Marylou:          Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting. Today’s guest is a gentleman who I followed for quite a long time. He’s the CEO and founder of a company called Sales Gravy. You probably know him from the seven plus books he has generated and sold on Amazon and elsewhere. His name is Jeb Blount.                       His most recent book, Fanatical Prospecting, really caught my eyes obviously because I’m really focused on top of the funnel prospecting and outreach channel. But his unique approach is, I think, amazingly simple, concise and impactful. I really wanted him and I’m so glad that I was able to catch him between all of his engagements to talk to us today about what his top learnings are that he can share with you and things that have happen to him since he launched his last book and then just overall in the ten years he’s been doing this, running around. What’s changed, what’s the same, what are the issues that he can share with us so that when we stop listening to this phone call, this video call, that we’ll put everything that we learned into action right away? So welcome Jeb, thank you so much for joining us. Jeb:                  I’m so glad to be on, I know we have tried so hard to make this happen between everything that was going on, I’ve been in Asia and traveling so it’s fantastic that we finally have a chance to do this together. Marylou:          Yeah, thank you so much. I think the last time, it was me, I had knee surgery, crazy stuff but you’re here now. Tell us about you. Jeb:                  I’m a trainer, a speaker, an entrepreneur, a CEO. I’ve got an entire sales team right over in the other building. I’m sitting in Sales Gravy studios right now but we have an entire inside sales team, we have an outside sales team, we sell both employment advertising. A lot of people don’t recognize it, salesgravy.com is the largest employment advertising web site on the internet. We’re also a training and development company and we own several other companies that are in that space. We own a company called Channel EQ that’s in the indirect sales space, in the channel space. Between that and the coaching and the training programs that we build and create for our clients, we’re pretty busy people. When we talk about prospecting, I have to wake up every single day. I just, before we get on that, walk through my sales floor, give everybody high fives, talk to them because whatever they’re doing, everybody in there is in the telephone, prospecting, everybody. Marylou:          It’s funny because you mentioned the word telephone. One of the hardest things that I’m discovering is getting the younger crowd used to using the phone. The Predictable Revenue that Aaron and I co-authored in 2011 really focused on the email engine. I think to a disservice, it made it seem as if you really didn’t need to pick up the phone until someone engaged. What are your thoughts on that? Jeb:                  Well, let me give you a quick stat. We’ve been tracking this since March of last year,  we’ve gone all the way in. We’re about on the 14 months end, or just 15 months end on just a basic experience. I’m the CEO of a company that spends not a huge amount of money but we spend close to about $650,000 a year with vendors who provide services for us. Some of the vendors are as simple as US Post Office, some of them are software as a service vendors, some of the people who clean our office, but a significant amount of money. I’m a pretty good prospect for a lot of salespeople. I’m the person in my company that generally is the person who’s going to say yes or no. I’m not always the decision maker, but I’m the person that, in a lot of cases, has the ability to fund it. I’ll give you an example of that. Yesterday, my Vice President of Business Development said yes to a one year contract with a company that was going to help us do a little bit better job of scrubbing our database. He said yes, he signed the contract, I said no because I’m not willing to pay for it so he had the authority to say yes to the contract, I have the authority to say no. I’m a pretty good target. Now I just want you to think of this for a second. It’s been 15 months now. Over a 15 month period, I am now up to 2373 as of yesterday, can we count every one of them emails, prospecting emails. Marylou:          Wow. Jeb:                  I received four phone calls. Marylou:          Oh my God. Jeb:                  My fourth phone call was yesterday. A gentleman named Chris, he sells software as a service and he called my line, I answered my phone. If I’m in my office, I’m going to answer my phone. He called into our offices, our phone number’s on our websites, not like it’s that hard. You call into the phone three, you ask for me and I answer my phone. His call was terrible, I coached him on, I worked him on it cause the first thing he asked me was how he was doing and I explained to him that he was doing really good before he interrupted my day not to ask that stupid question. We worked on some things but he called me and the calls he called me were having a conversation about his software. In fact, of the four phone calls I received, three of those companies are currently doing business with my company, just to give you an idea. One of those guys, a guy named Luke Rivers, Luke if you’re listening, you know this is true, that he called me out of the blue on a cold call because he listened to one of my podcast and I answer the phone, he goes, “I didn’t think you were actually going to answer the phone.” I ended up referring him to a bunch of other people because he’s a really good sales representative. He’s a great account manager and he takes care of me. But here’s the thing, the kid that called me yesterday, if he had sent me an email, he would not have gotten a response cause I don’t respond to prospecting emails anymore. I’m tired of them. I’m done with them. They’re driving me nuts, most of them suck, most of them have no relevance to me, and most of them I know are being sent by robots. I explained this to a group of representatives the other day. If your entire prospecting mechanism is just to send emails, I can fire every single one of you because I can get a robot that can do this for me, I don’t need you to send emails. And this is true. In our company, we have three different email engines and we use email as a prospecting mechanism. If you’ve read my book, you know I believe in a balanced approach, I don’t believe in one single approach. We use all those things. I don’t need human beings to do that. I can have one person that can run every email program that we have. Reps that are concentrating and focusing on email are doing themselves and their companies a major disservice and they’re sub optimizing their results because the phone is, it will always be, it will continue to be, the most powerful tool that you have in your sales arsenal. Especially if you’re an inside sales rep, this is what you and Aaron wrote your book about Predictable Revenue. If you’re inside sales rep, it’s one place where you can actually have a conversation. That kid that called me yesterday, his call was horrible, he got an A+ for picking up the telephone which is why I gave him a chance. But he and I are at least having a conversation now because he was calling me. He took the coaching and was appreciative of it and that made me feel good so we have a relationship now. He sent me a text message this morning. Now think about that. He used the phone, he used text message, he sent me an email with the follow up demo that I can watch. He’s used all the prospecting mechanism at his disposal and that’s the real key. That’s what I mean by balanced prospecting. Use all the channels. Marylou:          It’s such a disservice to continually slam people with the same message and think that because you’ve done it five, ten, 15 times that they’re going to for some reason change their mind, it’s just wild. I had an email stream sent to me by a client the other day where it was a company out of San Francisco and they basically sent one email and then had I think eight in thread replies like “Did you get my email?” “Hey, did you get my email?” “Hey, did you get my email?” It was like, “What are you thinking?” “Why do you think this works?” Jeb:                  I want you to think about this first. People who are watching this, think about the psychology with this. By the way, it’s the same thing with voicemail. You don’t leave a voicemail and then leave the other a voicemail and say, “Hey I left you a voicemail yesterday, you didn’t call me back.” You know how it feels when you got that next email that says, “Hey, why didn’t you reply to my email?” Or, “I sent you an email, you must not have gotten it.” I get these things all the time and I don’t know who’s teaching this cap. Whoever is teaching this crap, stop, you’re killing brands. It makes you feel like the company sending this to you sucks. Just think about this for a second. When you got that, at the sub-conscious level, you felt bad. It made you feel bad because the person was calling you out and saying you didn’t respond to my email. Now, I want you to pay attention to this, people who are listening. It’s a really, really, really stupid way to start off a relationship calling you prospect as schmuck. Stop doing that. I’ve been teaching this since the 90s, you leave a voicemail and you got to leave another voicemail and you gotta leave a voicemail. I get persistence, persistence always went. I get that. But if you leave a voicemail, you leave the exact same voicemail every single day. You leave it because you’re being persistent. But if you call up and say, “Oh, I called you yesterday,” or, “Hey, I’m calling you again,” or, “I’m doing this.” This doesn’t mean you can’t leave a series of voicemails that have a different message on them. If you start leaving voice mails and say I called you before, I called you before, I called you before, trust me, the prospect gets madder, and madder, and madder at you and the same thing happens on email. I was on this rant the other day if front of a group of CEOs. The room exploded. They are like, I’m being hammered by all of these stupid salespeople who were sending me emails telling me that I didn’t respond to their email. They’re not getting any value, they’re not giving me any relevance, they’re not doing anything that make sense to me and I’ll give you one that’s even more moronic, I mean this is moronic. You’re a company and you sell Telephone Prospecting services, we’ll do your cold calling for you. We pick up the phone and call and engage prospects. The way that you prospect to me is via email. How does that help your credibility as a company? I promise you, zero, because it tells me you’re not going to call anybody. All you’re gonna do is send emails and sending me crappy leads that no one is ever gonna respond to me. Marylou:          Definitely. The other thing too about voicemail, I’d like to go back to that, is how do you feel about direct and indirect influencers. When you’re actually working on a calling campaign and you have your bull’s eye, your target, the person that you want  in the middle of the bull’s eye but then the next ring out, you’ll have what I call direct influencers, people who have the prospect’s ear or at least they value them at a peer level. And then you have the third ring which is indirect people like perhaps colleagues or people in other divisions if you’re selling at market companies. How do you feel about the voicemail engine using that to do what I call intraday calling in and around the ring? Jeb:                  Personally, that’s exactly how I approach it. You’ve got a complex account, if you’re selling something that’s really transactional, I’m not sure if that really makes a lot of sense. If it’s a one call close, calling an influencer probably isn’t going to do a lot of good because they’re not going to be able to make a decision and you’re just gonna prolong your pain. I’ll give you a great, real life example. One of my client sells enterprise level software and these are your big spends so we’re talking about anywhere from half a million to five million dollar software purchases. Because they’re at the enterprise level, basically when the company gets their client to sign up, if they’re getting married for life, I mean this isn’t something that they’re gonna shift out of it because the risk of getting