Marylou:    Donato is probably one of the experts when it comes to working and utilizing the phone for your sales conversation. The data in your pipeline needs to be fresh and updated. Technology can help but very few can keep their pipelines clean while using them properly, i.e. they get full of gunk.    Donato is the Founder and General Manager of Data Services at Ring Lead, a company that offers the tools you need for your company’s contacts. In this podcast, Donato reveals the problem with thinking cold calling or cold emailing is dead, tips for tracking your numbers and pacing your interactions with leads, contacting multiple influencers to move prospects through the cycle, and the culprits that are keeping good sales processes down. Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting. Today’s guest is someone that you’re really going to want to listen to, why? Because he has just really drilled down to a level that is so impressive with working with the phone. Part of our process, if you’re followers of Predictable Revenue, you know that the Predictable Revenue framework really talked more about email. In order for this thing, this framework, this assembly line that we’re building, in order for it to actually improve in velocity and reduce the lag, we need to use the phone and we need to use the phone in a way that’s smart. I listened to our guest, Donato Diorio, I listened to a webinar of his where he talked a lot about the use of the phone and how in this case voice mail but that’s only of one small sliver of what this man knows. He’s currently the Founder and General Manager of database services over at RingLead and I’ll put his contact information after we wrap-up the call in the show notes. He’s got a lot of expertise in the areas that matter in terms of pipeline. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Donato and first question is tell us about who you are. Donato:    Sure. I’m a technologist who became a recruiter years and years ago, who then went and ran and started a software company and come full circle. I’ve kind of had many, many different careers to get me to where I am today. Today, I am, you said one of the Founders and the General Manager of data services at RingLead. What that means is when people have problems on their CRM, it is the thing that RingLead does, we take care of people’s data end to end, but one of the big problems that people have that software can’t solve is, what about all the existing data in people’s systems? The different strategies and processes in technologies that I put together help get people’s data up to speed. We remediate all the data so then technologies and software can take over to keep it clean, to keep it moving forward. I get to explore, I’m on the bleeding edge of how and what are the latest things to clean up and add some interesting intel into people’s data, that’s what I’m currently doing. Marylou:    Okay, very cool. As you know with the data that’s collective in the pipeline at sales stages from my world, it’s cold conversation or initial conversation through the qualified opportunity and then of course there’s an opportunity record all the way down to close one, close lost. There’s data being collected at all those steps. I’ve really focused on in my area is, what were those sales conversations, with whom were they with. Because we’re trying to establish a predictable formula for revenue, we’re looking at the funnel itself, the pipeline, we’re looking at the average deal sizes that are flowing through it and we’re also looking at time. The data elements are being collected but would you agree, Donato, that very few people really know how to take that and make something actionable out of it, that they can feed back into their marketing assets, to their marketing campaigns, to their voicemails, to their scripts, everything else. What do you say about that? Donato:    I’m going to blame sales representatives. Let’s just throw down the gauntlet. Think about this, that one of the early products that we developed was cold contact capture. This is when I was a running brawl because of CEO and I found the company before emerges RingLead and contact capture is a little tool that you highlight information, press the button, and it would parse it and allow you to move it into your CRM. I learned this basic axiom in watching salespeople and I guess it’s the same case for marketing people is that sales people, marketing people, people in general will only adopt a technology if it’s easier then what’s our currently doing, it’s that simple. If you bring this fantastic new thing into their life but it requires them to change their process, to do additional things, they probably won’t do it. Technologists, I’ll include myself, we need to be smarter and we need to make sure to collect that data, so I am circling around your question, to collect that data, to collect those things in conversations and the whom and who. Then what has to happen is the process has to as it naturally unfolds, as you naturally go to your daily process, the data must be collected as part of that process. That’s the challenge, that’s where things like the iPhone came in, one of the first user-friendly phones that you could do stuff with just a swipe or click or pinch. Yes, we are not collecting it but the responsibility is on technologists and the user-interface and things like that to make sure that the daily things that people do, collects that information as they go. That’s the challenge, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s not that they don’t realize it, it’s just that they’re not going to do it. That’s the solution to that problem and it’s not an easy solution. Marylou:    No, not at all. My biggest pet peeve since at the top of the pipeline we’re really more of a numbers game, still even to this day in that you open up the picket, there’s names going in. We may get out of every 300 records, three to ten people who’s like one raises an eyelash and one may raise a pinky, the other one might raise his hand. Those conversations are a drip compared to what we’re sending out. My biggest pet peeve is look folks, we hope to have five meaningful conversations a day, what is the problem in trying to wrap up those five conversations. What are your thoughts about that? Donato:    One of the first things I’ll point out is that a lot of people are selling something. Cold calling is dead, email is dead then came companies like Pardot and Marketo. What’s next, when do you say your talking is dead. A while ago in the 2005, phone conversations are dead and it’s all going to be email. Everything has to be a multi pronged approach. There is no single solution. For those listening to put your radar on when someone says this point solution is the only thing you need, they’re selling something. The reality is you need email, you need phone conversations, you need social media, and you need to figure out how your business model and your selling model best works to figure out which degrees of what things you need. Example, case and point, one of the most successful campaigns I ever had was selling to equipment leasing vendors. I was selling sales lead prospecting, data mining/software and I have some success with couple. I want to reach out and build a list of couple of hundred of these and I started going through and somewhere along the way I started looking at the numbers of my call, I tracked everything. This is the before Sales Force days. I think I was using gold mine, it was really easy to use. If you remember those desktop point and click interfaces. I started tracking my numbers and I realized that I was blowing through my list just way too fast, way too fast. What that meant is that in a very short time, my list was going to be done. I, by mistake, it wasn’t genius or anything, by mistake I said oh let me make a second pass through. First path, I reached out to the VP’s of sales and second path I started reaching the VP of marketing. I still had my notes from the first outreach. I started doing things like well, Joe, in the next minutes I’m also going to be reaching out to Harry who’s the VP of marketing and I started leveraging people and kind of using addition, basically name dropping, schoolyard peer pressure and I saw a massive bump in my response rate. I was like that’s interesting. Then, I said what if I call three people at each company. I did my research first, I think it was the VP marketing, VP of sales and CFO at each company or whenever the equivalent of a CFO would be, maybe the CEO. I did a three by three call approach, each person got a call and on each call I referenced to two other people that I am going to be reaching out. They may ask you about around the water cooler today. I kept changing it around. When it was all said and done, I changed my sales advance. A sales advance basically means that something moved forward in the sales cycle that I got a call, I put out a demo, I moved it to one of my sales reps, whatever, but a sales advance. It moves from one out of ten to nine out of ten. We used the bulk from the blue. I shared it with my co-founder Braw Bookin, he’s like oh yeah, that’s spear of influence selling, I’ve been doing that for years. I was like whoa, why didn’t you tell me? I built this software product, I’m learning sales by the seat of my pants, and he’s like thanks for sharing, yeah, it’s obvious you call multiple people and you get there. Dan and I developed a whole training program around this method. It worked out for us in a great way because of course, we are a company that sold the product that generated data of people at companies. The lesson still works to this day that you can greatly improve your outreach and stop burning through your leads if you do a three by three approach. It’s interesting, if I would’ve thought back to when I was a young recruiter in 1995 and my boss told me, “Donato you got to call and email somebody because it’s going to double your chances of getting a hold of that person.” Years later, I tracked the metrics and if you call and email somebody, it’s actually 1.3, you got 1.3 times a chance of getting a sales advance, that means adding a LinkedIn invite or any venue, Skype, Twitter, whatever. It’s only adding .3. The single and most impactful way to get that sales advance is calling multiple people, having your research done, leveraging and not burning through your data one contact per company. Marylou:    Yup, and the Predictable Revenue book is now very outdated but in 2011 when that was published we were trying to instill in folks that they needed to be emailing three people at the company at a time asking one question, who’s responsible for X. We were trying to get the internal referral and we used three people per company to do so and consistently with all the records that we tested, we’re getting a 79% response rate of positive, negative or neutral. A case in point since I was a business developer testing this out, I sent three emails to Chase Bank. One email came back saying we don’t give out any referral information, I didn’t hear from the second one and the third person gave me a name. It’s just amazing when you start adding in what you call sphere of influence we call the actual influence map. If you put your desired buyer in the middle of the bulls eye, we have a second tier that has direct influencers in the company, people with whom the buyer will actually listen to or they have his or her ear. Then, the third ring are indirect influencers, they might be users of the product or service or they might be a liaison type of person. We define all of those people when we’re working through the assembly of a framework for outreach so that we can do what we call intraday calling which is taking that bulls eye and then making calls on the same day within the company. I didn’t know that there was a magic three number. When I listened to your webinar and heard 3X, so 3×3 is 9, I was like, wow, and is that still holding? Donato:    Yes, and we’ve tracked the metrics for quite a while during the entire time from I think 2005, 2006 somewhere in that is when I first started experimenting with this and yes, the numbers still hold. Here is the interesting thing, here’s the rub, you know this, you call it one thing, I know it, I call it something else. Dan, my co-founder knows it and won’t tell anybody. How’d you get into that account, I’m just good. A lot of people know this and they’ve read your book so even more people know it, why isn’t it the norm. I’m going to put my finger on two culprits. Number one, the data companies. When you go to a data company, they sell you data by the contact. If you want a second or third contact, that’s three times as much, that’s a problem. It’s almost like the old story, you go to the parent/teacher conference and they say, “Hey Marylou, there’s some problems with your child, all his crayon drawings are in black and we’re really concerned because he only draws stuffs in black.” Later on if I ask to the kid and was like the black crayon is all I had. Nothing wrong with the kid, he just has black crayons. That’s the problem. The data companies, the traditional brick and mortar old style list vendors that tried to make the switch to technology and really failed, they sell the contact one at a time or they charge per contact. We change that model at  Ring Lead and we’re like hey, going to data mine the entire account and give everybody what you pick. That’s one thing and it’s important. The second thing is if this is important, do you know for example of any Merkato or HubSpot or Pardot campaigns that leverage in automated passion reaching out on a three by three approach and using that knowledge in the scripting? “Hi Marylou, in the next few minutes I’m going to be reaching out to Donato and Dan.” Nothing. The problem is in the existing momentum of old ways of thinking and old technology infrastructure. It’s simple to switch, number one, do what you can to buy multiple contacts, stop blowing with your leads. Number two, start pre-fabricating or pre-aligning your data. If you’ve got four points to contact, here’s an example, this is innovation that I’ve been playing with. If you segment on just title and you try to find oh this person has marketing on their title, you’re very limited. But marketing department could be email campaign, it could be category manager, it could be a lot of things that mean marketing. We’ve learned that if you’re able to segment a title by both level and department and then compare all the people in the department to each other, you could actually have an accurate role of something, a designation, a tag like top marketing contact. You can’t do that looking at a single title alone and not comparing it to its peers. If you pre-process your data and you assign a level at a department and some role tags in your marketing repository, you can do outreach campaign that are absolutely brilliant. I don’t see anybody taking advantage of anything like that yet, but they should. Marylou:    No, we have lots of bond aids in outreach. Our work around is essentially we still ask for internal referral. Once we get an inkling of where people are, we move it to working status. What you just described is done by hand. We call it under the umbrella of a highly personalized email where we define the template ahead of time that gives the robust sales message and then the representatives have to personalize usually the first paragraph and that’s where they would put what you’ve just said technology should be able to do. Donato:    Yes, and the problem is that when you’re looking at a contact alone, that is data. When you’re looking at five contacts at a company and you are adding fields to your marketing system that show the influence vector, for example first person John Smith, Director Marketing, Title: Director Marketing, Level: Director, Department Marketing. But then you compare him to the CMO, you see that a up influencer is the CMO, the down influencer is a Marketing Manager and Campaign Manager, the peer influencer is a Director of Sales at the same location. All those things should be designated and pre-processed in your marketing repository, that way it can be automated. That’s the challenge, that people just haven’t got to that level of sophistication yet. The data is there which is what’s nice. The data is there but next step is the technology has to catch up. Marylou:    Being a programmer, my brain is going a million miles an hour now. With level and department, if you have thousands of records in your house list, for example, how the heck, where do you start? Donato:    The first thing that you do in any data remediation is you go through and you clean up your account data first. You’ve got to have accurate information. If you’ve got accurate account information, you can then build your contacts. For example we’ve got a process, step one is making sure the data’s standardized or normalized. Step two means you fill in the company website, the website’s like the DNA for finding additional contact and information on the people in the future. Then, you can mine the contacts but starting out remediating and fixing the account data is step one, everything else falls in after that. Marylou:    I’m sure people listening on this call who are driving down the freeway like data geeks like the rest of us are thinking wow, I want this, what do I need to do, where do I go? Donato:    Yeah, Ring Lead can help you out. We’ve got patents, we love this stuff. We dive in and there’s tons of free information that I’ve written on my blog donatodiorio.com, that’s simple. Everything from Ten Things Not To Do With Data With Ten Things To Do With Data. The challenge is you got to get sales, marketing, operations alignment. Because if you don’t, everything sales wants to do, everything marketing wants to do, everything operations do supporting it won’t work. That alignment is one of the first things that I will seek when I consult with an organization that wants to bring their data to the next step is really understanding where they want to go, adding some insight of what’s possible and letting them dream a little bit. Marylou:    Well, here’s the rub is that point of entry. I’m talking up market accounts now so for those of you who are SMB’s, smaller businesses or startups, you probably have one guy that does all but the rub for me is always the point of entry of sales. They’re not making their numbers, the leads coming through from marketing aren’t high quality so they want control of the process. They think that outreach is going to be the answer to at least feed their pipeline with qualified opportunities. They want to get their own data, they want to house it in their own little shiloh. They will use marketing assets but in terms of the tool to actually generate an outreach campaign, they would love an outbound prospecting system that they can use that’s independent of the marketing system, of the marketing communication system. How the heck do you bridge that gap? Donato:    I think that you go back to the adage, the concept that sales representative would do and use what’s easier than what they’ve used before. No one can control it, it has to be a hybrid approach, account based data. Account should not get into the system unless it has size of company, number of employees, SIC code, all those perma graphic data. That should not be something a sales representative should mess with. Understanding where the hand off is. When it comes to sales, the sales person, they look at the LinkedIn profile or social profile of some sort and say well, this person has a great interest in the Final Four and you reach out and your first phone conversation is hey, how would you like to have court side tickets to the Final Four? I was just talking to a guy earlier today, that would be his dream, then boom there starts the conversation. You’re not going to be able to automate that, not in any real way. You got to figure out what sales handle, what sales should handle, what marketing handle, which marketing should handle. The simplest thing, Ben Franklin list, make a list marketing does this, sales does that and there may be some contention points. I think when it comes to data, it’s very simple, it’s just like the difference between marketing sale. Marketing is many to one outreach, and sales is more of the one to one. Marylou:    Correct. Belly to belly, we used to call it. Donato:    Yeah, how do you split up the data challenges? The same thing. When you’re going to act upon an entire CRM of data or entire marketing automation system full of data, you don’t put that in sales hands, you put that in marketing’s hands because