want to personalize for what types of accounts and then use automation to help you get that the rest of the way. Do you have a number that you work with your folks on as to what they should be personalizing per day?

Jason:            Number of emails that they should be personalizing a day?

Marylou:       Yeah, hyper personalizing. I’m just curious because you know how we used to say in Predictable Revenue, we just talked about five meaningful conversations a day in a two hour block time. I’m just curious if there’s a formula you guys are coming up with for hyper personalization emails. How many they can crank out and still be meaningful. Like you said, before they hit that send button, that it’s really going to be meaningful for their prospect.

Jason:            We don’t. The metrics I require, and I’ve never required hundreds of dials and emails per day. Inbound is a little bit different. 20 emails and 20 phone calls is my minimum. I’ve required this since the very beginning. 20 contacts a day and emails. When we first started out, they didn’t have any more than 5 to 10 meetings a week per rep. Instead of the volume game, we focus more on…

Marylou:       Quality.

Jason:            On quality. That’s been really effective for us. We’re a bootstrap company, we don’t have large amounts of funding sitting in our bank account. The quality does work for us. It’s not like, “Oh my God, we just have to throw everything in there and see what stays.” We kind of started with that. We tested some other stuff in the past but you just end up burning through accounts and we don’t want to do that. My reps are only given 150 accounts and then we go from there. Just 20 and 20.

                    Just to clarify, personalization isn’t we’re researching their whole background and where they went to school, and adding an email. When we say personalization, we are personalizing that based on what technologies we think they’re interested in, what aspects of a product we think they will be interested in and tailor specific to their role at the company and how it can impact their role to what we do. We don’t really put very much fluff in our emails.

                    We don’t say, “Oh my God, I saw you went to this school. That’s great.” Or, “You leave here. Have you ever been to this restaurant before?” We don’t use any of that but we customize it in a sense using that framework. Once they learn the framework, they can actually develop the email quickly. It’s not like they’re spending 15 minutes on it. Surely, they can crank it out in five minutes. It becomes very personalized and customized.

Marylou:       One of the callers I spoke with recently talked about the fact that they do this writing in block time. Do you have some set times that the whole team works on writing or is it just when they’re doing their emails, they’re writing?

Jason:            When they do their emails, they’re writing so we don’t have any block time. I don’t set anything like that. That’s a good idea though. The reason why I like using this framework and I don’t mind them spending time doing that because you guys have them record an example call first and then write the email. We actually have them write out the email first and then that becomes the call suite.

Marylou:       Okay.

Jason:            It kills two birds with one stone. When they’re done sending the email, they can just jump on the call and just you know, “Hey, I just sent you an email.” They know the talking points because it’s on the email. That’s been really effective for us as well.

Marylou:       That’s a great way to do it. I think the blending of phone and email, because emails need to be conversational, we have this tendency as folks to get this imaginary quill behind our ear when we start writing and I think it’s because we all were fearful of our English teachers in high school and college, that we would do a sentence incorrectly.

Our emails really need to be conversational. It’s like we’re talking so that’s why we have people talking to the phone because first of all, they have to sound coherent and they have to not use all the jargon-y types of words and they have to have a lot of clarity around the why change, why now, why us, all in a very short, concise, sweet little message. I like the idea of using phone to help email and email to help phone. I think that’s a great way to get people up to speed and onboarded quickly and get your meetings like you’re talking about.

Jason:            Keeping it conversational, you’re right on point. We have a different philosophy on messaging that I think a lot of companies do. We don’t actually talk about ourselves directly in our emails. We don’t ever mention Datanyze. I get emails all the time that say, “I can help to increase your pipeline by x. I’ve done this with these three companies.” They try and use social proof. I don’t know if that’s really that effective anymore because the conversation in email is now all about that company and it’s not about the actual prospect they’re reaching out to.

                    We don’t ever use our name in emails. Some of my reps started doing that but I put a stop to that because we want the focus to be on them. We oppose and we ask more of a question kind of approach. One of our most campaigns we did for awhile, there was more of a competitive play, competitive angle.

                    If one of my reps email you, let’s just for example say you work at Marketo, you’re VP at Marketo. One of my guys would email you and say, “Hey Marylou, if you understood which accounts or which companies were adding and dropping technologies, would that data be valuable to you and your sales team?” Just simple, but we pose a question. Didn’t mention Datanyze. Oftentimes, people respond like, “Oh my God, yeah, we’d love to understand who’s adding and dropping my competitors. That’s super valuable.” We would get in.

                    Our philosophy, we don’t talk about ourselves. We don’t tell them how we can do X. We just want to have enough contacts to the company we’re dealing with to say that we can do that for them, right?

Marylou:       Right.

Jason:            We approach it with a question based selling approach and that’s been really, really effective for us.