into it and getting out of it is just so high. For quite some time, they were going after a market of companies that weren’t actually using the software. They were taking a green field and converting them into this particular type of software and that was a pretty easy sell. You had status quo, the way we’ve been doing it but you also had a lot of market forces that were creating a situation where these companies really had just start making decisions about how they were going to be managing their data. That market began to tap out. They had a very pretty limited market of companies that would be eligible for this type of software. They had a few competitors and once they took out the green field market, they had to start going after competitive accounts. They have to go and start chasing businesses. The cause of this type of software is a long, long term investment, that’s a much harder not to cry. What we set down with them and built was a strategy that was exactly what you described. The strategy was we need to find people who are actually using the software, the competitor software. We know that there are problems there and we know there’s dissatisfaction. We have to leverage that group up in the channel to start really pushing the people above them to push the ultimate decision makers because in this case, the software was so big, it would’ve be a CIO, CFOs, CEO, sort of a joint decision and these decisions generally have to go to the board. You have to get those folks in your camp willing to go the board with a recommendation to make a change to their software. There was no way you were going to make that happen just by calling into the CEO’s office and chatting for a few minutes. You had to get an entire group of people around you working up the channel. As you said, there were some people that were more separated from it, users, people who had an influence but had no real ability to make any decisions at all. Then, you got people above them who were feeling that level of pain, who could push the people above them who had a lot more influence. What they focused on was building out that coalition of people and a lot of that was around a voicemail campaign. By the way, I think this is important for voicemail. Voicemail is not just a, “I’ll leave you a message, you call me back,” but it’s also marketing. If you have a really good voicemail message, you begin to create familiarity. What happens is you begin to help people move into your familiarity bubble so they know who you are, what your company is about. Like you said, it’s a campaign over time. That increases the probability that when a buying window opens, when there’s a trigger event, when there’s a place where there’s some level of dissatisfaction with their current situation, that they’ll either take your call or they’ll respond to your call or email or what have you at that moment. I think that we can’t ever forget that. To run these type of campaigns, you have to be able to manage your database in the way that you can segment your database out, you can run this campaign against the right prospects. Also, I think you gotta make sure, because voicemail is very time intensive, that you are blocking your time appropriately for that. For example, what we do is we do our voicemail campaigns at the end of the day, when our probability of actually getting a live person on the phone diminishes, we do voicemails in the afternoon because voicemail can be answered anytime. We do our calling campaigns generally first thing in the morning. We sit down, everybody’s got to listening in front of them. Calling campaigns, then social, then email, and then email we can schedule it typically, run our email campaigns, schedule them for 8:00AM. As soon as the email hits, we’re watching all the people that are opening the email a lot and then that triggers our phone calls out to them. We see an explosion of productivity and getting people on the phone cause they answered the email, they’re typically at their office. They show some level of interest. We can get them on the phone and typically convert them into a sale. Again, by business from the advertising standpoint is a little bit transactional so the person that gets the email, that’s the decision maker and we need to get them closed on that particular call. I know that was a long explanation but I hope it makes sense. Marylou:          Yeah, it does. One of the things that we work with clients. I just specialize really at three stages of the pipeline I like to call it, which is the initial conversation to qualified opportunity. That is my area of expertise. But within that area, we do exactly what you’re talking about. We call it cadence where we actually blend in the phone with email, we look for first response rates cause all of our emails are persuasive copy, they’re looking for a call to action. They’re adding value but they’re also asking for something in return. Very simple things but we’re looking for response rates, we follow up with those. We embed click through content in some of the emails, we follow up on those with telephone campaigns so then we know the pain point that has resonated with that person. We try to do that in a systematic way at the top of the funnel so that we can build multiple engines. The while you’re sleeping engine is the email only engine and then we blend the intraday calling like we talked about before. For those accounts that have those 5.4 people that ebb and flow throughout the sales cycle that we need to talk to. I think your definitions are great. It does depend on exactly how many people are going to be introduced at certain stages of the pipeline. But for the most part, lots of the clients that I worked with, they have at least three, at least three people that are ebbing and flowing somehow through the initial stages of the pipeline either to start conversation, to continue conversation, or to get through the discovery sequences so that they can create a qualified opportunity. There are people now who are driving along listening to this thinking, “Ahhh, this really sounds great, I’m not sure where to deploy what Jeb is talking about.” When you come in and work with a client, are you specializing from initial conversation all the way to close one close loss? Are there certain segments of the pipeline that you specialize in? Or do you look holistically at the entire pipeline with clients and then start attacking certain areas? What is your preferred way of working with clients? Jeb:                  We’re more of a holistic firm and we work with companies all over the globe. We don’t walk in with a preconceived notion of what we do and we don’t specialize in any particular part of the pipe. Nor are we specializing in any particular industry. As a rule for the last ten years, we’ve been industry agnostic and it’s been a huge boom for us because we’re able to find, there are a lot of commonalities, a lot of patterns that companies are facing so we’re able to bring best practices from one industry or one company to the next. We’ve seen some just explosive growth rates. For example, one of my clients is in capital equipment, they were a $45 million company two and a half years ago, they’re $100 million company today. We were able to work with them on improving their inside sales team, at the same time working with a mash up between inside and outside sales. This is a company that pulled all their people inside and it recognized that it was killing them in the marketplace because their clients no longer had the relationship that they counted on and their competitor started ringing their clock. I’ve had at least ten or eleven clients over the last two years that have been redeploying an outside sales team because it makes sense to them to do that but we’ve been able to mash these things up so we’re getting the most productivity out of every single channel. We are an organization that sits down with our client, we spend time with them, we try to understand where the touch points are, where the levers are that will allow us to get them the highest productivity or the highest performance in the shortest amount of time. Typically, what we find is a lot of times, it’s things that are really, really small that are holding companies back, especially merging companies. But we work with companies that are in the Fortune 100 to merging, I’ve got a client that’s $5 million and that’s what’s beautiful about not locking yourself into a particular space. It’s a little bit harder for us sometimes to explain to companies that no we don’t just do one thing and you have to trust us that we’re really good at what we do. But on the other hand, there’s never a dull day. We’ve got training programs that go all the way from top of the funnel all the way to the end of the funnel and we’re able to apply things like cadence like you described in the appropriate way for every client. Every customer is different, every industry is different, every company is different and they know that your prospect is different. If you don’t leverage things the right way, you lose. If you read Fanatical Prospecting, I’m clear about that. I don’t believe that there’s one way. I don’t believe that there’s a one size fits all approach, I believe in basic principles. I believe that if you call your prospect a schmuck, they’re not going to want to have anything to do with you. I believe if you’re more familiar to them, which is both a marketing and sales function, there’s going to be a high probability that when there’s a buying window, it’s going to open to you. I believe that you have to prospect relentlessly every single day because the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipe and the number one reason there is an empty pipe is because sales people fail to prospect. I believe that if you use robots to prospect all the time, then you’re going to sub-optimize your sales because sales in it of itself is an emotional endeavor and until we can find robots that can be human, it’s going to be that way. There are certain transactional sales in the marketplace that, for example if you wanna buy something over the Amazon, the experience is so good that you only need to talk to a sales person in order to buy a toilet paper, I get that. But as we begin getting more complex, buyers are asking and you use the 5.4 thing which is one of the most, in my opinion, this is my opinion only, it’s a ridiculous stat that came out of CEB and because there’s not .4 of a person. I think that the reality is this, some companies there are a lot of people making decision, in some companies there is one person making a decision. There is not a pattern, it’s just a merge where you have a group of people making decisions and that early 90’s, when I was selling, I would sit down with committees of people on a regular basis and sell to them. Sometimes, there were ten people, sometimes there were five people. To think that all of a sudden that change in the world, it’s just not true. The reality is that people are more risk averse than they were before the recession and so what’s happening is that people are less likely to make a decision just on their own because they want to go check with someone else because they feel a risk. As a sales person,  that is an emotional issue, not a 5.4 people issue. As you described if I can go in and start using a campaign to reach into organizations and build relationships across the organizations, some of those relationships are really shallow, some of them will be deep that will help me build a coach or really tap into influencers, then do I give myself a high probability of closing the deal? Absolutely. That’s the real message here versus saying the buyer has changed or all this things have changed because I just don’t buy into it. I don’t believe there is an old school or a new school. I believe that there is the school of selling and if everybody who’s listening to this, if you search your heart and look at the top salespeople in your organization, they are doing things that the top salespeople in the organization were doing in 1970. They are relentless, they are persistent, they have a great mindset, they’re mentally tough, they ask great questions, they build relationships, they recognize that intrapersonal skills, the ability to manage their emotions, and interpersonal skills, managing the emotions of other people are absolutely critical to their success. They are adaptive, and they’re