the mass operation. When it comes to the okay I’ve got the information, I’m able to reach out, that’s when sales takes over. You can give them tools like, we’ve got our capture product, that’s a great example. I’ll do my plug, ringlead.com/capture, little chrome plug in, you’ll land on a LinkedIn profile, it’s the guy you want because sales found his phone number and then you found this LinkedIn profile but you don’t have any more information on him. You press the button to capture, it goes out and fends on the additional information that will help you in doing your outreach to that person. Let sales do what sales does and let market do what marketing does. Marylou:    Let’s paint a picture for the startup, the folks who are listening to this who say hey I’m marketing sales and ops because we’re a small company. What’s the perfect scenario for them to start building and architecting a robust data driven engine that will allow them to push multiple channels of lead generation through it from a data perspective, where would they start? Donato:    I don’t think it’s a sales or marketing challenge as much as a product challenge. If you’ve got the right product and you build it steadily, you get your referrals. I am not going to solve that with sales or marketing. You could have a tool like capture, that would be a great tool for a solo operator because a lot of people that use LinkedIn, they don’t want to buy a list, they have access to a free version of LinkedIn, they get the contact information, solutions like that can work there so they get momentum. Startups, you tend to have general lists that are not expert to any one thing. Just like you’ll reading in books like Innovator’s Dilemma, you’ll see people tend to become specialist as the company grows. We’ve gone through that at RingLead, we’re getting some really amazing new hires that are great at marketing, they’re great at sales management, they’re great at operations and it’s exciting because it frees up people to focus, I can focus on leadership and other things. Start the product of your startup, make sure your product’s right, that’s my best, I’ve been through it three times, get your product right and everything else will fall in place. Marylou:    The other thing that I run into a lot is we do a lot of work in persona development. Marketing has personas that they developed but sometimes they fall short in the sense of the sales conversation and behaviorally where people are positionally in the pipeline. It makes a difference in who’s entering. A lot of times people, the personas ebb and flow, come in, go out, depending on the product or services that they’re selling. We develop personas then we go to the database and try to get counts of how many people. I’ll give you an example of a client just recently where we found a person, we developed a person we felt would be the ideal person to make a business decision on this product. We went to the house list, we did a count. We then went to LinkedIn and surprisingly we’re able to get a count that we felt wow this is great. The house list had 50 to a 100 of this people and LinkedIn ended up reporting in somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 thousand. That kind of disconnect in the house list versus what’s out there on the social or what’s out there in databases that are not resident in the company repository is another big issue that I’ve run into a lot. Donato:    Basically, mapping your total available market. I think that you’ve got to take a multi pronged approach there. The challenge often is the data you’re basing the persona building on may be inaccurate. For example, you may start by saying where were our last 20 sales, if they weren’t coded right your persona’s off. You think of it this way that everybody wants great, predictive abilities. Predictive is like the high level, hey I’m going to predict that this is the person you want to talk to based on this, this, and this. Predictive technologies are going to rely on analytics. Why is this the right the person looking at the data that you want what you want? Analytics is dependent on reporting. If you’re not getting the right data and fields, then you can’t analyze and draw conclusion to then have a predictive model that is anything but a solid. Then, the reports depend on the data. Get your data right, make sure the data goes into your system that you’re making all your decisions on is dialed. If not, then you’re not ready to develop a persona, you’re not ready for reporting, you’re not ready for analytics, you’re not ready for anything predictive. Get the data right first and the rest will fall into place because it won’t be complex, it will be simple, it will be like things you’re just dropping into that last puzzle piece, oh there it is. Marylou:    Perfect. Well listen, I would like to talk to you forever and I’m sure the people listening on this call are thinking wow, to me this is an awareness that a lot of people just don’t have an awareness around how, not like it’s complicated but how pivotal this is, how important it is, and how many people just aren’t there, is the scary part but it’s true. In closing, if I was someone whose head is spinning right now and thinking okay, what’s my first step? You said get the data right. If they would like to speak with you, Donato, on helping them figure out a blueprint, a plan, follow the yellow brick road at the beginning, how do they get a hold of you to do that? Donato:    I’m easy to find, I’m so easy to find. I’m on every social network. If you Google my name and can’t find me, don’t be in sales or marketing and no, I’m pretty easy. Best way to reach me probably is just send me an email just dd@ringlead.com or better yet send me a message on LinkedIn. Anybody who sends me a personalized message, I will respond to. Anybody who sends me a connection request with nothing but since you’re a person I trust, I’m like no, no, no. I’ve got 17,000 connections on LinkedIn from my recruiting years and I like and appreciate and respect the personalized invite. It’s linkedin.com/in/donatodiorio. Marylou:    Okay, so guys heard that, that’s the way to get a hold of him and perhaps we’ll have the subsequent call to talk about voice mail because I know that’s one area that I actually review that webinar. You can send me the webinar link and I’ll put it in the show notes but for those of you who are listening the voice mail, actually, Donato gave three examples of what he calls like three little pigs. Donato:    The straw, the wood and the brick. Marylou:    The straw, the wood and the brick and he gives examples of the straw voicemail which is going to blow your house over. The wood one which will convert up and the brick one which is indestructible. I think the webinar was done in 2014, I don’t know if you have any more updated voice mail analytics or on your donatodiorio.com blog but I’ll point people there and I’ll point people to this webinar. As he said before, it’s 3X the results that you’re going to get. If we go back to my old 79% response rate on email and you run it through a sequence and you include voice mail and you include the telephone in, we’re talking double digit response by the time you finish that campaign. Talk about less exhaustion, that will really make the list last longer, you’ll be able to get more value out of your list and not blow through records. The quality coming out of there is going to reduce the lag and get you further into the pipeline than you are today. Really listen to this webinar and I think that part of your tools should be to really understand the value and the power of voice mail. I’m talking to you millennials out there who love to text and email and maybe not use the phone as much anymore, it’s still the main way to generate Predictable Revenue and to actually have conversations that are meaningful in nature so that as Donato said you can advance the sales to the next step. Thanks so much Donato for your time, I really enjoyed having you on the call. Donato:    Thanks Marylou, it was fun.

Marylou:     Evan wears a lot of hats. If you’re in a smaller organization, you probably know what that’s like. Developing a lead generation strategy, creating and managing a team of reps, and handing over the process as you go can be as difficult as they are crucial to success. Evan is the head of business development for VoxGen, a company dedicated to interactive voice response also called as IVR. His role has led him to have experience in growing both sales and teams. In this podcast, Evan reveals how making sure the process is right before handing off that coveted opportunity, the benefits of testing and reiterating your process which we also call optimizing, how to deal with difficult cultures in a multinational operation. Evan’s experience is in both Europe and US, and tips for defining your ideal buyer and using that data to start conversations. Okay everybody, I have a great guess this week, it’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting and I am speaking with Evan Jones who’s the head of business development for a company called VoxGen. They are a global company located both in the United States and in Europe. Evan and I crossed paths a couple of years ago now, I think. I’ve been really impressed with the work that he has done in business development and I wanted to share his experiences with you guys so that you can hear from him first-hand what he’s been through, where he started and what he’s now implementing under the “business development umbrella” for his company. Without further ado, Evan, it’s very nice to have you on the show and I’m very happy that we were able to get this done. Evan:    Thank you so much for having me. Marylou:    Tell us Evan what it is that you’re doing with VoxGen now and how you got started in this role and what you’ve done. I know you’ve done a number of different things as you probably will tell the folks, you’ve worn a lot of hats in this company and other companies that you’ve worked with and really help our audience get an understanding of all of the levers that you had to pull in working for business development. Evan:     Sure. As the head of business development, we are not a big organization, about 40 or so or more people. But with that size, you have to essentially play a few different roles. The other thing is you pick up a lot of skills that go into the lead generation process, how you can refine a message. I essentially oversee all things related to lead generation, even in some marketing aspects and into post lead generation of selling, managing, some of our strategic accounts, bring on new ones and the like. I have a team of 5 SDR’s, VDR’s inside sales representatives, whatever term you want to use. We follow an outreach program focused on trying to find the right person and a sequence of an earlier process and structure of trying to identify the right people in the organization, gather interest whether it be through exploration or project or some of the work that we’ve done, pre-conversation. I really kind of going back to this, I’ve got my start along with my colleagues as an inside sales representative myself. Making the calls, understanding the nature of contact, understanding motivations of why they want to get on the phone with you or talk to you, anything similar, why they would reach back out. I don’t really apply that to some of the essentially the sales organization that we’re doing now. We’re going to talk about it throughout the length of this podcast but it’s really great stuff and we have the Predictable Revenue, Marylou’s process really to shine as the key example of how lead generation should be done. Marylou:    You mentioned a couple of things I want to share with the audience. One was all lead generation flows through you and you would do where a marketing path. You also mentioned that you’re looking for the right person which is the standard, the kind of out-of-the-box Predictable Revenue, what we’re trying to do is get an internal referral. Are there other things that you found now that you’re a seasoned veteran at this that you are deploying as part of your lead generation efforts over VoxGen? Evan:    The core to this is what you said, trying to identify the right person. We’re actually going into some other areas of just mixing things up essentially. Obviously the brutal truth that no one wants to talk about really is salespeople or lead generation representatives that don’t pick up the phone fail. The system really email focused and all that really needs to be supplemented by the phone and all that, that’s really important. But to your question of what else are we doing, we’re starting to incorporate texting, we’re trying to not necessarily use social, that’s really good for awareness purposes but we’ve actually had opportunities and meetings set out through the text channel. Really just trying to open up all the methods of contact almost in our business of how we preach and do our selling of channel preference and the like. I want to do the same thing to the lead generation process. There are some people that want an email and respond there, there are others that want to do a phone call and there are some that want to text you. It’s just being open and trying to adapt to the scenario of how we can best communicate with our prospect in the way they want to. Marylou:    Again, you mentioned your prospect which means you really have a good understanding of the buying personas, what will be called buyer personas or the people who are going to enter and exit through out the top of funnel for use. Whether they’re direct influencers or indirect influencers, you’ve spent a great deal of time mapping who these people are, how they prefer to communicate. It sounds like you’ve started looking into texting as part of that. But at the end of the day, you really need to get these folks on the phone in order to have that fit call, to have that AWAF what we call it, the are we a fit sequence. And then move them over to discovery and then qualifications. What role do you think the phone plays, because Predictable Revenue doesn’t really talk about the phone a lot. What have you discovered in doing this process for as long as you have in terms of the phone? When is it appropriate to start with the phone and when is it appropriate to blend the phone in to the sequence? Evan:     There are different touch points. The one thing that I’ve seen as I just mentioned a minute ago, some people want to communicate over the phone. There are individuals in an organization that will only talk to you via phone, they may never look at their email, they just get too bogged down or you email will go straight to their spam folding or something like that. They want to talk with you via phone and you’ll get them that way. You might catch them at the wrong time or anything similar but you will at least have a better chance of connecting with them that way. Same goes for email and texting and any other channels that you want. The phone will even drive email response reviews. Using the modern day VDR process or outreach processes, having the right tools in place is really important to understand and have the sequence really automated essentially, but having the insight into who’s viewing, who’s clicking, who’s responding and refining your message through continuous improvement type of process. Going back to phone, you will find in some cases that if you don’t talk to them or you leave a voicemail for that matter, it will influence an email viewer response or something along those lines. Even further when you ask what is the right message, how do you use phone, sometimes it’s not best to leave a voicemail every time. In some cases, you want to mix up and see what works. Call at the right time, don’t just call to call. Leaving a voicemail versus not, in some cases you may want to call multiple times a day because if you think of just your own personal lives of getting phone calls, if you get a phone call with just one you don’t recognize, you may not choose to answer. If they call later on in the day, same phone number which you have recall at this point from the prospect prospective or even the third time, of course you want to, you don’t want to, as far as being a pest or something similar. At that point you’ll be like this actually might be important, let me take it. It’s applying to those elements of okay how can I really get my prospect to talk to me and not in the manner that is going to piss them off or even put them where you’re starting in a position of weakness where they’re upset or anything like that, really coming from hey I was just trying to help, can you help me, that sort of thing, can you do me a favor, really kind of back into that. To drive email response, you’ll get the person on the phone or you could mix up and have some other areas of real recall to keep the conversation going or in their mind you’ll build awareness or something like that. Marylou:     That’s great. I think the underlying theme here is that you’ve obviously tested a bunch of different scenarios and have come up with a cadence and a sequence that works and that you are continually iterating and fine tuning. For those of you on the phone who are listening to this, one of the big key take-aways that Evan’s been successful, why he’s been successful, is because he continuously is testing and continually iterating his process for his folks. Most of you may not, he’s got European and US which are two different cultures that he’s also got to deal with. Can you share with us a little bit about that Evan, have you found differences in the way that you have to handle the sequences for UK, or Europe versus the Americas? Evan:     Sure, there’s a lot of similarities but there’s also some just little minor differences that just go a long way. Everything from writing to approach style and the like. Even the phone base, the way how they have their on the outreach they have a lot of switch board. When turn, you can actually get directives to the person you want without having to go through a gatekeeper of some sort, fairly beneficial fund wise. It is different, but there are a lot of similarities just in the form of being consistent. Circling back to what Marylou mentioned earlier was around knowing your customer, your prospect, your buyer, the persona, and defining all of that and understanding what their particular pain may be, both from strategic, financial or personal for that matter. Understanding what would this person be thinking about, what would get them on the phone, why would they want to talk to you and how can you really help that. It’s really important that we found across both markets that the prospects really choose to meet with you for their reasons, not yours. How can you really play to that and of course really be a consultant with a purpose is really what I like. You’re helping them, listening, really trying to help them solve their unique problems and challenges and of course not really advancing your own agenda but essentially you’re a salesperson, you’re working from that. They’re not oblivious to that fact, they know you are but if you can help them, you’re not coming from the position of equal strength versus others. Talking about the separation of US, UK, a lot of the same, just more cultural differences of approach or anything similar. Marylou:     Okay. Evan:    One thing I would like to mention, kind of edgy to talk about, and I would like to absolutely hear with Marylou in the form of analytics and understanding this and how you improve the process is really, really important. The good thing is there’s a lot of great data out there that’s probably available that organizations like HubSpot or insert marketing automation company here can put out for you. The one thing I’d like to say that it’s just best practice. Best practice doesn’t work for everyone and you ultimately still have to make it your own. When Marylou talks about the persona, defining your customer in prospect and understanding their pain, you can talk best practice all day but it’s really important to define those characteristics and continue to work to refine based off of you’re changing and adapting sales model in business to capture those and I’m sure that you’re always having the right message going to the market. In turn, your team is trained enough to be able to communicate that effectively. Just want to highlight that, it’s really important, one of the key take-aways that we really take from the Predictable Revenue book, and of course Marylou’s teachings. Marylou:    It’s interesting because I’ve been on kind of a rant the last month or so about personas because a lot