Marylou:    Kevin knows what it takes to build a tech sales team. As Manager of Sales and Operations at Digital Ocean, he was charged with building the company’s first ever team of outreach sales reps. His insights on building a team are beneficial for anyone either tech startup or an established small business alike. You can find him on LinkedIn where he’s built quite the following with his unique and telling pulse blog posts.    In this podcast, Kevin reveals insights on building a strong sales team, tips to find and keep ideal customers, and utilizing social selling in the tech world. Essentially what’s happening is I’ve known Mark and Manny. I don’t even know how we connected. I think they reached out to me a while ago but the success of Predictable Revenue, everybody was sort of wow, this is a really cool channel, I think it would work for our company. They started implementing or assembling it together to get a little bit of success and then things sort of fall apart. It’s the fault of the book because the book made it seem as though it’s a magic pill that you could take and then all of a sudden you start getting all these great referrals. They reached out to me and we started talking and I started mentoring them. It was very clear that the book was great for its time but it’s severely outdated. Also, when you got further into the pipeline, you started going to the working status and then maybe towards qualification or the are we a fit sequence. You really needed to rely on selling skills or at least a good understanding of where your position in the marketplace, why you matter, why people should change, why you, why now. We started working together and then I realized I need to write a new book because it was a disservice to all of my clients who were trying to use Predictable Revenue as a bible. They called it that which is kind of scary. To use that book in order to be able to create an outreach channel and an outbound prospecting system that they could scale or that was consistent and predictable. Fast forward, wrote another book. I’m blessed because it was picked up by McGraw Hill. Now, they’re gonna launch it in August and I thought, “Let’s start talking to our people.” People who’ve been embracing this, trying to get to work, making it better.  I wanted to hear everybody’s story so I started doing that then I realized, we should probably put a podcast together so that’s where we’re at right now. I’m interviewing people who have embraced the idea, the concept, the framework, the process, whatever it is. Listening to them on how they’ve adapted it to make it better or what pieces of it they thought were just brilliant, what pieces of it do they struggle through, how they overcome those struggles. I started interviewing people, and I interviewed Mark, and he’d recommended that I speak with you. Kevin:    Wow. That’s awesome. I’m really very honored that Mark would think of me and I’m honored to be speaking here with you here as well. Marylou:    Oh, good. Kevin:    What’s the name of the book that you launched on Amazon? Marylou:    It’s on Amazon, it’s called Predictable Prospecting. It’s not a stretch from Predictable Revenue. It was picked up by McGraw Hill. I think that’s kind of like, oh my gosh. It’s now a publisher that actually put money into it because they believed that this was still a missing hole for a lot of businesses. We try to cram it full as much as possible but can’t really do justice with the written word. I thought let’s take that book and then let’s build an ecosystem around it of people who have either done it, of people who are still working through it, of people who started with Predictable Revenue and thought there’s got to be more to this and actually created the more to it part so that we can share our stories together and embrace what’s working and what’s not, why it worked, why it didn’t. For me, Predictable Prospecting really talks about embracing the content pieces that were missing or absent in Predictable Revenue and actually taking a piece of content that we may use for inbound, turning it sideways, and then saying, “Okay, where is my buyer in his thought process?” I looked back and studied for years the greats of direct response. Eugene Schwartz, I read all of his level of awareness stuff. Drayton Bird, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, all these people who are able to get people to buy product and services and having a cold conversation to do so. I took those concepts and I brought them into the fold of Predictable Revenues’ framework and it ended up morphing into this 28 step assemble, activate and optimize framework that is Predictable Prospecting. Kevin:    Wow, I love it. I’m definitely going to preorder it right now. I have my one click purchase on with Amazon and I kind of have like what they call this happy finger or trigger finger. Just been buying a ton of books. I think being a part of the reason why Mark might have pointed you in my direction is I try to be very proactive in my learning and I think there’s so much content and knowledge out there that one thing you can do as young selves leaders is be proactive about absorbing all the knowledge from all of the sales leaders out there who have that track record of success. They’re sharing their stories whether it’s online through a blog or through a book. This is the one thing that I kinda knew going into reading Predictable Revenue is that it’s not gonna be a one size shoe fits all especially when everyone is trying to use that same sales played book all the way to the extent where they’re calling it a Bible. That it might be outplayed but I think that there’s definitely little nuggets out there and you have to absorb all the knowledge you can and then look at your sales process, your market that you’re going after