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Episode 42: Marylou Tyler’s Book Bites – Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting

Predictable Prospecting
Marylou Tyler's Book Bites - Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting
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Many readers have reached out to me wanting to know my favorite parts of my new book, Predictable Prospecting, and my advice for tackling the process I’ve outlined. This week I’m breaking down Predictable Prospecting chapter-by-chapter and picking out the most important concepts you need to know, areas that have been updated since Predictable Revenue came out, and how to get the most from the book in terms of worksheets and add-ons.
 
marylou-tylerEpisode Highlights:

  • The three key concepts and takeaways from Predictable Revenue that have stood the test of time
  • Predictable Prospecting Chapter One: Understanding the SWOT
  • Chapter Two: Ideal Account Profile
  • Chapter Three: Ideal Prospect Personas
  • My new Compel With Content framework for hooking your prospect
  • The Levels of Awareness framework
  • Chapter Seven: Measuring and Optimizing the Pipeline
  • Chapter Eight: Tools of the Trade
  • Chapter Nine: Managing a Sales Team

Resources From This Episode:

Favorite Quotes: “The Predictable Prospecting process is not something that you learn and then leave. You’re continually improving.” “The biggest thing I can tell you is that you are all fabulous writers. You have the ability to write the perfect email, an email that’s going to cause people to lean into their computer and be completely excited that you have written to them.”

Episode Transcript

Happy Tuesday everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. I have been asked by a number of the readers to pick out a couple of my favorite areas of the book and specifically relating to fast tracking folks because people have been studying Predictable Revenue and now are moving into Predictable Prospecting, wanted to know and understand what the changes are and how to move through the book quickly if they’ve got a good base on an understanding of Predictable Revenue. What I thought I would do is go through each of the chapters and pick out the areas that are different, areas where we’ve improved and then you can make your own determination how you want to apply them to your process. The assumption here is set for those listening, there’s a little bit of a baseline understanding of Predictable Revenue. When you think about it, there are three key concepts for Predictable Revenue that stand the test of time as they say.                 The first one is, if it all possible, separate your sales roles. The reason being is that, when you’re looking to put a machine together of something that has a velocity of a Predictable Revenue framework, you really want to have the sales roles separate as much as possible. There may be some of you thinking, “Well, it’s just me. How do I do that?” There was a webinar I did with Aaron in 2011 where I was essentially the only person that could generate leads but I also had to follow up on inbound leads.                 What I did was I looked at my block time and I dedicated days of the week that I was prospecting into accounts to feed the AEs and the rest of the time I was working on inbound and I was also an inside sales person closing what we would consider the outside extended core accounts which were accounts that were not quite in the sweet spot but we’re still good candidates for us and had a decent lifetime value that it made sense for us to go after them but not necessarily the AEs to go after them, I worked that. I was multi hat inbound, close smaller accounts or the ones that were kind of in the sweet spot but had decent enough lifetime value and then of course prospecting which is what most of you are doing. That tried and through formula is still coming from Predictable Revenue, it’s still something that I believe in and wear at all possible as soon as we can. I get clients to move into a separation of roles.                 The second concept that’s still an evergreen, forever concept is this concept of all leads are not created equal. I still see today a lot of companies making that same mistake of putting all the leads in a basket and thinking they’re all the same value. Very briefly, the three types of leads are, in Predictable Revenue they have funky names but I don’t use those names anymore. But they’re basically marketing leads which generate MQL, Marketing Qualified Leads typically, that’s what marketing cast a wide net out there, hoping to get as many whales as minnows but they sometimes get a lot of little accounts minnows and guppies and not necessarily the whales.                 Those are a high volume of leads and not necessarily high value. But some companies can get as many in where that justifies an inbound person. The number we used to use was 400 for that purpose. 400 inbound leads kind of dedicated an inbound person. Anything less in that, you can split the STR role and have them also follow up on inbound. Helping them really finesse the conversation because the psychology of it is that they’re coming inbound to you so they’re hoping and happy to hear your voice. Since they had an in trust in you, you’re going to have a conversation that’s a little lighter, it’s not cold, it’s warm. There’s some psychological things about inbound that are good for training for STRs and it’s a nice break every once in awhile to get away from the hunt and talk with people who are actually looking forward to speaking with you and welcome the interruption as opposed to not welcoming as much. That was one area.                 The second type of lead are the ones we all covet which is the referral engine. Frankly, the outreach programs that we do release per on the referral engine because part of the outreach program that I teach now is to look for those referrals and to ask for those referrals on a continuous basis. That referral engine, the referral type of lead is from a client, from a colleague and they’re typically high value because they’re fitting your sweet spot of the ideal account profile. They’re also going to be eager to speak with you. That’s the second type of lead.                 The third type of lead is what we know and love and just are fabulous for us which is the outreach site where we’re actually targeting those whales where it’s a spectacular to way to build a revenue, it’s consistent and it’s high value. Typically lower volume because we’re managing a good number of records but we have to be authentic and hyper personalize in a lot of it. We have to measure how many of those we can do. In Predictable Revenue, we talked about 50 a day, 250 a week but this was all pre app like, the apps that are out there now that help you manage those, as my friend calls, spinning plates. Those are the three types of leads.                 Make sure that you have that designator in your head especially when you’re working with your bosses. A lot of times they don’t necessarily, or board members, I’ve sat in a lot of meetings where numbers just fly around as if they’re all equal and they’re not. You have a net knowledge that  will help educate your peers, your mentors in the sea level that may not have that understanding of the leads and how they impact revenue and how they impact the forecast. That was the second thing from Predictable Revenue that we brought over that is really good.                 Of course the third thing is put a process in which Predictable Prospecting essentially expands on the process of generating outbound leads to qualified opportunities that consistently close at a high rate and of higher lifetime value. Given that, those three baseline tried and true areas from Predictable Revenue that I love. Predictable Prospecting really goes into more about how to go about getting those whales targeted. What do you do once you get them all figured out. How do you put them into a sequence? A sequence is essentially a range of touches over a period of time.                 There’s this thing called cadence which is the rhythm of the sequence. How are you going to touch them? Is it going to be a phone? Is it going to be an email? I have some clients who send postcards, they blend that into the sequence as a touch. We talked about that in the book in Predictable Prospecting of how to orchestrate that. There are three types of sequences that I start clients with and I’ll go through that in the latter part of this podcast.        For right now, you’ve got a target. You’ve got to be able to then figure out how to engage this folks. Once you start figuring that out in getting that under control, then we start looking at how to make your life less stressful and how to block your time so there’s some more management related SdR habit related sections in the back of the book. Predictable Revenue goes through of these as well but we’ve dive deeper. We’ve learned a lot about how not to hire SDRs, we’ve learned a lot about the managing of SDRs and the fact that managers really need to be different for the SDR role versus an AE role. We talked a lot about that in the book.      Without further ado, I’m going to go through the sections that people have asked me about or that were of acute interest to me to make sure that they were in the book because the more that I can put in there that’s a value to you, the faster you can get up and running and the less you’ll need someone like me to come and hold your hand because a lot of this is, I have that constant wrestling in my mind as to how am I going to get all this knowledge in my head into a framework for you guys.                 At the one end of the spectrum, I have accounts that I service, usually three to five clients a quarter and now I have the book. But there’s this gigantic gap in the middle that’s why I’m doing this podcast. I’m looking at having a membership where we can all come together and start learning the bits and pieces of this thing because this is not something that you learn and then leave, you’re continually improving. The whole framework, this whole process is based on continuous improvement.                 For those of you who have followed me for a long time, you know that I’m learning all the time. I shared in the webinar just the other day my horrific hiring experience that I was so bad at it and I run a call center of term 50 people. I was like the worst person to go, don’t let Marylou interview her because she’ll hire her and it won’t be right kind of thing. I had phobia about hiring people for a long time because I’d love everybody. I thought everybody was great.                 I had to really fix that. The last chapters of the book really dived into that and talk about what to do in hiring an STDR. For those managers, this book and this last section of the book is pretty detailed on hiring process. Let’s start with the SWOT chapter one. Everybody has written to me about the SWOT saying, “Oh my gosh, this is just way too detailed.” But it really isn’t. I would really like you to look at it and use the cheat sheet in the back of the book for it because the cheat sheet will tell you what I did to go through to do the SWOT.                 The SWOT is basically strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. What we’ve done with Predictable Prospecting is we’ve overlaid that with six known factors and we call them the SWOT six. Some of this you’ll remember from, if you’re a marketing person or heard about marketing. I’ll just name them and point the place for you to find them. They start at chapter one page 11, the [00:11:16] factors, the four Ps, reputation, internal resources, external forces and trends.                 The reason why we did this is because it will help you not get stuck when you get weaknesses and threats. A lot of times we are all gone home and get into these SWOT strengths and the weaknesses or strengths for sure and the opportunities. Those are usually filled in really deep. The weaknesses and the threats are light. We want to make sure that we’ve got enough in each of those quadrants so that when we come to do the prioritization of the SWOT, we really have an understanding of where the highest priority strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.                 You’re probably wondering why do I have to do a SWOT then. The reason is because the SWOT actually feeds into the value proposition, your positioning. It actually feeds into your ideal account profile because a lot of times I see people wasting their time on the wrong accounts. By doing the SWOT, you end up feeling free-er and full of conviction that, “You know what, this is where I fit and this is really where I want to go and focus my efforts.” That’s chapter one.    Chapter two is about the ideal account profile. This is a continuation of the ideal customer profile in the Predictable Revenue. It dives a lot deeper. Go into that chapter and pull out the subheads and that will be all the information you need plus for chapter one and chapter two, I have worksheets online and I post them everywhere I can think of. If you still can’t find them, email me tyler.marylou@gmail.com and ask me to send you that link. But I have posted it everywhere I could think of. There’s also a page for the book called maryloutyler.com/swag that contains every webinar I did, all the files that I’ve created, all the teachings, so far that’s the spot to accompany the book. Chapter two, ideal account profile is all about retuning, refining your ideal customer profile. It also talks about the frequency of which you need to do this. Remember we’re all about continuous improvement which means we’re going to be looking at and tweaking our ideal account profile, probably every three months, six months, somewhere along that line.                 It’s really driven by the amount of volume that you’re pushing through the pipeline. But don’t just set it and forget it, this is another one where we constantly find tuning, we’re constantly segmenting, we’re constantly doing the link to the best few that we can really attack and close and use as references from our business that may be in the outer rings of lifetime value.                 Chapter three is my favorite chapter so far because it’s all about ideal prospect personas. I can go on ad nauseam on this topic. I do believe that the biggest mistake I see is that sales people pull out the marketing personas and say with a smile, “We got it, Marylou.” No you don’t. You have part of it, you have some of it, what I want you to do is take the marketing personas or the product marketing personas, whatever you’ve got and compare it again to chapter three. Again, there is a worksheet that accompanies chapter three.                 The main thing here that you probably don’t have on any of your personas is the bull’s eye. The bull’s eye is what we use for a camp bay selling to call in and around. I don’t know if you guys have read Challenger Customer, that 5.2 number. We bump that up a little bit, maybe to seven and we have an actual calling sequence called the call immersion that goes in and around the bull’s eye of what we developed for the prospect persona in chapter three.                   We make those phone calls in our phone block. The goal of the phone call is to get in for that first meeting, get a referral for the first meeting, last to all of our buyers that we need to have if we are doing more of an extensive discovery meeting for the AE. That is all accomplished by really working the prospect personas.                 That’s chapters one through three, worksheets are all available for that. From there, we go into engaging which is probably the more fun of this whole thing. The biggest thing I can tell you is that you are all fabulous writers. I want you to get that in your head right now, that you have the ability to write the perfect email, an email that’s going to cause people to lean into their computer and be completely excited that you have written to them.                    Chapters four, five and six talk all about that. There’s a new framework called compel with content that I invented out of desperation again because I was seeing emails where it was all about us and not about the client. I have a very simple framework of how to do that. Again, there are worksheets of how to fill on the blanks. We take essentially the personas and then we develop a dialog, a story to tell the persona that’s based on the challenges they have, the outcomes that they can expect and really getting them to understand what the gap is between those challenges and the outcomes.                 What we do from there, we’ve got them hooked emotionally because we trigger them to get them to force their eyeballs to go into the email a little bit more. Once we got them hooked, then we disarm them with specificity around how our opportunity is going to come in and save the day for them. We’ll use some social proof or if we don’t have customers like some of my folks don’t even have client yet, then we’ll look on line and find similar stories where people have succeeded, we use those stories and then we have a call to action.                 We can do this whole entire thing in either 80 words or 480 words. We have examples in the book of all the ways to do that that you can borrow as baselines and then create your own. I always love if you can also test an A version versus a B version. I have a lot of clients that are doing that now. Four to six is for that. It’ll really go through the sequences, how to touch, when to touch. If you’re afraid of touching, there’s a, I think Jeremy called it light, he had a really nice name for it.                 There’s another table on page 84 that I want to make sure that you look at. It’s another framework that I came up with that deals with levels of awareness. In our world, we have to deal with five levels of awareness of our prospects. Some don’t even know we exist, some don’t even know what we sell exists. We have additional layers that we have to worry about whereas with inbound, people are searching so they know what they are searching for so they’re at least problem aware.     They may be situation aware, they may not be vendor aware but definitely some things bother them, they think they know there’s something to fix it but they don’t quite know how to fix it. Whereas with us, they don’t even know they have a problem, they don’t even know they need to know, they have a problem. We have to stir them up that way with our emails.                    This particular graph or table on page 84 teaches you how to create your content, how to write your emails and what to click through to in order to be able to get people to bubble up to the top so that they’ll have a conversation with you.                 Chapter seven talks about measuring and optimizing your pipeline. This was discussed in Predictable Revenue but we put some additional metrics in there for you to take a look at. Compare what you’ve got now to what’s in the chapter. It comes down to meaningful conversations, it comes down to, the way I describe it is that you are driving down a freeway and you’re working towards getting to that next mile marker. Whatever got you from mile marker one to mile marker two, whatever that action was, that should be recorded into your database or CRM even if you have to exit out, that should be recorded. The theme of what happened which is the pain. That has to be recorded.                 That gives us the ability to feedback to marketing to let them know, “Hey, this pains resonate best for this particular prospect. Let’s build the sequence for nurture, for example, if we throw them out exit. Let’s build the sequence that allows us to organize the pain points in order to reduce the slack.” A lot of that is discussed in this chapter about optimizing and recording.                 The next chapter talks about, it’s chapter eight, that talking a little bit about tools. The big message here, where I don’t see this a lot in my clients but definitely the SAS base folks are enamored with the stack and sometimes they are so enamored with tools that they forget functions. This chapter reorients you to really looking at function first, tools second. Being a software engineer myself, I can see where people can go overboard with tools but I think you’re doing yourself a disservice.                 If I came into your organization and saw the amount of admin that’s been going on now because of tools, I would pull out half the stuff, honestly. There’s too many tools and the function is getting lost. You’re spending too much time admin and less time selling which is not good. Take a look at that chapter, chapter eight. Learn about really working on the function first then looking at the form which is in the form of tools.                 Lastly, the last chapter I’m going to discuss on this call is the management of sales development professionals, chapter nine. I did an entire four part webinar series on this. It’s in the maryloutyler.com/swag section. For those managers who want to really drill down and hear me drone on for I think almost four hours, that section is all discussed in those webinars and I fully intend to break them down into manageable bite size chunks because even I cannot listen to myself that long. But there’s a lot of good information in there and the decks are in there most importantly. You can pull the decks and you can just go ahead and pull out the slides that are meaningful to you.             Always reply back to me because I can continue to push out content but I want to make sure that it’s relevant for what you guys need and then the order in which you need it. I think I know the order but sometimes I get so into the weeds because I’m an engineer first and process person. The vision stuff, it doesn’t necessarily surface in a way that’s like, oh, okay, that’s what she meant.                 If there are things that you want to see or there are questions you have, please get a hold of me. We’re in this business of reaching out so I fully expect my folks, you guys, to reach out to me. I’m a person that is here to help you and I expect you to contact me and those that do and you know who you are, I have reached out to every one of you, it does work. Reach out to me with the questions you have and I’ll be happy to get back to you.                 Those are the chapters I wanted to talk about, there’s a cheat sheet guide in the back of the book that you guys can pull and modify for your own use. Again, all the worksheets for the book that I have to date are located online and I will post the link in the show notes for this particular podcast. If anyone can’t find what they need, get back to me. Thanks so much for your time, have a great week everybody.