of times when I’m in a sales organization and we’re talking about personas and it’s a larger organization, not the people who wear multiple hats but there’s a director of marketing, a director of sales ops, a director of sales. Sales will tell me our marketing department does buyer personas and that really kind of gets the skin crawling in the back of my neck because as you’ve just said, Evan, the sales conversation drives the persona, the morphing of the persona. It drives the iteration of the persona. You’re on the phone, you’re learning language, you’re learning whether or not your pain points are resonating, you’re learning the priority in which you’re pain points are resonating and all of that may not get back to marketing. Sales really has to own their version of the buyer persona and they have to constantly change and update it so that it’s a working document as you get smarter and learn more as you go through the funnel whether it be where we are which is from cold to qualified. Evan, you also branched out into qualified to close one. There’s a lot of conversation and pieces that feed back into that persona development, do you agree with that? Evan:    I absolutely do. Just understanding the motivations of individuals. There’s a reason whether they respond to you by phone, text message, email, insert channel here. There’s a reason they’ve done it. Before you ever get on the phone with them, it’s good to try and figure out what that is. Defining the personas of understanding what their particular reason or motivation or pain or anything similar, understanding that helps you go a long way. Best laid plans can go totally different direction. I have a fundamental kind of belief of never really ask a question that you don’t already have a good sense of the answer to. I always start off all of my calls with of course setting the agenda to understand what the what’s expected of the prospect and really making sure that we cover all the key points of the call but I always open up with, out of curiosity what was your interest in the call, is there anything specific you want to talk about? That helps define what they want to get out of this and they’ll speak openly. Sometimes you got to claw it back and open it up and get it out a little bit. I’m not going to ask that question if I don’t, again, already have an idea based off their title, how they responded initially or anything. All that information of course goes into the persona of who this person is, why they are really on the phone with you. Marylou:    Yeah, that’s great. I think if one thing comes of the work that we are doing both in the podcast and my new book and things is to really get sales to start saying wow, we need to own that buyer persona, we need to really use that not as a document that’s produced once a quarter or once a year by marketing but it’s something that we constantly are updating because we’re learning and getting smarter as we start having conversation with people. Evan like you said, if you open that Pandora’s box, what would you like to get out of the call today and they give you a 180? You have to pivot and you have to be ready. Those wrap-up notes which I want you to share with the folks on the phone how you wrap-up these calls, if you do anything special or if you’ve taught your team to do anything special. Those wrap-up notes are just gold and putting back into the persona definitions, reworking your email body, sometimes redesigning your content and click through assets and things because you’re learning exactly what the hot buttons are. Let the email engine help you be smarter and get more people were more conversation that resonate because you’re learning more on that wrap-up. Evan:    Yup, I’m happy to answer that. I want to circle back for one second just to share, we’re going to talk about the personas and who owns it, marketing or sales or anything like that. There’s always been a talk whether it’s been published or not, there is almost always a finger pointing game between marketing versus sales in some organization. It exists, but when you talk about defining those personas and all that, it’s important that you guys work together because essentially your inside sales team SDRs, VDRs are the goods on the ground. They are hearing things and they represent the face of your organization in many cases. It is the first contact that will ever be had with some organizations. In turn, you want to make sure from a marketing perspective they are saying the right things and communicating the message appropriately. Also, it’s meant to be a two-way street. They’re the ones that get the best information that kind of goes to the next topic of wrap-up notes of sharing that with the marketing teams regardless if they own it or not because that further helps refine message and everything similar. Talking about that, what you hear from your prospect, as much as you can read industry reports or anything like that, alright this is where the market setting. Some organizations maybe they’re really as an early adopter but many organization may had been a little bit behind and are just getting to some of the places where you consider normal. Those are their problems, those are their issues and the pains that they’re looking to solve. You want to make sure that, of course, you are working towards the future as well but when it comes to notes and messaging and refining your own messaging for that matter, it needs to be based off of your prospect’s problems. The unique ones that they have while they may have similarities everything about them. It’s really important in your notes that you, through the call you demonstrate a sincere interest in listening to them, learning about them and their business and life and solving those unique problems. And then your notes, sharing those with your internal peers for message refiner or anything further. It also helps you later on the sales process where it goes past lead generation now further into a stale understanding that. You use all of this information to rewrite your sequences, the body of the email. You’re using terminology that your customers aren’t actually using versus what you use in your own business. For example, if anyone who’s worked in the restaurant industry may know what 86 means but if you’re a customer, your table, if you are like oh sorry the steak is 86 today, they don’t know what that means, that doesn’t necessarily help them, you are not communicating effectively to your own prospect. You use all of this to rewrite, use their language, use their terminology that’s going to help you establish a better connection with them because you feel like you’re already talking their language for that matter. In turn, it will only improve your success and everything throughout. This will go through click throughs as well. Using that as your call to action to drive to the website or particular piece of content or anything similar. It’s a combination of these things sharing within the organization, making sure you have the notes because you will find that the work that you do upfront whether it be the first or second call or anything similar will set the tone all throughout the entirety of the sales process. It’s really important to make sure that’s been shared, and of course you’re always circling back to it. Marylou:    That’s great. It has a number of different uses for wrap-up. As you mentioned, it feeds the email sequence so that you can improve your response rates, you can improve you click through rates, the click through to open rates, you can improve your subject lines. That’s one aspect of it. It also feeds back into your role playing. If you want to be training on objections that came up or how to start conversation so that people are leaning in and excited about what you have to say, all of these things are really fed by good wrap-up, call wrap-up. I’m happy that you’ve taken that and really extended that. As you’ve said, it also help you as you further go into the pipeline which Marylou stops at qualified op but there’s definitely going through the whole proposal process and the presentation process and all the other things that you have to do once it’s an opportunity to close. Those notes that were taken above are invaluable. Another use for that, and I know Evan does this, is if somebody falls out of the pipeline and moves into a long term follow up or nurture status, Evan now has the ability to create an email sequence for nurture that is organized by Top Pain Point. When they’re ready to actually come back in, they have now been armed with all the reasons why this pain should have a higher sense of urgency. There’s a lot of goodness that comes out of wrap-out. We are getting ready to wrap-up this call Evan, was there anything that you wanted to share with the audience in addition to what you’ve been so gracious in sharing about your experiences as the head of business development? Evan:    Yeah, a few points as a part of just reaching out. Just saying I’d like 15 minutes of your time just because I’ll learn more about you and your company works surprisingly well with a lot of prospects. Once you get on the phone, because you want to spend time working with them. Another one is ensuring that you’re organizing your day into, or your team’s day into distinct time blocks with specific activities and concentrating focus on those activities, eliminating those distractions within those blocks is really essential to increasing performance. If you do the same thing every day, it’s just the one thing you have to not worry about in the form of planning your day or anything similar. Depending on your sales organization, lead generation activity and the things that you’re doing just for lead generation until you get to the qualified op can take 90 plus days to really payoff and relentlessly each working to fill your own pipeline through a mixture of telephone, in person, email, social selling like through LinkedIn or Twitter which is really more for awareness, text messaging, referrals, networking, in-bound leads or even trade shows is really important, really diverse. Don’t be stuck on one particular channel and the like. This is kind of more into the selling side or anything similar but this helps with some objection handling. There’s a universal log human behavior that you really can’t argue another person into believing that they are wrong. There’s some great elements out there such as for Challenger Sale but it is how you really do it. The more you really push the other person, the more they dig their heels and they will really resist you. There really is a better way. Rather than attempting to overcome by defeating or prevailing over your prospect for that matter, really disrupt their expectations and their thought patterns when they push back with a no. The key really to a disruptive statement or question that turns them around as they lean towards you rather than move away from you. For example, when they say they’re busy, instead of arguing with them into how you will only take a little bit of their time, say I figured you would be. They won’t expect you to say that and it really disrupts their thought pattern. Or when they say just send me some information, tell me specifically what you’re looking for. You’re calling their bluff, you’re forcing engagement and everything similar. If they say I’m not interested, that makes sense, most people aren’t. Their brain isn’t ready for you to agree with them. In turn, you have a chance to really kind of put them again not on their heels but more leaning on to you like okay, why did you say that, that sort of thing. I got to be honest, I really, really am a big proponent of what Marylou, her teachings and the process as she is a process expert. I love what she does and the teachings that she has are really essential for any business. I really commend Marylou for all the research that I know goes into putting this stuff together, she’s been doing it for years but it’s really been great, I really appreciate it that you have me on. Marylou:    Well thank you, Evan. I’m sure people are going to want to know how to get a hold of you, can you give us contact information? Evan:     Sure, honestly I’m on LinkedIn, Evan Jones, VoxGen. You can email me ejones@voxgen.com hopefully with a lot of praise for this great podcast. I’m not afraid if anyone wants to call or text, my number is 813-453-7479. I’m here, feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or anything as regards to business development or lead generation, I’m happy to help. Marylou:    There you go. You’ve heard three ways to reach Evan. Evan, thank you so much for your time, it’s been wonderful speaking with you. Evan:    Thanks, Marylou.

Marylou:    Steven built a seven figure business using predictable outreach. Now, he’s the founder and CEO of Sales Ignition, a company that helps startups and large companies start conversations that will bring consistent growth.    There are so many things that either aren’t as effective as they have been in the past. Trade shows, generic lead lists, just visiting prospects and jumping into the negotiations and many more traditional methods are giving way to the better method of predictable prospecting. In this podcast, Steven reveals how focusing on the tools in your stack could be hurting you, tips to figure out your perfect fit and fill your prospect list, and gearing your message to show what’s in it for your customers. Hey everybody, thanks for joining. It’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting. Today, I have a very special guest. His name is Steven Wagner. We go back a little ways, he was a person of interest, I love that term. He was someone who really embraced the initial Predictable Revenue model back in 2011 and actually probably earlier than that and did some amazing stuff with his previous company. Today, he’s here to talk with us as the CEO and Founder of Sales Ignition. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Steven and have him give us an understanding of where he’s been, what paths he’s taken because he’s sort of been in the trenches fighting fires like the rest of us but actually executing and building an empire essentially from the ground up. Steven:    Yup. I’d like to think so. Marylou:    So without further ado, Steven. Steven:    Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today, Marylou. My background is that I started the company called Dealer Ignition. That company was, because I am part which I work for boat motor company, where I was responsible for doing business development offices and dealerships around the United States and integrating at that time the emergence of the internet into dealers. I saw some big gaps there. One of the biggest gaps was that the board was investing in all these online technologies but most of the dealers were not really able to use it because, as you can appreciate, they just didn’t have the scale or the team to do so. I created Dealer Ignition to create a suite of tools for dealers that would allow manufactures to connect with it. Probably like some of the your listeners, I built the software before I really had my first customer. I would call them option or at least some interested parties. We built the software and launched it, and really haven’t built a pipeline. I came and found Predictable Revenue at probably our darkest hour which fully involves development team with a piece of software. We had one or two trial customers and didn’t really have any other method for going out and trying to build the business. My first initial touch of it was maybe a slide show presentation or a PDF that you guys have before you ever written the book. I resonated with massive dare. Huge and tailored the process that Predictable Revenue outlines and used it at that point to grow the business into seven figures. We were adding 30 new accounts a month. We were constantly growing through the process that Predictable Revenue outlined. Then what we had to do to make it work for the clients that we run after. That business was a little different than anyone else’s because it was a two sided market, we would actually use Predictable Revenue to go after enterprise customers. We would also use it because an enterprise would ask us to get their dealers to enroll in the software. We had actually do it at the SME size market too. We would turn around and have to use Predictable Revenue to outreach into thousands of dealers across the country, to try to get them to demo and to see the product, and to see the value, and then buy it. We got really good at having a dealer cause I feel that we really can survive. That company, we got rolled up because there’s a lot of backstory, that kind of disposition of the company, teacher. When that got all finished, I started Sales Ignition with the business partner of mine, Joe Milam. Joe and I, Joe’s a success entrepreneur too. We just kept saying the problem of trying to build and create that kind of system is a challenge for startups as well as some large companies that use that Predictable Revenue models. We started Sales Ignition and we were trying to help businesses do that. Today, we’ve created a company that will provide kind of a manage service security, we call it that, to help people get up and running and run it consistently on the prospecting side of it. They thought that’s salespeople but that’s what we do today, help them on the prospecting side of it. Marylou:    There’s couple things that I thought were really interesting. I didn’t realize it was this far back. You said that you were actually play booking off of a PDF file or a soon to be version of the book. Now, the book came out in 2011. Aaron’s majority of the case study with Sales Force I think it was in 2003. It was somewhere in that window then right between 2003 and 2009 that you started drinking the kool aid as they say or getting really involved with this type of outreach. Steven:    We had signed a handful of customers and we really dug into it deeply. I just had to actually fire one of my best friends of mine who was in business development because his approach wasn’t very sustainable. It was your old field sales approach where you go after the customer and try to negotiate. To be honest, we were self-funding the business, we had some angel money but there wasn’t a lot of funds to grow the business. We didn’t have the time or luxury that additional capital would have given us. Having to go through that, it was saying what message can we do this because we just couldn’t fill and visit everyone. I’d say about 2009, 2010 was about the time frame when we really got introduced to it. I think it was literally doing a search maybe on cold calling. Marylou:    Yeah. It was called Cold Calling 2.0 or buildasalesmachine.com. That was the previous website that was used. It was just some classroom instruction, a little bit of webinar type of information and downloads. It’s amazing to see where it’s moved from. I think the core concepts are basically that this is a channel that we use when we want to really be targeted and segmented in our approach to sales. I think you discovered early on as you said you had two different segments that you needed to go after and that whole feet on the street, belly to belly type of sales is very expensive. I saw clients who want to do trade shows, want to do dinners, want to do this, that, these and those. They don’t really have an ROI behind it. It’s interesting to see that, especially in up market companies. There’s not necessarily an acceptance all the way around about trying outreach for this purpose of generating predictable revenue. Steven:    Yeah, I would agree. One of things that we had, I had an adviser, an investor at the time who had created a company that was called Data Stream back in the day. They sold software to maintenance groups of different companies. They had to have an inside sales team because they couldn’t do, like you said, go out and visit everyone and lay back before they have a name or structure kind of realize a couple key I think parts of what Predictable Revenue was is that you have to have people that specialize, you have to have people who can do the volume, you have to have a market that you can justify, make enough in whatever you are selling to afford all these people to generate the opportunities. What’s interesting now is that we’re seeing big companies who used to do like you said, large trade shows. Other things coming back and asking us, “Hey, we’re not seeing the ROI from trade shows anymore. We want to do and see what startups are doing or fast growth companies are doing and implementing.” It’s almost like the movie big companies. We