Marylou:       I think that hits one of the teaching points that I like to discuss with clients. That is that there are certain levels of awareness that your prospects are in. You cannot make the assumption that they’re already comparing and they’re at that interested or evaluating stage. A lot of times, in our work, we get people who are unaware of who we are, don’t know they have a problem, don’t really perceive that there’s problems aligned with what they’re working on.

                    We have to jolt them a little bit or gently persuade them that all is not good in their world. They need to understand that, but you have to gently, and patiently, and persistently, and pleasantly, and delightfully let them know that they’re wrong.

Jason:            We always look at our messaging, will this provoke them in any way or uncover some kind of thing that they’re unsure about? How can we provoke our prospects? There’s a great article by Geoffrey Moore. They wrote an article on the Harvard Business Review called Provocation Based Selling. It’s really fascinating. They encourage anyone to look at search data in Google and read the article. It’s really, really fascinating. We try and provoke people in our messaging, in our calls. To your point, they might not be doing something the right way, or might not be thinking about something in the right way.

Marylou:       It’s awareness. It’s figuring out where they are on that ladder of awareness because we can’t make assumptions that they’re further along than they are especially when we’re doing outreach. I’ve had so many people over the years thank me for contacting them because they had no idea. Citibank, these large accounts. They just don’t have time to go run around on the internet finding stuff.

They’re just grateful when you can hit home with something. Next week, I’m doing a little tiny workshop here in De Moines and I was actually talking with someone at the supermarket, of all places, about what I’m doing. He was like, “Oh my gosh, we are just getting ready to look at reorganizing our sales process. I can’t believe you’re here and that you’re going to be over there.” You never know where people are. They have no idea what they really need to do and how urgent it is until you start talking to them.

But you have to meet them where they’re at in their head, in their purchase intent. That’s great that you do that. We only have a few minutes left so let’s talk about one more thing to debunk so that I can get my group all hot and bothered about, “Oh my gosh, everything I read is all different.” Which is good. It’s where we are. It’s just technology. It’s why we love what we do, because we’re constantly iterating, we’re constantly optimizing. What’s another one of your favorite things that you would like to share with the audience today?

Jason:            Geez, let’s think of another one.

Marylou:       Anything on metrics or any analytics.

Jason:            The idea of start-ups that has sales territories.

Marylou:       I think every one of my clients has territories. Do tell.

Jason:            This doesn’t come from me. I was having a conversation with Daniel Barber.

Marylou:       Daniel was on the podcast. He talked to us about planning and how we don’t plan properly.

Jason: We had a conversation about this the other day. The idea of start-ups having territories, it’s an interesting one. When Daniel Barber came here to Datanyze, we quickly restructured our accounts. People do it in different ways. Most of the time, it’s based on region.

Marylou:       Geographic.

Jason:            That’s not necessarily the right way to do it. I think for startup companies, instead of focusing on geographic areas and having these are our geographic territories, you want to base it more on developing an account profile no matter where they are and base it off of that profile. It’s more about making sure you’re speaking to the right types of accounts versus what region they’re in.

Even at Datanyze, we don’t have geographic based territories. Everything is based on our tiering and segmented tier one, two, and three. I guess we can consider those as our territories. It’s not based on anything geographic. It’s based on trust, tier one is gonna be a company that is most likely a tech company. We classified it as a company that uses SalesForce, Marketo, or Pardot, they have a sales team that’s over 250 and a marketing team above 44 people. That’s what we classify tier one. All those accounts that are in our SalesForce, they belong to our enterprise reps. It doesn’t matter if they’re east coast or west coast, those accounts are evenly split.

Tier two, we classify same technology as SalesForce, Marketo, Pardot, or they’re using Hubspot. Their marketing team is reaching 20 and 48 and sales between 100 and 249 or something like that. Those are mid-market. How people are I think [00:37:05] define territory goes back to the geography of things, it doesn’t really make sense. Why should that really matter?

It’s more of making sure you have the right tiers in the accounts that you say should be your customers at all cost. I think that’s where the focus should be, especially for startups. It’s gonna be like, “Okay, let’s focus on California and New York and drive as much as we can there.” Versus, “Let’s take a step back and identify here’s what our accounts looks like. We’re going to make sure that they’re our customers.” I think startups should start thinking in that regard.

Marylou:       That’s a tough one. I’m thinking real estate. I have some clients in real estate who want to branch out nationally. It’s difficult for them to even get their arms around how are we going to do this? In reality, they can move geographically around, they don’t have to have presence and billboards and all the things that they’re so used to doing. I think there’s a mindset there that the beauty of the technology is that we can try to reach out to these other neighborhoods and see what it is that their needs are.

                    I have some clients too who actually physically go visit their accounts. In healthcare industries, they’re still old style in some areas. I think we really overlay with the ideal accounts, high revenue potential, high likelihood of closing, you want them as customers, and then this factory model that you’re talking about of round robin, the reps get them as they go. When there’s something active, the next available rep gets it. It’s a very different way of looking at things. It’s fun to explore. Maybe, you won’t do it for every tier but I think it’s something that people would probably benefit from especially if you’re allowing people to work with multiple SDRs and do multiple types of partnering up instead of these pod concepts.