Episode 41: Understanding Buyer Behavior – Marc McNamara

Predictable Prospecting
Understanding Buyer Behavior
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Today’s guest is Marc McNamara, Chief Enablement Strategist at The Value Shift, a company that presents a unique solution to the sales productivity challenge. marc-mcnamaraWe’re here to talk about Marc’s experience with team enablement, how to get the best out of your top-of-funnel conversations, and finding the root of your buyer’s behavior.
 
Episode Highlights:

  • Introducing Marc McNamara
  • What is a Chief Enablement Strategist?
  • Understanding buyer behavior
  • Generating meaningful conversations
  • Finding the next step as a rep: Training and continuing education
  • The nuts & bolts of building a repository
  • How to track your best conversations

Resources: Connect with Marc McNamara on LinkedIn, through The Value Shift website, or by emailing him direct at mmcnamara@thevalueshift.com Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hi everybody, welcome, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest is Marc McNamara. He is a sales knowledge architect and the title that I like of his is chief enablement strategist over at The Value Shift. Marc has a lot of experience in the term enablement. I know that’s a term that we hear a lot lately; sales strategy, sales enablement, sales knowledge, and I really wanted you to listen to Marc because he is approaching essentially the ability to generate predictable revenue top of funnel but he goes probably all the way to close. We’re going to concentrate mostly on the top of funnel with Marc today. I want him to share with us his experiences in readying the sales team so that you more consistently generate sales qualified opportunities, but also you’re building predictable revenue because you’re building a predictable lead generation engine. Marc, welcome to the podcast. Marc: Thank you, Marylou. Marylou: Tell us, this chief enablement strategist. I love that title. What does that mean to you? Marc: What it means to me and most importantly to people who work with me, is I commit and I help them think through how to actually enable their team to be more productive. It’s funny that you mentioned the whole concept as a word enablement because that’s not really a word, right? But when you look up the word enable, it’s really about helping, giving people assistance in achieving a goal or completing a task. What I try to do is come in, look at a customer’s environment, the context, the culture, and take the important work that’s being done around how to sell, the information and the knowledge and tools and put that into an architecture delivery system that ultimately will have sales using it appropriately. Not just being able to find it, but having the coaching built into it and having the trainings or learnings built into that and make them most effective at what they can do at their job. Marylou:       We talk a lot about aligning our sales to the buyer’s journey which is a term or a phrase that’s thrown around a lot, but you really live that. Correct me if I’m wrong but you’re working with sales professionals to be able to articulate conversation, no matter where the record or where the person or where the buyer’s sitting physically in the pipeline, but also you’re taking it even deeper to get an understanding of behaviourally where people are in their heads, in their thought process, and helping the sales executive recognize, A, where they’re at, and B, what to say, how to say it, when to say it, with whom to say it. this is all done with leveraging technology, correct? Marc: That is correct. What’s interesting about what we do with technology is really about making it as flexible and responsive to the user. When you talk about the buyer’s journey, it’s grey and we’ve all been mapping that for a long time. I had a great mentor who told me once that selling is an art and a science, it’s not discrete. By looking at all of that data and saying here’s how the buyer buys,  well maybe, right? But we know in sales conversations things may jump around and they may not be linear. You may have more than one party on the line and buyers may not all be in the same place in that journey. How do you effectively serve up that information or that knowledge to that salesperson during that conversation? Or wherever they may be, whether it’s in their car, whether they’re in person in front of a customer or on the phone presenting over the web. There’s a lot that goes into that to think about not just providing them in some cases, in Sales Force or some other tool, here’s the step of the sale or the journey or the opportunity and here’s the content that belongs here. There needs to be I think a broader context too to help educate the sales person and let them make good qualified decisions in and out of that and respond to their behaviors as well. Marylou: A lot of times, when we’re focused on top of funnel, we tend to be activity based. What you’re saying is the way you help people is to look contextually as to where things are and what the best decisions to make and activity follows but it’s not driven by activity. Is that a correct statement? Marc: Yes. Well, it’s driven by activity because you have to ask the right questions to know did I accomplish what I needed to accomplish. We write a lot of playbooks that say don’t go to this activity until this is completed. But to your point, I think it’s important to know that we’re not dealing with automatons, we’re dealing with people who we want to give them the right information and knowledge to help make good qualified decisions, right? That’s what we’re really responding to, to say yes, here’s an outline. But more importantly, we want to them to create competencies around recognizing where they are, not being told where they are. And know when they hear certain words and experience certain things, it can pivot quickly on that and be able to respond to it. I think you’ll agree with me, Marylou, that things can be lost and your effort can be wasted if you’re merely following a process and not recognizing the fact that somebody just leap frogged over something and you don’t have to go through that process. You may actually frustrate somebody. I’ve seen that in junior people. Marylou: When I reference the activity, I mean the number of dials, or the number, just the action of doing something as opposed to sitting back and thinking through where is this person that I’m going to have this conversation with or that I’m trying to having to have this conversation with, where is he in his head right now? What can I say that will get him to lean in and recognizing that all is not well, that we have problems, there are problems out there. Your tools allow the reps, once they are in the top of funnel. The premise is that we’ve identified the right person already when we start engaging with your type of work. There is some work that we need to do top of funnel to get to the right person and we have leveraged technology for that, we have a pretty good way of doing that. Where people are getting stuck, majority of my clients are getting stuck in the meaningful conversation. They don’t know what to say, what to do, how to say it, when to say it, and to whom to say it. That’s where think when I talk about activity, it’s not about the number of dials, it’s not about the number of connects, it’s not about the number of conversation, it’s about the number of meaningful conversations. Having a tool or having a process in place like you’re describing would give us the opportunity to have more quality conversations, thereby increasing the likelihood that we’re going to get from point A to point B faster and with more quality which is going to be a better return on the effort for the sales executive. Marc: No questions. I think I misunderstood your comment in the beginning but to that point, yes,  I’m in 100% there that it’s all about the conversation. We have a process which results in something called the conversation coach which actually solves that problem. It gives people information at their fingertips to listen for and recognize and think about where that prospect is in their thinking and how to unstick them at any particular place. Don’t throw somebody away before you’ve actually explored that because we know we don’t want to waste effort but at the same time if we’ve taken the time with the number of dials to bring somebody in the boat and they’re clearly stating they have a problem, let’s make sure that we can give them enough to keep it moving along and recognize the value of what we can do for them because we’re there to help. Sales people are about helping customers. Marylou: Yes. I think to your point, marketing is spending a lot of time generating hand raisers for us. If we are good about our record selection and we’re targeting accounts, then theoretically by definition, anyone who bubbles up to the top is worthy of a conversation. We can’t waste that just because they’ve given us an objection or we haven’t been able to get a hold of them or we haven’t said something to them that gets them thinking, “Wow, I really should spend five to ten minutes talking to these folks because they hit me right in the heart of what my problems probably are. I never recognized it that way.” That’s where the types of tools that you provide come in so handy, and that’s where most of my folks get stuck. We can get people to bubble up to the top of at least responding to us but then you have to take that conversation to something meaningful. That’s where I see a lot of people losing those records and losing those leads into a bucket that we can never recover from. We become this sort of non-ending, revolving door of just getting leads in but the conversion rate from the lead to a qualified opportunity suffers. I’m not an expert in opportunity to close but I can only imagine that it also suffers there. Marc: It does. It even goes with the customer care. It doesn’t stop with once you close business, but particularly with SAAS companies and those who want to expand their relationships. I’m finding even working with customer care organizations that it’s problematic because they don’t have the right challenges and questions to ask and insights to give their customer to have them realize that there’s value in either something else we have or just changing the way you do things. Marylou: Yeah, that’s a good point because I know a lot of us are users of SAAS products where we have renewals sometimes after a year, sometimes two, depending. I’ve never been happy with getting a renewal notice where I haven’t heard from the company after I bought the product. I haven’t heard from them at all until it’s time to renew now. I think those are areas of improvement that we could see very quickly if we bring them into the fold of conversation that’s enlightening, that helps me do my job better, that helps me use their tool to get better results in my daily life. Marc: Yeah. Sometimes, I simplify it down. You said it so eloquently, we don’t need demoers, we need problem solvers. You have be able to go in and have this conversation about understanding the prospect customer’s problem and having a meaningful conversation to get them to go, “Yes, of course, that makes sense to me, let’s keep talking.” Instead, we see too many organizations, particularly in technology, where, “I got you on the phone, would you like to see a demonstration?” I think the big challenge that I’m seeing, I don’t know where your observations are, but there’s high commoditization around solutions in the technology world especially. It’s hard to differentiate your value and that’s a big problem that’s happening. They don’t know how to express themselves when it comes to helping that customer. First, realize they have a problem that can be solved and then how to uniquely add value to them. Marylou: It’s funny, the information is there for the rep. If you’re in a larger company, chances are marketing has put together spec sheets, they’ve done a lot of different posts and blog posts and info graphics and this and that and these and those about all the product stuff. But to have it available at your fingertips so that if you hear some keyword that then immediately allows you to scan potential scenarios of how to help the customer or the prospect recognize that what they are talking about is severe enough so that it’s worth their time to continue conversation with you. That’s where people are just falling down. It’s not as if we don’t have the information, it’s just that the information is so vast and spread out in the corporation or we just don’t have it at our fingertips. If we’re not studying it on a daily basis, we’re just not going to have it engrained in our body language or just our body itself as to how to overcome all of these things. Having the ability to have a repository of result information at your fingertips, for a rep especially since we’re talking to a lot of people top of funnel, I think it’s just a great way for the reps to feel more confident, more competent, and they’ll be able to have these conversation with their prospect personas no matter what level of the organization they’re talking to. Marc: Yes. What you just said had me kind of sum up what we do in that regard in a couple of words. One is it’s a packaging problem, it’s a testability problem and it’s a reinforcement problem. What we do and what I try to architect is great packages of knowledge and learnings and content that are contextually oriented, and it continuously reinforces. Out of sight, out of mind, I’d have spoken to that person about that solution for months. How do I keep things fresh in my mind and how do we keep reinforcing that value proposition and that ability in the sales professional’s mind on a regular basis? Marylou: That’s why I think if you’re a sales manager listening to this call, I get it, they say training doesn’t work. People, once they’re trained, a week later they forgot it all. I kind of agree with that because if you’re not using it, you’re going to lose it. If you’re not constantly studying it, then you’re not going to necessarily be as sharp. And like you just said, if you’re talking to a prospect about product A and you don’t have any more product A conversations for the rest of the month, you’re not going to be as sharp. It’s impossible to retain all that knowledge and all those scenarios and all those kind of scripts and plays and what not in your head. I like the idea of what you’re doing in that you’re enabling the reps to have this information at their fingertips, their recall is very easy, and there’s also a what if condition set in and what’s the next step. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves that I see a lot with reps is that they don’t have idea of what the next step should be, they don’t have an idea of what they should be suggesting as the next step. Having these conversation kind of scenarios already set up for them, I think we should see a rise in the conversion rates. Have you experience that with your clients that once this is in place, because it’s there and it’s becoming enriched, I would imagine there’s an enrichment process where you are learning and adding more to the system as life goes on and you have more conversation but do you see a pretty good rise in the conversion rates all across the pipeline? Marc: We do and it’s supported in other research as well. When customers actually execute well and they support adoption, meaning up and down as a vehicle to do this, there’s definitely rise in conversion rates. One other point is CSO insights point out. We started this whole thing and the result is that those who have a knowledge culture compared to those who don’t in a fluid knowledge culture see a 25% differential in revenue attainment and quota attainment than those that don’t, there’s a lot of, just not my anecdotal research but other research out there as well. Marylou: Actual quantitative research, which is great. Let’s talk nuts and bolts. I’m a curious person, I want to know just a high level, how does one build the repository. When I’m working with clients, just to give you a background, we’re working on emails for our cold engine for example. We take the cold engine first to tackle, then we’re collecting a repository of whatever content, whatever surveys, whatever touchpoints, anything related to the prospect and customers that we can get our hands on, and then we dump it in this big pot. From there, we flip it sideways, we do some qualitative research on it to pull out keywords etc., and we come up with eventually an eight type sequence of emails that we think are going to enable people to raise the hand faster. What do you if you’re a manager sitting here thinking that this is great but we have information everywhere? What does the process to start collecting the data and putting it into the engine look like? Marc: Not dissimilar to what you just described. I know it’s funny how all things align. We start with typically looking at what somebody might call a playbook or more importantly getting underneath that playbook and looking at what we call a value conversation inventory. I think it’s a lot of the work that you do that I get excited about. These messages, these insights, these questions have all been thought through relative to how you’re going to engage both from a prospecting and then even further down the pipeline. Flesh that out, does it exist? Some cases, I’m going in organizations and none of that material is available. Marylou: One thing that I find is that I go through blog posts, they may be the competitor’s blog post or they may be the client’s, I look at any type of reviews that I could find and I dump everything, as much as possible to get the language, I dump things into a database. From there, create a qualitative analysis and almost like a sentiment database that allows us by persona, we try to break it up by persona too because we want to segment down to the person. Sales is a person to person dialog; it’s not company to company, it’s not sales rep to people, it’s rep to client, it’s one to one. We really look at how these people are talking because it’s different. If I have clients maybe sell to IT, maybe sell to sales for example, those are two different language sets, it’s like two different languages completely. We’re constantly looking at trying to glean information whether it’s there or not and come up with the value that we bring to the table. What the dos are, what the product does that’s maybe different or an outlier or something different, a lock out they call it, that we can say, “Yes that’s great that they do that, but this is how we do it and this is why it matters to you.” We collect all that and put it in. In our case, we have worksheets, we have trees, we have different types of matrixes that we use in order to be able to generate the email engine. It is similar to what you are saying that you guys do. Once they get it in there and actually start having conversations, is there a way for us to track the conversation that are gleaning the fastest pipeline velocity with the highest quality? Are there mechanisms that are built into the document engine so that we can see which conversations are yielding more revenue more quickly and of more lifetime value? Marc: Yes, that’s really dependent on what their CRM is and how they’re tracking their own records. Let me explain, we have a system, our technology works with something called the XAPI which tracks all the interactions with content whether you’re sending something to a customer or you’re you’re consuming it yourself. Part of our architecture is to go in and say okay, what CRM are you using and how do you want to relate what’s being used here to seeing how it’s affecting your pipeline. Is it enough to do is as if you’re doing pipeline management inside of your CRM, we then match the result to the activity that you’re performing to each individual record and then take that back. We can give you some very good analytics on how well the performance support is assisting in the close of the deal or moving it faster from the velocity perspective. Marylou: Cool. I don’t want to overwhelm everybody. We’ve kind of gone through a good discussion to at least get them exposed to what’s out there in terms of helping sales professionals have better conversations that are more meaningful in nature with their prospects. With the goal of creating a fan base of clients who would recommend you to other companies if you’re selling B2B and also a longer life time value. I hope that this podcast has gotten you guys kind of thinking, “Wow, this is a cool thing.” Marc, how would someone get a hold of you to have further discussions around the assembly, the activation and the optimization of a product or a service like yours? Marc: You’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn or go to our website which is thevalueshift.com. My email address for everybody out there is mmcnamara@thevalueshift.com, happy to reply back or have a conversation if anyone’s interested. Marylou: This is a scenario where we can provide you with all the technology to get velocity in terms of records at top of funnel, but where the rubber hits the road is that you guys have got to be able to have meaningful conversations with your prospect and gently pull them through the pipeline in a way that’s going to increase the velocity to close. The way you do that is by working harder and understanding why change, why now and why you? This is a tool that allows you to get there faster because we’ve been encapsulated all of the potential sales conversations in a tool. It’s also designed to help the team know which conversations are causing people to bubble up faster, which ones are responsible for higher close rates, and which conversations are going to yield clients who are going to stay with us longer. It’s really the next step, especially if you’re a process geek like if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are, you are. This is one of the tools you’re going to want to look at because if you’re on the fence about training and knowing that periodic training is not the way to go, this is everyday training. This is intra-day training that’s available to the reps, and they’re only going to get better. I think that in terms of tools to help enablement, a tool like this that allows all of the sales conversations to be in a repository for easy access is going to be the next level of getting predictable revenue. Marc, thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it. Marc: Thank You Marylou, Thanks everybody for listening.