flexible and as new technology and new ways of connecting with prospects have emerged, they’ve adopted those and they built an end into their entire system so they become more powerful. This is to me, the greatest fallacy in sales right now is that sales is harder than it’s ever been which is complete BS. Sales is easier than it’s ever been. I worked when sales was hard. Sales was hard when there was a phone book, sales was hard when there was no CRM, sales was hard when my serum was a stack of business cards. Marylou:          Roll of decks, I had a roll of decks. Jeb:                  Today, we’re talking about, I can sit on an engine overnight, we use a company called TelWise we really love, we send an engine overnight, we send out emails. At 8:00AM, the emails hit, people open them up, we attach documents that they can look at. But when they look on, we use proactive chat to engage them on a conversation with us and get them on the telephone. We have a telephone system that, when I’m in Asia, I’m able to take a call and transfer to somebody in my office from Asia. I can do video calls. Lord, have mercy. It’s easier than it’s ever been before. Yet, just the other day ago, in one of our sales trainings, I was sitting there looking at three 20 somethings, I’m in the front of them, we were doing a prospecting blogs because we do live phone blogs in our Fanatical Prospecting bootcamps, had a stack of business cards in front of them, dialing off the stack of business cards. My mouth is open. I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” That’s how you go about organizing your day? Don’t tell me about millennials and how good they are with technology because they’re really not that smart with technology. They’ll adapt it faster than other people but they’re not that smart. Don’t tell that there are some new school or old school and please don’t tell me that everything has changed in sales because it hasn’t. It just hasn’t. Marylou:          Amen to that. I think a lot of it is there’s this difference of leveraging technology and hiding behind technology. What we really need to embrace as a community is that we can leverage technology where it makes sense to help us create better consistency in our work habits. In my area of expertise at the top of the pipeline, it’s all about habit. It’s really that consistency, you mentioned persistence, Aaron used to call me, “Patiently persistent Marylou,” because I would be patient but yet persistent in my sales conversations. I agree, I think we have a lot of work to do ahead of us because of this thought process of the younger or just sales representatives in general that the things have changed that much. There are some behavioral things, I will admit to that. My kids, you know with the swipe left, swipe right thing. Their attention span is a little bit shorter so you have to break through the clutter a bit. But all of that means, Jeb, is that you really need to think through what is my value? What value do I bring to the table? When I work with my clients and trying to create this grid, this value grid a friend of mine calls it, of why I matter to you, it’s a hard to thing to do. That’s step one for us, is to try to figure out why should people change? Why now? And why with you? Jeb:                  Even deeper than that, and this is the where, it’s not just millennials, it’s everybody. One of the core sale specific emotional intelligence skills is empathy, the ability to step into the prospect’s shoes. We use a qualification exercise we have in some of our sales training. Then, we ask our sales people to articulate the customer’s problem. They’ll make a list of problems and all the problems are their problems, not their customer problems. The problems are basically all of the features of their product. I’m like, “That’s not the customer’s problem, the customer’s problem is deeper than that. The customer’s problem is that they just hired Marylou as their intern who’s supposed to be getting them Starbucks, but Marylou’s not getting Starbucks because Marylou is going through the invoices that your competitors sent over because it doesn’t make any sense. They don’t trust your competitor.” That’s the problem. For me, it’s not millennials specifically, it’s every sales person. It’s getting out of your own self centered skin. When you start thinking about value, think about it in terms of why is it important to your customer? How does it fit into your customer’s language? With millennials, I get the span of attention, myself-trains had become video games. I’m literally never stop moving, it never stops moving. Nobody has a moment because if I don’t, I lose them. But my attention span has changed. I’m consuming information at such a speed that, I’m trying to read a newspaper the other day, I used to love to read the newspaper and it’s too long for me and I’m like, “I can’t move it.” I get all that, but this is what I mean, sales has not changed. What the great sales people always did was understood the emotional context from which their prospect was coming from. That emotional context changes over time. We’re an evolving society, technology has moved us. But if you don’t have the ability or the discipline to get out of your own way and think about your prospect, then it gets very, very hard to deal with them. If we go back to prospecting, I totally get millennials love text messaging. I’m 50, I love text messaging. I’m into text messaging. One of my vendors sent me a text message the other day, “I noticed something about your business, we can fix it, here’s what it is.” I wrote back and said, “How much?” They said, “This much.” I said, “Okay go ahead and do it.” That was the entire sales call. Now they were familiar with me. I knew who they were but that’s what I used. Later on that day, they called me and said, “Here’s what we’re doing.” That anchored the trust I felt for them. The relationships can be fluent across all those channels. But if you don’t get that it’s a relationship and it starts with the top of the funnel. If your prospecting email sucks, if you call your prospect and go, “Hey how you doin’?” How stupid is that? That’s not a way to start a phone call. If you waste my time, if you don’t bring me something even in your email that’s relevant to me and my business, if you don’t connect with me in that way, you’re gonna fail. This is what I mean by it, you would’ve failed and if you were selling tools to the Egyptian, you would’ve failed then, you’re going to fail now. It’s a different context but the emotional part of sales has not changed. Marylou:          Very good. Now before we go, one of the things I would like you to elaborate on for the audience is the concept of education and training. It’s not a set it and forget it, it’s not a one time shot. Tell us about the most successful clients you’ve had in terms of continual education and how they go about doing that and how you support that through your company? Jeb:                  I’m so glad you asked me. This is one the messages when I first started working with the client. One of my very first messages is, “Great companies don’t have the courage to train. They have the courage to train the same information over and over and over and over again.” This is true for leadership, it’s true for customer service, it’s true for most customer facing disciplines when in business because this is a skill position, these skills, these techniques, these dealing with people, these are skills that have to re-up on a regular basis. When you have that mindset that, “Oh, Marylou has been trained,” and you expect that the training that you gave Marylou was going to sink in and it’s gonna be working forever and ever and ever, you are sadly mistaken, it doesn’t work that way. The analogy that I used with companies to help them understand this is like a professional sports team. I always ask them, “Who’s your favorite NFL team?” Imagine if your favorite NFL team, were moving in August so they’re all practicing right now. They came to camp and had one practice. They went over the play book once. They went over the place once. And then the coach said, “Everybody is trained now, we’re good to go,” and then they never went to practice again. Imagine that. The coach will be fired, the ESP will be up in arms, and all the people have talked about sports be going crazy because nobody would do that. Here’s the deal, salespeople are the elite athletes in the business world. If you don’t have those elite athletes working at peak performance, your company will fail, I guarantee it. The number one reason why businesses fail is because they run out of customers, number one reason. As an organization, it’s your job and your role to train your people over and over and over and over and over again. A great example, we’re talking about prospecting, filling the top of the funnel. You teach a group of salespeople how to get on the telephone and call, we do this in our training classes. We watch business leaders watch the training class and they are amazed at what happens over the course of just three 30 minute dialing blocks because people get so much better. Then they go out and for two weeks, three weeks they are killing it. And then their skills begin to diminish. Why? Because you’re making 30, 40, 50 calls a day, if you’re doing that, you’re getting reinforcement by the call, the customer, you begin to boost that skill. If you’re not re upping that, some of that’s the manager, some of that’s online self directed, some of that’s bringing the backend of the classroom. But if you are not constantly doing that, you will fail. You asked me about clients. One of my most successful clients. They have two rules. One, every morning they train, every morning. Every morning, they do a training class. These are 15 minute trainings, they take things that you and I have been talking about, they’ll take one part of that and they’ll teach that every single day, every day, every day, every day. This plays, their rocket ship is incredible, they’re sales people are always on. Number two thing, this is the number two rule and this by the way is a rule that I recommend to every single leader. Number two rule, they never, ever, ever, ever get their sales people together in a room for a meeting or online for a meeting, however they they get sales people and not train them something, not teach them something. That way, they’re always teaching. The most successful clients I have, have that as a culture. They teach and teach and teach and teach and teach and teach and teach. I learned it because I work for a company that, we train the same stuff over and over and over again and it was an amazing place to work. It was so much fun. That doesn’t mean you can’t layer on new ideas and new trainings. It doesn’t mean that. What it means is that you can’t send someone to a training class and then expect them to be trained. This is not like teaching accountants how to use a bunch of spreadsheets. This is teaching people human relationship skills. We know how hard it is to deal with other human beings. When I look at the companies that I worked for that were the most fun, the most dynamic where we had people who we were really building on their talents, these are companies who had the courage to pick a path and teach it over and over and over and over again until it was wrote because they believed and understood their self-professionals were their elite athletes. Marylou:          Perfect. One of my friends is a sales director at a company in Seattle and what they do is they have block time everyday where they’re doing their calls. They take 15 minutes, it seems to be 15 minutes as I remember, I don’t know if it’s just palatable or what but they do one topic, one objection, they sometimes do writing exercises where they’re writing emails but they do something every day with the team. If they do a call related warm up, it just gets them ready for their block time. Incorporating it into a daily rhythm isn’t a difficult thing. It’s just like you said, I love the term you used, having the courage to do so. Because it really will change your life and your revenue. Jeb:                  Absolutely and if you take that concept of 15 minutes, I’m working with inside sales teams and working with the managers and supervisors. Far too often, in my opinions, the managers and supervisors are separated, their offices are over there and the salespeople are over here. Not