                    I think there’s a lot of change coming down that it’s worth exploring. Don’t be so set in your ways when it comes to organization of the teams because we really need to experiment to see what works for your culture and what works in selling your products and services. That’s what you taught us today, Jason. Look outside the box a bit because technology changes. Like in my real estate, our reach is changing so let’s figure out how we can leverage technology and process and people in order to be able to reach our intended targets authentically and with value. That’s really what it’s all about.

Jason:            Absolutely.

Marylou:       Thank you so much for joining us today. How do people get a hold of you now that they’re all intrigued by our conversation today?

Jason:            They can reach out to me on LinkedIn or if they want to email me directly, my email is jason@datanyze.com. If they want to tweet me, my handle is @jasoncvargas.

Marylou:       Okay. I’ll put all this in the show notes, Jason, including that Harvard business review article so that people can at least get there quicker. I very much appreciate you coming in on the show today and talking with everybody. Just to remind you all, Jason is walking the walk. He’s out there doing this type of development. It’s not sitting behind the desk saying in theory how things should work. He’s actually applying all these principles and testing and iterating and optimizing and systematizing every single day. If you’re at a point where you really want some assistance or ideas, Jason’s a great resource for that.

                    Thanks again for your time today, Jason.

 

The number one problem most sales people say they have is lack of pipeline. Yet, lack of pipeline is usually a symptom of other issues. The three key issues that affect lack of pipeline are having the wrong mindset, using the wrong narrative, and executing the wrong activities.

Today, I speak with LinkedIn’s most read author of B2B selling content. Tony Hughes is a sales improvement consultant and bestselling author. His new book Combo Prospecting: The Powerful One-Two Punch That Fills Your Pipeline and Wins Sales is available for pre-order and will be released in January of 2018. In our conversation, we attack the myths around prospecting and lead generation. Tony also shares some wonderful actionable tips that you can implement right away.

Episode Highlights:

• Treating predictable prospecting as a process.
• Separation of roles that actually work in large organizations.
• How sellers need to generate their own pipeline.
• Everyone in the organization needs to be prospecting and looking for referrals.
• Getting to a point where the sales process is a habit.
• After engaging with a client ask for a referral.
• Lead with why the conversation should matter and add value.
• Help, help, help and then ask.
• Ask is this email helping a prospects challenge? If no, don’t send.
• Speak to prospects at the level of a peer.
• Combo sell with phone, email, social, etc. using the right narrative.
• Buyers are interested in what is going on in their industry, provide value.
• Try to reach a range of people within an organization with the right narrative.
• More focus on customer experience and human engagement.
• Embracing technology and the way you sell. Being politely persistent.

Resources:

• Combo Prospecting: The Powerful One-Two Punch That Fills Your Pipeline and Wins Sales
• Tony Hughes on LinkedIn
• Tony’s Keynote Speaker Website
• RSVP Selling
• Tony on Twitter @rsvpselling
• Cracking The Sales Management Code : The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance

 

Episode Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest is the most read LinkedIn author on B2B selling on the planet. It’s global. This guy, Tony Hughes, is an amazing guy. I’m sure most of you have read and followed his post. I try to comment on his thought provoking, sometimes rib poking posts on LinkedIn. It’s amazing the amount of conversation that flows around you, Tony. It’s wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

                    The other thing I want to tell you guys is there’s a book coming out by Tony called COMBO Prospecting by AMACOM New York. It’s coming out in January 2018. Yet another book on prospecting that we all need to have in our arsenal. For today’s conversation, we’re going to talk about some of the myths around prospecting and also lead generation.

Tony has some really great views that I’d like you to just sit back, listen, and we’re going to ask you to take one or two of his wonderful tips and put them into action as soon as you hang up the phone with us today. Welcome, Tony.

Tony: Hey Marylou, it’s so great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Marylou: I love the fact that we can talk. I’m in Iowa, you’re in Sydney, Australia and here we are through the wonders of the internet, having a conversation about prospecting. My first question to you is besides the fact that you are the most read B2B selling person on LinkedIn on the planet, based on that, what are the questions relating to prospecting? What’s the top most thing that you hear from readers as challenges they have with prospecting?

Tony: Marylou, the thing that really sticks to me is because I blog a lot, it’s a great place to really test what topics resonate with people. I actually ask a lot of questions to my audience as well to get a sense of what really concerns people. Whether it’s online with my blogging or whether it’s me working in the real world with clients because I’m very active with organizations out there in B2B sales, the number one problem that people tell me that they have is that they just don’t have enough sales pipeline.