Episode 40: Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team – Max Cates

Predictable Prospecting
Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team
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How do you become a strong leader? How do you encourage your team to be not just good, but great? My guest today is an expert on managing sales teams and the author of Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers: A Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team Through Collaboration. Max Cates is here to discuss why sales managers should focus on continuous improvement, what separates the good managers from the bad, and using the Six Sigma process for eliminating defects and improving your team.
 
max-catesEpisode Highlights:
  • How Max Cates got started in sales management
  • Discussing Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers
  • Why sales superstars make poor managers
  • Implementing a tactical plan for your sales team
  • The millennial sales team
  • Six Sigma for sales
  • The McKinsey Issue Tree
  • Setting good stretch goals

Resources:

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hello everybody! It’s Marylou Taylor and today I have a guest who I think you’ll just need to get some coffee, sit back and listen to if you’re into sales management. Very top of mind for me because I’m in the process of working with a couple of vendors right now and putting some webinars together on this topic. With me today is Max Cates. He is the author of Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers. His book is released in 2015 and it’s coming on, you said your anniversary, right Max? Max: Yes, first year anniversary. By the way, it’s a pleasure joining you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today. Marylou: Well, thank you. Max is an expert in all things dealing with the management of all types of salespeople, correct? It’s not just top of funnel. Can you elaborate on the book itself and in terms of the area of the specialty that you are talking about? Max: Yeah, primarily the undercurrent that lies throughout this book is servant leadership. I’ll give you a little background on how I got into it in sales management and that kind of thing. First, I spent the first half of my career just about 20 years on the non-sales side. Primarily in marketing, advertising, corporate communications and leadership positions. There again, for Fortune 500 companies. When I shifted over to the sales management side, I was really kinda surprised because I came from a background of employee involvement in which you would make decisions planning procedures based on employee input. You would get your employees involved in the process, some call it employee participation, involvement programs. But basically, you’d get to involve in decision making and you would share in the process. You would use their knowledge and their expertise to help come up with better decisions. This actually goes to back to 1940s with what’s known as TQM, Total Quality Management. Long story short, when I got into sales management, I found more and more of a command control type of management. I’ll typify this whole  process by one conversation I had early in the going with another sales manager. The manager was working on a pricing program. He was having problems, he was asking for my input. We kind of discussed pricing and customer discounts, real wide variety. Then, I asked him, I said, “What do your reps think about it? Do you have their input?” His response was, “Well no, why would I want their inputs? I mean, these yahoos can’t even make their objectives. Why do I want them to help me run my job?” I was kind of surprised by that but then the more time I spent, the more I found out that it seems like antiquated command control system was fairly prevalent not only in the companies that I was working for but in talking to other managers in other companies. There again, that’s kind of the impetus for it. When I first started looking, I thought there’s got to be a body of knowledge on using employee involvement in the sales arena. I went through amazon.com, I did my research and I was looking for employee involvement programs as they pertain to sales and basically found nothing. That was kinda of the impetus for me getting involved in writing a book. It primarily, in addition to not finding any resources, the more data and research I found about sales managers encouraged me even a little bit more. For example, one thing I found was that one recent research program showed that only 50% of sales managers have received any kind of sales management training from the time that they were named sales manager. In addition to that, for example the top 25 business schools in the United States, only half of them offer any kind of sales management curriculum. To capsulize it, the book is really offered as an alternative, as an option that sales manager can refer to as a way to enhance their own effectiveness. It’s really something that hadn’t been offered before that I could find. It’s an option to sales management. It’s a way to tap into the energy strengths and experience of sales people to make the sales manager’s job easier and more effective. Marylou: I know that part of effectiveness training that we focused on for sales reps in three areas is really time management, personal effectiveness and communication. For top of funnel, it’s all about trying to blend those three categories together to create an SDR whose consistently developing opportunities that they can pass to a quota carry rep in the field. A lot of what I see is that sales managers are typically grown from AEs who did really well selling and then they’re all of a sudden walking in the door given a badge, the magic wand over the head, you are now a sales manager. Did you discover that a lot in your interviews and things? Max: Here’s what I found from a research standpoint and also anecdotally. The kind of people who tend to get promoted into sales management jobs are kind of the sales superstars. Here’s the irony of it is that great salespeople usually make poor managers. In fact, I was reading one research study that showed that as high as an 85% failure rate of sales superstars who have gone in sales management. There’s a lot of reasons for that in addition to not receiving sales management training. Here’s how it normally works, this is kind of an over generalization but here’s what I’ve seen personally and even in research studies. The super successful salesperson, when they’re promoted, at first has this concept of, “I’m successful, here are the things that I’ve done to be successful, I’m a great closer, I do great presentations, here’s how I organize my files, here’s how I set appointments.” There’s a very specific skill set that they have going into the sales management job. The overall thought is what I’m gonna do is I’m going to take my approach and I’m going to shape a sales team in my own lightness and it just doesn’t work. Because the sales team is such a complex mixture of human dynamics, you can’t go in and say, “Here’s how we’re going to do it and here’s the plan, I want you to follow me. If you follow me, then we’re gonna be successful.” I can even think back in my early career, I was the same way. I’m a great follower, I’m gonna use these things to be a leader. What happens is salespeople, as naturally independent as they are, they’re not real good followers. When you have a sales manager who comes up with a follow me plan, a lot of sales teams will kind of smile and kinda nod and say, “Yeah, that’s a great plan.” But then what goes on behind the scene is they kinda go on and do their own thing irrespective of what the plan is. Here’s the analogy I use. If you are a really good salesperson, if you’re an outstanding salesperson, you might have up to a 50% closing rate. That’s a pretty good closing rate for a salesperson. But when you’ve got that kind of closing rate as a manager, you’re going to fail because you have half of your team working for you maybe, and then you have the rest of your team who are either against you or indifferent. Either way, if your salespeople are indifferent or if they’re resistant, it’s not working with you. It’s real tough for a sales manager to come up with a plan and get everybody to follow them if they’re not getting buy ins from the sales group. If the salespeople haven’t developed a little sweat equity, if they haven’t become part of the plan and if they feel like they’re not respected enough to be asked their opinion or asked for their input or asked for their involvement, the easiest thing in the world for a salesperson to do is kind of agree on the surface with a plan and then make it an eight to five job. Do my job, go home and forget it. The whole idea of employed participation is to develop this sweat equity approach to get people involved in decision making, to get people involved in planning and organization because the more they’re involved, the more they buy into the program. The more buy in you have, the better their efforts are going to be because it’s their plan. If they’re out executing a plan that’s theirs, they’re going to execute better than executing somebody else’s plan.   Marylou: What I heard you say earlier was there’s a lot of tactical that a sales manager coming into the role will implement or want to put into play because it’s something that’s worked for them. If you have a plan like that and you want to enforce it, how do you get your folks or team to buy into that? Do you present it as an option of this is one way we can get there and look for input to fine tune in? Do you start with a plan that you present to them, are you just bringing everybody in a room and saying, “Okay, here’s our objectives for next year. Let’s roll up our sleeves and design a plan together to get there.” Max: There’s a variety of different ways to do it. I have seen some start with a plan but what I’ve found to be most effective is just to start at ground zero with more of a vision, creating a vision with your reps. For example, you get your reps in a room with you and you start out with what do we need to be doing to be successful and where do we wanna go? How do we create a vision of success? In the book, I used the JFK moon landing vision. John F. Kennedy created this crazy vision of landing a man on the moon. When you compare that to a sales objective or sales vision, it might be we want to be number one in our corporation, we want to be number one in the state or whatever your ultimate, long term vision is. And then develop an action plan to get there. It first depends on getting your people involved and letting them know that number one, we want to be the best we can be. Then asking how do we actually get there? Once you set the vision, then everything starts following down below that. In addition to that is that mutually agreeable objectives for the sales team and mutually agreeable objectives for individual salespeople. In addition to that, you set specific ground rules, metrics. It’s really important to develop the right set of a metric to make sure that they’re commensurate with their overall vision. But once you get your employees involved in this and letting them know that me, that I as a sales manager, am your partner in progress rather than I’m the guy who’s telling you here’s how we’re going to do it, then you start getting a consistent series of input and you develop in your work team, in the book it’s called an entrepreneurial approach. An entrepreneur is an entrepreneur who’s operating in a corporate environment. This kind of salesperson is the kind of person who’s going to come to you with ideas on how to get the job done better, on sales techniques, on training. You’re getting this consistent set of data and information flow coming into you. That not only improves your decision making but it also makes your job a lot easier. You’re not having to do all the heavy lifting. The traditional command control manager is kind of a lone wolf. He’s kind of in his own silo or she is in her own silo. They’re developing plans, procedures, ways to monitor success, tracking metrics on their own. What the book emphasizes is that the days of the lone wolf sales manager are pretty much over now for a number of reason. Number one, you’ve got global competition. In addition to that, as you had mentioned earlier, technology, rapidly advancing technology. You also have a workforce that’s changing dramatically because now we have baby boomers who are being replaced by millennials. They have their own set of challenges to traditional managers. For example, millennials are more likely to like to work in teams. They’re kind of collaboration oriented, they also seek more input than baby boomers did. They’re more technological savvy. There’s a whole difference that management needs there as we see the workforce changing. That kind of gets into one of your prior questions is what have I been developing since I started on the book. That’s one of the biggest changes because officially, millennials are now the largest workforce segment having replaced baby boomers. It takes a lot of complex approaches to management that the lone wolf manager just, you just can’t do it, it’s just too complex, too challenging. One premise of my book is this, that it’s a lot easier to be a successful servant leader than it is to be a poor manager. Being a poor manager takes a lot time. You’ve got to invest a lot of time in planning, developing and monitoring. It’s really a lot of heavy load, a lot of heavy lifting. When you could share it with your reps, it not only makes your job easier but makes your decision making better and it creates an environment, the sales culture that’s going to be more successful than a typical command control sales sculpture. Marylou: Especially in the newer sales models, like the ones that we advocate which is separating out the sales roles into multiple role types. If there’s one manager over all of that, it makes it difficult to be a command in control because there are very different styles of management and managing depending on the role of the sales person. As an example, the top of funnel folks that I worked with, business developers are really on a daily metric rhythm. We’re looking for more of that hard worker profile, they’re coming in and doing a lot more communication on a daily basis with daily metrics that are actionable in nature that they’re trying to meet. When the prospect moves further into the sales pipeline, we get more of a relationship building, sales person. The metrics may change to weekly, quarterly depending on the size of the actual revenue potential. But if you have one manager overall that you’re trying to micromanage, it’s an impossible task. Something is going to break in that type of model. One of the other things that I thought was interesting from your book, I’m a big fan being an engineer of course, of the lean, six-sigma, that methodology. I apply it actually to my framework. I notice that you’ve also adapted, adopted, taken pieces or maybe even the whole thing to looking at the the success of the team, performance. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Max: What I’ve recommended, I’ve got two models here; the six sigma and the dimming process. Just to give you an example on six sigma, you can use six sigma in a sales environment. What I recommend is to use it as a teamwork tool. For example, the six sigma process has five basic steps. First, this is part of the whole continuous improvement concept in sales management. Continuous improvement meaning that you don’t settle for last year’s accomplishments, you continuously build and continuously make your sales process better year by year. Using six sigma, the first part of it is to define your problem. In a teamwork environment, let’s say for example that you have a sales cycle that’s two weeks longer than the industry average, you need to compress your sales cycle. You define the problem. First, you have a longer sales cycle than you’d like and then you define the components of that problem. It could be a lack of technical assistance, it could be a level of customer knowledge, it could be discounts and all these things that impact your sales cycle. Maybe you’re not offering enough discounts or promotional incentives. Maybe you’re not offering adequate technical assistance to make the sales faster. Maybe the customer doesn’t know enough about the product and they’re taking longer to make a decision. You define the problem and the components of the problem. Then, second step is to measure. Let me back up a little bit, you do this with your team because these people are really the ones who know the answers to your problems. If you have a slow sales cycle, a manager might have some ideas of what the problem might be, but you could probably go to any sales person and say, “Hey, we need to make this sale cycle faster, how do we do it?” They can probably tell you, they know, they know the answer. Sitting down, getting your team involved in the process, asking them these questions, defining the problem. And then number two, how do you measure? In this particular phase, you might measure it by contract dates. You develop a measurement tool. We get sales people to identify contract dates and as well the status of their particular customer. Where do they stand as far as product knowledge, do they need technical assistance? You develop the data to feed your ultimate decision making and then you analyze it. The third step is to analyze that data, to take a look at the dates, the discounts. For example, what level of technical assistance was involved in sales? And then the fourth step is to improve. For example, let’s say that you find customers who have technical person come out and help them in the early going of the sales buy faster. That tells you right there we need to get more technical people out on the sale early to speed up the sales cycle. Or, it could be discounts. Maybe you’re showing a positive correlation between the level of discounts offered and the speed of the sale. Maybe customers will buy faster if they’re offered the discount earlier. You institute, you implement these various tactics to improve your sales cycle. The fifth one is really the easy part and that’s continuing to track your sales cycle, continue to monitor incentives, to provide training and all the administrative support to implement those improvements that you’ve identified. That’s kind of a nutshell of the six sigma using the specific example. It’s basically a five step process. The key thing is getting your team involved in it because they’re gonna provide you with rich data. But, even more importantly than that, they’re going to buy into the process and really make your execution a lot more effective in the long run. The other kind of things that you look at in this whole six sigma process, one of the key things is root cause of analysis. Too many times when we get involved in problem solving specially in sales management, you take a look at a problem and you take a look at how we’re gonna solve it without necessarily looking at what the root cause of that problem is. Six sigma gets you to the root cause because you defined the problem and you developed metrics to measure how your solution is working to the problem. Instead of saying, “Okay, our sales cycle needs to be speeded up,” or, “We need to be generating more new business.”  What do we do, do we offer new incentives? What do we do on a superficial basis just to kinda get the problem addressed and move on to other things? Well, six sigma goes below that down to the root cause and it develops a sustainable program that you can use year after year. But in addition to that, to developing a sustainable program that’s going to be successful on an annual basis, it also gives you the numbers to see where maybe this solution at one time worked but a year later it doesn’t seem to work as well. We need to go back and take another look at it. I’ll give you an example in a six sigma process, you can come up with let’s say your sales cycle. Let’s say that you are trying to compress your sales cycle and you found out that discounts really made a difference today but in a year you find out through your tracking that discounts aren’t working as well, customers are getting tenured to discounts upfront. We need to look at some other alternative because everybody is offering discounts so it’s kind of deluding the effectiveness of your discount program. That’s the other good thing about the six sigma process and that’s sustainability. Marylou: We use a portion of that to define at the top of funnel the pain points that we’re going to have in our sales conversations. We actually settled on the Mckenzie issue tree because sometimes the six sigma, the five whys was a difficult thing for some clients to grasp. We use this issue tree where we start with the root issue and then we drill down from there and eventually get to root cause but it’s more of a less structure way, I guess, of just kind of branching off of a tree to say well, it’s this problem but that means it’s really comprised of all these different things. That allows us to then take those pain points and create effective campaigns for email or scripts for voice mail, things like that, tactically. I love the idea of looking at these and analyzing it through the root cause it does. Everything changes. One of the things that I think your book really speaks to is the fact that this is something that you don’t set it and forget it. It’s a continual cycle of continuous improvement. We’re really trying to build a cohesiveness with our teams but also stretch goals and get to the point where we can continually improve the sales environment and also the revenue potential. Max: Yes, exactly. One point that I make in the book is to stretch but don’t over stretch. Stretch objectives are great. However, one of the studies that I was taking look at… First, 75% of high performing sales team set stress objectives, set objectives that are 10% or higher. However, that’s the good side of it. On the other side of it, sometimes we have a tendency to over stretch. It’s estimated that it’s as high as 80% of stretch goals are not achieved. Here’s one thing that I put in the book, instead of making for example a 15% sales goal that you know you can’t achieve, why not set it at even 8%? Which is a stretch but something that you can achieve. Here’s what happens, let’s take a look at two years time. It would be better to achieve 8% on an 8% objective. Over two years time, you have 16% growth as opposed to 15%. Even if you achieve 8% on a 15% objective, you made the same percent of increase, however, it’s viewed as a failure. It’s kind be more realizing for sales team when you over stretch when you can make that stretch objective a little bit more moderate but something achievable. Marylou: Indeed, indeed. Max, how can people get a hold of you if they want more of your time to discuss the material in the book or other learnings that people can flock to you for that relate to this book? Max: I do regular articles on LinkedIn. The best way to take a look at sampling is to go to my LinkedIn account. I have a full array of articles there that all pertain to subjects from my book. And then also all of the booksellers online have excerpts from the book as well including amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, any kind of bookseller online has the book as well. Marylou: Very good. So LinkedIn is one way to get a hold of you. Is there a website that you have that people can go to or is it mainly through the LinkedIn vehicle? Max: Primarily through LinkedIn. Marylou: For those of you again, the book is on all the major retailers, it is an excellent read for those of you who are in management or even considering going into management because you know that a lot of times, the more tenure we have with the company, there is a little bit of an expectation that we’re gonna be moving up into management. This will give you a well rounded recipe, if you will, of how to get there and get there in a way that’s going to ensure success for you, your team, and also the quality of life of a sales team I think will be enriched by reviewing and reading and following the steps in Max’s book. Thanks again Max for your time, very much appreciated. Max: I appreciate it too, thanks a lot.