all of them are configured that way. With the supervisors and managers inside of an inside sales team, everyday even if you have multiple shifts, you should be doing shift huddles and for 10 or 15 minutes inside that huddle, you should bring a training, something that you’re teaching. We supplement this with our clients, we have a really powerful elements, we call Sales Gravy University. It allows us to create private programs for our clients so we can create a series of training programs and most of our clients use the mobile app cause the mobile app is slicker and easier and there’s a lot of video based training, we keep them down to two or three minutes. What the manager can do is they can take one of the modules, show the video, and then have a conversation about it so that people can actualize that. Like you said, then they go get on the telephones and they go work or they go sit with the customer and they work. If you’ve got really good leadership team at that point, the leaders are anchoring the training with hands on coaching. I’ll give you a really nice example of one of my clients who I think just took it to the total next level. Most inside sales organizations, they had a quality control group that was listening to calls and going back through what was happening. They will sit down with the representatives in the coaching, they will give them all this things. Nobody can deal with everything you did wrong on a call. What the leader did on Jen, I think one of the best inside sales leaders I’ve ever met, she said, “This is not working for us.” We built training for them, we customized an entire training suite just for them, spent months with them really understanding their business. What she did was start taking the modules, we try to build training in short modules so that managers can then take those later on and use them for their idles. She took the modules and she said, “This week, we’re focusing on this.” That’s what every manager would focus on all their little 15 minute get togethers will be that. Then the quality control people, the only thing they will pay attention to was the thing they were focusing on. Then they will give the managers feedback on the people they were listening to base on how they were doing against that particular focus. The managers were able to use that to really concentrate their coaching. They just got better and better and better and their representatives felt like they weren’t getting fumbled by hey, you did all these things wrong. I’ve got a group of people that are really trying to help me approve a particular skill and then they were growing to the next one, growing to the next one, growing to the next one. I recommend that to a number of my clients, I recommend that to anybody listening. To me, I never thought about doing it that way, it was a game changer for them. Marylou:          That’s great. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I know we can go on forever cause you’re just so knowledgeable about so many different things. But to keep it short, be respectful of the people who don’t have a lot of time to listen. What’s the best way for someone who just is totally excited about what they heard today and want to connect with you? What’s the best way to do that? Jeb:                  A couple of things you could do, one is you can go to my blog, a personal blog, it’s jebblount.com. There’s a ton of resources there, videos, blogs, that type of thing. You can also find me on YouTube, so the YouTube channel and you can go to Sales Gravy, @SalesGravy on YouTube. My Facebook is Jeb On Demand. My personal Facebook is Sales Gravy, connect with me either way, I’m happy to take you and bring you on. I post pictures of food and cats so you can look at that. Twitter, I’m @salesgravy. Instagram I’m @salesgravy. I’m Jeb Blount on LinkedIn and I’d love to get your LinkedIn connection. And then you can find me on iTunes and on Stitcher and wherever you find podcast if you type in my name or type in Sales Gravy Jeb Blount, you’ll find my podcast on those channels. You can also send me an email if you like I’m jeb@salesgravy.com, send me an email, I answer, trust me I gave out my email address, I get tons of spam. It’s okay. I’m happy to connect with you any way that you want to and definitely go pick up my book Fanatical Prospecting. It is the one book that I guarantee you, I guarantee that if you read that book, it will make you more money this year. Marylou:          For those of you who listened and took to heart what Jeb said about phone calls, I will put his office phone number on this show page where I’ll have all these links he just mentioned and other resources that I think would be of value for you to consume. But definitely look him up, if you really want to radically change from where you are now to where you can be as a sales professional, Jeb is your guy for sure. Jeb:                  Thank you. That was very nice of you. Thank you. Marylou:          Thank you so much for your time and it’s great finally connecting with you. I wish you much success going forward. Jeb:                  Awesome. Thank you.

Marylou: Joanna helps startups and other small businesses write irresistible copy. You need great copy but either can’t afford it or don’t have the time to write it yourself. Joanna is on the program today to give you some help writing your own compelling words. She founded Copy Hackers, a website that educates startups and anyone else to write words that sell products and services. If you don’t have the time to learn, you can find some of the best copywriters on the internet there as well. In this podcast, Joanna reveals why copywriting is one of the most important aspects of sales, the ideal timing and first steps to writing great copy, and tips for AB testing and keeping your skills sharp. I’ve been at Mastermind for few months now. I kind of understand your business model and kind of don’t, so can you tell me where did it all start, were you always focused on the direction you are and what is your main goal? Joanna: Yeah. It’s so big. I’m happy to talk about it. Going way back to four and a half years ago when Copy Hackers came out of nowhere for me and decided it was going to be a business whether I wanted it or not which thankfully I now do want it. For me, I feel, you and I have talked about my aversion to frameworks or my skepticism around frameworks. This is part of it where that comes from. I’ve got major issues, clearly let’s just start with that. I’ve a lot of crap that I need to work through. One of the things that I found in my professional life is that I, this is bad and good, I think that any success that I have had with Copy Hackers in particular, it’s happened in spite of me, honestly. It is something that I feel I have followed a lead rather than led. I haven’t built Copy Hackers, Copy Hackers just decided to build itself around me and I found myself in it managing the building of it which really means just watching it happen in wonder, what are you doing business, how are you building yourself? It’s because of the fact that I fell into copywriting initially. I didn’t intend to do it. I was in law school two months before I became a copywriter. I had this plan, we all have these plans, right. I had this plan, I was going to finish undergrad, went to Japan for a year, came home to do law school, and then I would be a lawyer and when I was in my 30’s I would write a novel or two. In my 40’s, I would stop being a lawyer and go on and be a novelist or something like that. That was the plan. First day of law school is coming at September 6. Its midnight, September 6, just like 12:06, law school starts that morning. I got a call that my Dad had died, that same day. He died, and how do you go to law school now and start this other life. I was kind of thrown off this path with this major event and from there I floundered for a couple months just figuring things out but I’m a very practical person, I couldn’t flounder eternally. I’m not someone who can travel the world because I didn’t have any savings. I couldn’t go wander around. I had student loans to pay off. I had to get into something. There were a couple paths I could take to do something while I took a year away from law school. I deferred my admission instead of dropping out, I just deferred. I’ll come back to it, so I decided to go. I had a friend who was working in a marketing agency and she was like, “We’re looking for a writer so maybe you want to apply for that.” I was like, “I don’t even know what marketing is, what are you talking about? Explain this marketing thing to me.” I legitimately had no idea what it was or how it worked. I was an English major, we were very proud of being far, far removed from like the business side of campus. Marylou: Right. Joanna: We’re in our own little philosophy world, right? The humanities. We don’t care about making a living so I said, “Okay fine, I’ll try this thing.” I applied for it. I got the job to my stunning amazement and so I decided to do this thing. I was a “creative writer” at the agency, that’s what I started as, I should have started as copywriter. That’s what I was doing but I didn’t like the title copywriter. I thought that was boring sounding. I did that and decided not to go back to law school because it just didn’t feel alright, it just wasn’t there. Years later, I found myself still copywriting into it at that point. Huge software company, learning a ton about business and marketing. Social media was just starting up at the time too. I got to lead the Intuit Global Business Division Social Media Team, which was awesome. It really exposed me to all of this stuff and I started to pay attention to Hacker News which is a popular sort of forum. It’s like inbound but it’s for developers that came well before inbound and Growth Hackers came along. I was hanging out there where all these startups hang out. I helped some people out with some copy there. That was turned into case studies and a couple of people on Hacker News said, “Since you can’t help all of us, why don’t you write an ebook to teach copywriting?” I was like okay, sure, I can do that, so I did. I spent about a year writing what turned into a huge book. I sent that out to some data readers and they were all like, “Too long, it is way too long. It’s an ebook.” Ebooks were still pretty new, this was about five years ago, they weren’t everywhere. People are like, “I don’t like reading on my screen. If you’re going to give me an ebook, it has to be a short ebook.” I cut off this big 250 page ebook into four little fifty page books and I discarded some of those pages leaving behind this four books of fifty pages each. I launched that to the Hacker News community, actually. That’s how Copy Hackers launched as a business. I just said, “Hey, I quit.” I had just quit my job and Intuit. I wrote this post and said, “I left my job at Intuit to start a startup for startups.” It took off on Hacker News and the book sold like crazy. I had people like Dharmesh Shah whose HubSpot’s founder buying the book. I was like, “What is happening here?” Suddenly people are paying attention. Cool people that I had only been following forever are emailing me to ask me to like do whatever might be, like all of these cool opportunities are to present themselves to me. These ebooks are selling. I find myself blogging to talk more about the things that I couldn’t cover in those short ebooks. It just kept kind of rolling, this thing kept  rolling and getting bigger. People kept reaching out to me and I kept having cool opportunities. I got to a point in the past, that was about four and a half years ago that that started. About two and a half years past and so the last two years I’ve been like, “Holy crap, what is Copy Hackers? What is this thing? What is it?” That’s part of the problem that I’ve had as someone who’s implemented the sort of lean, startup methodology which is not to say that I did it absolutely right. I probably did some things wrong and that’s led to my current-ish state of confusion around where my business is and what it is because with lean startup, it’s like okay. this is the experiment. That’s all Copy Hackers was, it was an experiment. Let’s put together, do everything for as cheaply as we possibly can. I wrote the books in Word. I went to 99designs to get somebody to design a book cover for me. Cool, I think I paid $700 which I was stunned that I had to pay that much. I was like I can’t do a business if it costs this much money which is very little money in these kind of things. But everything else has been so cheap, I had a WordPress site with like $20 theme installed on it, through commerce which was like basically free so I could sell my books online. Everything was really cheap which is part of the lean startup idea is do things affordably so you can see if it works and then not have lost your shirts when it’s time to pivot or shut down. Because it was lean from the get go, I didn’t have a business plan in place. I didn’t know what the model was. I was like, let’s just see.  