                    The thing I find really interesting about that is that the first thing is that’s just plainly not true. If people don’t have enough sales pipeline, that’s not the problem, that’s the symptom of other real things but they’re causing it which we’ll maybe talk about. They all think that they can close, they think they know how to build rapport and build relationships and do discovery. They all think they know how to sell but it’s just that they don’t have enough pipe.

                    The reality is if you’re going back to recourse, the thing I believe is that there’s three things that fundamentally cause the issue of not having enough pipeline. First is the wrong mindset and we can maybe explore this a little bit but it’s the wrong mindset. A lot of salespeople have just abdicated responsibility for creating their own pipe. I even see people out there saying that sales people shouldn’t be doing prospecting and creating pipe, they should just focus on selling. We may be explore that. The first thing is the wrong mindset.

                    The next thing I see is people have the wrong narratives, people having the wrong kinds of conversations with people. One of the problems in sales is that we get delegated down to what sounds like we deserve to be talking to so they need to really change the conversation if they want to elevate the way that they’re selling.

                    The third thing is that people are executing the wrong activities. Mindset, narrative, and the types of activities and the volume of activities are the three things that really cause a problem, typically, in my mind. I think it’s really yourself with your excellent book Predictable Prospecting. I’ve downloaded the book. I’ve started reading it and really enjoying it. I love your approach for treating predictable prospecting really as a process. It’s a really topical issue. It’s the number one thing that people think that they need to resolve.

Marylou: It’s interesting you say that. Again, the three areas that we’re going to talk about today are the mindset, the narrative, and activities. The other thing you mentioned very briefly is this concept of separation of roles and the fact that there’s a lot in discussion today around should salespeople prospect, close, service? Should they just do the selling and closing part?

                    I view this as it’s compartmentalized. Me, as a solo practitioner, I prospect, I close, I service. I am not going to grow my team. I like to service my accounts by myself. That’s really how I work. I think in the larger organizations and if you’re doing higher volume transactions, there are some ideas around separation of roles that really work.

It’s more about the fact that some salespeople are better at opening doors and some sales people are better at closing doors. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn these tricks to the tray and these actual ways of opening those doors because you never know when you’re going to be put in the situation where you’re on the hook to generate revenue yourself. I like the separation of role concept but it doesn’t apply to every bit.

I think that that was one of the de-services of Predictable Revenue, the book that we wrote in 2011. It’s that there is almost a mandate that you must separate the roles As soon as you can, separate those roles so that you have business developers, and you have closers, and then you have people who service accounts.

        Let’s talk about this root cause, not enough pipeline. You said you hear that over and over again. If I’m sitting here as listening to this podcast and that resonated with me, how do I figure out the root cause of it by myself? If I’m really trying to figure this out, that it’s really not pipeline, it may be one of those three, lead us through how we would self diagnose ourselves to figure out where we are lacking or where the gap is.

Tony: I really love the comment you just made. You really bang on the money. I loved Predictable Revenue obviously, based on Sales Force back around the 2000 mark. The idea of getting people to specialize in roles is absolutely valid but the whole problem is that regardless of how good marketing is at creating marketing qualified leads, it may be go to an inside sales function that turns them into sales qualified. If you’ve got inside sales people that are doing out bound so they’re using a blended approach obviously but they’re getting on the phone and trying to make appointments. All the field sales people, all of that is valid.

I really agree with you. Here’s the main problem. Although those models work, no one mounted that activity gives a field salesperson enough pipeline for them to make their number each year because every organization is bumping up the sales target every year. They, in essence, reduce the territories. The number goes up 20% or 30% a year. The territory gets cut down by a third to a half.

        The reality is if you got an inside sales and marketing function that’s working really well, it will never give a seller enough pipeline. They have to generate their own pipeline as well. Where I see inside sales is falling down is that if you need to elevate the conversation, if you’re selling high value solutions to a CSR style of role, you need to be able to carry the conversation with that person and you need to be able to talk about what you’re seeing with clients in terms of risk outcomes issues within their particular industry that have relevance.

        The thing I find is a more junior person which is typically on the inside sales team can’t carry the conversations at that level. If you’re wanting to get, for example, to the chief financial officer of an organization, you get one shot at having that conversation securing the meeting. My view is sales people can’t abdicate responsibility. They need to work with their inside sales team to help those folks get even better at what they do. They need to be grateful for every lead they get from marketing or inside sales and that they’ve also got to be able to go and develop their own pipeline.

That’s really the key thing. They must be able to do it in a way where they avoid being delegated and they’ve got to find a way to really break through.

Marylou: It’s funny you say this because this is so real for me now with clients that I’m working with. What we’ve come up with, and by necessity is exactly what you’re talking about where the account executives, the closers, whatever you want to call the folks that are actually going to close the deals, I’m seeing more and more that they’re selecting their key accounts, some people call them dream whatever, dream 20, dream 300, whatever accounts they’re working that are in that center of that bull’s eye and those accounts are worked hyper personally sometimes with AE and the SDR working together, sometimes AE only.