Episode 39: On Social Selling and Linkedin – Kurt Shaver

Predictable Prospecting
On Social Selling and Linkedin
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Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin – there’s a huge chance that your ideal customer has an account on at least one of them. As our role as business developers continues to evolve, the technologies and techniques we use to connect with prospects has changed as well.kurt-shaver My guest today is Kurt Shaver of The Sales Foundry, an expert on leveraging social selling and using Linkedin as part of the sales process. We discuss how to research and connect with prospects on Linkedin, becoming an business expert on your social media platforms, and the essential skills all new sales development reps need to have.
 
Episode Highlights:

  • Why is social selling important?
  • The evolution of Linkedin: Outbound prospecting and inbound marketing
  • Inbound marketing for the new SDR
  • Broadcasting and curating
  • Essential outbound marketing skills for the new SDR
  • Working in time blocks while prospecting on Linkedin
  • Researching and using Linkedin as a disqualification machine
  • What does Kurt Shaver do?

Resources: Connect with Kurt Shaver on Linkedin, follow him on Twitter, and visit him on the web at The Sales Foundry

Episode Transcript

Marylou:      Hey everybody! It’s Marylou Taylor and today’s guest is someone you’re gonna really wanna listen to. Grab your coffee or whatever you’re doing right now and make sure that you’re leaning in to this podcast. Our guest today is Kurt Shaver; he is by far one of the best known and I think very smart people in the area of leveraging social selling, meaning is it strictly in LinkedIn or are you in other things now, Kurt? Kurt:            It’s mostly LinkedIn, we can talk about a couple of other things but mostly LinkedIn. Marylou:      I asked Kurt on the show today because many of you know our roles as business developers are changing. Some of you are now known more as account based selling folks where you’re targeting a core number of accounts or an anchor, I have clients that call them anchor accounts. Some of you are still using the more traditional methods described in Predictable Revenue of selling, but all of us are concerned about whether we get a lead from marketing or some other channel of getting that first conversation or follow-up conversation under our belts so that we could move our prospects to a qualified opportunity. Now, Kurt, his area specializes in that very thing; that’s why I asked him to join us today. Welcome to the show. Kurt:            Great, Marylou. I am looking forward to our talk. Marylou:      Yes, so tell me, I think I last contacted you a couple years ago when I was struggling myself trying to figure out how to leverage LinkedIn. Can you give us an idea of what has changed in the last couple years and where you see this all going with respect to starting conversations with people top of funnel, the right decision makers at the right time leveraging LinkedIn. Kurt:            Sure. Well, LinkedIn is 13 ½ years old now so LinkedIn is a teenager, that doesn’t exactly feel like it’s a new thing anymore. If sales leaders or sales people or marketing executives needed any more convincing that this whole social selling technique was not just a fad, I think you only have to look back a couple of months to the world’s biggest software company plunking down $26.2 billion when Microsoft announced it was buying LinkedIn. That’s a real hand riding on the wall kind of phenomena but social networking is just gonna be stitched into every aspect of software and really every aspect of business. I think the 90s were really the ushering in of the internet and the oughts was when kind of everything became web enabled. Since then, social networking as a subset technology of internet has just been huge in the actual interaction and that basically comes down the communication which is what drives people and brings us back to our discussion of lead generation, top of the funnel, connecting with decision makers, all of those things play perfectly into social networking. Marylou:      Okay. You know where I’m coming from with our trips over here, we’re process oriented people trying to figure out how to leverage this as one of the key process elements. Can we think of LinkedIn as part of our process or is it something that we manually do, what is it or how does it evolve to the point where we can leverage it as a piece of technology? Kurt:            Yeah, so there’s a couple elements to that. I think it would be helpful for everybody to kind of start it this way. I always say the primary function of LinkedIn, primary value really is lead generation, it’s starting that. It will help in other areas as you move along the sales cycle but its main value is getting the sales cycle started top of funnel. In doing that, there’s basically two activities, that really I’ll break down into the two activities. There’s out bound prospecting which salespeople are all very used to. Outbound prospecting is essentially just looking at LinkedIn like a fresh database of 450 million business professionals and being able to slice that and dice it based on your ideal customer profile the same way you would any database with the huge differential advantage that you get to lay your own individual network on top of that database to find out where there’s common connections. As if 450 names wasn’t big enough, and if the fact that this is all fresh and updated because every number maintains their own profile, as if that wasn’t big enough, you also get to overlay your own network on it. From an outbound prospecting role of decks, network, CRM, referral, introduction, all those things that salespeople are used to, it’s unparalleled cause that’s number one, is outbound prospecting. The second activity though which is newer for certainly salespeople is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has become a very popular method over the last five to eight years as people just turn to the internet to find more information. The marketers realized, “Oh, we need to put information out there so that we can be compositional as thought leaders and subject matter expertise and they come to our websites, webinars, and get our e-books and all these things.” What’s changed in the social selling realm where I focus very much of the salespeople side is that again because everybody has a social network, essentially each person is a mini marketer of one, each sales person becomes a mini marketer one. Individually, they can all take advantage of this inbound marketing idea by sharing content, posting it, engaging it and again, attracting customers to it. It’s essentially the question was how is it been the process? There’s really two processes; outbound prospecting and inbound marketing. Both meant to fill the funnel and the difference is it’s the salespersons doing it, it’s not the marketing department doing it, it’s the sales person. Why is that important, take some company that’s got 500 sales people. Well guess what, they probably have one website and they have one LinkedIn company page, and they one Twitter account. Maybe they got a Facebook page or something like that. That’s like four or five properties that the company marketing department owns but then again if we have 500 salespeople, that’s 500 websites in it of itself in their LinkedIn profiles. If they have Twitter accounts for business, now we got a thousand properties represented really under control of the sales team as opposed to four compared to what marketing announced that’s where the power of social selling comes in. Marylou:      When you said that inbound marketing, that got my attention really fast and that is because one of the things that I like to instill in the business developers I work with is a mindset that they are colleagues of their intended target. Whoever their prospecting to like the CEO, COO, whatever, CMO, that they are at the same level colleague wise. If I’m an SDR, what kind of inbound marketing things do you think, starting out, cause these folks might be fresh out of college or just one to two years in sales total. How could they leverage in inbound marketing? What are some of the things that they could do in order to be able to start building awareness around their expertise? Kurt:            There’s a couple of things they can do. The simplest step would be to share some of their own company’s content like with their social networks. That’s sort of like the easiest level but you don’t wanna do that too much or you end up basically looking like you’re pirating company information only. What value are you adding at that point because the prospects or your connections could have just subscribed to company blogs? You got to mix in other types of content. Again, you’re doing this very similar to like how a magazine editor thinks of their audience. The magazine editor doesn’t write the articles, the magazine editor just ticks articles because they know their audience interest, they decide I’m going to read 50 things and 6 are going to make the cut this month. The sales person or SDR or whatever role there is, they’re certainly reading things about their industry which are not coming from their company, right? They’re looking at trade magazines or portals or Mashable or cio.com or whatever they happen to be reading. They’re reading stuff about the industry. As they see things like, “Hey, this is news. Oh, this is an article my audience would be interested in,” they can then share that with their social network, they have this content broadcast mechanism now at their disposal. As they do that, the better that they become as a magazine editor or as a curator of that information and they get dialed into the interest of their audience and they know what’s valuable to them. They’re raising their visibility and credibility such that when the need comes around and that prospects company for a particular thing, they sort of jump top of mind and that’s where you’re causing that idea of actually attracting customers to you because you are establishing your reputation by the content you are sharing. Marylou: Are there any other things that people can do to sort of get a toe in the water of inbound marketing? I like the idea of it becoming a broadcast or a curator. Is that done through the update mechanism in LinkedIn that you are doing this or you said that there’s a broadcast mechanism now? Kurt: Yes, you can do a couple of different things in LinkedIn; there is a specific action. You can do an update which an update could or could not have like a piece of content associated with it. You could update and post the link of a blog URL and write your own little comments along with it so that you’re adding value above and beyond just the blog itself. You can also simply share content that could be done through Twitter, you can post it to groups, so if there’s a group that you are involved with and you think, “Wow! This will really be a valuable information with the group, you can share that way, just slightly different because you’re sending it into a targeted group of folks that are already rallied around some particular topic or title or industry or something like that. The other thing that you can do which would still fall under the social engagement umbrella, you can go in and react, you don’t have to be the initiator, you can go in and react to what somebody else has already started. Whether it is a shared post or somebody just started a thread about some topic in your industry, if you’re gonna jump in the conversation just like in the real world if you’re at a networking conference or industry trade show and people were gathered around the bar talking about this topic, same thing’s gonna happen on LinkedIn and on social network where you can weigh in and if you have a valuable opinion you’re gonna raise your feasibility there so that would just be commenting on something that somebody else had started. Marylou: That’s it for inbound marketing in terms of I know we’re just kinda scratching the surface here but essentially getting started as an SDR business developer from an inbound perspective, sharing articles that are of value to your prospect personas is perhaps commenting on existing dialogue that’s happening out there or putting up your own questions if you’re in a group. Let’s switch over to outbound, what are the most impactful? I’m putting you on spot here cause I’m expecting you to know what the SDR does on daily basis but I think you’d know. In your mind, what will be the most impactful tactical actions that an SDR can take from an outbound  prospecting point of view? Kurt: If it is an SDR, they are fairly young and they probably don’t have their big business network, I would actually flip the advice of these actions that I usually would give to a more senior sales force. If you’re trying to trigger an initial connection with the prospect. First, it had to be two things; you gotta find them and then you gotta connect with them. The finding them is understanding the search and how it works, what are my filters, how am I gonna use them fully in operator to whittle it down, just the ideal absolute best target. That’s finding the people, you end up with a search results as much as you would in Google except this time it’s people on LinkedIn that fit your search and ideal customer personas, so you found them. Now the question is what strategy are you gonna use to reach out for them that’s better than just cold? Usually, what I say is the number one priority is to leverage a common connection. If you can use either an introduction which will require a proactive action on the part of the common connection or whether you’re just gonna name drop which is usually a little faster because you don’t have to get involved with third party, that’s usually the best way because there is that commonality piece of it, but again that relies on you having a fairly strong network. The bigger the network, usually the more you’ve been in the industry, you’re gonna have a bigger network and so those chances of having a common connection grow, grow and grow. If you’re an SDR you might not have a big network, maybe you have not been in the industry, the technique you’re probably gonna wanna use is research based. You’re gonna be doing your social research, now social research can have a couple different ways on the simplest level particularly if you’re like using the free version of LinkedIn, that’s just gonna be a quick scan of that person’s profile to see what you can pick up. How long have they been at work, where they worked before, like where did they go to school, what’s their industry, have they been posting stuff on LinkedIn or do they have a Twitter account that they use for business. You can go and read, it’s kinda mind reading, like what are their priorities, what are they talking about, what are they posting, so that’s research driven that you’re gonna have to pick up because you’re gonna try again to outreach, you’re gonna try to come up with something of relevance to them to initially gather attention. When you decide what it is, what research you’ve found, now you have a choice of what communication mechanism am I gonna take. If you’re on a  premium version of LinkedIn, you can use its internal messaging system which is called InMail. If you’re on a premium version of LinkedIn your choices could be I’m gonna use LinkedIn InMail system, I’m gonna use regular old email if I know where I can get this person’s email, or I’m gonna pick up the telephone. I found the person, I used LinkedIn, don’t forget the telephone, the telephone is still extremely efficient. You might find the person using LinkedIn, it’s awesome search features against 450 million business professionals and you might research the person on LinkedIn, spend 30 seconds looking at their profile to get one or two nuggets that’s gonna help you in the report but at that point you might be done with LinkedIn and you might turn and pickup the phone and call the person now knowing something, knowing that they looked your profile, knowing something about them and weave that into kind of whatever your opening outreach would be. Marylou: This is great. Listening to this, I’m immediately thinking of sales process. Just to fill you in, our goals with the day in the life of the business developer is usually we’re trying to get five meaningful conversations a day and we’ve allocated  time blocks for that. What kind of time block are we talking about when we’re engaging using LinkedIn and doing whatever, whether it be inbound marketing or outbound prospecting? Is there a best practice as to how much, I know you can spend eight hours doing it but what is the most meaningful amount of time where you’re gonna get the biggest bang for the buck? Or is there such a thing that we can add to our daily rhythm for LinkedIn. Kurt: That’s obviously going to depend a lot on the sales role, really how much prospecting are they doing. In the case of an SDR, I would say it’s gonna be fairly high. If it is an SDR prospecting into a B2B customer base, then I would expect that they’re probably in LinkedIn some way, shape, or form at least an hour a day, maybe more if it’s a field person and they’ve got a bunch of other stuff to do and they’re running around. It might be 20 minutes a day and all done off their mobile phone. It just depends really on the amount of prospecting activities that they’re gonna be doing. Marylou: I’m sure you’ve heard in the industry now, the best words around personalization meaning that when we’re having an email or phone conversation with the potential prospect, we’re to do some research ahead of time to do what you just said before, to find out what the challenges are, to get an understanding of how they use language to describe their challenge etc. etc. Let’s pretend that we have a calling queue of 20 accounts we’re working on at any given time, we may wanna research 10 of those in LinkedIn. From there, we’re going to be able to have these conversations. From a hyper personalization point of view doing 10 accounts a day, is that still that kind of hour time you think, is that when you’re thinking for the SDR? I’m just trying to get a filler for around time wise because their day is already filled with time blocks for phoning, time blocks for doing any type of discovery calls, from working on the calling list for the next day etc etc. Is an hour reasonable for 10 accounts or do we need more than that, what do you think? Kurt: I think that’s reasonable. I guess the clarification I would make is that, but I don’t see it being like it’s one hour curved out from like 11:00 to noon to do LinkedIn stuff and then you go back to your regular process. It’s rather the situation that the LinkedIn steps that I would suggest are gonna be like four or five minutes, they’re gonna be in the process. The process is identification of the person, LinkedIn can help with that. It’s gonna be research, and LinkedIn can help with that, it’s gonna be the social selling on the LinkedIn, it’s gonna be woven into their normal process anyway, I supposed it’s being this like curved off, stand alone time because it has to be integrated into this process that’s ultimately going to end with the conversation. Marylou: What I like to do though with our folks is there is a habitual day in the life of an SDR so to speak. We do tend to do things in blocks. For example if I am getting ready to call my 10 accounts, the night before or in any dead time when calling is not a good time, any hours of the day were connects are horrible, I’m gonna concentrate and pull my accounts for the next day so that when I go home, I’ve done what I need to do for the next business days so when I come in, I have the best time to call, I’m calling. It means I’m tracking all the personalization ahead of time for that particular prospect. My view is I would go into LinkedIn, I would map out my 10 accounts, I would look up all the information I need one after another during that dead time, and the next day I will come in and as part of my process now I have all the personalization I need to get those emails out, to send voicemails, to do whatever I need. That’s how I see an SDR using LinkedIn from a process standpoint. What you’re saying too is that during the day, if someone were to come inbound for example and they have to handle a call or they get on a call and then they get referred to somebody else, that’s the time to look up LinkedIn information on a real time basis or to be able to get what they need. I think that sometimes the SDRs, when we’re multitasking in real time, they lose sight of their calling list and they don’t get to the end. We wanna make sure that they do get to the end which means rather than real time we do our research in blocks as well. Kurt: The other thing that LinkedIn is good for from a research standpoint is finding other people that might evolve in that purchase decision. It might be these are all the people that came through webinar, these are the people that got the email book. We all know that the number of people that are involved in buying committees and purchasing decisions, that’s growing in the B2B space. One of the things that’s great about LinkedIn is it really gives you that visibility either by searching or using that side bar on the right hand side that says people also viewed, it often times shows you so if you’re targeting the big T of IT, it might show you also there is the CIO and here is the director of information security and here is the director of business applications and things like that. It helps you round out who is around that person on the org chart that you might not have otherwise known and again give you a couple different either more chances to get in the door to start a conversation with somebody else or just get those other influences all on the same page. Marylou: That’s brilliant because we map out as part of not all the clients I worked with, but there are some clients that do what I call an immersion program with their accounts where they run a sequence of emails and they may follow up with a voicemail but then they pick one or two days within that sequence of 22-25 bussiness days where we’re doing immersion calling and that’s where that right sidebar comes into play because we’re actually calling in and around the bull’s eye of direct and indirect influencers. People, if you’re listening to this, that right sidebar that Kurt’s talking about is a great place when we’re doing our research to do an immersion program of the people who are going to most likely influence your target and that’s really what we want because as Kurt said, we want to get a foot in the door. We want to have that first conversation, we want to be invited in so LinkedIn gives us a nice way to atleast get an understanding of the org chart and of the roles people are playing both up and down the actual reporting structure. Kurt: I was just talking about a client a little bit about this kind of idea and you know they were saying what a lot of people think, “Oh, I need to get to the C level, I don’t want to look at all these other people. I need to get to the C level. I need to get to the C level.” I have a couple observations; number one I said is, “Do you really need to get to the C level?” A lot of times, it depends on the size of your product offering and the size of the company. The bigger the company, the smaller I can talk to on the org chart to get them to sign off on what is essentially sales training. If I’m a huge company, the manager can sign off on my budget so I don’t have to talk to the C level in the huge company. The other point is not only might they might have the authority but a lot of times those people, maybe they don’t have the signing authority but a lot of times they can tell you a lot of the information that you’re gonna need, they’re often times much more open to share what’s going on the information that you may need to eventually get up to whatever decision maker it is. Marylou: Because we’re disqualification machines in this top of funnel is really our role is to fast track the ones that we know are going to close with the higher probability and a high lifetime value, we kind of want to be on that mindset of we’re disqualifying many people as possible so that we can get to working on all the meaty ones. This is the way to understand what initiatives are in place, whether or not they’ve already started working on something, and where you fit in that timeline to see whether or not it’s a good use of your time today to go after that or to put it in long term follow up for sometime later on down the road. Kurt: That’s good. I like that term disqualification machines. Marylou: Tell us what it is that you do in the world and how you help people understand this LinkedIn engine better. Kurt: As it says on my LinkedIn profile, I help B2B sellers connect with more decision makers. It’s just part of the endeavor to cut through the clutter right between voicemail and caller ID and overcrowded email inboxes and everything else. It’s how you get a hold of people and social networks obviously is a newer channel, a way for reaching people, so if you know all the tricks and ways to leverage it because they are spending time there you can just use that as communication channel to start that initial conversation. Once you can get that initial conversation going, I usually recommend take it off the social network, move in your email, your telephone conversations and things like that. It’s just another way to reach people again because they are spending time there, they’re either researching things or they’re communicating with their network or they’re using it to read up on the latest things. I worked with corporations to put this in into a systematic way. You don’t like that Marylou. Unlike CRM, at least CRM, the company paid money for so they usually allocate some money for training and they have standards and things like that because the company bought the CRM system, that’s not the case with LinkedIn. Everybody walks in the door with their free LinkedIn account. Everybody is doing something different, totally random. The sales that you’re all think of, well it’s free, they’ve had it for like five years, everyone must be an expert on it. Neither one of those is true, it’s like you got all sorts of people using all sorts of different ways. some great, some not, some don’t use it at all, some are using it incorrectly and damaging themselves and your company. I help raise the skill level and standardize, there is a minimum requirement and their consistencies. Those consistencies then actually in corporate sales organization those consistencies then becomes synergistic, it becomes greater than the sum of all those individual parts because of things that you can do with the marketing department and content to amplify the inbound marketing piece of it so that’s what I do. Marylou: I like that. The other thing you mentioned about the outbound piece is that it helps us leverage a common connection. For those of you who hate the word cold, LinkedIn is a great vehicle to kind of warm up that chill and make it not so cold. What is the best way that someone listening to this call who recognizes that they have a bunch of silos out on their company when it comes to LinkedIn and they want to bring it all in and make it more cohesive and actually create a strategy around it, how do they get a hold of you? Kurt: They can go to LinkedIn and they can find me there, Kurt Shaver same my Twitter handle is the same as well and they can link off either one of those to my website which is thesalesfoundry.com This has been great. A lot of fun, I enjoyed talking to you and how this social aspects fits into your predictive prospecting skills. Marylou: We called something the first in ten which will be the outbound prospecting side which is everyday go in, find ten people who are in your network, already first level connections, and look to see second level wise who are in those accounts you’re trying to reach. Like you said, either name drop person from your first level or ask permission to use their name in an email to connect out to second level. I’ve got my folks doing ten of those in the morning or again those dead hours on the phone and just not a good time to use. Ten connections a day times twenty two business days a month is 220 more connections that they’re requesting. If you do this on a daily basis systematically, you will build your network pretty quickly so that all these other things you are talking about will be leveraged and amplified to the point where some people are gonna respond to your cold/warm email for that first conversation. Kurt, thank you so much for your time and again I’ll put all of this information inside of the show notes and LinkedIn is not going away for us people, the B2B side, it’s a very important tool and it’s getting smarter and smarter to the point where we can’t ignore it any longer. We’ve got to use it to leverage those conversations to get more opportunities to the door. Thanks again, Kurt. Kurt: Great, thanks Marylou!