have one right know, it’s multinational. They’re down to the point where they want to pivot on it because as you said they don’t see the ROI. One of the big things that I think happen too, that maybe help to accelerate this, was once you had 9/11 and stuff, there was a firm on a travel constraints a lot of places had for a long time about going and having these many people at shows. If that’s your way of getting your business, than you really start to drain yourself out of it. Some industries, companies start to do their own private trade shows and don’t go to the major trade shows. Some of your key buyers might be at a vendor’s specific event, not at the major trade show because they just don’t go to it anymore. I know that happens in some of our client’s industries where their buyers would get their pick before they would actually had a big trade show for the year. Definitely one of the things you want to consider. I think it’s the most sustainable path that we can really implement, execute, Predictable Revenue. Marylou:    This is your own personal second effort and company that, I’m sure you’ve built a lot of companies but I’m thinking that using the framework, Sales Ignition as part of the second company. What were the major lessons that you learned or the experiences that you think would be a value to someone listening to this call and thinking I want to figure this out for my company. For a first timer, how do you fast track somebody? What are the things that you can share that you learned, that you really put into practice for Sales Ignition? Steven:    Good question. Find the one key thing that’s going to make your sales funnel beginner get kind of solidified with someone. If it’s conversations, measure how many conversation a day or a week that you’re having, and the disposition of those conversations, and not focusing all your time on the tools. The messaging, I think you have to get and iterate on but I see other founders or people who come and ask myself or my partner and I advice, they always worry about the tools. People spend more time wondering what CRM to use and not really worrying about did I send out enough today or did I send out enough this week to follow up on it and to actually get some opportunities on the calendar. Marylou:    Right. That’s a big thing with the smaller companies, this whole concept of sales stack is something I don’t usually hear about. The only reason I know now because I’m kind of hanging my hat a little bit in the lower end market as I do some speaking engagements and things. They’re always talking about sales stack. Well, in up market companies, you have to move mountains to get software put into the IT umbrella. They have the standard tools but they’re not going to really worry about which of the 200 tools that they could use is the best stack. They’re focusing on how do I get more conversations that are meaningful in nature? What do I need to say and to whom? Why should they change? Why now, and why use us? So it’s all about why matter. Getting them to that point and getting them over the technology piece, I don’t see that a lot in my area but I’ve seen that a lot in the small DSMB space for sure. Steven:    Yeah. I think there’s a lot of good tools out there much more than there ever were before. I think that that’s good but I think the problem becomes you spend so much time thinking that the tool provides the result and not the work. The next thing is you have to have a really good source for data. You have to have a good contact database of any kind that you can rely on. Some are very trade specific and some just have to be built or cultivated on your own. I see this a lot. If you’re new to this and you haven’t done a lot of it, go out and find a partner that can help you with it because I think it’ll rapidly increase the quality and also reduce your learning time and just get a good source of data. I see too often they’ll go and get data from one of the common sources and haven’t really been vetted out or attended with any important information for the business. They tried to contact it and it doesn’t get them results. They get frustrated because maybe the kind of data that they have isn’t very good quality. It’s not who they thought they should be they should be contacting, just the quality of the information they did have. Marylou:    Yeah, we have a lot of outreach and outbound prospecting is that we live and die by the list. The list in my framework is the fifth thing we worry about. There are four things before that that we worry about in order to be able to create the right query and understand where to source the eventual lists. Like you mentioned a couple things about the buyer persona profiles, the ideal account profiles, there’s also the SWOT, I call it the SWOT six because we drill down six different ways on the SWOT which is strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so that we can get an understanding of where we fit in the market place. All of these factors get thrown in this big pot and then from there we figure out what this list should look like. And then and only then do we source it. Like you said, there are a number of different sources, some you have to build yourself, some you can purchase names. But if you’re a Sales Force person, you just naturally think data.com is going to help you and it’s not. It is not, people. The deliverability rates, there’s so many other things that you need to look at. But for the outbound prospecting, in order to generate a predictable revenue stream of highly qualified opportunities, that list is not kryptonite but the opposite. It is the gold that you need in order to be able to move mountains, to go to the next step. Steven:    I think the last thing that happens is that too often early on the process, people write a lot of emails about what they do. Everything is concentrated on we do this, and we work with—maybe they say who they work with. A lot of it is very off centered like what we do, and why we think it’s important, and why you should probably have interest. The thing that we really had to help people with now is that we create a value to do this. Put your messaging in terms of what’s in it for them and whatever messaging you’re going to do with this kind of process has to be at the benefit of the person receiving it because that’s the only way you’re going to get responses for the whole system to really work in effect. That takes a fair amount of iterations to get right. We created the grid because it really helps, from start of all way of very big multinationals, very often everything isn’t really kind of as a customer, what was their day like before and after using your product? What did they feel before and after? What did they have before and after? Did they have chaos before and now they have something that’s organized? Do they stress in their life? There’s the fact that their projects are all over the place. They’re in spreadsheets and they’re not organized. They’re missing deadlines and whatever those things are. You a create value and answer basically the before and after. What did they have? What did they feel? What was their average day like before and after your product? What was their status before and after? We see this very often in really good marketing or advertising. P90X, P90X shows you the before and after pictures. People buy a lot of that because that’s what it shows. If your outreach has that, then people are going to be interested. But far too often, you probably got, and I get a lot of it too, people trying to do cold emails. They’re all about what that firm does. You’re like, that’s great, that’s what you do. I don’t see any reason for me to reply to this because it’s all about you. It doesn’t engage me, it doesn’t ask me a question for me to even reply. Marylou:    The other thing that I just saw, a client actually forwarded me emails as he was getting them from a vendor up in San Francisco. She had I think six in thread replies, like “Did you get my message?” “Hey, I’m just checking, did you get my message?” Over and over and over again. No value at all. It was like wow, because he wrote to me saying, “Is this the Predictable Revenue model, Marylou?” I’m like, “No, it’s not.” But it was like, wow, it’s just the abuse of the psychology of in thread, I get it. It’s like when you see a reply, you’re thinking, “Oh shoot I forgot to look at something previously.” But if you’re not adding value to that in thread reply, like you said, and putting it into what’s important to them. They’re not just swiping left or right, my kids were telling about this app where you swipe left and then something is, swipe right, it’s something else. It’s essentially what people are doing with these emails is that they’re just spamming people but in a way now that psychology is with the in thread but it’s not adding any value. I could not believe the people are still spamming like that. It’s just unbelievable to me. Steven:    We found out that in one of the things that you have to do, and one of the early things we like to do with our new customer is to sit down and create a spreadsheet that says who are your customers, who are all the people that bought the product, why did they buy it from you, who was involved in that decision, what did they get out of it? If it’s a technology product, sometimes you say what technology things the client have that you integrated with so that you help them integrate or improve with? Because to your point, all they send is an inline thread which is like did you get this? I’d really like an answer or repetitively like that. To your point, there’s no trigger. There’s nothing for the person receiving it to really delete or they’ll tell you to go jump in the ocean, or whatever the reply is for that kind of annoyance. Instead, you can ask questions like, “Hey, the reason I’m outreaching to you is because we’d help other companies that use the same thing that we think that you use.” Like whatever that technology is. Now there’s something, there’s a reason, there’s a trigger we’d like to have a conversation. That’s why we think the value puts everybody back on the same page. If you can appreciate it, we’re trying to do Predictable Revenue, and you bring in your first sales development rep. You’re trying to get them up to speed. One of the most valuable things they can know is why other people ever bought from you. Because they’re going to have to at some point do some creative thinking when they’re either on the phone or replying to someone in the moment and they have to have kind of this arsenal with them that gets them up to speed and is as well versed as they can be, if you’re a founder, or you’re VP of sales, and you’ve been doing the deals. There’s all the room that might help that STR as they reach out on your behalf to other customers or potential customer. Marylou:    It sounds like this, you called it a grid, it sounds like you guys have thought through a process and mapped it into a, I don’t want to say step by step but at least some type of framework. Is that where you’re at now with helping clients? Is that you’ve actually crafted a methodology that can guarantee more of a successful assembly activation and optimization of an outreach framework? Steven:    We have, both myself and my partner Joe have done a lot of this and use that for other companies. We’ve seen the good and the bad. If you can appreciate taken years of doing it okay and trying to get it better and knowing what those key levers are. We provide a framework. Whether it’s in some cases helping them craft the message that goes along with the people they’re trying to reach out to. In some cases, it’s the offer.  A lot of times there’s no offer for the recipient really take their person up on it. If it’s a demo, or it’s a document, or if it’s a conversation/phone call, you have to put that offer into some context. You have to have, in some cases, a deadline, or something that causes an action to happen. We help clients evolve these pieces together to do that and then go and use this in the market that they’re going to go after. Marylou:    That sounds great. How big is this grid? Steven:    There’s really two main grids to it. You have a grid in which you’re asking the questions before and after. What did the person have before and after? What did the person feel before and after? What was their average day like before and after? What was their status before and after? The great thing about the grid is you work on it, your team can work on it. Take a couple customers and think about how they would answer it. But then, if you ever have other customers to do testimonials with press releases, you want to do webinars, you want to do anything of any value, people remembers stories more than anything else. If you’re going to do Predictable Revenue and don’t really have story like, “Hey, we help this company do X and Y. We helped do something from the VP of sales at XYZ Company, how we helped them grow their pipeline. They remember stories far more than information. You have a grid knowledge which if you ever had to sit down with a customer, you could ask really, explore questions, use those four questions to get the answers that are going to help sell yourself to your next customers. If your customers are going to tell you, “Before I use this product, my average day was like this. I had these problems in my business. I sell this way because of it. And because of that, it made my status feel like this. You get them to answer it as well. Now, you have something that’s far more powerful than the company that does XYZ that we mentioned earlier. It’s a very generic message. That really starts to compound it. Then, you just itemize, collect 10, 20, 30, however many deals you have. Who it was, to what company it is, who all was actually in the buying process, what exactly they were looking for, what you delivered, and any other technologies and other pieces of that did you help solve. If you took marketing automation, made it work with a CRM or any of those pieces. Those are the things that people want to have. Now, what you’ve got is your sales development rep can be on the phone with someone. If they’re trying to set an appointment with a VP who wants to connect marketing automation, they can say, “We just helped ABC Company actually connect this and these people wanted the decision and what they’re looking for was this and we delivered that.” You have this kind of formula people in their mind get and it’s a story. They start to see that and makes what you can do for them much easier. A sale development rep can think on their feet, they can reply, they can get these answers that can help keep people going because one of the biggest thing that early on you’ll learn with doing sales development is if it’s a new person, they’re trying to learn not only what they have to do but how to do it and what to say. If you can help them with what to say, then you’re really giving them, only concentrating on what they have to do and how to do it. That’s kind of what we team as the power behind it. You should have a, if you’re in any sales rep, no matter how big your sales team is, because there’s always some that are looking to do something, enabling them to do something. Many people in organization forget who are involved in the decision, why they were buying, what they got. The grid really gives you a play book or at least a framework to work with on conversations and engagement with your target market. Marylou:    Yeah, I love that because being an engineer myself, I’m all about analytics, I’m a data lover. I kind of break it down to three different stool legs. Descriptive analytics is what you’re talking about of gathering the information of what’s happened. You sound like your framework which I’m going to ask you about if you would be willing to post that for our audience. I know I’ve got some people driving down the road thinking, “Is it going to be in the show notes somewhere so I can see what it looks like?” But anyway, we really worked through descriptively where we’ve been. Then, we put our predictive hat on. We figure out what will we be wanting to do next week, next quarter, next year. Then, we figure out from a prescriptive analytic point of view now that we know where we’ve been, we know where we want to go, what do we got with our team and how can we use limited resources. I heard you mentioned a ton of things about that once you get the grid filled in, you have story line. You have structure. You have the ability to create content assets that will help move your prospects positionally from a cold status through a working status to a qualified op and then beyond. I don’t go past qualified op but you do. You do the whole pipeline, correct? Steven:    We’ll get them all the way to sales qualified opportunity. Marylou:    Okay, so you’re like us. You’re like me. What we’re trying to do is create an engine where you decide, it’s time to turn this picket on full blast because we perfected as much as we can and gotten the conversion rates both intra and inter of the content assets, the emails, the voice scripts, everything else we’ve worked on that are assets for the pipeline are now humming along. Now, all we have to do is put more records through it. That will give us the ability to generate Predictable Revenue because we know all of our conversion rates for meaningful conversations. The grid sounds like that’s a great way—four questions people, four questions, you heard him—that you can get started along the path. Four questions is probably at the macro level and we’ll drill down into those four questions because we want to know behaviorally some information, we want to know strategically, financially or personally how these things impact our buyers etc, etc. That is a great starting point so how can we get our hands on this grid, Steven? Steven:    We’ve created the system for URL for people could go to, it’s valuegrid.io. You can go there and you can download the value grid and use it yourself. You cut some tips, and tactics, and some other bits of information from using it successfully now with other companies. Gives you more than just a grid with some questions on there, it actually helps you kind of frame within your own mind. Go there, valuegrid.io and you can get a copy yourself and use it in your own business and with your own sales team. Marylou:    Well, Steven, this has been great. How do people get a hold of you if they want help in filling out their grids because I think a lot of it is execution as you know. We can provide them with the tools but some people are more, I would like the help in getting this filled out. That’s the service you obviously offer, so how do they get a hold of you to do that? Or just some general for general questions as well. Steven:    Sure. You can always get a hold of us at our company is sales-ignition.com is our URL you can go there and fill that out. I’m available steven@sales-ignition.com is the best way to get a hold of me myself or one of our partners, other analysts will reply to you as quickly once you fill that out and hopefully answer your questions and see if it’s a fit. Marylou:    Yeah. For those of you listening, I mean its 2016 now, we’re recording this call. I think Steven’s a veteran. He’s been doing this a long time. He’s been like I said, there’s been a lot of ups and downs, change in the marketplace, the email engines constantly are changing, and needing to be iterating. I think you of all people have figured that out that this really is a lean process that you’ve come up with. I think that is very attractive to startups and also to mid-range companies, even the up market companies are starting to see like you say the value of putting the toe in the water for outbound campaigns that are value-driven. They’re actually segmented and targeted to those companies that they want to get but may not have any dialog with for whatever reason. Not everybody uses social, especially corporations. There’s still the value of using the phone, and using email, and putting it into a sequence and then a cadence so that you can consistently reach people who will buy your product. Steven, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate it. I’ll put everything in the show notes of to how to get a hold of you. Maybe some time in the future we can do a webinar on filling out the grid and taking a couple clients, either minor of yours and working through that. How you would do that in an immersion sort of way like on one webinar if we can do that. Steven:    That’d be awesome. Marylou:    Alright, great. Thanks again. Alright Steven, take it easy. Bye. Steven:    You too. Bye.