Two and a half years after that, it’s like holy crap, I’m seeing but now I’m so deep in it. I’m so caught up in the wave that I can’t find my footing. I had to kind of pause and reset. The last two years have been me trying to do that work of resetting and figuring out what we are but I feel today that I know what Copy Hackers is. Marylou: And? Joanna: But do you? Marylou: So share with us what your definition of Copy Hackers. Joanna: I think, I think, I think. I allow myself to make mistakes. I think that’s been a good thing too. Copy Hackers is and has been since the beginning a place for startups in particular. By that, that really does get to the point of startup marketers is really what it comes down to, to learn how to grow their online businesses. That’s it. A lot of people can say that. We do it with a focus first and foremost on copy. Secondly, which is related to copy, on things that are affordable and achievable. Because you’re a startup, you’re doing a lot of stuff yourself. You don’t have a lot of money. You also don’t have a lot of time, that’s tough. But you have to have one or the other. You can’t have no time and no money. I can’t help you if that’s your situation. You have to have one or the other and we can help you in both cases. If Copy Hackers is a place where startups go to learn how to grow their businesses affordably and by achievable means, so things that you can actually do. How do we do that? We do that with a lot of free content, a lot of it. Basically, 90% of our time is spent on producing “content” but content process is bigger than that terrible word content. It’s about the real stuff, like not a list of six ways to write a headline which you could find actually, probably a million of those posts online, but rather things you haven’t thought about before, a test that we’ve been running to see. Are those six ways that people have been teaching you, are those actually right, are they legit, let’s test them and see it will tell you what we learn. That’s the core of the Copy Hackers business. But how do we make money, well we have courses where we teach people, startups in particular, how to write copy that will help them grow their businesses. That’s what our business is. Marylou: A lot of times when you’re in a startup environment and you mention the lean protocol that you follow, it’s the minimum viable product. A lot of times, the CEO founder is the one who’s writing the copy to start. Joanna: Yeah. Marylou: I know you mentioned before you have a background in humanities? Joanna: Yes. Marylou: How much does that play in the way you teach what I will call right now none writers? Joanna: Oh, it’s definitely a really good question. It’s hard to say because the humanities are like part of my DNA. I didn’t go into the humanities to learn about that kind of stuff. I went in there because it was a natural fit, because it felt like it was drawing me there, philosophy. I want to talk about things. I want to explore. I don’t want to spend my time putting together widgets, as much I love building things. I was a Lego enthusiast until my teen years, like embarrassingly long time. I love building things but I also love the thinking part of things. The critical thinking. How does that play in, I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts waiting through my head right now about it. It’s hard for me to say oh, it’s because my humanities background that I want to teach or that I teach in this certain way. I don’t know, I think I’ve always also wanted to be a teacher. That was what I wanted to do when I was a little girl. I plan architect and teacher, those are the two things I wanted which couldn’t actually happen together, sadly. I wanted to be that. I went and taught in Japan for a year. My dad was a teacher. I feel like I’ve always really respected teaching as well as learning. I loved being a student, I loved the teachers that really made me think and didn’t accept my okay work, where they would like punish me for doing poor or decent work. I love that movie Whiplash where some character says that the worst thing you can say to somebody is good job. I feel that resonates with me. I don’t want to hear that, I don’t want to say it. I want to be a part of growing cool people, things, and businesses that push harder, that try a hell of a lot of harder than anything you’ve seen before to really push for that excellence, to not look for shortcuts. That’s actually where I have a hard time teaching is because I want to get into the thinly side of stuff because you need to think about what you’re working on. Of course before you think, you need to read. Read first then think, then act. It’s hard for me when people want a checklist. They want a shortcut to do X, Y or Z. I think that there are good checklists and shortcuts and I think they’re very good frameworks too. Don’t get me wrong with frameworks but it is not the same thing for me as sitting and talking through an idea at length. I think that’s kind of tension around having a humanities background and then trying to teach especially honestly to teach people in business which is a different group of people entirely. Marylou: Specifically in startup because it’s almost a duality, right? Because in English, my daughter brings home papers and she’s organizing over paragraphs for hours and hours and hours. In startup world, it’s the minimum viable, get it up now and we’ll test it and improve it. How do you marry that art, and love, and just beauty of writing with needing to deliver a response so that you can get sales for a startup? Joanna: I think that’s interesting. They’re probably close, there’s probably something there, some great overlap. I do think that of the things that make me who I am, this goes back to how I feel like I’ve been led down a path and I have been smart enough to just quietly follow that path for a while. We’ll see what comes of it. It leaves me in alert because I don’t know what’s next all of the time and that’s hard for me as a planner. Growing up, we had very little money, very little. I’ve heard people talk about the very little, I don’t mean to compare anything. My stepmother talked about we didn’t have much. She had pictures of beautiful dolls she had growing up. I was like you don’t know what not much is. We were raised with very little and my stepmother came along much later in my life, that’s why she didn’t quite get a picture of where we were before my Dad went back to school and became a teacher. Of course, those very difficult years while he went back to school and we found ourselves hungry a lot to his huge dismay, right? He was a provider. There was a lot of not having money for anything. The things that I look now at my two step sons and they gets to have a lot of things, we feel detached from that world we came from where you didn’t have anything. The things that you didn’t have are embarrassing to even think about. Marylou: Or sometimes you don’t know what you don’t have either too, right? Joanna: Sometimes you absolutely do. You know you don’t have lunch today, right? Marylou: Right. Joanna: You know you’ll probably have lunch tomorrow. I would never change myself, that definitely made me who I was, who I am. It did give me a hunger like nothing else, like a hunger to make sure that I’m always going to be providing for myself and my family. That I’ll have my education earlier on in life so that should I have children or in this case step children, I won’t have to go back to school at that point. All of those things, even though it was extremely brave of my dad to do that. All of that stuff gives you this hunger and in turn that hunger goes everywhere in my life. I’m not a raging capitalist by any stretch of the imagination but I do like making money. I like seeing businesses make money, I like being responsible for businesses doubling the revenue. For a business having a product launch that has three Xs or five Xs and knowing that I was critical to making that happen. For me, that part of my life comes out in business. That’s what makes me hungry as a marketer. I salivate at the idea of running an AB test where we really try to grow revenue or really try to get an X wonderful results working our ass off to make that happen and then seeing in the data either that you did and wow would you actually did something very cool. You kept people employed at this organization that’s your helping out or maybe you matched the people like customers with the product that they need for their lives to be better, or you find out that you lost and that AB test didn’t work and now you get hungry all over again to make sure that never happens again. Where from now on, I refuse to let me and myself have a losing AB test which is impossible, right? But it will keep you hungry, it’s different from the humanity side. If I was raised in a wealthy environment, I might have gone on to do an English Degree and maybe stay in that world and get a PHD in philosophy but that wasn’t the plan for me. I think that the humanity is something different from what I have here. The arts of writing is not something that I think about very often when I’m writing copy. I don’t think, oh William Boughner would be so pleased that I wrote this line of copy. He’s more like really? Did you just do that? But that’s okay because I’m in a different world. This isn’t a world of arts, necessarily. Not that there’s no place for it but for me copy writing is just separate from that other writing that I still love but I keep separate. Marylou: That’s music to the ears of the startups because they don’t have necessarily the staff, the time, where with all the knowledge, the comfort. It’s very scary to try to write an email sequence or to create a landing page because you just also have this imaginary quill behind your ear. Joanna: Yeah, it’s true. Marylou: You know. Joanna: Sadly. It’s hard because I know that. I’ve talked to a lot of startups, thankfully. Along the way, it’s clear that if they’re going to put their time into anything and I get it as somebody who is growing her own business, any time you spend on anything has to have a great return. You can’t keep guessing. Large organizations that are making a lot of money let’s say, or that have a big staff probably because they’re making a lot of money, they get to hire people that have earning positions of luxury a lot where they can say, “Well, what we are going to test today?” We’ll see what learning we get out of it. I believe in testing to learn because that learning will help you grow. I don’t necessarily test to win although I am driven to win. I think the biggest win is the learning that will help us have more wins down the road. That’s a bit of a luxury. For me to say that, “Thank you Joanna, but I don’t actually have any time to sit here and do a test to learn and to see what happens next. I don’t have time to as you say to write a drip sequence that isn’t going to perform, because if that takes me four hours to do,” which is actually really fast to write a trip campaign. But that’s really, that’s a lot of time for the average startup founder, or co-founder, or one of the first hires and they’re, they just don’t have time so they have to work on, they have to make sure that the thing that they’re working on does bear fruit. Like you say, they can’t have that quill behind their ear though. As soon as you look at something and say oh, this is a writing exercise. You’re probably wrong in the business world. It’s not a “writing exercise” so you probably need a better word than writing for things that are related to writing for business but we’ll never get a better word than that. Marylou:   Indeed. Yeah, definitely. Why startup versus corporate world? Joanna : Cause I love startups. I love the hunger. I think that’s what it comes back to. You do crazy stuff that