Episode 38: [Interview] Marylou Tyler and Gabriel Padva – Role of the Sales Development Rep (SDR)

Predictable Prospecting
Interview: Marylou Tyler and Gabriel Padva - Role of the Sales Development Rep
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On this episode, I’m interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague Gabriel Padva. Gabriel is the founder and principal consultant at 30,000 FT Strategies, a company that focuses on helping companies communicate with their prospects. He is also a CRO at Revenue Accelerator Inc. We go in-depth into the role of the sales development rep, including how to hire them, train them, and promote them into upper management positions. We also discuss the do’s and don’ts of cold emailing, my must-have tools, and the best sales advice I’ve ever gotten.
 
gabriel-padva-2Episode Highlights:

  • Marylou’s process for identifying new prospects and driving sales
  • Why is sales team specialization important?
  • The evolution of the SDR
  • Client metrics
  • Understanding the ideal account profile
  • Building your list
  • Is the phone still relevant for the SDR?
  • How to work the internal referral system
  • Hiring the best SDR: References, interviews, and skill tests
  • Critical KPI’s
  • The do’s and don’ts of crafting cold messaging
  • Must-have technology tools of 2016
  • The best sales advice Marylou’s ever gotten

Resources: Gabriel’s question checklist for checking references of potential SDRs Tool Recommendations:

Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler

Episode Transcript

Gabriel: I’m really excited today to have a very special guest on the line, Miss Marylou Taylor, Predictable Prospecting. It’s been such a pleasure getting to know Marylou over the years. Marylou is one of my mentors and one of the people that I worked with in the past. I’m  really, really grateful that she’s taking the time to be here with us today. Marylou, perhaps we can just start off by talking a little bit more about our background, your background and how we got to know one another.Marylou: Sure, I’ve essentially been doing this work which is top of funnel, sales process, sales enablement, sales strategy or whatever you wanna call it, it keeps changing as life goes on. I specialize in starting conversations with people we don’t know and trying to get them engaged enough to get them through to a qualified opportunity. Back in 2009 or 2008, I met a gentleman by the name of Aaron Ross. I was working with a client who was looking to put in a lead gen system and I have worked in contact centers for a long time. I was a specialist in outbound prospecting but not necessarily leveraging in the internet in social channels. That got me searching online, found Aaron, and that culminated in creating a book called Predictable Revenue in 2011. Shortly thereafter, we had the opportunity to meet you, Gabriel. We actually flew up to Canada and had a series of meetings with you and worked on some partnership opportunities and so you and I have ebbed and flowed since probably 2011 now, right? Gabriel: That’s right, yeah. I remember when you came up here we went and sat down at Vij’s Restaurant in Vancouver which was still one of my favorite restaurants, the incredible meal, it was a really great time with you and Aaron up here. With Predictable Revenue, and similar to your new book, Predictable Prospecting, I’ve basically been highlighting about half of the book cause there’s so much good content in there and you’ve been in this business now for how many years? Marylou: It’s going on 30 when you count the contact center stuff so it’s been a while before the internet, before cell phones. Gabriel: That’s why I love speaking to you about this topic because you really bake in the actual fundamentals of prospecting, it’s not just the latest gimmick or hack. You’re directly connected with people like Jay Abraham and other incredible markers. I feel like when I speak to you, I’m getting the source of true knowledge of what works and what doesn’t because you’ve been there and you’ve done that and that’s such a privilege to be able to learn from people like you. Marylou: Oh, thank you. All grounded in our mantra is always be testing. I’m willing to try all the new stuff and apply it to the framework, that’s the beauty of having a sales process is that it’s like molding your lead gen with these different applications and pieces of software and technologies and methods. You have the superhighway in place so all you need to do now is take a piece of what’s new, flop it in there, give it a test, give it a whirl and run it against your sampling theories and if it works, great, you keep it. If not, then you tried it. Gabriel: Exactly, yeah absolutely. Always be testing and measuring and pull out the data, tell the truth, right? Marylou: Yes, it’s the stress-free way of conducting a lead generation outreach program where you’re trying to close business with high performing, high likelihood of closing, high lifetime value clients. Gabriel: Nice. Okay, what I like to do is dive into basically three or four different topic areas today. We’re gonna do a sales process, sales development reps or SDRs, cold emailing and then some pieces around technology as well. Let’s start at the top with sales process. What has been your process, Marylou, for identifying new prospects and driving sales? Marylou: Well, the book goes in great depth on that because I found as I’ve been working with clients, especially since the release of 2011 of Predictable Revenue, it talked about the ICP, the ideal customer profile, as a foundation for making sure that you’re talking to the right people at the right time. But it wasn’t deep enough so I spent a lot of time, the last five years in fact, fine tuning that ICP. Chapters one through three of the new book talk about how to generate what we call SWAT 6 which is your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and threats and overlay that with some of the marketing methodologies and data rich research that allow you to not only understand who you should be marketing to and selling to but why you matter and why people should change for what they’re doing now in order to do business with you. We start with that and then that dives right into the ideal account profile, we change it to an ideal account profile because a lot of people now are seeing the value of account based selling .We want to make sure that this book focused on that for those people that who are looking at their top 20 per SDR accounts. I have a lot of clients who just have 250 accounts they’re going after and that’s it. We have to make sure that they really hone in on that so that the ideal account profile goes very much in depth in the book. The next chapter is where Predictable Revenue just fell flat in my opinion, and I was part of the book, which is the ideal prospect personas. I think armed with the SWAT, the ideal account profile and prospect persona, these are not the marketing personas that if you are in a bigger company you may have seen a marketing persona. Think about the end result of a marketing persona is to get a marketing qualified lead. The end result for us, a prospect persona, is to get that first meeting, is to have that are we a fit call, is to disqualify them. We’re going further into the pipeline which means we really need to think through what those personas look like and how we attack them so to speak from a sales point of view, from the sales conversation point of view. When I have all those and there’s a few other concepts in the book that talk about leveraging the products that you’re selling by persona, we call them buying scenarios. Then from there, calculating your list, then you have what you need in order to be able to really assemble at least from a list perspective, the right sales process for going after those accounts. Gabriel: Perfect! Okay, that’s wonderful. I know a big topic for us has always been this concept of specialization. In fact, I learned the concept of specialization from you and from Aaron Ross, that’s one of the key elements to my practice what I teach my clients to work with, but in your own words, why would you say sales team specialization is so important? Marylou: If we’d look at the anatomy of the sales person, there are different skills that one needs depending on where a prospect is in the relative position of the pipeline. When we are at the top of funnel, which is where I focus my efforts, we’re talking to a lot more people. Our goal is to really disqualify them into a small subsets of accounts and people that we can continue our conversation with. That requires a very different skillset than someone who is now taking an opportunity and taking it all the way to close one. Because the skill sets are so different and because the amount of records that we’re working with is so different, then we need different skills in the sales roles, thus the role of top of funnel is really one of more consciousness and really going after people on a daily basis in a very habitual way where as we move further into the pipeline then we are really looking at these accounts as unique. You’ll hear people say, salespeople especially say, every sale is different. That’s probably true from opportunity to close but when you’re going from first meeting to opportunity, there’s a lot more to weed through. There’s a lot more systematic approaches that we know work and we can leverage those systematic approaches in order to guarantee a certain number of opportunities that we’re gonna generate each month. If you go even further up which is the marketing qualified folks, the inbound leads, those are people from a level of awareness who have already become interested or are evaluating your product because they filled out a form, they did something to engage with marketing, and they’re coming inbound. But when we’re doing outreach, we have five levels of awareness to worry about, not just the two of interested and evaluating. We have people who are unaware, we have people who recognize there’s a problem but don’t really know solutions out there, and we have people who recognize the problem, know a solution, but don’t necessarily know that you are one of those solutions. If you think about you it, the skills that you need to bubble people up to the top of the funnel so that you can have these conversations is very different that when you are already engaged, very different. That’s why we like to separate the roles. In addition, let me just say one more thing, the SDR role now is even splitting. That’s not in the book either but basically with account based selling versus a fully mass automated selling approach, we have two different types of SDR roles now that are emerging. Gabriel: Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? Marylou: When you are thinking about working your top 20 and you look in your working status, and I’m talking about relative position in the pipeline. The accounts are usually already in working because you identified them as your top 20. There’s probably been a lot more research done of who the targets are and your methodology for reaching them is more hyper personalized. It’s what everybody is talking about saying, “Oh, we need to write emails that are hyper personalized now, that the SDR takes a template and customizes it for each person that they’re sending to.” That’s a beautiful concept but it only works with a limited number of accounts which usually would be your core or anchor accounts. The other 80% of the accounts that are good candidates for you but you haven’t designated as anchor or core, those are treated with as much automation as possible but intelligent automation which is a different SDR role because then you’re going to in the pipe what you’re doing now, you’re doing a lot more of data personalized e-mails, they’re smarter than mass but they’re not quite hyper right in the middle but they’re reaching a good number of clients that are great candidates for you but they may not be your core or anchor accounts. That’s different. The person doing the ABS, account based selling, is going to be also a more phone proficient rep. They’re going to be calling in blocks immersing into the account doing what I call an intra-day phone essentially calling. Whereas the SDRs that are working the more mass personalized emails data driven are probably responding to responses or maybe they’re chasing click throughs but they are not going in and say, “Okay I’m gonna split into my top 20 accounts today and I’m gonna phone in and around this bull’s eye which we discussed in chapter three, of direct and indirecting influencers until I get a meeting.” Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. Going back to this topic of specialization, do you find that SDRs act as a good farm team to become future account executives down the road? The core challenge here of course is I see a lot of companies wanna spend $80,000 to $100,000 to hire an account executive. It takes six months just to train an anchor on that person before they become a true industry expert. Maybe could you could just speak a little bit to how SDRs in your opinion, whether they can or cannot be a good farm team or future account executives? Marylou: My co-author wrote about this I think in the latter chapter, I think chapter nine. He has a very valid point, he even suggests that when you are interviewing for the SDR role that you mention right up front that this is a position that has room for advancement. I think that it’s desirable to be able to get someone who will come in and do the SDR role knowing it’s more habit based. And then once they have become proficient at it, it’s based on merit, not on tenure, then they have the opportunity to “advance” to an account executive role or maybe they become an account based SDR because that’s a little bit, in my opinion, that position is probably gonna be between the SDR basic role and the AE. And then, they could have all this progression upward, and then there’s the whole account management side of things which is after their client, they also can move over to account management where they’re gonna grow the existing business with upsell and cross sell. It’s not that I don’t think these folks can do all these roles, I think it’s just when you separate the roles, you’re really focusing them like Kentucky Fried Chicken here in the States, one thing and doing it really well. That’s really what you’re looking for is one role they’re gonna do really well and master. That’s not to say that they can’t do the other roles because if you onboard them and test them on the hiring side for the sales aptitude, they should be able to perform all roles and they’ll settle in on a role that really works for them and that they’re happy doing. Gabriel: What will you say the average timeline is before you would recommend promoting somebody from an SDR function to an account executive role? Marylou: I think it’s about 18 months is what I’m seeing, somewhere in that range. Like anything, the more that the roles are separated, the faster they’re going to be tracked and ready to go for an AE. If they get bogged down in other corporate stuff where they’re not doing SDR role daily, then it’s gonna take longer. Gabriel: Last question here on specialization, I personally measure this but I’m curious what your take is. After somebody moves from a higher approach where you have one sales person that’s doing everything, prospecting, account executive work, or account management, and then actually adopt a proper specialized model. What kind of efficiency gains are you seeing in terms of greater sales activities, higher win rates and so forth. Do you have some numbers that you can share with us? Marylou: It’s more guessing cause I don’t take on clients that don’t specialize, that’s one of my non-negotiables. I can only use my solos, the people who are one man shops or one woman shops, and then once they hire their first person, it can be as much as four fold that I’ve seen in that if you think about the four roles being 25% of your time for each and then all of a sudden you are now 100% of the time, then it’s 3x, 6x, some are 10x of what they were doing before. Basically what I shoot for is still the 8 to 10 opportunities a month that Predictable Revenue used because I’m making the assumption that SDRs go further into the pipeline. If you’re a full timer doing all roles, I’m hoping for one to two ops a month. But if we go to specialization, then I’m looking for 8 to 10 or above. Gabriel: Got it. Yeah, and those numbers definitely align with what I’ve seen. I’ve measured before and after scenarios and I’ve seen on average is 300% to 1000% sales efficiency increases. Not only that but actual sales operating costs tend to reduce by about half. It’s really exciting and there’s definitely a business case for it. Marylou: You’re more advanced than I am because of my non-negotiable of working with clients. I don’t want to fight that, I don’t want to fight that particular and negotiate that particular piece because that is the only way I can guarantee the results that I guarantee. I do take some solos here and there, some solo  entrepreneurs but going in, we have an agreement that they’re not gonna get that results that my other clients get. Gabriel: Yeah I know, it makes sense, 100%. Moving on here, you eluded to this a little bit around the ideal account profile and ideal prospect profile, I’m not gonna use the acronyms for it because it sounds kind of funny, IPP, but I love it, I love the idea behind it. When I first read that in your book, it was kind of like this a-ha moment for me. I’m like ugh, such a good idea, of course. For a while there, I was thinking something was missing from that particular equation. Can you just talk a little bit more about how that particular idea came to the purpose behind and just go a little bit deeper on the topic. Marylou: We were with Predictable Revenue, it was a five step process and we would get people assembled and then we would start activating and people will get stuck and gunky in this sell the dream portion of the framework which is when you start having conversations with people and talking about your value propositions, why they should change, why now and why you. It was really out of desperation and trying to figure out a way to get my clients fast tracked faster that I started thinking about when I was in development of all things and developing operating systems code. We used to have personas for our product sales or programming. They were specific to user experience and how people navigated the software. I thought to myself, what in the world, why don’t we have one of these for sales? I started to compile, essentially I started to do interviews, I started to ask my clients to give me everything they had with anyone who touched the prospect inside. I talked to industry experts and I came up with essentially a 15-step development methodology for prospect personas. We dwindled that down that to something more reasonable in the book. What really did it for me was that the personas that are for marketing really generate marketing qualified leads. They get so much a slightly raise of hand. What we’re trying to do is to get someone to want to engage in conversation with us which is a lot beefier, a lot more work than what we had before. This was a way for me to consolidate all of the ideas of working with a prospect, what their challenges are, what did their strategic financial or personal challenges that mattered. We never thought about that for Predictable Revenue but it became very apparent that setting that up allows us to craft our emails, to send voice mails, to create scripts if we’re doing scripts for our conversational pieces, to handle objections. All of that was under discovery when we started putting together the prospect personas and we just didn’t have it before. Gabriel: I love it because it goes into depth. You’re also profiling the company as well with graphics and so forth which is great for list building. Not a lot of people will go beyond this is the industry that we’re going after, this is the general employee account and here is the key title. Marylou: I’ll tell you a good story about this too which is pretty funny. It was with Jeremy, my co-author. He was a client of mine. He’s the one who we wrote the book together. We did a prospect persona definition on Betty. I can’t remember what Betty was but she was some type of a liaison between IT and marketing and they were gonna use their house list. Great, let’s use the house list. We did the prospect personas and then we did a count on the house list of how many Bettys there were, we got a number. And then we went over to LinkedIn and we counted the number of Bettys there. They had 500 Bettys in their house list, there were 50,000 potential Bettys that we could contact in LinkedIn. If we haven’t done that prospect persona definition, our campaigns would have fallen flat on their face if we just used the house list as is. Gabriel: Interesting. In terms of building on the list, let’s say bring a new client and you developed your IAP and ideal prospect persona and now it’s time to go out and build a list. Can you just share some best practices for the ways that you go about doing that? Marylou: Well, I will preface it by saying to your listeners that I work mostly in enterprise accounts so there is going to be an established list typically. This is not speaking for start-ups who are just starting out with their list. What we like to do first is go to the house list, those are opted in names, they’re names that over the course of time have been generated through trade shows, workshops, executive briefings or whatever it is, whatever lead gen channels that they’ve used for marketing purposes we have this list. If as in my client whose co-author, if we find that the list is lacking, the next thing we go to our purchase list, we also look to see based on the persona whether or not there’s enough accounts in those purchase list like a Zoom, Uber versus larger companies and see if there’s enough accounts in there to make our campaigns meaningful and statistically viable. If that doesn’t work, then we’re gonna look towards industry lists, we’re gonna look at creating our own lists through crowd sourcing, we’re going to maybe hire someone off shore to help us generate email addresses and phone numbers. We start with what’s available in the marketplace and we dwindle that or just keep going until we exhaust those and it might be that we have to build our own lists, we’re paying more per lead but the quality won’t be there. I have clients do all the above, basically start with what they’ve got and some end up going off shore and then work out a deal where they’re getting a number of leads per week that they pour into their campaigns so that they have a statistically viable cadence and sequences that they can market against. Gabriel: In terms of statistically viable, what would you say the minimum number is required for statistic analysis? Marylou:          I still use the old [25:17] distributions which seems to work really well. If you have to look at it as a margin of error and it’s gonna be a swing plus or minus. The number 400 emails, 400 contacts gives you plus or minus 10% margin of error which is 20%, 20 swing either way. That is the best number to use. The next one down from that is 96. 