They’re working those 20 to 30 accounts, something like that and hitting, hitting, hitting those accounts because they’re high revenue, they have a higher likelihood of closing so they’re targeted.

The next ring out becomes a little bit looser in terms of how much the SDR can help but they still, like you said, I heard you say this that if they’re a junior SDR, they’re not going to be able to positionally take that lead or take that account into the pipeline towards the mid, they’ll have to still be at the top. Maybe they set meetings, or maybe they’re doing a live demo, or they’re just doing a very light what we call AWAF call, are we a fit call, with one of the stakeholders and then that lead gets passed along.

        Or if you’re more seasoned as an SDR, you can actually find all the stakeholders, get them to the discovery call, bring the AE in at that point and then the lead is handed off. It’s not set in cement like it used to be, at all. It has evolved and it has incorporated the concept of account based selling. What’s really funny is even in Predictable Revenue, we talked about a 3 hour 15 process which was account based selling because the SDR had that lead for 3 hours 15 minutes. 15 minute AWAF, 1 hour with single stakeholder, 2 hours trying to locate, and get to a discovery call, multiple stakeholders.

Tony: It’s a really, really good model. The reality is everybody needs to be prospecting in organization whether you’re a CFO, CEO and God forbid, an AE or a sales business development person. We all need to be prospecting all the time. We all need to be looking for referrals because obviously referrals and trigger events are the fastest path and the highest probability to a sale.

                    The reality in life and business is we see what we’re looking for and it just staggers me how many sales people and business people are not tuned to really be looking for referrals and listening for trigger events which give reasons to go and engage with people. That’s really part of mindset.

                    The first thing of mindset is personally own the responsibility of creating pipeline regardless of how good marketing or your SDRs and inside sales cross function is and time block a period of time every single day. Your book Predictable Prospecting is bringing and creating that framework but you also need the mindset where you think you know what, if I want a predictable pipeline, then I’ve got to be investing time every single day in the right activities. They’re going to create that for me. If I don’t have consistent inputs and activity levels, I’m not going to get consistent results and that’s how you avoid the horrible roller coaster ride that is most people’s lives in sales.

Marylou: Let’s say we bought into this, Tony, “Okay, I’m going to hang up this phone, I’m going to listen to this podcast, I’m going to put into my schedule, then I’m going to prospect every single day.” That is your will when you’re at that level. What we need to do is get from that sheer will to this habit. That’s what I’m really trying to get people in the mindset area to think about. I’m coming from a process perspective but I really want people to drive through sheer will and go all the way to what becomes habit.

                    When you get up in the morning, you already know your time blocks for the week. You’ve probably pre-planned your calls and your views of those calls and you’ve done whatever research is important for you to hyper personalize that conversation and away you go. That to me is really where we’re trying to get with all these books that we’re writing on process, is to get you to a point where you do this as habit.

Tony: It’s 100% on the money. It’s what people need to do. Habits are the things that creates results in anybody’s life, whether it’s staying fit and healthy or whether or it’s having a good, healthy pipeline and consistently delivering a number in business.

Marylou: It trumps discipline. I hear a lot of our sales colleagues talk about you need the discipline of sales. Discipline is along that journey towards habit, in my opinion. I can be disciplined. I’m an athlete. I can be disciplined to go out there and do my stuff everyday but it’s only when I get up in the morning, the natural thing to do is go work on improving my time as a runner or a biker. It’s just habit for me. I just get out there everyday because my body craves it, I love it, it makes me feel good. That’s really what prospecting should be.

It’s fun to prospect and I think a lot of people dread it but I think that’s also mindset. Putting yourself in a very positive environment, smile when you’re on the phone. There are some phone habits and things that can really warm you up and get you ready for these types of calling. It’s so much fun when you get people who say, “Thank you so much for calling me. I’m so happy you reached out to me.” It does happen.

Tony: It’s funny I was working with a large law firm and we were talking about referrals. You are so right about this habit. It’s simply developing a habit. Every time you finish an engagement with a client, simply say, “I really enjoyed working on that matter with you. Who else inside the organization should I be talking to?” It’s simply a case of having your own way of asking the question. It’s just a soft way of asking for a referral.

                    If you’re in a habit of doing it, a percentage of the time, they’ll say, “Hey, actually, you should be talking to Bill over in this area of the business. We’ve got an issue going on at the moment.” If you’re in the habit of asking, then you’ll get referrals. Most people are not in the habit and then they try and execute some crazy level of activity to generate referrals and it doesn’t work for them because it just needs to be a daily habit to make it work.

Marylou: You can’t wait to the 16th or the 20th of the month if you’re closing on the 28th with your pipeline. You have to be looking at it daily. I was at a conference just yesterday in San Francisco where we talked about daily metrics. Just keep aligned with your daily goals, and your adherence to goal, and your alignment to goal on a daily basis to just keep you on track because if you wait and get lazy and to the third month of the week, maybe the fourth week of the month, it’s just so stressful and there’s no need to go there.