Marylou: Consistent Growth and Powerful Copy, Samuel Woods.Sam believes growth can be exponential and consistent. Taking the time to get to know your target buyers is more than getting to know just the facts. Understanding their emotional ties to the decisions they make will help you write compelling copy that get your conversions up, and allows you to scale. Sam’s agency, Response Copy, specializes in conversion copywriting that helps his clients set massive growth that’s consistent and scalable. You can also check out his growth marketing tips at his website samueljwoods.com. In this Podcast, Sam reveals insights into understanding the language of your ideal buyer, the importance of testing and validating your message, and tips for timing your email touch points with prospects. Okay everyone, today I have Sam Woods. Sam runs an agency and the service that really helps people grow their revenue by at least double, most triple for what the type of work that he does. I met Sam in a Mastermind, actually as part of my continuing education I’m always looking to learn how to write better emails. I joined the Mastermind group, met him early on and saw in him that oh boy this is a great resource, a great person to get to know because he understands what we struggle with at our part of the pipeline from the cold queue through the working status qualification and then of course nurture, is how do we motivate people and engage them through this process and get them excited about having a conversation with us. Or in terms of the cold queue, how to start those conversations to people we don’t know. I’ve asked Sam to join us today and I’d like to always start by asking, Sam how did you get involved in this business and what got you interested in focusing on this particular type of writing? Sam: Sure, well Marylou it’s nice to talk to you, nice to be here, thanks for having me on. My story is fairly simple and almost typical I’d say. I actually started of learning and doing graphic designs. My background is in graphic design. And that turn into creating websites for people, this is probably wow six, seven years ago, so a while ago for me. Starting with websites, starting with just creating layouts and understanding human psychology from the standpoint of visuals and graphics and color. The clients that I worked with then they love their size, the size did well but they came back to me and asked me, “Sam how do we actually get leads? How to get clients? How do we turn our website into a lead generation machine or even a sales machine?” That put me on a path on marketing. I start learning about direct response marketing. Some of the old school guys like Gary Halbert, and Dan Kennedy, and a few other people who do a lot of work then. I fell in love with what J. Abraham says, I’m a huge J Abraham fan in terms of general philosophy and marketing philosophy. I got turned into marketing and that led me on that path of okay, people come to our site or people see contents somewhere, how do you get them to respond? How do you connect and engage with them and get them to respond to what you like them to do? I started doing that and helping clients with setting up funnels of different types, anything from lead generation, inbound, to even getting it to outbound, sending out post card, done that a lot. That got into cold email or direct outreach outbound email generation too. From the graphic stuff to marketing, which has then been the core part of what I do for the past four years now which is helping companies use growth marketing which is a combination direct response and the plot psychology, to use that to generate quality leads and do that faster and quicker than they have before. That’s my start. That’s how I really got into it. My clients came with needs and I responded to those needs and here we are today. Marylou: Right. Well, for those of you who don’t know the term direct response. It’s the ability to reach out directly to people that you have targeted, that’s what our framework does. We are putting in our pipeline those companies with whom we think are going to close the fastest with the highest revenue potential. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: We may not know them but we are reaching out to them and targeting them directly as opposed to casting a wide net out there and getting the minnows and the whales, we tend to want to really focus on those whales. Sam’s has just cornered that market in figuring out how to do that. So tell me Sam, what are some of the misconceptions that your clients come in to working with you? What are the things that they come in that you see most often that if you can wave a magic wand and say I wish they knew this, what would that be? Sam: Yeah. It’s a many of things but it comes down to few key mindsets that people have when they think about doing marketing and sales and then getting those leads and conversions. For the most part, into a very degree and different variations, people assume that in any marketing and sales messaging betters about them. And not let say their target audience, their target ideal client profile or person. We use terminologies like the buyer, persona, ideal profile and so on. People have the assumption that, which is often true that they have a great company, they have a great practice service, and then they can offer for a lot of value to people. Those things are true and they should be true. But when you are looking to start a conversation or get in touch with someone and engage them, you have to drop that attitude and that mindset. It can’t be about you, yet. It has to be about the person that you’re trying to reach. You can trace this mindset back to a core fundamental belief that I have which I think is going to be helpful and that is whoever understands their buyer the best will always win. You have to understand your buyer better than they understand themselves, and better than your competitor understands them. It does come down to understanding people, understanding the context in which they receive your message, where they’re coming from, who they are, what they’re looking for. I think that’s the core issue at hand here is understanding other people first before you make an attempt to connecting with them. Coming from the point of it’s all about my company and my product and my service, it will become that at some point, but first of all it is about other people first. The second thing is that you can’t assume unless you know in highly detailed outline who these people are. You can’t assume too much about them when they first see your message. Context in which they see a message, that matters a lot. A lot of marketing and a lot of content marketing is usually outlining how your product works, your opinion on things, and your take on different features or products, or services or your take on the market in general. That’s cool but you have to angle your messaging towards what these people are asking themselves. All your buyers, they come with a set of beliefs, they come with a set of assumptions, they have suspicions, they have fears, they have needs. It’s all these psychographics and all of these psychological angles that you have to account for. Even as simple as answering questions and let’s see your content marketing, you put out article or maybe white papers or webinars. If you create that marketing messaging from a standpoint of what are these people asking themselves and what are some of the bleeding neck issues? What’s keeping them up at night? If you take that approach in terms of answering those questions, your messaging will instantly become more relatable and more impactful. I think that’s the core of the assumption that people make. It looks different whoever you talk to but I think at very basic level is the assumption that your product and your service in your company is what matters when actually it’s about your buyer. Whatever your messaging is, that as long as you talked about how great your features are or what benefits are, even benefits are decent but you have to go one step further in that your conversations and your messaging in whatever format it is, it can’t be about how awesome your things are, it has to be about connecting with your target buyer and your target market and answering their questions, speaking to them from their context, from where they’re at, in any buying process or lifecycle stage. Marylou: So basically what you’re saying, because we all get those emails were we read about the features of a product or service. Sam: Yes. Marylou: And then it’s almost as if we are given the task of trying to figure out how what we want fits into what that feature is. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: And you’re saying that this is a common error that if we can flip that, and I heard you say features translate to benefits but benefits go even to deeper desires, wants, fears, skepticism, all of those other things. Sam: Yup, and needs. Marylou: That’s another great point, and needs. Because we are in our world at the cold conversation stage, we’ve got to really focus on that. How difficult is that for you to teach clients to do that? Or do you do that for them to get them thinking? Sam: So both, yeah. Marylou: How do you get them to that deeper level? Sam: So it’s a combination of things. It’s partly teaching and showing and also helping them through a process we can discover this things, discover the language of your ideal profile or your ideal buyer persona. It’s important that anytime you set up a new campaign or you look into do whether it’s outreach, outbound or inbound, you have to route and anchor your messaging in the language of your ideal market and your ideal buyers. Doing the research necessary to extract that language. That can be done through looking at what people are already saying, and other types of content that exist, you can learn a lot from just picking up what people are saying in book reviews, or what they’re saying on testimonials on other sites. A great thing to do is look at your competitors’ websites and look at the testimonials that they get. That will show you and that will teach you a lot of what people are expecting, what they’re looking for. You can also obviously get the language and the default process and the paradigm from just speaking with your existing customers. That’s a great place to start. When I work with clients, we usually do a combination of just that. We spend some time doing research and discovery, looking for their messaging, the words, trying to uncover the paradigm, trying to uncover how they view the world and how they view their situation in relation to your type of product or service. Also, I do spend a lot of time also just instilling this mindset and talking through with my clients and showing them, not just telling them this is how it is but actually showing the process and showing them how to uncover the messaging. We walk through better cross with clients. We don’t just leave them on the road and then they go off and do something. We walk them through it. For a lot of people, even if you’ve been in a business for 10, 20, 30 years, you start assuming that you know everything there’s to know about your customers. But your customers change, their needs change, their situations change. Whatever worked a year ago is probably not going to work right now. It’s important to always gather that feedback, gather that data. Look at how the people are behaving. Even sometimes disregarding what they say they will do and just look at their behavior. There’s a lot of this, a lot of what you need can be found on what you already have. We walked through a process of discovering and uncovering that and just showing and really opening people’s eyes to, look, your existing customers have a lot of valuable feedback that they can give you. Even speaking to leads or marketing qualified leads or sales qualify leads, ask them the right type of questions, you will get answers that you can then use in other messaging as well. Marylou: That’s a great point. I tell this story a lot about a client of mine who were, they were accountants. They saw themselves as accountants. They described themselves as accountants. But what may do, they doesn’t sound like as in depth exercises what you put your clients through but we did a very brief interview with some of their clients, maybe 10 to 15 of them we interviewed. We asked the question. When you think of ABC Company, how would you describe their people? And not one said they’re my accountant. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: Not one. They said they’re my business coach, they are my kind of right hand men, my right arm. They keep me out of trouble, they are my growth experts. Never did we hear the word accountants. Sam: That’s fascinating. Marylou: Yeah. Sam: And often whatever you think is the reason why the people are buying from you is usually not the primary reason. Marylou: Right. Sam: That’s one thing that I discover all the time. We think we know why people buy from us, why they buy our product or service, but it’s usually something else. That something else is usually on a deeper level than satisfying an immediate need. On the surface it is about satisfying immediate need or getting a specific outcome. But if you go a few layers deeper, you’ll always uncover a stronger emotional reason why people do what they do and why they behave the way they behave. Marylou: This research portion of the work that you do, it’s a typical engagement. How long does that take for you to pull the right information out with your client and work side by side with them and why? Sam: Yeah, sure. It depends a bit on the scope of what we’re trying to do and what part of the funnel we’re working on, and if we’re looking at the whole funnel or just some parts of it. But anything from a couple weeks to a couple of months depending on how quick we can get access to people. Sometimes we can uncover some real gold within a few weeks. At that point, once you have gold and you actually take them, use it. Sometime we have to spend a bit more time doing some research because it might be, maybe your target audience or your buyers are hard to get to. They might not be readily available, there might not be whole lot of information already out there so we might have to spend more time getting qualitative data. I’d say a couple of weeks or couple months, depends on the scope. Marylou: So the planning is, even in our world, planning is a very important part of success. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: Tell us what’s next? After we get our buying personas complete and we know who we want to market to, we know the message that we think will resonate, what’s next? Sam: Then it’s a matter of taking all that quantitative data that we have. Then kind of, the undefined collection of things. We’re turning that into actual phrases, and sentences, and words. What we tend to do is we create inventories of phrasing and sentences that we can use. For example, if we have a heading of a particular pain point, maybe a target buyers looking to do their accounting quicker and not spend hours on it. Then, under that heading, how can we phrase that pain points? What kind of different sentences can we use? What emotional angle can we use in each sentence? That can be as granular as writing out 10 different sentences each capturing a different emotion. We create an inventory in that sense of these different phrases we can use and language and words. After we’ve done that, we put that in front of people. We partly put that in front of existing customers, kinda get a quick validation on yes that’s actually how I feel or how I felt. And then obviously you want to put that in front of a potential new business and potential new customers as well. That can be done either via outbound, direct outreach, or can be done even in blog posts or articles or white papers. It’s important that you have an inventory of different language and phrases and words that you can use in test and see what are people are resonating with. Cause even if you write out ten different sentences for example, there might only be two or three of those are really hitting home, and really getting people to perk up and respond. Marylou: Yes as we talked about I think in our last session. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: There are certain levels of awareness. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: There’s unaware which we get a lot in our world because we’re reaching out sometimes with new product or with new service. That awareness level, there could be a problem awareness, there could be a solution awareness, there could be a product awareness. You have to make sure that you hit those three different messages that you have to test and get out there and start essentially tracking the results. Sam: Yeah exactly. What we can usually find is that our processes are very well defined. We always tell to trust the process even though we might be in the midst of the research and they’re wondering what on earth is going to come out of this. We always tell them, look, trust the process because at the end of this, or even at before the end of it, in the middle of it all, you’ll start seeing trends. You’ll start seeing it okay, these emails would this type of messaging is getting great opens and great responses. Then, you take that and you amplify it. It’s always about keeping track of what’s going on and being able to be quick in making changes. What people responded to three months ago is probably not what they’ll respond to tomorrow. Things change, people’s perceptions changes. Having a process where you’re continuously testing and also being able to make changes quickly and being agile in how you operate, that’s going to be key. It’s important to also have a process that allows for that as opposed to be being locked into this very rigid, very structure, very formal process, but instead having guiding principles. I like to think of it as having heuristics as opposed to algorithms. If you think in terms of that, it’s more about okay here’s a room in which you can move in, on Monday you might want to be on the left side of the room and on Thursday you might want to be on right side of the room, as opposed to here are the exact steps to take. Because when you deal with people, that’s the key. That comes back to what I said early on, when you deal with people, there’s always, always an element of surprise, of unpredictability, and a lot of variables that you just don’t even know about and certainly can’t control. Making room for that in how you do your marketing and how you do your outbound and inbound is going to be key in terms of getting the results you want to get. Just know that you’re always talking to a person on the other end. There’s always a person who’s opening up your email on their smartphone, and who’s reading at maybe 7:00AM in the morning. They’ve just drop off their kids before they are going to work. How is that person going to respond to your message? What do they need to understand and believe about themselves and you in order for them to respond to what you’re asking for, right? Always keep in mind that there’s a person on the other end. You have to account for humanity, and the psychology of the people you’re reaching out to cause that is what will make a break any campaign at any day. Marylou: Right, so the word campaign has come up. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: I think one of the misnomers especially with my audience who has read Predictable Revenue was under the assumption that one or two emails, and that’s it you’re done. Tell us about the campaigns? Sam: Yes. One or two emails then you’re done, you may say yeah you’re done. You’re not going to get much pay on that. Quit today, pretty much. If you want us to talk about direct outbound campaigns and e-coding the campaigns, having more than two steps is going to be more critical because you’ll often see responses on the second, maybe second, probably third or fourth email. That’s just again accounting for the fact that if people receive your email on a Monday, they might be walking into meeting. They have no time to look your email. Then after that meeting, they’re getting another request from other people and there’s things to do. They might have thought to themselves when they got your first email, “Oh, this sounds pretty good actually, I’ll deal with it later.” Well, that later never comes. People forget, things happen, things come up, you just never know. If you only have one email then that’s it, you’re not going to hear from them. But if you have a second or third email, or fourth or fifth email, and this is a touch point, you’re increasing your chances of getting in front of them again, connecting with them again, and being able to get their response when it fits them, and for them to feel like, “Yes, today is a great day for me to deal with this, I have some time.” You can’t just do a one off campaign. This is a process that you have to have in place that runs continuously. If you have let’s say a direct outbound campaign or a process you want to call it, that consist of let’s say five or six emails, then you’ll let that run its course to a list and then you’ll let that list rest for a bit, then you go back, and recycle that campaign into the same list. Leaving it up to chance and leaving it up to one hit wonder will never work out well. It is always important to understand that your emails reach people at different times. They may not be ready, they may not be aware enough, or they may not just have time to deal with it when they see it. By stringing out touch points throughout a period of time, that is how you increase your chance of actually getting a response. Marylou: Okay. Sam: You can say the same thing for inbound and different types of other campaigns too. It’s staying tough in mind is the usual phrase people use. Following a process where you’re not just doing marketing for a while and you do nothing for a while, cause then you’ll be at least famine roller coaster cycle there were you have a lot of new business coming in then nothing for a while and then a lot of business coming in and then nothing. Having consistency in what you do and how you do it, that’s going to be the key for getting long-term results. Marylou: And it sounds like your firm does address the multiple streams that come in from lead generation. My heart is always with the outbound, so I was like, hence I slat most of our conversation to that. Sam: Sure. Marylou: We do have the influx of inbound leads. I know you work with landing pages and all of those other forms of lead generation that all come into the funnel. Sam: Yeah, and the way I see it is just you’re stacking your odds and you’re layering how many different streams of leads you can have, and even how you deal with them when they come in, right? You can have high touch campaign where you have phone calls and meetings, or you can have low touch campaigns where there’s just emails that go out. For example you have a SAAS and you have the, during an on boarding face, you can either have a high touch there too or a low touch, depending on how much resource you have available to yourself and to your company or how valuable that lead might be to you. The way I look at it is as long as you have the foundation right in which you have the messaging, you have the right message to the right person at the right time, you understand the psychographics of who they are, and if you have a really strong offer of whatever might be for the next step in a sales process. If you have a hook and a promise to that, then you can layer the channels on top of it. You can reuse that same hook promise and offer and use that for your outbound. You can use in your inbound and that could be either through webinar, or articles, or white papers, or whatever that might be. But as long as you have the foundation right, as long as you have the core right, then all you’re doing when you’re adding more channels and more campaigns on top of it is you’re stacking the odds and you’re layering the different avenues you have which should open up new streams of leads. It’s a quick way of doing growth with just—people have this perception that you can grow over night which is never true but if you can stack and layer your channels and campaigns on top of each other, then those are incremental changes, right? Marylou: Right. Sam: If you can have 50% in one campaign, 8% in another, 3% in a different campaign, 20% in a another campaign, then all those small percentages are going to add up. That’s how you get to double or triple growth. It’s you stack those campaign in top of each other. Marylou: Right, so let me reiterate that for our audience. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: First and foremost, before you decide how you’re going to reach out to your prospective clients, you’ve got to fundamentally know why they should change, why change now, and why choose you. As Sam was saying, you have to get down to the core essence of the why regardless of product feature. There are features that translate but it’s the ultimate benefit that they’re going to get. Once that is figured out with Sam’s guidance and his team, then they work with you to figure out, okay what are the different streams or what we call channels. What are the different channels we should send these messages through? As he was saying, when you layer or overlay multiple channels on top of a really good core message system, that in aggregate is going to give you that double or triple growth. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: Okay people, so we cannot take shortcuts here. Sam: Yeah exactly. I really want to stress it too. This is another misconception, right? People think that okay, one or two channels and one or two outreach or inbound mechanisms are enough to double lead quantity or even double or triple just like and that’s simply not true. That’s not reality. Marylou: Right. Sam: Reality is always that you’ll have some channels up perform others. There’ll be some messaging that’s going to be stronger than others. But if you can’t stack them in top of each other, that’s how you can double or triple your growth and lead some sales. Marylou: It’s like a symphony where you have all the different parts of the symphony, all the different percussion instruments, you have the wind instruments, and they all work together to produce this amazing result. Sam: Exactly, that’s it. Marylou: Yeah. Let’s talk now about the typical engagement. Who would be a good candidate for your service and how long could they get expect to be working before they start activating? Because the planning process is really a joint partnership in that you’re relying on the client to get you the information because you don’t know their product necessarily. You may have some experience but you don’t know their uniqueness. They have to work with you to get that piece done. Let’s pretend that is a certain timeline you said, anywhere from two weeks to two months. What about activation? What can they look for for activation about? Sam: I want to go a step back and say during this assembly process, before we start an engagement, we do look for a couple of areas that we can get our clients quick wins early on. Even though we do have which is a critical part which is that whole gathering data and understating people and sending products, we do make sure that okay, what are some quick wins that we can recommend right away that make a huge difference. Marylou: That’s nice like a fast track. Sam: Exactly right, so we have those the things that going on at the same time. I don’t know why we still see this but one of the most common, common places and areas we can get a quick win is to simply implement resurrection campaign is what they call. Or a second reactivation campaign. Marylou: Like we call dead accounts. Sam: Yeah, dead accounts. Or even leads that have gone cold. You can apply this to different parts of the life cycle of a customer of yours. You can apply a resurrection campaign to leads that have gone cold, to leads that are sales qualified leads but they maybe have responded to like I say, our proposal or something else. You can also apply a resurrection campaign to past customers. It’s a reason why they should buy from you again, probably. It’s easier and it’s more profitable to get a past customer to buy from you again than it is to chase after a new customer. Marylou: Sure. Sam: What we love to do and we always find this to be true, or for the most part with our clients, is they don’t have those resurrection campaigns. Not because they don’t want them but they usually don’t think about, it’s not something that you usually consider and realized you can actually implement that really easily. Marylou: Right. Sam: We usually do one of those campaigns or a couple of those campaigns where it makes sense to do so and implement that really quickly, and that will usually plug any leaks that exist in your funnel and set you out for even great results later on. While that’s happening, then we are also doing that assembly. We gather all the data and information that we need. Marylou: You are getting invalidation from that campaign, the resurrection campaign to help you with the language now a day. Sam: Exactly, right? It all feeds into each other like this all ecosystem that uses talks. It just feeds in each other. It’s a great way to get feedback. Once we’ve done that, then we activate whatever their campaign is. We usually get activation to a high intense period of activation where we’re testing a lot of messaging, we’re testing numerous different languages and words, and we’re testing channels, and we’re testing formatting. That process can take anything from one to three months depending on the scope of your funnel, depending on what part of the funnel, and also and especially depending on what we’re seeing in terms of feedback from the first month or two. Sometimes, we can hit on a really great campaign, a really great messaging really quickly and that will make a huge differences. So what we do is we focus on that and amplify that result. Marylou: Right. Sam: However, what is most common is that from the first month or so, you’ll have some good results in one campaign, some decent results in a different campaign, and you have to do a lot of analyzing the data in terms of okay, what’s actually going on here? What are the factors that are contributing to this growth, the kind of trick that we’re seeing? And then what can we do to amplify that and turn that from let’s say an 8% conversion to a 20% or 30% conversion in terms of response or anything else. It is very important that in the first month or two of that activation that we review the data, we make changes on a weekly basis sometimes. You have to be really quick on what you change. You might launch a couple of campaigns with messaging that you think is going to work but then the results aren’t what you want them to be. You need to be, okay let’s change how we do this and let’s make that change fast as opposed to running something into the ground that’s not working right. Agility is really critical when it comes to marketing and sales. Being able to change, being able to make adjustments to what the feedback you’re getting is. You’re looking at a couple of months there. Marylou: Which goes back to the preparation of multiple ways to language something so that you’re basically going down the list and saying okay, well this didn’t work. Now, we’re going to implement this one because it was the next in priority as being important. Sam: Exactly. Marylou: That’s great, and you calibrate as often as you need to. Sam: As often as we need to. Marylou: Okay. Sam: On a granule level, that looks like it really depends on the client, the scope, and the funnel and what we’re doing. That whole activation process is early on a very intense period of a month or two, sometimes less, just depending or to feel what we’re getting. But once we have a few, once we learn enough about the messaging and the channels that we’re getting, from there on out, we can keep that running for forever. For however long someone wants to use it, right? Our typical engagement is anything from three to six months and beyond. Just depending on how many funnels people want to work on, how many campaigns we want to launch, and how long they want to keep on going with it. Marylou: That’s great. As we’re finishing up here, I’m sure some people in the audience are thinking wow it’s a lot of work, which it is. Sam: That’s worthwhile. Marylou: It’s definitely worthwhile. It’s on the road to Predictable Revenue. It’s on the road to generating double, triple growth consistently and repeatedly. But if we were to think about step one, and you’re out there buying into this concept and thinking boy, this is something I want to explore, what advice do you have in terms of taking the steps? Sam: Yeah. If your first step is okay, I get it, this makes sense. I want to move forward in terms of just going down that path. The first thing you should do, unless you already have this, but if you do have this you should do this anyway, that is to flesh out your buyer personas and what you know about your ideal target. Not just who your customers are now, but also flesh out okay, what are they like before they buy from us? Whatever a person is like when they bought from you is not always who they were before they bought from you. Getting a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer personas or your target market, that’s a first step. It’s not about understanding their age and if they have a dog or two or three or a house or a car, these are information. What you’re looking for are the psychographics. What they think, what they feel, what they know, the beliefs they have, the suspicions they have, the fears they have. You want to really go down on a deep psychological level, you don’t have to spend weeks or months during these. It’s a rabbit hole in it of itself. If you can fill out a document that contains some of the core human emotions, the type of persons that these people are, are they more analytical, then that’s the type of a person that will respond to different messaging. Or are they more creative in handling thing, are they more strategic? Just having an understanding of your target market but also your customers are, fleshing that out, that’s going to go a long, long way because the messaging you get from that will make a huge difference in what you are saying, and what you doing with the channels, and the campaign you put in place. Marylou:   Yeah and you know really people, it’s very true still to this age, and that is people first look at things emotionally and then they switch more to a logic to justify the decision that they want to buy. Sam: Exactly. Marylou: It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B, business to business or business to consumer. At some level, you’ve got to hit them emotionally. It could be curiosity, mystique, you mentioned fear, greed, the typical human emotions. Check them off your list to make sure. There’s this IT guy, he’s analytical but does he want a promotion out of the deal? Sam: Right. Marylou: Or it is a marketing person who’s very creative but once a bigger seat at the table with the big boys in sales? You have to really think it through to that level. Sam: Yes, absolutely. Marylou: Regardless of your product. Sam: Yeah. It might seem like okay, you’re going too far back, or that’s too much work, or how’s that going to result in bottom line increase? Understanding that is at least half the battle, it’s usually probably 80% of the getting to the results you want. When you then put them together, the copy, and the landing pages, and the campaigns, all of that will fall into place and can be put together really quickly when you have this bulk work already done. Marylou: Right. Sam: You might think of it as wow, we’re not getting anywhere. All we’re doing is just getting information, and looking, and understanding, and reviewing. But yes that’s exactly what you’re doing, that’s exactly what you need to do because then putting the other campaigns will happen really quickly, that that’s the easy part of that point. Marylou: Right. Sam: That’s another misconception that I want to really mention is that people think that the constraints is or are the campaigns that you have and the mechanisms of it and that’s not true. Those things can be done really easily, really quickly. The tech exists for it, the apps and the technology, that’s happened really quickly. The constraint is actually you understanding your buyers and your market better than they understand themselves and better that your competitors understand them. Marylou: There’s a phrase I remembered that once you understand that, the copy writes itself. Sam: Yes Marylou: Not to be little what you, your team do. Sam: Sure. Marylou: It certainly, Sam: But it’s true. Marylou: It’s a hard thing to do because we’re so focused on why don’t take it, why these feature will help them, and it’s not about that. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: It really isn’t. So if we sit back and pretend that we’re having coffee with the guy right across from us, they’re humans. At the end of the day, everybody’s a human. There are some underlying needs, desires, wants, fears that we need to get to. Sam: Yup, exactly. Marylou: And then take it from there and then morph that into this is the feature, this is the benefit, this is the deeper benefit, this is the desire. Well, thank you so much Sam for your time. How do people get a hold of you? Sam: Sure, they can find me on Twitter at @heysamwoods or you can go to my website stimulead.com. That’s where my agency is housing and resides. I also have a personal blog it’s samueljwoods.com. Either one of those two, you’ll find me. Marylou: Alright great, well thank you again for your time. It has been great. Sam: Thanks so much.