would get absolutely kiboshed in a large corporation. I was that into it. I know what a big business looks like, even though Intuit has, they talk about lean startups internally and they have groups of people that try to act like startups, so think like a startup, that kind of philosophy. It’s very different to be in startup, where, especially bootstrap startups. A funded startup has a little bit more wiggle room than a boot-strap. Startup funded, you can hire that first marketer to come in and write stuff for you and then you just do reviews which is extremely problematic, which we can talk about absolutely. When I work with startups, so many of the ones I’ve work with have been self funded. Then maybe they get funding later and most of them don’t end up needing to use that money thankfully because they’ve grown their business to a state and they have good revenue. Seeing the crazy stuff, I have never worked with AirBNB, but knowing what they did, it was one of many startups obviously that has done a lot of cool stuff early on. Knowing that they had to go to like conferences and sell, I think they’re the ones that did the cereal. It was either them or Dropbox. I think it was AirBNB that went to a conference and sold boxes of cereal or something. Anyway, that’s a crazy shit, that’s like stuff that nobody does unless you really passionately believe in the thing that you are trying to get out there. And then, you’ll do just like your own child. You’ll do crazy stuff to make it work and that’s what I love about start-ups. It’s just how willing they are to go and do the crazy thing. The hard thing like getting on the phone and talking to ex customers, people who stop using your product, persuading them to get on the phone with you without inserting them even, Finding a way to persuade them to go with the phone with you and tell you what was wrong with the product. What didn’t do for you that you thought it will do? This is a thing that in a large corporation, I have found at least, that’s rarely the thing that the person who should be asking those questions does. It’s hard for a marketing manager, senior marketing manager, a C level or VP absolutely to get on the phone with an ex customer and really listen to them and ask them questions and then do something with that. But startups do that every day, all day, all the time. Who doesn’t love that? I love it. Marylou: Now, they love community which means they probably would love to see your face in some of their meetings. Are you taking clients? Do you do client work like that anymore? Joanna: I have a client. Right now it’s a Rain Maker by Copy Blogger and that’s purely, I guess Copy Blogger’s now called Rain Maker but I always follow them as Copy Blogger so it will be hard for me to ever change that, but I’ll try. Brian Clark has become a great friend over the past few years which blows the mind of Joanna Circa 2009. She’s like, “What are you doing talking to Brian Clark on the phone right now?” Brian has become the cool, I’ll call my friend, I hope he’s not like, “What? We’re friends?” I don’t think he would be surprised. He had this thing that he wanted to work on with me. I was like, “Cool, let’s do that.” In that case, I work with clients. But otherwise, we do this thing at Copy Hackers where, because I always want to stay sharp. I don’t ever want to become somebody who teaches about what happened ten years ago, not that it’s not relevant but you can still teach about that but make sure you’re talking about how does that applies today, if at all. I need to stay sharp. To do that, we actually have this program at Copy Hackers it’s called research partners. Our research partners are businesses that we work with 100% for free. We don’t want to get paid. Part of the idea there is that we just want to be allowed to work with organizations that have a culture of experimentation, that have a growing brand which will usually mean enough traffic to test, to run an AB-test to confidence and who are willing to do whatever we want. By that, I mean if we’re going to run an experiment, sometimes we are going to test something really unusual, right? If you were my client and paying me, I’d have to have a big discussion with you about why we want to test a Johnson box on the home page. And you’ll be like “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” I’d have to have a really good reason. I would expect to have really good reason outside of, “Well, you signed up to be a research partner and we believe it could work for you based on this, this, and this. Let’s go ahead and test it.” Our client is allowed to have different exit. That’s not to say that we test wild stuff that is going to hurt our business. Our goal is always to get a fantastic result for our research partners so that we can go tell people, “Hey, we just got X lift for Buffer and we just did this cool campaign for Wistia because that’s great content that gets shared, that helps people do better things at their business. It makes our life easier because now they’re coming to our site. They’re attending our webinars. They’re doing things to learn more from us which of course in turn leads to more course sales. I don’t do client work but I do research partner experiments. Marylou: If you’re not of the taint of heart variety, you’re not willing to go down that path. What’s the natural course? If I’m a startup and I hear about you, what’s the next best thing that I should do? Joanna: We do “train” copywriters too. We do have a really good network of copywriters that are able to take on work. Of course, a great copywriter, once the work gets out, is extremely hard to keep. To get in front of that copy writer, to get that copy writer to come work for you. Everybody listening, if you find a great copywriter, do not let him or her go. Stay on her calendar, make sure that you’re always like, if that might mean being on retainer just to have access to that person because it’s so hard to find a great one. And when you do, oh my gosh. If copywriting is your online sales person which I firmly believe that it is, and it’s a really affordable sales person too that can do tons of work, doesn’t need time off, doesn’t have weird stuff going on personally, it can constantly bring in money for you. Don’t let a great copywriter go. We have Copy Hackers for hire. It’s a place where we send most people who are looking to get help with let’s say more of a one off project or something like I want to redo my drip campaign and get more sales. Go to Copy Hackers for hire and find an email copy writer on that site. And then if you want something more like we’re redoing our entire site beginning to end including in app messages or whatever might be. Something bigger, then it’s good to just reach out directly to me and I can do my best to match you with somebody who can actually help make that project a big success because there’s so much on the line. Marylou: So not only are you helping the startup company but it sounds like you’ve got an ecosystem in place for copy writers as well. Can you tell us more about that? Joanna: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. We do. I don’t like saying no to things and that has a lot to do with this hunger that I had growing up. The idea of turning away a great opportunity for a great copywriter. I know that there are great copywriters out there and I know that they don’t always have the same access to great perspective clients as I may have. We’re very fortunate at Copy Hackers to get some nice people that want to work with us and pay us good money and have great stuff happen. We’re lucky to be in that position, we don’t take on client work anymore outside of very, very few cases. Why shouldn’t we, we want to help those business get great copy and we want those copywriters to be able to keep running their business and put in food on the  table and make life great for themselves. Let’s connect the two. That’s what we do. We’ve been doing it for a long time but we more recently kind of turned that into a real thing with Copy Hackers for hire. Marylou: Yeah and amped it up for certification and then a lot of educational. I was talking to one of my partners the other day who said pretty soon colleges are going to be challenged by places like what you’re doing because you are certifying people for writing, they’re getting great jobs, they have a long tenure. Joanna: It’s happening fast, too. Marylou: Yes. Joanna: I agree. Obviously you to me is a good example of a place to go and learn a lot of stuff but then there are these other pockets of people that are maybe subject matter experts. Like you say, moving people into certification paths so they absolutely haven’t just finished a course which they could have watched passively like, or listen to while they’re reading blogs but actually have to take exams at the end. The really good thing about these online courses is the very fact that it can happen super fast. Instead of having to wait and apply to get into a university just to take one course that you want to take in your third year which is the most exciting one, you can just go take that right now from people who are actually doing it for a living. I think that the future of education, it’s interesting. Future of everything is interesting. Absolutely. Marylou: A lot of this is going back to, you talked about being a lawyer back in the golden days. You used to be an apprentice with the lawyer. There was no law school. You would go apprentice. You would learn the trade. This is aligned with that, so it feels right. I know from looking at your certification courses, they are not easy. Joanna: I’m not an easy marker. Marylou: There is a lot of red pen going around, right? Joanna: Yes, sadly. Sorry to everybody who strive but no, but in the end yeah you do end up. I think people who pass certification feel like they’ve definitely earned it. And I feel very good about recommending clients their way. It is an interesting point that it hasn’t always been focused on formal education. Is it industrial? When did it started? I had a friend when I was temporarily doing my masters in English before I switched to communications and technology for my masters. He was doing his masters in English on books about Doctors in the 1700. He would talk about the fact that to be a physician was like frowned upon, oh you’re just a doctor? According to some of the stuff that he’s been reading. It’s not what it is today. It didn’t have all the training that it has today. It was passed down and like you say you apprentice under somebody. But now, today, there’s so much to do to make that your career. Anyway, it’s an interesting thought on education. Marylou: Yeah, definitely. Let me ask you a couple more questions. First one is if you could just paint the picture of the perfect Copy Hackers business, what do you see on the horizon for you? Joanna: I see. I do see this in the next two years, by the end of the next two years. Much of it by at the end this year, God willing. I see a multimillion dollar education business that’s well respected as a place for businesses to learn about communication with their audience. Coming out of that as something that works side by side with the Copy Hackers business is a tool, a platform to help people in business write better. We teach people how to write at Copy Hackers and then we have a solution called Air Story which will exist to help those teams at businesses writes better together. Marylou: Perfect. One more question and it’s about your ideal student, really. I’m a startup company, I have my idea, when do I start thinking about Joanna and her offering? Joanna: Stop always thinking of me. Marylou: Early on as I’m designing my product? Or do I think about it? I don’t like the word stage because that’s not the right word. But at what point in the design cycle do I start thinking about what you have to offer? Joanna: Early, I would say. I think most people would say that think about it early but I say it because if you’re building out your startup idea, chances are extremely good and I hope and pray that this is true for you that you are researching, you’re setting up interviews with people that you want to build a solution for, you’re following jobs on methodology to get down to like okay give me the documentary view of a day in the life of you trying to do X job. I’m kind of zooming in on those different parts of their day to find that pain that you can solve. You’re