Tony: One of my favourite books is a book written by Jason Jordan, Cracking Sales Management Code. He really talks about this issue the right way around. You can’t manage results. All you can do is manage the activities that feed into your sales objectives that then create the results. We need to be a little bit clear about what are the activities that we need to execute well if we want to achieve our objectives that then deliver revenue. That’s the initial mindset.

                    The second thing that I really see up there is that when people do go ahead and jump on the phone or they send an email, again, I love those email templates that you’ve got in Predictable Prospecting, but the thing is they just seem to have the wrong narrative. For me, there’s really a couple of important points to make here.

                    The first is that we all know that people both buy from those that they feel, that they know, like, and trust but nobody worth getting to their business from a brand new business development point of view. This is not existing relationships. This is new business development but anyone worth getting to, there is not lonely and bored and looking for a new friend. Calling people up and adopting a friendly strategy I just think paints you as a salesperson immediately and gets the call up on the wrong footing.

                    And then the other issue is that nobody worth getting to out there is lying awake at night hoping some sales person is going to call them the next day to tell them about the joys and wonders of their products and solutions. Leading with a strategy of trying to be someone’s friend calling saying how are you today or calling in and talking about who you are, what your company does, and how it all works, none of that matters until you’ve first anchored why the person should care about it.

                    The thing I see with narrative is people has got a narrative that tends to be all about them and what they’re selling instead of leading with why the conversation should matter to the other person and also really focusing on providing value in the conversation for the person. Give value, provide value well in advance so they’re considering becoming a customer.

There’s an interesting research done by Corporate Vision a few years ago and what they found was that 75% of the time, the company that wins the deal was the one that first provided education and insight for the person buying. The one that really starts to educate the person becomes the emotional favourite. That actually comes down to we have a focus on providing value well in advance so then they will become a customer and create a narrative that leads with why conversation should matter.

Marylou: That’s a great point. I’m an avid student still of copywriting. There’s a rule for persuasive copywriters that is a three one rule. It’s help, help, help, and then ask, is what they really preach. Help is adding value. One thing that one of the copywriters said to me that’s really stuck with me, I’ll share it with the audience is that when you’re crafting an email or you’re doing something correspondence wise with the prospect or stakeholder, before you hit that send button if you’re doing an email, ask yourself, is this email transforming or in some way helping a challenge that my prospect is experiencing, that I know they’re experiencing?

                    If you cannot answer yes wholeheartedly with your heart on that one, don’t send the email. That eliminates these just checking in emails or hey, I’ve got a great idea. You’re not going to send that email if you honestly can look at that and say will I transform my guy’s day before I hit that send button.

Tony: I really think that’s great advice. Just in line with that, the other part of this is we need to understand, if we’re elevating conversations to their real leaders of organizations that make the decisions and approve the spending, we need to talk the language of leaders and the language of business which is numbers, dollars, and percentages.

We need to be able to talk about how we think we make a material or can help them make a material impact on their KPIs, their revenue or other important metrics inside their business around net promoter scores or staff engagement, whatever those things are important to them because they just care about delivering outcomes and managing the risks. That kind of talk when you’re talking with people, that’s part of how you avoid delegation because what you want is engagement and then sponsorship and access to the organization to do a deeper level of discovery and help the client build the business case that will anchor why they should change state.

Marylou: Why change, why now, why us. I think, to your point about mindset again, when you’re writing these emails, you are that person, you are their colleague, you are their peer. It doesn’t matter that you have a role of sales, that that’s your title. When you are conversing with someone belly to belly, I like to call it, you are a peer of theirs, a colleague. You speak to them at that level. You are at that level.

I think that’s a big mindset issue that I see a lot especially since I work top of funnel, a lot of younger people are usually in that role, they’re almost afraid to have these conversations even though they know that they could help and they have at their fingertips the specificity around percent improvement or dollars saved or whatever the number are. They can say them but they don’t say them with conviction and they don’t say them with that emotional surety that will get that executive to lean in and say, “Wow, this guy really knows what they’re talking about. I need to spend five minutes with them.”

Tony: That is so true. Selling is first and foremost the transference of belief from one person to another person. People make emotional decisions. They rationalize with logic. Without being able to talk about that, you’ve got to be a true believer in the value that you offer.

Marylou: It transcends globally, too. You’re in Australia, there’s a different culture there than US but it’s still the same throughout globally, I think. Behaviour and the way we are a humans is the same throughout.

Tony: It really is. I absolutely agree with that. You got to have the right mindset, you gotta have the right narrative and talk the language of leaders in business linked with why conversations should matter is really important.