Marylou:    Jorge Soto is a self proclaimed startup fanatic. He’s been on a journey from an employee of Twitter to a mission aimed at inspiring new entrepreneurs to community. Jorge is a consultant for Node.io and has also launched Soto Ventures Media as an educational hub and community for entrepreneurs.    In this podcast, Jorge reveals his fundamental truth for sales, thoughts on becoming a fantastic leader, tips for getting in the right sales mindset, and we end it with discussion of the new book that I’m releasing called Predictable Prospecting. Jorge:               Yes. Wow. Quite a few things, I left Twitter in February of last year. I went to start a company so that I’ve been working on this idea. The idea was trying to simplify the workflow inside of Sales Force for the STR, right? Marylou:          Yeah. Jorge:               The inside sales rep that’s getting a bunch of leads in and needs a better visual queue. I’d really like the user experience that you see, there’s a tool called Trello. Are you familiar with Trello? Marylou:          I use it. Jorge:               Got it. Yes. If you think about Trello, Pipe Drive’s another one, I always thought about the spreadsheet. Why do we always default to the spreadsheet for basically everything? I said what if we created the user experience inside of Sales Force that had columns that represented the steps. For me it was like, why I think spreadsheets are so great. One of the reasons is that you can visually see the world of things you’re working on. Anyways, we built this application called Dashtab. I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a long time. I started the company in 2011 through an incubator that didn’t quite work out. I was able to end up partnering with a great engineering team that was excited about solving this problem with me. Actually, it was shocking. I decided to quit Twitter and do that. We launched a product and it was great. It’s still out there. At one point, this was in the summer time of last year. I just burned out. The company, my partners at that time who I’m still very good friends with, they had a software consulting business that they really, really were monetizing well. We just said, what do we want? What do we want for our lives? They had spent a lot of time building this consulting business. We just decided, “Hey, let’s continue to offer the product as kind of a line item around services solution.” I decided to start traveling Europe. I left and started traveling Europe and China. I did eight countries over the course of a couple of months in 2015. It was the best year of my life. I would say one of the best years, certainly as an adult. I guess that’s what I call myself these days. That was just really, really eye opening. What was interesting was right before I left to travel, I met the founder, a woman by the name of Falon Fatemi, founder of a startup of called Node.io. I really loved what she was doing. She was really trying to personalize the web and doing some very interesting things. She has a very big IPO massive business idea. One of the biggest things she wanted to after use case was solving the SAAS sales use case. She wanted to be able to plug into Salesforce, automatically understand what accounts you should be going after, who are the contacts within those accounts, how, what you should say when you‘re about to prospect, about to pick up the phone. It fell in line with this whole account based sales and marketing world which is not a new concept, it’s not a new jargon or anything. I just really liked this approach that she was taking. As soon as I got back from Europe, I started consulting with her the rest of year. I fell in love with the team, a great engineering team. Fallon’s a great visionary. That’s what I’m doing now full time. But then I have this, I don’t know what it is. It’s a community called Soto Ventures. Soto Ventures community is very, very interesting. It’s my last name, right? It’s so tied to me in a very intimate way. It started with me buying this domain about 13 years ago. I had an LLC called Soto Ventures. I did a bunch of random stuff around the time that I left Twitter and started Dashtab. My instinct just told me, “Hey, you what? You want to make sure that you continue to build your personal brand.” I launched it. It was supposed to be my personal blog, something was fun. As I started to travel Europe, I started doing these like motivational speaking things in Spain. Marylou:          Wonderful. Jorge:               Yeah, it was insane. It ended up becoming this community. Now, again it’s not a non-profit, it’s not even a business. I like to call it a community or movement. We’re Soto Ventures. It’s a community that’s focused on inspiring and educating entrepreneurship around the world. There’s been some really interesting that have happened. Anyways, that’s a long winded, obviously a lot more there. That’s kind of what I’m up to now. Again, the focus is Node and building this community which again, it’s been a lot of fun. People are getting involved all over the world. These are individuals who care about building their personal brand, of course, but also care about their communities. I have a gentleman, I can’t pronounce his last name, but Brad. He’s based in Detroit. He came up to me. He’s going to be upset if he watches this video. I’m sorry Brad, but I don’t want to butcher your last name for everyone. He came up to me at Saastr. We were chatting, he was based in Detroit. He works for Level Eleven. They do leaderboards and gamification to help sales teams. Marylou:          Okay. Jorge:               You look at that whole sales productivity space. It’s one of the hot ones. I would say, I would actually call it like a first mover there, innovator in that space. They’ve been around for many years. They have a solid team. He’s a rep there. Somehow by the end of the night, we ended up deciding to launch Soto Ventures Detroit. It’s very interesting. Obviously, his day job is that, it’s not a huge time commitment but the thesis was let’s help him build his brand in Detroit as an enthusiast of start ups. The underlying energy or mission was really interesting because everyone knows Detroit had some issues economically, right, or that Michigan as a state. The idea was imagine if we can stimulate some growth there, some thoughtfulness around entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a very interesting movement that’s going on right now. I think it’s building the economy’s future. It was just really nice to be able to partner up with Brad. That’s a really good example of the types of stuff that are happening just everywhere. That’s something that’s really near my heart. Marylou:          The thesis was you said was getting communities together. Is it rallied around entrepreneurship? Also, is it rallied around SAAS or is it just people who feel that sense of community, want to extend their brand? Where are you now in exploring that? Jorge:               The community, it’s interesting that the overarching mission is entrepreneurship, educating and inspiring folks to even launch business start up and to offer business of courses of focus. But not necessarily only SAAS, right? But the funny thing there is that in my core competency, what I’m involve with her, most of my career, it’s been SAAS, web based products, B2B. I had never really gone that long. It’s a couple of experience that never really worked out. It’s not a complete focus on B2B SAAS but because I spend a lot of time in the folks in my immediate network, our typical B2B SAAS, there is a sort of correction towards that. I didn’t own that kind of business. I needed to focus somewhere and be able to have immediate value. We’re talking mostly about SAAS and B2B and that kind of stuff. I guess in the short term I would really put more focus on that. The important thing is I will going to be teach people how to launch an viable products, and how to launch application, that new sorts of things, and to understand how to build this software. I’m obviously not an engineer so I can’t go up there and teach them how to build an application. However, I can sit down and the community, the folks that we’re bringing on, they can talk about how do I as a non technical cofounder launch a business, right? How do I understand how to work with engineers? If I have an idea, how do I get really excited about the idea, recruit a technical cofounder and then build a product in following a process that’s actually intelligent? Those sorts of things. The life of a non technical cofounder is very painful. I would have to say someone trying to get to build software businesses who can’t actually write any code is nearly miserable, but it’s doable. Just trying to teach those processes from that perspective. I’ve been blessed to be able to have a ton of engineers in my network, real friends that were engineers who are also getting involved with this community, who can talk to how do you actually build these things. Marylou:          Are you thinking that it’s going to end up being an exchange of maybe matchmaking between engineering people and people who have a vision but don’t necessarily have teams that can carry out the vision? Or are you focusing on getting conversation started and starting to think through with the MVP emphasis, not only products but conversations in getting those products launched? Jorge:               Yeah. Marylou:          Where are you at? All of the above? Jorge:               All of the above. Its interesting because people ask me all the time, “What is that thing?” Literally everyday. I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know, actually. The beauty is that I don’t have to know cause we’re not monetizing it. There’s no focus and stress of I have a business now, we have investors, we have all the stuff. That’s what the day job’s about, right? I feel like you got to be able to have a creative outlet. This is my creative outlet. I literally love this stuff. This is what I’ve been doing my entire adult life. I’m going to be 35 this year. Not that I’m old, I’m still very young, still have a lot to learn. I’ve been focused on this very mission since I was 21 years old. 14 years of my life that I focused on trying to become an entrepreneur and trying to become a successful entrepreneur and trying to build businesses and the whole thing. For me, it’s important that I have a creative outlet that is not necessarily tied to revenue or tied to some sort of expectation, or have to answer to anybody. That’s probably one of the biggest things I love about being your own businesses owner, it’s just that you don’t have to answer to anyone. I think I was always a rebellious child. My mother tells me even as a little guy, I never wanted to listen to anyone. Marylou:          Beat your own drum, right? Jorge:               Yeah. However, I think at some point you got to say hey you know what, Rome was not built alone. Your team is probably the most important thing. If you think about an evolution in an entrepreneur’s life, I can certainly speak for myself. I think the sales stuff is easy, in my opinion. It’s kind of like fundamental truth, it never changes. Okay, the technology changed, what you’re selling changed, the story changes, but the fundamental truths are always there. What I mean by that is I was actually doing an interview last night with a friend of mine, Andy Veneda Smith. She’s involved with Soto Ventures but she runs a recruiting firm. We’re talking about the fundamental truths in sales. If you think about it, there’s always going to be a point where there is a person or organization that you’re trying to sell to or getting contact with. Now, how that happens, I don’t know. Like in the past, you’d have to get a phonebook and dial up a thousand numbers trying to break in. That was the entry point. Marylou:          Or for you, knocking on doors. Jorge:               Exactly, we’re knocking on doors. The context behind the question she is asking me was what’s social selling thing and all that. What’s the future? I get the whole trend and marketing jargon and stuff like that. But in social selling, of course I’m going to do that. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to build my brand and allow people to understand who I am so I can, if I’m selling something, sell them something, right? Assuming there’s value and I’m doing it ethically, obviously. I think that’s what I mean fundamental truth. When the fundamental truth is again, I’m trying to get in contact with you, how I do that, how that happens, what channel I use, those are the things I think that vary. Sales, what I was saying earlier, sales for me I feel like it’s easy. It’s always been easy. It’s all about how much effort can I put forth. How much can I keep my attitude in check? How can I not get negative when the no’s are coming, I can’t get through, and all that sort of stuff, discipline and stuff. Assuming those variables are I’m fine with, I think it’s pretty easy. It’s always been easy. I think the thing that I’ve really been thinking about now is mindfulness and leadership and what leadership really is. I thought I was a leader at some point. For such a long time, I’m like yeah, I’m a leader, I can lead and build businesses and run groups and these sorts of things. I realized maybe my intention was there but like real true leadership is not even about you, it’s about others. It’s about inspiring others, making them better. Once you’re a leader, again, it’s not about you. That’s kind of a good interesting thought. So if it’s not about you, it’s about your team, motivating, inspiring, and growing, and making them better. How do you now do that at a high level and deal with you own shenanigans in your own head, your own ego, in your own insecurities, your own, all that sort of stuff. How do you keep calm when the stuff hit the fan? Those are things that I think a lot about now. How do you become a fantastic leader? That’s what’s hard right now. I don’t know that I’ll ever master that, I think that’s an ever evolving sort of mindset and skill set and experience. That’s one of the things that I’m super focused on now. How do you build influence? Do it in an appropriate way because the other things is I think with leadership comes tremendous responsibility. That’s not always easy, right? Marylou:          Yeah. Jorge:               I think leadership is also, there’s opportunities to lead by example. There’s opportunities to be an influencer for good. That’s my personal sort of opinion and decision is that I want to be a leader that doesn’t use intimidation and all these other silly tactics. I think if you look at leadership at its core, yeah sure. There were plenty of leaders out there and today that use these other negative tactics to lead and influence and get things done. I think that’s it, get things done. But for me, it’s beyond just getting things done. It’s getting things done in the right way, getting things done that makes me happy about how I’m living my life. I think that if you’re a true leader, then whatever it is that you’re leading, you got to be passionate about, you got to be hopefully be all in. When you put everything into something, you put your heart and soul into something, good things happen. If you’re leading that group of individuals, gosh, again you just have a very important responsibility to do the right thing and lead by example. That is not easy, right? Marylou:          No, no, no, no. Getting back to Detroit connection, you think this idea, this notion of enriching other’s lives under a leadership umbrella is what got Brad excited? What was the one thing you think that got him to say, “Oh my gosh, we should open up a branch in Detroit now.” Jorge:               Yeah. I don’t know if he had too many drinks. I don’t know necessarily, I’m actually looking something up because I wanted to read you a couple of quotes. I think that with Brad, he was a fan of videos. I put out tons of videos over the years,  content, and stuff. Since he was at a startup in sales, I think he was an audience consumer of the content and stuff. He appreciated it. He was a fan of the stuff that we were doing. I think that he was inspired by it and wanted to try to bring that or get involved. I think if I’m remembering the conversation accurately, he wanted to get involved within some capacity. Immediately, I said after he said some very kind things, okay well, your community needs you. Imagine if you’re able to help your community a little bit and stimulate some economic growth there. Just embed some seeds in two people’s’ minds. That ends up building a business that’s meaningful to that economy. At the same time, I think it’s totally fair to say he wants to build his brand too within the tech startup community. As long as you’re doing the right things, you’re impacting people’s lives in positive ways, that’s perfectly fine. My agenda’s very clear too. I want to build my personal brand, I think that’s fine. Kinen. Do you know Kinen? He wrote this book, he talks about doing business, how do you do business, how do you become successful these days. Building a digital presence and building a brand is super powerful. In terms of Brad, I think that’s what he was, what his intention is. We’re doing our first event in Detroit. I unfortunately can’t go out there cause I have no time to breathe but that’s why we’re chatting. Marylou:          Really? Jorge:               We’re doing our event, our first event in April next month. Super exciting, with Level Eleven and Detroit Venture partners. It’s at some really fantastic venue there. I think that’s what it was. He was trying to help his community, build his personal brand, and just do something that can also be a creative outlet for him that doesn’t have to be tied to any revenue goal or something. Marylou:          Or any outcome, yeah. Jorge:               Or any outcome, yeah. Exactly. It’s just fun. The analogy that I like to use is I’m an artist. I painted that back there. I don’t know what it is. I play guitar and I love creative stuff. The analogy is during the day. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, depending on my mood and my mindset. I might say working, for someone else it’s ban but I’m blessed right now that I’m in a good situation. You could almost think about playing guitar, painting. During the daytime, you’re getting a paycheck from someone else to paint and play guitar. You’re receiving feedback around how they want that painting to look or how that song should be, the words to the song. That’s fine. You can make money, gotta pay your bills, etc. At some point, you’re an artist. You want to paint your own picture, you want to sing your own song. For me. there needs to be that outlet where I can come home and sing my own song, and play my own guitar, and paint my own picture. For me, that’s the core, that was how Soto Ventures started. That I think is what I loved about entrepreneurship in general, is that kind of being able to apply that concept. Marylou:          Yeah, that’s great. I can totally relate to that. I’ve been a solo entrepreneur since 1985 before it was fashionable. I was in sales so I could afford to do that. But I’m with you 100% on the creative outlet. I’m an engineer, I’m a software engineer. What I do with my spare fun time is I still create code, I still write code. To me, that’s my creative outlet. I love it. But because I’ve been in sales and marketing for so long now, the expectation is I continue along that path. But if there’s an opportunity to pick up a programming job here or there, I will definitely do that. Jorge:               I won’t argue that that probably makes you super, super thoughtful around sales and marketing too because of the way you might approach the problems in sales and marketing has a very thinking as an engineer which I totally appreciate. Marylou:          Well, that process. Anything process oriented. That’s why the way I teach even clients, that’s the reason why I have a new book coming out. I’ve put it into a process that’s easy to follow, that’s step by step, that they don’t have to freak out or worry about. Okay, what are you to think about? It’s all laid out. Like you said, the channels change, some of the methodologies change, some of the way we approach people changes but the underlying foundational framework is there for them to follow. Jorge:               Can we talk about the book for a second or is it too early? Marylou:          Yeah, we can talk about it. Jorge:               Just talk about the book. I want to hear about it. Marylou:          It’s funny how it all started. I was working with a client in New York. I did a two day immersion class for them. I walked them through the normal, I have a table of elements, it’s 28 steps now. It evolved from Predictable Revenue which I think was five. Jorge:               Kudos, by the way. Marylou:          Thank you. Jorge:               You like basically changed the world. Marylou:          Oh Aaron is just, yeah he’s great. Jorge:               Shout out to Aaron Ross. Marylou:          Shout out to Aaron. And your 12 children. Jorge:               I know. I literally love that guy. Marylou:          I know, he’s just great. We kind of moved on from there because people were getting stuck in certain areas of the pipeline. I saw that as I started working with accounts. I decided, I’m going to create an extension of Predictable Revenue and really look at the conversational elements, kind of bolt on my process knowledge. Then, I was teaching this class and I finished, it was a two day. Finished it and the Executive VP of Sales and Marketing came up to me after and he said, “I have never been taught the way you just taught us. You need to put this in a book.” I was like, “I don’t know.” He says I’ll tell you what, “I’ll write the book for you.” Turns out he’s an author that has done ten books already on various topics. What we did is we got together over the summer. I outlined everything that I wanted to talk about. He recorded me for two hours every week for I think eight or nine weeks. We took those notes and put it into the new book. It’s all about that little slice of the pipeline that cold working and qualified in nurture is still where I focus my efforts. It really gives them a good blueprint of how to go about it. We actually include emails in there cause email’s just always a big kind of like, “Why can’t we see the emails for Predictable Revenue?” I just threw them in there to the book that we’re launching in August. It’s been fun. It’s great getting feedback. That book is written by my clients. They’re the ones who helped extend where we were with Predictable Revenue in 2011 to where we are now. Whatever you see in those pages is the work that we did together since 2011. Jorge:               That’s awesome. Marylou:          Yeah. Jorge:               When is it? Marylou:          August. I know it’s a long time away. It’s getting published by a publisher, so it’s kind of out of my hand as to when things get released. Jorge:               Yeah. Marylou:          Now what we’re doing is looking for opportunities for people to review the book and give me the brutally honest feedback. What’s boring, what I don’t understand. Also give me some idea of the bonuses that they would like to see as part of the launch of the book. Part of this is to reach out to people who I know, love and respect and say, “Hey, tell me what would make you like just transform if you have the book, and whatever else you need in order to get going on this whole idea of qualified opportunities in the pipeline?” Jorge:               Awesome. Marylou:          Yeah. Jorge:               I’m excited. I’d love to help out of any way possible. Marylou:          Yeah. I know, it’s really funny because I live in Des Moines, Iowa. There’s this concept called Lunch and Learn here where you walk in and you teach. It’s just been great. There’s a couple startups, not a lot here, see rapid test of pretty big start up communities. I went up there and ended my spiel, it’s been great. I don’t usually work a lot with startups but I’m gravitated towards them because of the fact that I too am them. I worked either selling, creating, or peddling disruptive products way back when. I can totally understand and relate to where they are in that life span. The work that you’re doing is just incredible leadership, much needed for sure. Jorge:               I’m excited about your book. I forgot a lot the first time we met. I remember meeting you in Seattle. We’re doing that event with the Outreach.io folks that we worked. I remember having such a pleasant conversation with you there. Marylou:          Yeah. I remember your talk was about the phone. I immediately connected with you because one of the things that I recognize with the younger crowd is that we tend to want to rely on email a lot. Having that conversation as you mentioned in the early part of this broadcast, the conversation on the phone, or just one on one with your person whoever that is, is so important. It’s still all about relationships. I’m not saying you can’t have a relationship with email but getting on the phone with that person and really hearing the tonality of their voice and listening to the stress if they’re in a situation where they’re under stuff to do. You can’t get that in an email. Jorge:               Yeah. Marylou:          I loved your talk about the cold scripting. You don’t have to re-permit but you practice it. I thought that was the greatest thing ever. Jorge:               Thank you, I appreciate it. In terms of phones, I always thought about the phone is the most direct, well not the most direct but we know what we’re looking at email versus phone. Email for me is just a method of getting contact with you assuming that that’s the only way I can do it, to get you on the phone, to hop on the phone, to be able to, as you mentioned here the human behind the email. It drives me a bit nuts whenever I see folks who are just only on email and they’re trying to sell on email. Unless it’s some sort of low price point transactional thing where you’re selling 200 of those things a day or something like that, you got to hop on the phone and connect with the human and have that conversation and really be able to walk them through what’s going on. Obviously, it’s tough. People are rude because it’s not personal but they’re getting those kind of calls, or they don’t know how to actually have that conversation or receive that call. There’s a variety of things. As I was mentioning earlier, the mindfulness and discipline of detaching yourself from how that call might go, negative or positive and just doing your job and following the process, following those steps in the conversation. That’s what’s important, right? But it is hard, right? It is much easier just send an email and get a, “Hey, don’t email me back or unsubscribe,” or all the other responses that you get. That’s much easier to just and someone saying, “Hey buddy, stop calling me. This is my cellphone. Hit the road.” Marylou:          Great. Jorge:               That’s much harder, right? Marylou:          Right, but I think your concept of I’m finding the buyer, I think there is one video you did on that topic. That just really hit home with me because you are locating the person with whom you could have an enriching conversation and to see if you’re a fit or not. Going back to Predictable Revenue at the AWAF call, Aaron and I invented that acronym in New York City. You’re really genuinely trying to find if you’re a good fit or not. That’s it. Jorge:               Yeah, right. For me, it’s so important to have that mindset. When we were doing door to door sales, I was in graduate school and I was selling, I talk about this all the time. I literally say what I just said a million times because it was such an impactful experience for me. It taught me everything that I believe that I know in sales. One of the things that my manager, who by the way I’m so excited. We’re doing a video series called Leadership by Bryan Ross. I have one video. We’re both all super busy but we’re getting these things recorded. What he used to always tell me was, “You got to get your mind right. You gotta have this story and this mission that you’re focused on everyday as you’re doing these calls.” We were doing door to door. That was the most— Marylou:          Most difficult. Jorge:               Most difficult, yeah. Because it’s so personal. Because you’re in front of the person and there’s this moment where they’re like, “Who’s the stranger in front of me and my door?” You have those instinctual defense things that you got to deal with too. Breaking through that is really interesting. I think that after knocking on thousands of doors, you start to understand there are five ways that this could turn out, there aren’t a thousand. As long as I prepare myself for each of those things, those outcomes, that’s fine. I should have that expectation that that’s how it could go. One of those could be they curse at you and say, “Hey, I’m going to call the cops, get off my doorstep.” After that’s happened to you a couple of times, that’s part of it. For me that’s ego, its thickening your skin. Those sorts of things which, if you think about, do we talk about that as leaders and managers at work? No. So many of us, we’re not even aware that that kind of stuff even exists. Our mindfulness, or self-awareness, or awareness of how we operate within that sales scenario. That’s a life thing, human thing, but we don’t talk about it. We don’t arm our people with the right information that’s going to get them through those challenging moments. Anyone can sell when it’s easy, when everyone’s saying yes. That’s why inbound, working at Google, and I love Google as a company and this and that. But there’s no way that working at Facebook, Google or one of this established businesses. I worked at Twitter for a little bit, it was a piece of cake prospecting, it was a joke. It’s like, “Hey, I’m calling you from Twitter.” “Oh, yeah.” “Can we talk now?” It’s a joke, right? That experience is quite different than you’re an early stage startup or you’re a company that’s maybe not well known which is most of the planet. You’re going to get people who are not going to want to talk to you or are not going to communicate in the nicest way all of the time. So, again, I think that the point here for me is how do we arm our people to have their mind right to be able to understand the possible outcomes and be able to have an often kind of awareness to be able to effectively deal with that throughout their day and not let it mess with the resolve, and not let it mess with their attitude. Once your attitude’s gone, you’re in trouble, right? Marylou:          Right. Jorge:               Then it’s like, oh man. Then you’re going oh my god, I hate this. Maybe I should’ve gone to law school, maybe I should’ve whatever, right. Why am I a salesperson? My dad was right. Especially as an entrepreneur, you got to deal with that forever. You’re constantly just dealing with the most negative things at times but you gotta build that result. Marylou:          Right, right. As we tie this up, what advice would you give for someone who’s listening now and thinking, “Wow. I do want to be a really good leader, I want to be able to move my charges whether they’re virtual or they’re actual employees, or 1099 contracts,” or whatever the team looks like. What advice would you give and how can people learn more about what you’re doing? Jorge:               I think the first thing, I want to read off a couple quotes here. I think it’s developing a tremendous level of self-awareness. Start to look at us as humans. How do we as humans deal with things? How do I deal with a negative thought, or a negative situation? How am I going to deal with my own ego when my rep or my employee or my partner has a bad day? Or I’m having a bad day and I need to deal with these other things, right? How do I make my people better? How do I now become selfless, because that is now what happens. If you’re in a leadership decision, wake up. It’s not about you, right? Marylou:          Right. Jorge:               Period. If you want to be an individual contributor, that’s fine. You should not be leading anyone because it’s not about you. I think it’s okay to say, “Hey look, I got an ego and I feel like I can do all these great things and I’m super strong and can do all these great whatever.” That’s okay to have that confidence and trip on your shoulder but I think you have to be able to say, “Okay well, now how do I transfer that energy to be able to make my people better?” This is what really really aggravates me when I see people in leadership or manager positions. First of all, I hate the whole manager concept but because in my opinion they don’t do it right. I hate to see those folks in there and they’re just freaking out scared not to get fired. You ever see this where you see these managers or leaders who are just freaking out because everything’s about how do they not look bad within the organization. They just completely totally forget about the fact that they have to lead some folks, and inspire some folks, and make these other folks better. It’s almost like plugging holes or following process. That’s just absolutely not the case in my opinion. It’s not the objective there. Again, how do you make your people better? How do you serve your team? How do you make them great? How do you develop leaders if you’re an STR manager? If you’re an STR manager and you’re dealing with young guys and girls. Some of them coming out of college, some of them are early in their career. How do you make them rock stars? How do you make them leaders? How do you teach them the things that maybe you’re slightly out of the scope of what their day to day is but you know it’s in their best interest because you are there, you’ve been there. Those are the things that I would encourage folks to think about. It’s not about you, it’s about others. I did this blog post at sotoventures.com. Basically, I spoke, I literally texted and sent emails about 36 of my friends, business associates and I asked them one question. Marylou I’m sorry, I should’ve pinned you on this. I ask them one question, I asked them what is leadership. The intention was for them to send back a text message length response but I pinned Mark Cuban, who’s a Dallas Maverick’s owner, he’s also one of the investors in Node. He says, “Having a vision for success that everyone takes ownership of,” which I love. My father who’s an organizational psychologist says, “Leadership requires the ability to take the initiative to get things done.” I appreciate that. Actually, Aaron Ross, our mutual friend says, “Leadership is tuning out all of the freaking noise to listen to yourself and feel out what’s most important, needs to be done, or just plain right even when others think you’re crazy. If you’re not crazy or called crazy once in awhile, you’re managing, not leading.” I love that. A couple other ones, Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group, “Leadership is when you don’t have to ask your team to get motivated because you are what motivates them.” The list goes on and on here. As you read through these things, you start to go wow. It’s not even about me. Kyle Porter at Salesloft, “Leadership is serving others through influence and love to accomplish more than they believe possible.” I like to think of that as the breaking belief barriers. The concept that I held dear to my heart. A couple other ones here, Tomasz Tunguz, he’s the venture capitalist of Redpoint. His blog is super crazy right now. It’s super popular. He says, “Great leadership begins with great compassion.” Anyways, the common theme here is it’s not about you, it’s about them, it’s about your team, about your employees, about others. Anyways, there’s a ton more there. I just noticed a typo of that’s driving me crazy. I’m the typo king, I don’t know why I can’t get over not making typos but anyways. Marylou:          That’s okay. That’s alright. Editor, get a VA that’s a great editor. Jorge:               I know. Marylou:          That’s one thing great about the book with the publisher involved. There’s a whole staff of people that edit, and make things sound better, and humanize it a little bit better because you don’t want the whole thing to sound like a big engineering book. It’s cool. Jorge:               Totally. Marylou:          How do people get a hold of you? How do people get a hold of you to help you with your Soto Ventures? Jorge:               Yeah. Email j@sotoventures.com. Twitter @sotoventures. LinkedIn, I just signed up to Snapchat and I’m trying to figure out how to use this Snapchat thing which is going to be something. These things, whether it’s Snapchat, or Periscope, or some other streaming thing that comes out. I think that media, there’s something about that. Just email me if anyone wants to get involved. We’re looking for ambassadors all over the world. We have regional Twitter handles that are compiling information about the sort of influencers in the startup community in those cities. We follow their handles and automatically post their tweets to our Soto Ventures, let’s say Austine Handle. We’re looking for folks to volunteer to be part of that community or those efforts. Marylou:          Just so you know, the crowd that I serve, if you’re working at a larger company and you’re a business developer or you’re a sales manager, it applies to you too. It’s not just a startup company venture. It’s for anyone who is in an organization where there is a team aspect and you’re responsible for livelihood, the enrichment, the transformation of your team. Jorge, that you so much for your time. It’s been great catching up. Jorge:               Absolutely. Marylou:          Keep me posted of what’s going on. We’re very anxious to hear how things went. If this crowd can help in any way, we will certainly do that. Jorge:               Thank you so much. I’d love to take a look at the book when it’s available and spread the love. Marylou:          Okay, great. Thank you so much. You can critique it, a really honest critique is where I’m at right now. I’m looking for those wonderful people. Aaron actually did the forward of the book. He’s already looked at it and given it the Aaron stamp of approval. Jorge:               Nice. Marylou:          Thanks again. Jorge:               Thank you. Have a great day. Marylou:          You too. Bye. Jorge:               Bye.