96 gives you 80% to 85% confidence rate but there is a bigger swing now, there is a bigger gap between did we do this right or did we not do this right. Those are the two numbers that I use with clients, we try to get per SDR, especially if we are splitting the campaigns by persona. We want to have 400 of the same persona in a cadence so that we can test the viability of our emails and also the cadence itself, when to use the phone, when to leave a voicemail, when to do this ABS type of intra-day calling in and around the bull’s eye of influencers. Gabriel: Got it, alright. Perfect. That was really a viable conversation around sales process. What I’d like to do now is dive into a little bit more tactical discussion around the actual SDRs. With the sales development reps, we elluded to this a little bit, in the world of cold emailing, cold emailing is a very popular topic area nowadays. How important is the phone? Is the phone still relevant? Marylou:          You’re talking to someone who grew up in contact centers. By definition, I’m gonna say the phone is very relevant. I do like to handshake the phone with email and social so you’re kinda warming up the chill if you will with those other levers of contact. And then the phone is used as a follow up mechanism to those social and email channels and ways of starting conversation or warming up that chill. I do use a phone, I think the phone wants you to get in that rhythm of contacting people at the best time to call which is an algorithm that we actually perfected in the call center using predictive dialing in the 90s. It gave us the opportunity to call our prospect personas at the time that they were gonna be in the office. Once we did that, we reduce the number of dials which we got better connects and we also didn’t blowout our list. The list fatigue numbers went way down because we use the phone more. Now with our current sequences, what I recommend with clients, I have 3 different sequences that I use with clients. Some of them are afraid of phone to start so we do an email only, I call it the while you are sleeping campaign because basically you only follow up on responses and that’s it. We try to get to the Predictable Revenue numbers of 7% to 9% response rate. For every 100 emails, we want 7 to 9 people to reply either positively, negatively or neutral. We are looking for 3% positive, 2% to 3% neutral and the rest negative. If we reach that email on an email only campaign where there is no phone follow up other than responses, we think we’ve done a good job. I have some examples that I shared on a webinar recently with the client who created eight emails in this while you’re sleeping campaign and he was able to achieve with his two prospect personas, one of them was 23% response rate overall  in aggregate, emails one through eight, and the other was 37% response. Think about list fatigue. For every 100 records, we heard from 37 people who were in sales and 23 people who were in IT in this case which means our list is gonna be a lot happier because we’re not blowing it out and we’re not over socializing it and mass emailing it. Everyone in those emails, except for one, two and eight were value driven. Emails one, two and eight use the old style predictable revenue emails. I still bumper those, not with everybody but again our mindset is always be testing so I go in with a known entity which is the predictable revenue emails one, two and eight. Basically, email one and two are trying to find the internal referral confirmed that I got the right guy. Two is an in-thread reply to one with adding a little bit of value prop to it, and then eight is what we call the Hail Mary. We say hey, you know I essentially don’t wanna be a pass, I’ve sent you some of what I think is are most valuable content in 337 and I completely understand if this is not a good time, just let me know. We bumper those 337 are fully packed with why change, why now, why us, with testimonials endorsements and it’s really content assets that are viable to that level of awareness we talked about before, trying to figure out where people are in their head in order to be able to engage in conversation. Gabriel: Just to add to that, there is a few lines that I’ve gotten from some clients of mine that I’d like to share. The first is on the Hail Mary, I actually baked this around email four where I say I know there is a fine line between being persistent and annoying and I don’t wanna cross that line. I found that particular message, I learned that from one of my clients in Silicon Valley, and he learned that from his mentor that he learned 20 years ago. It’s such a good email because it just tells people you care about them, you’re thinking about them, you’re persistent, but you don’t wanna cross over that boundary. There is always that balance and I think that when I’m running my campaigns, I often get responses from people saying thank you for your persistence. They thank me for consistently following up. They appreciate the professionalism but there are some people that it just annoys them. I kinda just wanna know so that’s one thing. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, I was having a conversation with somebody this morning, another client of mine this morning. We talked about this concept of internal referrals. Do you think that internal referrals are better placed when they are from a peer or from a superior as opposed to somebody from the bottom? Let’s say you are trying to get through to a VP of Sales. Do you think it is better to go in through the side or through the top or through the bottom? Marylou:          I always like to call above and work my way down. I’ve really not changed my thoughts about that if I’m doing research then I go top, middle, bottom, whatever, to try to find information that I think would be relevant to have that first conversation with my target. But if I’m actually requesting referrals, I will always start at the top and work my way down because I think just from a social-psychological perspective, it does have more of a recognizable sort of “Oh, I should respond to this because my boss said it might be a good thing.” It at least gets them to lean in and think I guess I should talk to this guy. Gabriel: I need to give them the time of the day now because my boss told me to. That’s really interesting. Going bottom up I think can work if you have lots of time and lots of money but often people want to try results quickly. Marylou:          And bottom up does work for research because we use bottom up for our persona research which allows us to get more information about where to navigate around. For ABS, it’s gonna be especially with this gigantic companies that have 57 marketers and if you’re selling into marketing, who do you talk to, it’s not that clear. I love reading these group posts from people saying, “You should do your research, you should know me.” We did a project for a local company here, a $1 billion company that was trying to sell to marketers. They came up with 38 marketing definitions in companies, so how are you gonna know who to call? You have to go in, you have to ask some questions, strategic questions in order to be able to get to the right person because the titles and roles are all different. Gabriel: Diving into SDRs. When you’re hiring an SDR, this has got to be one of the hardest things I think in the world of specialization, atleast for me anyways. Finding good sales development reps is not an easy task. When interviewing, I probably interview over a thousand SDRs in this planet and personally managed over a hundred of them myself and I still to this day struggle with finding the right SDR hire. I’d love to learn a little bit more about your process in terms of hiring an SDR. Do you check references, what’s on your checklist when you’re hiring somebody to ensure that you’re getting the best possible person in that role? Marylou:          Well again, Jeremy is hiring more than I am because I’m working on putting on the frameworks in. I do have a list and I actually a doing a webinar on this very topic. It’s really about everyone seems to do the informal interview, having an interview of the potential candidate. That is like one quarter of what you need in order to be able to hire the right person for that role. In the book, we talk about if you just add a skills test to that, meaning that the day in the life of an SDR. For example, I have a friend of mine here in Iowa who is hiring an SDR and asked if I would interview her. I said yes, I’ll interview her, but that’s only 17% of what you need in order to make a good decision on an SDR. He says, “What do you mean?” I said I want her to write an email, I want her to leave a voicemail, I want her to craft a script telling me a value prop. I don’t care what she’s selling, I don’t care if she’s selling how to make temari balls, I don’t care, but I want her to leave me a voicemail as to why I should get back to her. When you just add those skills in there or find the right person to call or mapping call, that’s gonna bump up to the probability that you’re making a more confident hire by at least 50%, just right there. And then there are other tests that people don’t do that are available that are the aptitude tests for sales. There’s another one that talks about what we talked about before, that consciousness. We need to have SDRs who are habit driven, meaning that if they’ll do the same things, the same tasks over and over again until they perfect them which is what we want. We want to be able to have meaningful conversations a day. How many? Ideally five. Five meaningful conversations will guarantee us 8 to 10 opportunities a month. If we’re doing that and we’re expecting that of an SDR, we need to hear them. I put her through in this case through an email, cold email, she wrote a follow on email, I had her do a roleplay with me where I was throwing objections at her, and it didn’t really matter what the objection was, what product she was selling, it’s just how she handled those objections. The fact that there are four or five we all know we’re gonna get, not interested, I already have something that works, what’s this about? They’re standard rejection or objections that we should be testing for when we’re in the hiring process, and a lot of people don’t do that. Gabriel: Yeah, it is interesting. I’ve done role plays always as a step to my hiring process so I have a checklist then there is roleplaying, but I’ve never actually had people write cold emails or leave voicemails messages or doe some of these other important functions. Marylou:          These are their livelihood, this is what they are doing so if you just chunk down their daily role, you’ve got to test them on each of those components. Granted, they’re not gonna be knowing your product or service but whatever they’re passionate about, like baseball or like me with tamari balls which are balls that you make with thread, just have them talk to you about that. Gabriel: Okay, what about references? Do you check references and how do you do that? Marylou:         A lot of times, the SDRs are fresh outs, they’re out of college. Just the fact that they graduate and they got a good degree, good grades, we check that. But in terms of previous work, I will call references and check on those items relating to the role of the SDR. If they were in a previous position where they had to show up on time everyday, I wanna make sure they have good attendance. If they had some type of task that they did everyday, I wanna ask how they did with that task because repetitiveness is part of the SDR role, habit is part of the SDR role. I look for those traits. If I’m talking to a references or if I have enough references to contact, I’m looking for the traits of the daily role of the SDR within that person. Gabriel: Makes sense. If you could share the webinar information, or at least a link for people to register, I’ll include that in the show notes page. There is also a checklist of questions that I’ve used to check references as well that I modified from talk reading for the actual SDR function. I’ll link to that as well and I’ll share that with you, Marylou. In terms of managing an SDR team, what are the most important KPIs that you look at in terms of a dashboard and I know you are talking about the five meaningful interactions a day. What are the other criticals or KPIs that you like to look at? Marylou:          If we’re looking from an email campaign, we’re gonna use all the predictable revenue numbers which will be the number of responses we get, deliverability, we’re looking at our list fatigue, things like that. In the SDR role itself, we’re looking at the number of meaningful conversations per day, we’re looking at movement interstage. If we’re going from a cold or new cue to a working cue to a qualifying cue, we’re looking to see how many of those records move on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis and we’re looking for consistency. We don’t wanna see peaks and valleys, we wanna see a consistent stream of records moving so we look at that, we look at the ability to add and grow the database especially for account based selling. If we don’t have a lot of the contacts that are designated in our bull’s eye, then we wanna look to see that they’re making an effort to grow the database as well. Those are the kinds of things the actionable metrics get us from stage to stage to stage, inter stage metrics, and intrastage metrics would be the conversations that they are having, the number of emails that they are sending out their own emails for the hyper personalization, is it the right number for the number of accounts that they’re working. Gabriel: Okay, that’s helpful. And then in terms of cold emailing, just going back to that topic, do you have any kind of dos and don’ts for crafting messaging? There are some people that hear about this concept of cold emailing and some of these personalized automation tools and they just go to town. I was chatting with a couple of the outbound vendors that I use. It’s a big problem right now where people are just stabbing, less thinking with the same templates and they are not putting any thought into it and it’s not resonating with the marketplace. What are your thoughts on that in terms of some dos and don’ts? Marylou:      Well, I still follow the Predictable Revenue model which is 50 emails a day per SDR, turn 50 emails a week, so you can’t really spam per se unless you have a large team. And then I look to the compel with content framework that’s in the book which is the ability to craft an email that triggers some emotion, get you to a place where you immediately hit them between the eyes with the challenge that is ahead of them and how life could be the outcome that they could be getting given this challenge, the gap between that, and then from there specificity around the opportunity that lies ahead with them, if they engaged in conversation with you. That whole framework can be done with an 80-word email all the way up to 480-word email and I have examples in the book of that. Gabriel:        I’m taking notes, this is good stuff. In terms of short versus long messages, I know in Predictable Revenue it’s short and sweet, blackberry size messages. Do you find that those still tend to work better or do you find that longer message can work as well? Marylou:      We mix and match and testing against your product and persona, that’s gonna drive. If it’s an IT guy, sometimes their brevity is better. If it’s a marketing person, they like to read a little bit more, it really depends on the persona. Crafting emails as if you’re sitting across the table from your persona, having a conversation with them. Do they like it short or long, do they like you get right to the point or do they like more information before they make a decision? Gabriel:        Perfect! Okay, I got it. Before we wrap up, here’s a couple more of questions about technology and then just final words of advice. What would you say are the must have tools for you, technology tools for 2016? Marylou:      If you need some type of marketing automation system, because we’re leveraging technology, we’re sending emails out. You need something that can help you with that process so that you don’t have to be spinning all these plates as a friend of mine says, trying to remember did I send him email number two, do I need to call him now, you want that to be done for you. Whatever technology can use to help you with your sequence, the cadence within that sequence which is the phone, the email, the social, when should I do what, you need that tool. There are some tools for pre-getting a list, research tools that are lovely to have because they cut down on your ability to get that list going better, faster. But again, you can do the old manual approach and get there. I’m not as critical about having that, but for sure I want some type of automation tool to leverage technology for sending emails, sending voicemails. Then, you need something to collect your responses in. We’re using those sales conversations and the sales conversations we have, we’re recording the data from those sales conversations so that we can recognize again by persona what pain point resonated with them, when in the email sequence did that pain point resonate, and was the pinpoint we started conversation with the same pain point that got through opportunity and close? Why do I wanna know this? Because we’re trying to reduce lag in the pipeline. The more intelligence we know about which pains resonate faster are what we’re gonna put into our email streams. We really need to have this 180-circle back around to our email engine that’s constantly being fed by the conversations the reps are having. This concept of call wrap up is extremely important. That’s a call center term. Whenever an agent hung up the phone, they had to wrap up the call, give a disposition and some kind of code to tell the systems where should I file this thing. I do that with my folks, it’s rudimentary, it’s not as automated at was in contact center but we record the pain point. Gabriel:        Mary, could you backup for a second? The last thing I heard was call, wrap up. Can you just start over that call wrap up and restate what you were saying? Marylou:      What I do is I make sure that my reps do something called call wrap up which is a call center term that we used because we were using predictive dialing systems. We had to be able to disposition a call and then let the dialer know where we wanted that call routed for the next time it was placed. I do the same thing with the SDRs, we track a few key items and I have quotes for those that I can send them to you, Gabriel. We basically are looking at whether this pain point that resonated was still the same pain point throughout all of our conversations or if it changed during the course of the pipeline. Then, we wanna know essentially any language that they mentioned, that we hadn’t heard before. We wanna be able to record that because we’re gonna use all of that in our marketing email engine, and also voice mail. We’re trying to reduce the lags, we want people to be able to hear a word, or listen to a pain and immediately have it resonate as opposed to waiting to email number seven when it could’ve been email number two where the pain resonated faster. Just like you were saying, you wanna know faster before you were saying you wanna know faster, whether they wanna continue or not. We want to leverage the wrap up so that we know the order in which we should present pain in our sequence. Gabriel:        That’s really smart, I like that. In terms of tools, do you have any specific tools that you would recommend for cold emailing and marketing automation and so forth that you like to use? Marylou:      Like I said, I work higher up with enterprise accounts. Believe it or not, more limited than a SAAS company because the approval process for an IT to approve software takes a lot longer. We’re kind of probably more nimble than I could ever be. For the term outreach, I like the Outreach.io, there’s Tout, there’s YesWare, there’s Sales Loft, there’s all these great tools that help you with that sequencing. I think it’s more function when we talk about this in the book, about tools, there’s more function that we want you to think about. Align that function with the actual tool itself rather than do it the other way around. I think if you master your process find out how you wanna go after this accounts, are you doing key accounts, are you doing core accounts, are you doing anchor accounts, what is the definition of accounts and that would lend itself to which tool is gonna be the best tool to use rather than the other way around. Then, for marketing automation, we use all the top end ones, Marketo, those guys. Gabriel:        I totally agree with what you’re saying. I find that marketing technology, often people that I speak to feel held hostage to the technology that they’re using because it’s so complicated and then they start driving their sales process around the templated sales processes or tools that are these various systems like Sales Force for example. I can’t tell you the number of companies where I come in and I’ve seen a sales pipeline and it hasn’t changed, it’s the exact same sales pipeline that Sales Force is programmed in. That’s one of the most intimate things that a company can do in terms of adjusting their sales-process, those pipeline stage. 100% I agree that the fundamentals are so important and the tools also repurpose but it’s important not to get distracted on those fundamentals. Marylou:      Exactly. Being a software engineer, we used to go up against this all the time. Which programming tool do you like? It’s really based on what is the application I’m designing and once I get through the design of the application, which tool is gonna best fit? That’s how I want you guys to think about the pipeline. Let me design the pipeline, the processes, how I am going to leverage technology, people and process. Once you figure that out, and is really drawing it, it’s like the way I like to do it, then you can plop on the tools themselves as to who’s gonna do what, which does what, and look at it that way. I think that’s the better way to do it rather than stacking up all the stuff and then realizing you’re not using 75% of it. Gabriel:        Exactly, just getting to overwhelm. Okay, last question, what would you say is the best piece of advice that you received on the area of sales and/or marketing? Marylou:      I think it’s really a mindset. It’s whenever you get on the phone, whenever you craft an email, whenever you’re thinking about having a conversation, remind yourself that you are a peer or a colleague of the person who’s on the other of end of that line, the other end of that email. You are as equally important as the person that you’re trying to convince to try your product or service. If you do that, your tonality over the phone is going to increase to a point where they are thinking that they’re talking to someone who is just like them. If you can really think about changing your mindset, that you are a CEO of a company, that you are the director of marketing or director of sales ops when you’re getting on the phone, then, you’re going to be a lot more successful. Gabriel:        That is such good advice, absolutely! Thank you so much Marylou for your time and there’s so many good insights that you shared with us. We would be linking to your book and some of the different resources that we mentioned. Thank you for spending time with me today, I really appreciate it. Marylou:      Thank you, Gabriel. It was a lot of fun.