                    The third thing that I see, there’s a lot of people just got the wrong activity and the wrong levels of activity. One of the things I see up there which is just a scourge on sales is the rise of people just being passive. You go into a lot of sales calls today you’ll struggle to hear anybody even making a fun call. I just find it absolutely amazing. I did a keynote for Sales Force World Tour about eight weeks ago. My topic was the rise of the silent sales floors killing business. Whenever I write in my blog about the need to pick up the phone and make calls, people just go absolutely crazy.

                    To me, this false dichotomy that’s raging at the moment of social selling versus the phone, to me, it’s a false dichotomy because the first ever social selling tool was really the telephone and it’s not a case of social or the phone, it’s both. All of our buyers themselves face a white wall of noise. When they come to the office everyday, they’re bombarded by people trying to gain access and just opening up their email and getting to some level of close to empty inboxes. They just regard it as an impossible task.

The reality is we’ve got to adopt combinations which is what my next book is really focused on, COMBO Prospecting. We’ve got into pragmatic research and obviously platforms like LinkedIn are really important to that. We’ve got to get their cell number, we’ve got to call, leave a voicemail, send a text message, send an email, send an inmail. If we’ve got the right narrative where we’re not being seen as a sales pest, we’ve got the right narrative where we’re able to provide business value for the person, that’s the sales people.

One of the things, if you’ve got the luxury of being able to do it to it is absolutely focused on a particular vertical. If you’re able to create a narrative around the fact that you work with others in their industry and there’s some interesting trends that you’re seeing, a common set of problems, you’ve seen how a non competitive, because you don’t want them to feel like you’re taking trade secrets in someone within their industry to them because they’re worried that you’ll do that to them.

But if you’re able to say, if you’ve seen how one organization has managed to go from this state to that state as far as tangible results, if these are common issues that you’re facing, we’ll really love to have a conversation and talk about what I’m seeing within your industry. The thing is that the buyer is absolutely interested in what’s going on within their industry and what others in their industry are doing, what trends could be coming over the horizon toward them. If you can be the person that can provide that level of insight, bam, you’ve absolutely got engagement.

People shouldn’t feel like wow, am I bombarding this person? If you’ve got the right narrative, you’re helping them and you’re providing value for them. They should be grateful that you’re doing this. You shouldn’t be embarrassed that you’re determined to get through. What you want is you want to go at a range of people in an organization concurrently and you want to go with them with the right narrative where they’re being, “Wow, this person can provide value for me in a conversation and boy are they determined, so I think I should return the phone call.”

        I know you’ve interviewed Jeb.  He tells that story, a true story where he had a huge number of outreach. I think it was every single day he left a voicemail for a CEO for about a month and a half until the guy finally called back and that person ended up being a customer which really validated that the conversation really was a value. I know when I posted that example as a quote from Jeb in social, it had over a million reach.

I had one person write into me saying, I think they were going to hire two linebackers to beat me up for harassing somebody. I said it was Jeb, not me. I thought that was really funny. Jeb was really persistent because he knew he could help the person and he did. The person became a client and invested more than $1 million with his organization. There’s the proof that the value is there. Jeb was determined and that’s what salespeople need to do.

This whole thing of having mindset of time blocking and really make it a habit but you’ve got to have the right level of activities. If you’ve got the right narrative and the right level of activities, then you’ll definitely break through.

Marylou: I heard persistence and I remember Aaron and I when we were at Predictable Revenue, he used to always tell me because I did a lot of the outreach then, he says, “Marylou, you’re the only one person I know who is so pleasantly patient and persistent to the delightful stage.” I said that is what it takes. It really does. I love talking to people I don’t know. I love starting conversations with people I don’t know. I think that’s who we are as business development folks. We really like to get those conversations started. If we’re armed with the messaging from your new book about how to touch, when to touch, and in what rhythm to touch in, our conversion rates are going to go through the roof.

                    I have a story I like to tell about a client of mine who decided, “I think we’re going to send a postcard to our dream 250 accounts.” Within the sequence, they had a 10 touch sequence over 32 business days or so. The third one, they decided to send a postcard out and then they halted the sequence and followed up like in the olden days, what we used to do with the direct mail. Send a letter and then follow up with a letter.

                    It was novel enough. It was impactful enough. It was engaging enough. They went double digit conversion rate. Just think of how you are now able to shrink that pipeline lag by incorporating some of these strategies that worked in the olden days and still can work now instead of just doing your time blocking from 9:00 to 11:00 and wondering why things aren’t going any better.

                    Part of this is to be nimble, to really think about when your prospect is going to be in the office. I can remember sitting in the parking lot in New York waiting for the New York telephone COO to come to work. It was 6:30AM. I knew he would be there and I caught him in the parking lot. We have to adjust our calling time blocks as well as part of this combo effort.

                    Really looking forward to the new book that’s coming out. Can you give us a little flavour of how you’ve broken that book out? And is it a reference book like a how to guide or is it really just getting us more aware of some of the issues that we really need to take in and figure out where are we along the spectrum of not being able to prospect properly?