doing these interviews early on. You’re doing a lot of research, different kinds of research early on. You’re doing that in order to find the idea and figure out how to make it work. All of that stuff that you are doing is great for copy. Everything, all those interviews, if you sit there and you’re on the phone interviewing, let’s say I go back to the idea of Air Story because we did we followed jobs to be done to come up with the idea for Air story. We had these interviews that we were doing with writers, with editors, with literary agents, with writing teams, VP of content, that kind of thing, people who are hands on and more hands off and just like overseeing it. Tons of people that we spoke with all to get to this idea that there was a problem to be solved about how one assembles ideas into a written document. How do you do that? That’s the pain. There’s all this other stuff. We found this to be an opportunity. If we had just walked away from that, from those interviews and gone on and built the product and then gone on sat down to write the marketing materials for that product, we would be starting all over again to write those marketing materials. But when you think about the fact that in those interviews with those writers, editors, and agents and team, people were saying all of these great stuff. We recorded all of those interviews and then we’re able to go play those recordings, transcribe them, pick out the interesting messages that people were saying, and then use those messages to shape the copy that is on our site today. I don’t believe that a copywriter’s job is to write copy or that a startup founder who is working on his or her own copy, that their job is to write copy. It’s not, the best thing that you can do as a copywriter is to be a great listener and copy editor. If you are starting early on, and interviewing people coming up with that idea, listen well, come up with the idea, record those conversations as you do and then transcribe those, pull out the sticky messages from there, pull out those interesting things. All of that gets placed on your pages and in your emails. It would just be a huge tragedy if you didn’t think of that stuff right out of the gate because you would miss out on all of this extremely valuable copy. Marylou: There are courses on entrepreneurship in colleges and universities all through the US and probably Canada as well. Are they teaching students the value that you add? Joanna: No, just kidding. I don’t know. I haven’t been to school in—seven years ago I think I got my masters. I wish, I think some of the great ones absolutely are. I’m sure there are pockets of people. I know that the University of Iowa, which is a great writer school as any writer knows, they now have a copywriting course or two. I don’t know. I think it’s at the masters level. I was interviewed for that copy writing class last year and then I’m going back I think in two weeks to do it again. They’re teaching copywriting but there’s so many pieces and all of these pieces overlap. People who were talking about entrepreneurship and lean startups should be talking to the guys in economics. We should all be talking to the guys in journalism which is of course not a lot of people are signing up for that anymore. But all of these groups we talk together because we’re all going to be critically intertwined with each other when it comes time to actually go out and do great stuff for business. They might be teaching it in pockets but I don’t know, I haven’t seen evidence after teaching it as like this integrated system of business genius as we call it. Marylou: Yes, a copy writing curriculum. Joanna: Have you seen any evidence of that? Marylou: No, I’m in Iowa. I was actually notified by the University of Northern Iowa. They have an entrepreneurship program. They had heard about the work that I’m doing but it’s too late. You already have to have your products ready to go, you have to have your markets defined. What you’re talking about is getting them at the incubation level or even when they’re ideally when they’re in school. Joanna: Yes. Marylou: Having this curriculum throughout the schools systems and universities, it’s almost as if I tell my kids no one’s taught you guys to do time management. Joanna: Yes, true. Marylou: You come out of school, you don’t know how to manage your time. This is the same thing. It’s a core of how we communicate, why change, why now, and why buy our product. Joanna: Yeah. I mean there’s so much that we don’t learn in school. I guess it’s because maybe it was a felt niche previously but is it, is it today? No. Not at all, right? Marylou: Not at all. Joanna: Maybe it will catch up and if they don’t, they’ll be replaced by online businesses that are teaching the stuff. Marylou: Yeah or maybe you have a piece of your business that goes out and seeks out that before they get into the incubation process. Joanna: Yeah that’s true. Marylou, you always make me think about the things that I should be doing differently. Oh no, now I have more work to do. Marylou: Well as we close, is there anything else that you would like to share other than of course we to know how to go copyhackers.com to learn all this wonderful material that you’re constantly providing. Anything else that you would like to leave us with? Joanna: Well, that’s the thing. We are definitely focused on making Copy Hackers a great resource for people. That’s the place to go. Of course I’d love to hear what people want more of, what I didn’t hit the mark with, things like that by email. I’m joanna@copyhackers.com. I’m happy, completely happy, more than happy to hear from people about what they’re looking for, what their challenges are, if there’s any way I can help or connect them to people who can help. That is what I love doing. Marylou: Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it. Joanna: Thanks, Marylou.

 Marylou: If you’re feeling the pressure to keep up with new tools and apps in the sales world, this episode is for you. Our guest, Jake, is a sales executive for Sales Hacker. He’s a great resource to help you keep up with the craft and avoid detrimental overwhelm and he’ll be sharing some awesome ways to keep yourself educated and in the sales game.In this podcast, Jake reveals the crucial importance of continuing your sales education, tips for knowing your audience both in and out of the tech world, information on the upcoming sales hacker conference. We’re gathered here to talk about your role and what you’re doing now. Also, those listening to the podcast are going to be people who might be struggling with prospecting or they may want to pick up some additional tools and ideas and experiences that you’ve had that you might want to share with the audience. Tell us about your path to what you’re doing now and lessons learned and a couple of tidbits to take away so that people can start activating right away as the result of our call. Jake: Yeah. My path was when I first got out of college. Marylou: Yeah. Jake: I went to work for a company as a management trainee in the semi-trailer leasing business. Marylou: Okay. Jake: Nothing tech related at all but a big portion of my job was prospecting. They were very old school so it was just pick up the phone, make a little email, just cold calling right and left, trying to get transportation managers on the phone. That company ended up getting sold so I had to move on but I realized when I started looking for a job after that, the tech world specifically but more industries are catching up to it, really specializes in just prospecting. I didn’t know that was a thing until I found a company called Velocify in El Segundo and they hired me on as one of their BDRs to do prospecting. I thought, “Well this is perfect, I was just doing this. I didn’t know you could specialize in this role.” Because before my role is sort of a hybrid of a lot of different things. Marylou: Right. Jake: That’s how I got into being a BDR there. I loved it. I thought the challenge of trying to get people not only to get on a demo but just to get on a call with you was sort of exhilarating. When I was there, one of the main ways that I utilized my community to prospect was through the Sales Hacker LinkedIn group. That’s how I got involved here. I loved what they were doing, what they were saying. I learned a lot from them. I didn’t just use them for prospecting. I learned how to prospect from other people, what tools were good to use. When they were looking for someone to run sponsorships for them it just seemed like a logical place for me to be since I believed in what we’re doing here. Marylou: That’s awesome. I had a conversation with Max this morning so I ask specifically what portions of the pipeline do you specialize with training and dissemination of information and he’s like, “The full gamut,” which is great. I just focus on that little pie sales process from cold conversation to qualified opportunity which is a subject like Predictable Revenue. I have never strayed from that for the last 25 years. That’s what I’ve been doing. It was really refreshing to hear that anyone who has an inkling of wanting to get into the sales profession can go to this resource that has pretty much all the sales roles figured with educational material so they could first of all decide where am I best suited. One of the issues that I see a lot, granted I’m not skills training, I’m sales process, but one of the issues that I see a lot is that we got the wrong person in the role of a business developer. They maybe should be someone who manages the account after it’s sold and then grows that account through cross-selling or up-selling, I’m sure those terms are pretty familiar to our audience. Jake: Sure. Marylou: There’s the whole account executive role which to me is like you’re engaged now and you’re trying to get married. Where I am most comfortable is I’m in the dating mode, so I’m trying to get people to notice me, to see how wonderful I am and also to go to the first part of the path with me towards becoming a client. That was really refreshing. That’s a lot to cover. Jake: It is a lot to cover but it’s definitely necessary. When I was using it as a BDR, I had the goals and aspirations to become an account executive and sometime in the future maybe a VP of Sales or something like that. I read that information not that was pertaining to just my role but to the roles that I wanted to be in. They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you’re in. To me, that was the same kind of situation, I should learn about the job that I wanted to be in and not just the job I’m in, and the skills. Marylou: That’s great. When did Sales Hacker start publishing? Jake: A few years ago. It started with just some meet-ups around San Francisco bay area and as it grew in popularity, people were coming to those, it became a blog, it became webinars, and it became events where we are today. Marylou: I have personally read at least 200 of your blog posts it seems like, because there’s always information. People like me who have been doing this for a long time, you’re constantly learning. I think one of the things that I want our audience to really understand is that we’re never finished with our learnings. Jake: Definitely. Marylou: Especially now, when I was talking to Max, the tools that are out there for sales are just so ubiquitous that it’s kind of like wow. Jake: Yeah. It’s overwhelming. Sales is moving so fast and technology is trying to keep up with any way it can. There’s new product every day. It changes the game. Marylou: It changes the game but then there’s products that overlap and this whole concept of the actual sales stack, that terminology I think wasn’t even in existence a couple years ago. Jake: No, definitely not. Marylou: What tools can you use together to start conversation, to get them through the top of the pipeline towards an opportunity and then get them to close one hopefully, and then from there get them serviced and success, keeping the lifetime value. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: There’s tools for all that now. Jake: There are tools for all of that. Marylou: Yeah. Jake: You can all do either one piece, or multiple pieces, they overlap as you said. Marylou: It’s almost like you need to have a constant advisory as to which tools work best with others. An organization like yours that talks about the latest technological breakthroughs or tools and then also shares experiences of what people have done and which tools they’ve used, I think it’s just fabulous. I love that. Jake: That’s the goal of all of our events. We named our event Sales Stack, not the one in June with Salesforce but the November one that we’re going to be doing annually is Sales Stack for that very reason. We want people, sales leaders, who don’t know what piece of their sales pipeline is missing, we want them to come and fill up, build their own sales stack right there on our marketplace. Marylou: Tell us about the events that are coming up and also who would be best served by attending these events. You mentioned there’s a June event, and you mentioned there’s another one in November, you said? Jake: In November. Marylou: November. Tell us about the June event first. Who’s the ideal person to go to that event? Jake: The June event is going to be called Sales Machine 2016. It’s the first ever of its concept that we’ve done and that’s because we’re co-hosting it with Sales Force. That’s a big deal for us. The event is going to be highly focused on the enterprise. We’re looking at targeting companies that have a thousand plus total employees. Those are the kinds of companies that are going to get the most value out of attending this kind of conference. What we’ve seen in the sort of trend of sales is that we talk to a lot of tech people every day because that’s the sort of the space that we’re in but the same problems are plaguing every sales team around the country. It’s not just tech people that need to add to their sales technology stack or their sales processes, it’s everyone. We’re going to be covering a wide variety of industries. It’s going to be focused on not just sales technology but just sales process using general, how to best on board train your reps, how to hire the best reps, top of the line funnel management with your BDRs or SDRs and all the way through closing an account management. It’s covering the whole process, not just technology but also managing that team. Marylou: Wow, what I call sales skill, sales management, sales process, all of those items are going to be covered. Are you having workshops? What is the format of that event? Jake: Yeah. We are. We’re going to have a couple of workshops the day before. The event will be June 15th and 16th. The workshops will be on the 14th. It’ll be in New York. The workshops will be a little bit more intimate, with a smaller group of people, maybe 30 or 40 with one person leading the session. Then at the actual event we will have some massive keynote speakers like Arianna Huffington, or Billy Bean, the guy from Money Ball. Marylou: Wow. Jake: And then we’re going to intersperse that with some panels. We find it’s best at our events when we have a specific topic led by a moderator and a few other folks who are experts in that space each share their ideas. That way, we get more ideas all at once as opposed to just one person speaking at a time. A lot of them will be panels. Marylou: Perfect. Just so the listeners know, there will be some notes in the show notes for this podcast that will be codes if you want to go to the event that Max has agreed to a discount code for you, for attendees. Jake: Awesome. Marylou: Check out the show notes for this podcast and you’ll see what the code is in order to be able to attend the event. Tell us now about the November one. How does that differ from the one in June? Jake: Yeah, so the November one is going to be a little more focused on the sales technology stack that we we’re talking about before. It’s not as broad, it’s a little bit more on how do we build this technology stack to automate the current process within our teams and how do we implement it all together because I think as we’ve talked about before, actually on our last call, sales ops has a lot of responsibility already and integrating all the new apps together is just another thing to lay on their plates. Marylou: For those old timers like me, it reminds me of when we went from 1999 to 2000, we had the 2000 date thing we had to all worry about. I’m sure it’s before your time. Jake: I still remember. Marylou: I was an IT at the time, consulting, mostly doing conversions. It was a nightmare but it’s not that bad but it does, for someone like me who’s been through nothing, there was no CRM, there was no internet when I started working in this industry and then going into now where there’s so many tools, it’s just mind-boggling, it’s daunting. Jake: It is daunting. Marylou: The fact that you guys are going to cover the entire pipeline and beyond I think it’s just fabulous. I love that. Good. Someone who would want to go to that event would be a sales ops or teams that are involved in integrating the different types of tools into their architecture. Jake: Sure, I mean there’s definitely some overlap too with the June event. Sales leaders are going to be showing up at both. We’re going to see a pretty decent size of enterprise groups there as well. That event will also be helpful to smaller companies as well, startups, in market companies that are looking to build out their stack, that’s a very good resource for them too. It’s sort of more of a catch on in terms of company size. Marylou: Okay, great. Before we depart, I want you to tell me about your journey. You mentioned about the fact that you worked for a non-tech startup community, what got you interested in the technology company itself? Is that in your mind different? Do you sell differently when you’re in a tech company versus when you’re in transportation company or is it you can apply the principles across? A lot of times, we’re all coming from, a lot of us, a technology background but people who are lawyers, professional service companies, accountants, brokers, real estate people, can’t they all get a baseline understanding and a knowledge that can help them in their business since you went from a non-tech to a tech? Can you share what that experience was like for you? Jake: I think the absolute most important thing that I’ve learned so far in the world of sales is to know your audience. Marylou: Okay. Jake: A lot of these same best practices and tools sort of overlap with different industries. We were a pretty old school company that I used to work for so we weren’t using those tools. We didn’t even have a CRM. It was very minuscule in terms of the technology we were using but that technology overlapped. Definitely we could have made use of a lot of those types of things that are available today. But knowing your audience is still key. I was talking to, as I mentioned before, transportation managers back then but now I’m talking to sales leaders and marketing leaders within the tech world. You need to approach them differently. Obviously, the technology—I can still prospect with a tool like SalesLoft or Type Desk or something like that to both industries but once I actually apply my messaging or talk to someone on the phone, it’s a very different feel and a very different approach that I need to take based on not only who I’m speaking with individually but the type of company, the industry they’re in. All that I figured out matters a lot specifically going from, as you said, non-tech to tech. It was a different outreach process, the language and lingo was different. I had to portray myself in a different way then as I do now. It really opened my eyes to the fact that each person should be approached in a meaningful personal way, to the point where you’re not just giving the same spiel to every person you talk to and hoping that it sticks. Marylou: Right. Jake: It really has to be targeted to that person and demographic. Marylou: I hit you hit the nail in the head. The technology allows us to leverage systems, and leverage probably some research components. But when it comes down to having that conversation, you cannot throw people into a mass bucket and speak to them all the same way, you’ve got to set some context around what is different about this person because they get bombarded too with people who are doing it in the lazy way. Sales people have sort of a right or wrong, they can get lazy especially when they’re looking at these high tech tools that can really streamline their workflow. At the end of the day, it’s still a person to person communication. Jake: That’s exactly right. Marylou: You may be able to cut through. In the olden days, we used to use predictive dialing which used to dial thousands of numbers until someone says hello which meant you didn’t have to dial everybody, you just get the people who were on the other end of the line. But still even then, if you didn’t have something impactful or value to say to that person, it’s a wasted call. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: It’s the same thing with the email systems and all these other things. You have to be able to get on that phone and say the reason why I’m calling is. John Barrows, I talked to him this afternoon, he’s a Sales Force trainer, consultant. Jake: Yeah, I love John. He speaks at some of the events that we run. He says some valuable things for sure. Marylou: Yeah, and he’s the one who said that—he quoted somebody else so I’m quoting a third removed about context over content and he also talked about the fact that at the end of the day, it’s still a person. What I do is I create that superhighway that allows you to put more stuff through it but the stuff has to be quality. You cannot have the quality going down that pipeline. I’m really happy that this community is where it is and it’s growing and it’s starting to infiltrate into the enterprise because technology companies, because they are technology companies, embrace technology a lot faster and are more willing to pivot if, “Well, this stack didn’t work so let’s move to this stack.” There’s a lot of iteration, it’s in the DNA of the company in a lot of ways that you’re going to be able to iterate, improve the whole lean model. But when you get to the larger enterprise and go upstream, you’ve got more bodies to worry about, they all have opinions and sometimes it takes a little bit longer to get the message in that, “Hey, technology can help us do this better, faster, cheaper and with more quality.” Jake: Exactly. Marylou: I’m very happy that you guys are out there helping people kind of open their eyes that the stacks are going to be different depending on who your audience is, that it’s first, your audience. Who are you selling to, and they need to know why you, why change, why now, why you, basically. Once you get through that, then we can leverage technology to do more of the quality sale. Jake: Exactly. Marylou: Let me get the dates right for people, for them listening. There’s a June date and then there’s a November date and I think we’ll have that in the show notes, the June date information. If they want to get a hold of you, Jake, to find out more, what’s the best way that people can contact you? Jake: I’d say jake@saleshacker.com. Marylou: Okay, jake@saleshacker.com and you respond right away with quality. Jake: I’ll respond within 30 seconds to a minute. It comes through my phone email, it comes through my computer email, it comes from all over the place. Marylou: I encourage you listening to this podcast, if you think about that, “Wow, we could be more efficient, we could be more effective.” Or you to just learn what’s out there. Because for marketing, there are now transit maps of all the tools that are available for marketing people. If you’re doing a certain type of campaign, the entry point, what tool. I haven’t seen one yet for sales. Actually connecting with Sales Hacker and what they are doing, you’ll get a really great idea of at least where to begin. You may not have the recipe tweaked exactly the way you want it but you’ll at least have the foundational elements that can get you further along than if you didn’t review them or follow what they have. I would read their blog. It’s just pretty amazing. The guest blogging on that thing is incredible. Jake: We really appreciate that. I read it every day too. I’m still learning as you said, we’re all still learning. Marylou: We’re all still learning and I think we’ll all continue. Things are changing so rapidly now. Whoever’s listening to this, shame on you if you’re not learning every day. Thank you so much Jake, really appreciate your time. Again, jake@sakeshacker.com is where you go. Jake: Thanks for having me. Marylou: Thank you.