Episode 34: Benefits and Challenges of Separating Roles on the Sales Team – Pleasant Rich

Predictable Prospecting
Benefits and Challenges of Separating Roles on the Sales Team
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Are you running a “one-man show”, where you do absolutely everything yourself – from building the pipeline to closing the sale? How effective is your current system? On this episode we’re joined by Pleasant Rich, the Director of Enterprise Sales at Outreach, a team-based sales communication platform. We discuss the benefits and challenges of separating roles on the sales team, why you shouldn’t try to fill every role yourself, and how to make the transition between roles as seamless as possible.
 
1069901_10100954786248058_1166434891_nEpisode Highlights:

  • Challenges with having more aware buyers
  • Passing the baton from top of funnel, to sales, to close
  • Working through the four categories of authority
  • SDRs and BDRs
  • The evolution of the 15 minute call
  • How many opportunities can you really generate?
  • Planning, testing, and executing
  • Doing every role versus following a separation model: Pleasant’s experience
  • Training and roleplaying
  • Challenges, tips, and tricks to separating roles

Resources: Outreach.io Connect with Pleasant on Linkedin  

Episode Transcript

Marylou: When I started working, there was no internet, there were no cellphones. When I was in sales, we were the trusted adviser because there was no way to get information really out in the world. We were the provider of information. Transitioning from that to where now the buyer is in control, just as if they know what they’re looking for. It’s a tougher world out there so I get it.I’m very interested in speaking with people like you specially from the standpoint of you’re the recipient of the work that I specialize in which is the top of funnel. It’s getting you a qualified op and how you take it from there. That’s why I’m really excited about you joining this call today. I think there is a lot of misinformation coming around about you guys and what you get. Pleasant: Do you feel that there is much more of a challenge with having more aware buyers? Marylou: I think there is two problems. One is, people are assuming that buyers know what to look for. In that sense, no, it’s the same it was when I was selling because buyers really don’t know. In a lot of cases, the why behind something is good for them to do. Why change? I think that is still the same. I think what happens though is you probably spend more time on teaching them of misnomers, of bad information, of implied sense of knowing about something because of what they research. There’s probably a lot more need to negotiate now than there was perhaps when I was in sales. Does that makes sense? Pleasant: Yeah, it completely does. I can see that we have the kind of sale and negotiations always comes in because when they’re doing apples to apples comparison, that’s the whole problem is that they do the research, they do an apple to apple comparison. Half the time, they’re not comparing apples to apples, they’re two different completely different things, completely structured or motivation for what they are trying to do and thinking of they can do more in something in. You have to work all around that just to get them in the right mindset to even begin in negotiation. Marylou: That’s right. That piece we really didn’t have to finesse when I was in sales because it was more about building rapport and trust. The buyer had to put a lot more trust in us that we knew what was best for them. Whereas now there is a level of trust still yes, but there’s also the having to back up like, “Let’s back up to this.” There’s a lot more of undoing, a lot more psychology that you have to deploy. That’s the sales professional I think in understanding the behavior a lot more earlier up in the cycle, earlier up in the pipeline. The other thing is there is also unfortunate incident of this whole thing is, there’s a teaching out there that buyers are of hire awareness, not only the apples to orange but that they know a lot more about things. I think we give them too much credit because sometimes they just don’t know what they don’t know. Pleasant: Right, I agree with that too and you within the specific industry, especially if you’re a salesperson that’s selling to different industries. There are some that are so much farther along than others and it’s poorly different sales from one vertical to another. Marylou: Yeah. I think it’s good to hear from the professionals that have the baton passed to them and that’s why I asked you to share with us your experiences as being the recipient of that baton because I talked about everything you need to do to prepare to pass the baton. Now that the baton is passed, what experiences have you encountered in trying to get that thing to close one? Pleasant: I think there’s a big challenge with that baton passing I think it resonate that when we talked before, I was thinking about this. There’s a whole line being drawn of when does it get passed, what qualifies to that being that passed from that top of the funnel into a sales person. I think that’s going to be different for every industry but I think the challenge is understanding the level of the SDRs or the CDRs and the people that are actually passing those leads over. Understanding and trusting them to be able to deliver valuable content or qualify really well. Marylou: Right. Pleasant: I’ve seen it both ways even within our own organization. It’s really easy to pass the baton with certain team members because you can trust their qualification skill level of knowledge that they have that’s truly qualified. You can pass it later on in the cycle if you want to immediately grab it. Marylou: Yeah, like when I was in the BDR role, we called them Business Developers in my world. This is pre predictable Revenue. I fed three account executive like yourself and we did a BANT process, Budget, Authority, Need, Timing. There were two AE’s who wanted me to quantify the budget to the point where they wouldn’t touch it if there wasn’t substantial reason for them to go after a lead that might be able to get budget. Then I had another AE that said, “Don’t even bother with budget, Marylou, because I will be able to help them find money.” She was more confident in her ability to create a sense of urgency around putting this product or service in and she was confident that the organization would find the money because they would see the value. To what you just said, it really depends on the STRs capability. It also depends on who the STR is passing the baton to and what they’re willing to take. But then overlaying that are the sales manager’s desires of what he wants to see in order to be able to forecast that opportunity as a high percentage, low percentage, medium percentage, however they do that. A lot of times what I see is we work through a BANT or ANUM authority need or money, whatever. We decide based on the product we’re selling, there maybe three or four products too that were selling as a BDR or SDR. What we do is we create a matrix of, “Okay, here’s the four categories of authority. There is need and sense of urgency. There is timing or time frame, or somewhere in the initiative, is the initiative is going to be sometime this year or whatever.” Then there is this budget money, can I find it column. What we do is we create a matrix saying for this product, here is what we’re going to attempt to get as an SDR and for the next product it may be beefier. Why we need to know that is because we want to be able to understand the talk time of how much conversation we need to have at top of funnel in order to get from initial conversation to a qualified opportunity. Why we want to know that is because that determines our pipeline velocity. Then, once we give it to the account executive like you, Pleasant, then what your job is to do within a certain period of time 24, 48 hours, 72 hours, decide if that lead is of quality to take it the rest of the way. Meaning that you’re putting your stamp of approval on it and you’re going to accept it. We have an actual metric that we track and as part of our matrix to look at sales qualified leads and then sales accepted leads from the AE. We strive for 90% or higher ratio of for every ten leads I send Pleasant, she’ll accept nine at least. That’s the goal. Then what happens is once you accept then we analyze it and say, “Okay, the AEs are accepting these types of leads. Here’s how far we got into the qualification process.” Then we start training the SDR saying, “Look, everybody has to get at least this minimum.” Pleasant: With your SDRs, you were calling them BDRs before, correct? Marylou: Yeah. Pleasant: I think that’s a difference and there has become this vision with BDRs and SDRs and how people are saying that. I see a lot more of like for example our SDRs, they’re not doing a lot of deep discovery, qualification. Their whole goal is to get a meeting set for their AE and then the AE’s baton to pass it on to take it to do the discovery simply because for us we look at the SDR, their KPIs are around getting meetings that are getting those conversations started with the AEs. The AEs know to do a deep guide discovery and are able to discover those piece of information. We have certain qualification things, specific pieces that they have to have, tools that they have to have. They have to be a user of SalesForce, simple things like that. We know that if we don’t have those in place, they’re not going to be successful. Our SDRs don’t really do a huge escape level of discovery with the prospects. Their whole first call, their first goal is, “Let me set up an introductory meeting,” and they bring on the AEs for that initial meeting. Marylou: Okay. Pleasant: We also have a BDR though with our more enterprise teams. The big start there will actually do more discovery qualification for the prospects and they’re working to lead further into the funnel enclosure to the pipeline before they’re passing it off. Marylou: Interesting. A lot of people don’t remember this but the Predictable Revenue book released in 2011 talked about a three hour 15 process. By definition in today’s world, that three hour 15 process is describing the BDR role, not the SDR role, which is kind of interesting. Really what it boiled down to is a 15 minute AWAF call which is the are we a fit, for you we were talking about they had to have SalesForce. It’s your top level qualifiers that if they don’t have these three things, then it’s not worth the time to even go through a qualification process because the AE is not going to be able to convert that very easily, Then once we do the 15 minute call of the three 15, the hour was to actually do maybe a little bit of a demo or discovery call with one of the decision makers, followed by a two hour call with the team. The decision maker and his indirect influencers. By definition, you’re doing a lot more discovery and that role is the role that was describe in Predictable Revenue as an SDR role. Since then, we’ve discovered and learned that companies like Outreach like your company are actually creating tiers of accounts that have certain levels of priority. People who were doing the business development in those different tiers are called different things. You have SDRs that maybe just do the 15 minute AWAF call and set the meeting and then the AE is responsible to take it the rest of the way. Then you have BDRs, Business Development Reps, or ADRs, Account Development Reps, that actually go through the discovery process and actually meet with the team, and the AE comes in on that last call to take the baton. Pleasant: Yeah, I actually think just from my background which thinking about education, and teaching, and even from going from being a sale reps, from inside AE, and it seems like that’s a process that’s working really because you can have a very strategic processes in place that are perfected on. It made them really well, our SDRs, I was with our SDRs yesterday and the day before and they are so good on the phone.When they get people on the phone, they have perfected their methodology of their research, of their initial introductions of getting people to elicit those responses of, “Yeah, let’s get on a call.” They are so good with it. I even know it myself, if I were to do that I would be very inefficient because I would go to my notes and I’ll be re-practicing my things and it makes it to where we can chunk it down into those specialized role and compensate well for them whether it’s very top of the funnel or closing the deals. It makes it to being much more fluid motion when moving people through the sales cycle. Marylou: Yeah but like anything, the more that you push on the AE in this SDR AE combo where they’re getting the meetings and the AE is taking it the rest of the way. If you have a very complex sale, that’s going to bug down the AE at some point. They won’t be able to take that many opportunities per month. That’s why I was able to feed three as a BDR because our average deal size was 150,000 and up and it was a recurring revenue. It wasn’t a SAAS offering, it was a service offering. But because I needed to only generate eight opportunities a month for three AEs because that’s all they could work, the sales cycles were longer. When you’re starting to think about what Pleasant and I are talking about with this SDR role splitting or the Business Development role splitting is thinking through the talk time or conversation time. Sales conversation time is a good parameter to call it of how long they are going to be working with a prospect before the handoff takes place. By definition and the math, if the SDR is set to create meetings, then their talk times are shorter which means they should be able to generate more of those meetings per month. If they are going through the qualification process and only handing off to the AE after there is this two hour discovery/common vision meeting, whatever you want to call it, they’re not going to be able to generate as many of those per month. That’s another consideration when you’re working on how many opportunities can we actually generate. The talk time or sales conversation time is a big factor in that. Pleasant: Absolutely. We did experience some of exactly what you’re talking about. Several months ago, we transitioned and we tested out that methodology of how do we want our AEs to work and our SDRs to work? We actually tried. We’ve always consistently done, SDRs are setting the qualification in which assets to be take in. We transitioned it to more the SDRs are gonna do more of the research on the account. They’re going to be doing the qualification calls and they’re going to be pushing the meetings up today when they’re actually qualified and they’ve talked more and done that initial discovery. Now what we found for our business was that we were not generating enough meetings. We saw a huge dip because for us we need more meetings on the calendar with our AEs working them because our deal cycles are a little bit more accelerated. That was what we needed from the SDR once they get a product to that level. Marylou: For those of you listening to this, testing is a big component of this because you may go in thinking this is the perfect structure, this is the perfect handoff methodology that would work with our product or service. Planning is always very important, but when you start executing like Pleasant was saying, they had metrics that they knew they didn’t meet certain numbers that they were going to be suffering as the opportunity moved further into the active pipeline. They essentially course corrected. Would that be fair to say? They course corrected and went to a more hybrid model where the SDRs is not necessarily diving into the active pipeline as deeply. Pleasant: Absolutely, absolutely. Very quickly,we start to think projected numbers. Very quickly. Marylou: Okay. Tell us what have been the experience? A lot people are, they’re embracing separation of roles, some people are, “Oh wow that’s tough to be able to pull a new role into my company that’s just as business development.” Not everybody is ready for that. What have your experiences been? Have you done all roles in a prior life? What is the difference between you doing everything like a solo entrepreneur who has the prospect, close, and service versus the separated model where you’re focusing mostly on closing? Tell us about what your experience has been. Pleasant: I have done all of the roles. My very first sales role was doing everything from prospecting to closing, even implementing the product solution for the different client. I was in a little bit of everything and each position has been a little bit different. I think worst thing to trend where this is something even with our larger companies that have been more established traditionally, maybe they’re farmers, and they’re more order takers, they had their sales pick that are doing a little bit of everything to be part of more strategic territories which mean a big shift in this division of role. I think people are really starting to take notice of the data when it comes to getting sales acceleration tools. Everyone is getting those types of things, having more meetings and getting more into the pipeline and it is so competitive. I think that we’re seeing a lot more companies start to breakaway and get specific people to do the meeting setting, the prospecting and try to implement the pipeline while they’re getting the sales team member focus more on closing. I personally found it to be a challenge doing everything within the role. Salespeople love to close and we love to put out fires and we love to hop on the things that are in front of us. There’s a very low percentage of salespeople that are very targeted in what they do within their prospecting, part of the day they’re doing. There’s a very low percentage of people that are actually very strategic with how they plan their days out to make sure that their pipelines are constantly filled. That’s where you can see that up and down wave. We see that all the time and I think that’s the challenge, it’s being able to joggle. Multitasking is common place in every company but it’s never the most effective thing to do. Like I said, I found that a personal challenge. I would be on the road a lot especially with sales reps. We see a lot of companies that still have field rats that are very responsible for dealing their pipeline. It becomes a great challenge because they’re going to client meetings, especially when you’re in geographic territories. You’re typically more in front of people if it is in outside road or more in front of people on the road doing meetings and more complex field. It becomes a challenge when it comes to pipeline filling and that’s where you see most people lagging behind, is the pipeline going to sufficiently meet the expectation of their quota? Marylou: Right. I think a lot of it is the juggling the fact that people are horrible at multitasking. As humans, we’re just really not good at it. Very few people can do it well. The other thing is from a psychology point of view and habit point of view, we’re kind of wired to do certain roles anyway. I am definitely a business developer at heart because I liken it to duty dating. I love to date. Just so everybody knows, I’ve been married forever. I’m 59, I’ve been married. I’ve married my college sweetheart so I have a longevity there. But from the standpoint of working with prospects and things, I definitely like to have conversations and start conversations and then love them and leave them to the AEs and go on to the next one. Whereas Pleasant is probably the kind of person who loves the engagement, who loves getting engaged and going the rest of the way with getting married, having kids, the whole thing. I think a lot of it is we have to really look at who we are as people. For asking a salesperson to do all the roles is extremely difficult. To do them all well and to do them all consistently so that you can scale your business if that’s what you want to do. The first opportunity you have to separate the sales roles is when you should go for it. I agree with you, Pleasant. Pleasant: I’ll give you another couple of examples too is one of the big terms that we hear a lot is repeatability. How do you repeat it and scale it? When you have sales teams that are doing from start to close, the end to end prospecting and closing, it is almost near impossible to repeat a process. Almost all of them are individual because their days are so broken up by all different kinds of things that they’re putting out. They’re doing meetings, they’re doing this, they’re doing this, to actually put that into a process and to even train. Here’s how you can bring on new people, here’s how you’re going to do this. Everything from start to finish is an exhaustive list. I was thinking about, I always bring myself back to teaching because that’s my root. I taught for four years, I taught it in middle school and I taught history. I was the 2nd highest scoring in the division, in the district with our scores. Everybody’s score based and I love data and I’m pretty competitive so I was very excited about it. I was second only to the teacher that taught all gifted courses within the district though. I was very good at my craft, very good, high scoring kids because I taught them really well and always had wonderful years. I took a year off and I went back into teaching after a year off and the position that I took was a 5th grade teaching position and it was every single subject. Marylou: Wow. Pleasant: My day changed and my outlook on teaching actually completely shifted just by making that change in elementary education because I now had to plan, instead of four, one subject with modification for three different classes. I was planning for seven subjects include all that spelling and all that seven different lessons I had subject for all of my different learners that were within one classroom. I was really good at planning history but I was really terrible at the new math standard, really, really terrible. I say this quite honestly, I felt like I did a disservice to the kids that year because I just was not a skilled math teacher nor was I a skilled basic reading teacher either. Those were my biggest areas of weakness and I struggled all year long with those and I was constantly having to work after hours to figure out how to get these lesson plans structured to be effective. It was a really rough year for me. Marylou: Right. Pleasant: I always think about it within sales too because people love certain aspects. I do love the close. I love taking those close skills and going through with them and I’m very good at them. When it comes to the other parts of it, your heart’s not necessarily in it. I think when you have those specialized roles, you can find people that fit really well that excel in those positions and nurture them, help them in lesson, be coaches to others that are coming on. You’re going to see a much higher success. Marylou: Like you said, the top of funnel is more of a numbers portion of the framework of the pipeline because we’re dealing with hundreds and thousands of contact records. We’re squeezing those into accounts and people who want to continue conversation with us. We have a lot of numbers to help us get to where we want to go and we also have the ability to leverage technology to get us there faster with more quality. I think a lot of times, if you’re the type of person like I am who is more numbers driven and process driven, you enjoy this constant habit of getting up everyday, looking at your numbers, knowing that you’re going to have a two hour block time of phone calls, and looking forward to that, looking forward to all those conversations because you’re dwindling, you’re trying to get people out of your active pipeline as fast as possible. I find that very challenging whereas some people would prefer to take an opportunity where you’re building rapport, you’re building that relationship in a deep way and guiding them towards a purchase decision that’s going to help their career. That’s a very different way of looking a things. I think the biggest news coming out of all these books that I’ve been fortunate to be a part of is that we need to respect the fact that salespeople should have separate roles and let the person really excel at that role and dive into it deeply with continual education. I think that’s one of the things where I know people when they hear the term sales trainers, a lot of these companies just their eyes glaze over but we definitely see an improvement the longer that people practice. I remember speaking with Mark who’s your counterpart over as a sales director over there. What they do is when they’re getting ready for this block time which is this two hour or so, hour and a half, whatever it is of call time, they kind of warm up the voice by roleplaying. They’re training how many times a week now? Is it every time they do block time that they’re training people? Pleasant: Yeah. Marylou: It’s a constant training and I think the beauty of what you guys are doing over there is that you not only train on the voice side but you’re training on the writing side. They write emails together as a team. They critique them. Everybody’s just getting better and better and better. It also means that the pipeline velocity is getting faster and faster and the lag is shrinking. That’s really what we want because we take those metrics along the active pipeline and work really hard to get a formula for Predictable Revenue which is the goal. Especially if you want to scale your business, it’s definitely where we’re working towards and separating the roles is a big way to get there. What else Pleasant do you think that our audience would want to know or that you can share with them as things you’ve learned, mistakes you’ve made or things that you’ve discovered along the way that would be helpful for people who are considering the separation? Pleasant: I think that one of the challenges that we have with the separation of role is the misconception and the de-valuing of specific roles within the sales organization. There are typically SDR are the de-glorified position. When people get calls from SDRs, it’s all of this is just the lower person on the caller. There are those misconceptions and we see those all the time that they’re not highly valued. We really strive and we’ve seen some companies that do this really, really well. You literally have career SDRs or ADMs or BDRs, whatever you want to call them, simply because they are really positioned as a high commodity within the organization because they are the first line of contact for those new accounts and new divisions that you’re trying to get into. They’re going to be that first point of contact and your very first phase of the company. It’s really important when you are separating the roles because this is a highly valued position. I know conversation is a big deal, it’s always a faux pas to talk about but that’s an important piece to it. It’s making sure that those meetings are valuable. That to the SDRs or to the BDRs, whoever you’re passing it to, to make sure they know this is the valuable thing that we take seriously and we want you to get us and pass us the things that our sales team can work because we’ll treat you well for that. I think that’s a very important thing to keep in mind with the separation. Marylou: I remember going back to my BDR days, I changed my title to Chief Conversation Starter because essentially that’s what I was, the chief of starting conversations. Pleasant: I love that title. Marylou: It’s funny because I’ve seen some people since I wrote Predictable Revenue, I think I mentioned it in the book and I see some people when I get emails that use that term or Chief Door Opener. It’s good, it really is a difficult role and it’s one that should be embraced as part of the team just like when you’re running a relay. Every leg of the relay is important, it’s not just coming home. It’s starting. I think if we look at a relay team and think of ourselves as members of that team, each one has a very important role in making sure that the prospect is taken care of from beginning all the way to end and then beyond when they become a client, definitely. Pleasant: I think another important thing with what you just said with the prospect taken care from the beginning to end. I think it’s a very important exercise to take a look at how the prospect is taken care of when they are being passed on. One of the risks that you have with the separations of roles is the number of contacts and then points of contacts that that person has to go through throughout their sales cycle. It can get a little frustrating and overwhelming if it’s a really poor handoff between the different departments or the people within the sales team especially if you have, like for us we have a solution consultants and we have customer success manager that come on and sometimes we’re introducing security and then we’ve got our SDRs. There are multiple players, especially the more complex your sale becomes, the more people that are going to be brought into that conversation. Just keeping that in mind of really being able to smoothly the transition and to do it in a way that makes the clients feel like they are of value. I tell our team when they pass it over, I want the SDR on the first call with me. I want them to introduce and the way they always introduce is I really respect your time. I want to make sure that I bought on a person that has worked with a company just like you so that way we can make the most of our time. This is so and so who I’m bringing on for you and let’s start the conversation that way. I think it’s really important to think about that handoff because you can have a really poor handoff and leave the prospect very confused. Marylou: Yes, most definitely. I think the other thing is like you said you have to make it clear early on that you’re going to be taking them to a certain point. I used to actually kid people that you and I are going to go down a path together, down the road together, and then once we both think we’re ready I’m going to have you meet the rest of my family. Essentially the resources that we’re going to bring in in order to be able to understand the business requirements. Now granted, we had a very complex sale. We did just a lot of work in solution with solution consultants and things because we had to put together a plan. We would bring in resources as the opportunity rouse in priority on the forecast. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t wasting our internal resources as well but the clients, the prospects, knew the different levels of when people are coming in and why they’re coming in and how that’s going to benefit them and also help them to prepare because they needed to bring their people in, etc. etc. We made sure that each of those handoff points were well communicated. We gave them enough time to digest them but we also gave them that back door that they can get a hold of us in a pinch if they had difficulty in getting information or whatever. We always left a backdoor key for them if they needed to do that. Very rarely that they exercised utilizing that but they knew that we cared about them even though we’re now handing them off to the other family members. It was a good process, I really enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it a lot. Pleasant, we’re at the end of our call. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with our audience.  I think what I really want the audience to understand is that separation of roles is a very flexible concept and it really depends on what you’re selling, how long it takes you to sell what you’re selling, and who’s involved in what you’re selling in order to figure out the path that’s going to work best for you. As Pleasant said before, you may go down the path and then change it only to realize that the change wasn’t effective. Embracing change, embracing testing, and pivoting if you need to are all very common things that happen when you separate roles. The last thing she said too is that the handoff is very important to keep the communication flowing to your prospects so they’re not confused. They’re not basically lost in where they are, where they should be, where they’re going. The communication has to be very, very intelligent and timely so that they know exactly what’s going to happen to them as they go through this process with you. Thanks again for your time, really appreciate you talking with me today. Pleasant: Thank you Marylou, it’s a pleasure.