Tony: I jokingly tell people, in my writing style, I try to be the Jason Bourne meets [00:31:14]. My very first book was written as a novel so it’s very engaging emotionally and tells a story. This next book is quite different. It’s really based on the blogging I’ve done in the last two and a half years. That’s really where I’ve ideated and really refined the ideas. It’s what I call eclectically snackable, so I struggle to get that out.

The idea with it is you can flick through it and find the things that address that you may be currently facing. It really talks about what we’ve discussed today. It talks about the dangerous trains in selling. There’s a lot of people predicting doom but I do believe, probably around 20%, 30% of B2B field sales people will probably be gone within the next five years. Organizations are going to continue to spend substantial amounts of money on sales and marketing but I think the mix is going to change.

There’s going to be a big focus on how do we create great customer experience even well in advance of someone becoming a customer. Human engagement will definitely be a part of that process but expensive field sales people is some kind of magic way to go and drive sales, it’s something that’s getting tougher and tougher.

                    The reality is people need to change the way that they sell if they want to have a good future. They need to embrace technology as part of all of this. They really need to up their game and they need to adopt the combination of old school and new school. Marylou, you said something a couple of minutes ago that everybody listening to this should really, really pay attention to. I love that fact that you talk about just being politely persistent.

The thing is you can get all wound up and frustrated. You just accept the fact that hey, people are busy. It’s not that they’re rejecting me. They’re just being incredibly busy and I just need to be persistent. I just need to have the right narrative. I need to find the right approach.  Same thing a piece of physical mail is a great thing to do because so few people do it anymore. Picking up the phone and making a call is a great thing to do today because so many people have stopped doing it. They’re sending emails and emails and doing things in social which is part of how you break through. At the end of the day, a conversation with your own voice is the way to do it.

        We’re going to get to a point in the very near future where there’ll be more mobile phones per person. People have a phone for business and a phone for their personal lives. Everyone’s got their cell phone. It’s the ideal way to actually get through to them.

The thing the book does is it really talks about the things we’ve discussed. Old new school, new school, blend all these things together. Find the right combinations of outreach and come up with the right combination in how you’ll actually execute and personally own the daily cadence of creating sales pipeline. It’s the only way that you can really deliver strong predictable revenue regardless of how many leads are coming through from inside sales and marketing. There will never be enough. You’ve really got to do both.

Marylou: Focusing on those whales, those ideal accounts that you would love to have as clients. You’ll find enough to keep you busy and you’ll find enough that you can continually work on a daily basis. It is a daily habit that we’re working towards and it is persistence and the data will help you feel good about the number of context you need. Because when you’re just starting out, everyone thinks, “Oh, they don’t want to hear from me twice a week or three times a week. I’ll be in their face, I don’t want to do that.”

                    You don’t really have anything to substantiate that yet unless you have really strong data that you can look at and say, “Look, over the last year, with these 2,000 records, this was the cadence that worked.” If you don’t have that, you’re going to be building your own cadence and you need to test it, iterate it, move it around a bit, and you will come up with your own unique cadence that works for you over and over and over again but you’ve gotta start somewhere.

Tony: It’s so true. And really create the habit but make sure you’re in a habit of doing the right things and doing them well.

Marylou: Definitely. Tony, thank you so much for joining us. Before we leave, even though you are the most read person on LinkedIn, how do people get a hold of you if they would like to continue this conversation with you?

Tony: Thank you. They can find me in LinkedIn. There will be show notes I’m sure, where they can see that. I also have two websites. I have a website for me as a keynote speaker and it’s tonyhughes.com.au. My sales methodology website is rsvpselling.com.

Marylou: Okay. We’ll put all that in the show notes for everyone and we’ll be looking forward to the launch of your new book. Very exciting!

Tony: Thanks, Marylou. I really appreciate it.

Marylou: Enjoyed speaking with you.

 

As an Executive Coach and Consultant, Bryan Franklin has helped multiple businesses pass the one billion mark in revenue. His newest venture, OutboundWorks, is the marriage of the traditional SDR role and the future of sales — Artificial Intelligence, or as Bryan calls it, Augmented Intelligence. In this episode we’re talking all about using automated tools in the sales process: How to implement them, how they’ll affect relationships with prospects, and what it means for the future of sales.

Episode Highlights:

• Bryan Franklin’s background and coaching track record
• What is Outbound Works?
• The future of selling: Augmented Intelligence and account-based selling
• Automating good habits
• Where does Bryan Franklin sit in the pipeline?
• Bryan’s process for Implementing an automated tool
• Will automation replace outsourcing?
• The future of automation and the phone
• Does automation mean the end of human relationships?
• Working with marketing
• Bryan’s ideal client profiles

Resources:

• OutboundWorks
• Connect with Bryan Franklin by visiting his website, sending him a message on Linkedin, or by following him on Twitter

 

Episode Transcript