and your ideal customer profile. Molding all the best pieces of everything into what’s going to work for you, that’s how you become more successful rather than just copying something from somebody and applying it exactly. Not all markets are the same and not all businesses are the same. You gotta have to sell and adapt to the buyer that presents itself to you, not someone else. Marylou:    Right. Tell me, what is the type of business that you’re in right now? What do you guys do? Kevin:     This is a very, very interesting story, cause I think that not a lot of people in SAAS are very familiar with DigitalOcean. I think we actually just made a recent name for ourselves in the SAAS base because we sponsored Saastr which you probably or might have been at, which is one of the biggest sales conf in San Francisco that’s hosted by Jason McCann and Max with Sales Hacker. We sponsored that event. We’ve been picking up a lot of traction because we’ve built a very, very successful business that’s now going up against Amazon web services. You can technically still consider some storages because we’ve only been around for less that or around four years. Marylou:    Okay. Kevin:    We built a very, very successful business off of selling or simplifying the cloud infrastructures experience for developers. When you take a look at Amazon web services, they offer everything and anything that you could imagine about infrastructure. What we wanted to do was simplify that and just take us to what they’re offering and patch it up for the developer markets in a way they can deploy their own server web application in less than a minute. Marylou:    Wow. Kevin:    We’re not necessarily in the service base. If you take a look at the three tiers, you have software as a service, you have platform as a service, and then you have infrastructure as a service where it’s like the bare bones virtual machine. Every SAAS application is hosted on something whether it’s DigitalOcean or Amazon Web Services. We’re selling it to developers and the developers build the applications and then we sell it to the consumer market. It’s been really, really interesting because DigitalOcean has become that unicorn essentially and has had no sales. Everything has been organic sign up and solely just on product execution that has really projected our growth from zero to the unicorn status that we are today. There’s not a lot of companies like that in the market. The one that I can really think top of my list that’s still doing it that way is Wack. They’ve built a very successful business not focused on sales whatsoever, it’s really just organic signup and then kind of up selling from there I believe. The interesting part is you can think of decision very like B to C and now we’re transitioning, B to C because we have over six hundred thousand customers. A lot of that is the developer market or the individual developers but we have definitely tons of customers and teams of developers that are now migrating from Amazon Web Services over to Digital Ocean from companies like ZenDesk, Docker. It’s just crazy because they’re starting to see that DigitalOcean is just as viable a solution as Amazon Web Services and we’ve really been only around for a short amount of years. When most people who are in a work decision think that there’s just really AWS or Microsoft or Google. When I heard about the opportunity, it’s actually pretty crazy because I actually work with my brother, he’s the one who told me to leave Greenhouse which is the company I was at and I absolutely loved working at Greenhouse. They’re the leading tracking system in the space right now that’s taking on some of the legacy players like Oracle. Marylou:    Right. Kevin:    Some other notable ones might be like Smart Recruiter or Lever. They’re working with just really, really big companies and they’re growing really fast. It’s tough for me to leave but when I heard about Digital Ocean, where they came with no sales team, I knew that it was an opportunity that I cannot turn down. To be the first sales person joining that and build that team from scratch was something that I’ve been wanting to do my entire life. I wanted to pursue that opportunity. That’s what brought me here today Marylou:    That’s great. You step in the door and you look around, what’s your next step? What did you do first to try to figure out the ideal team that you put together, that you eventually put together. What was step one? Kevin:    Step one was definitely thinking about or learning about the product. I left Greenhouse just around early December before this past winter. I was supposed to start DigitalOcean on January 4th but literally, that entire two weeks, I already had homework assignments technically so my brother had assigned me some stuff to do. There’s definitely no Christmas break for me. It was dive right in and make sure that my first day with DigitalOcean did not seem like my first day at all. I spent the first two weeks just studying the product day and night, making sure that I could come in on day one and not feel flushed. I wanted to make sure that I knew the product really well especially because I didn’t have that advantage of moving from one SAAS company to another. Marylou:    Yeah. Kevin:    I definitely got to give the executive team props for bringing me on because it’s tough. It’s hard to find someone in the infrastructure background because it’s not as easy as like picking a SAAS sales leaders because there’s not that many players in the infrastructure’s place. They kind of brought me on with my background in SAAS and I do have that track record there. Before I used to say that, that’s gonna easily translate into infrastructure service because it just doesn’t. That was my first thing,  I wanted to make sure I understood the product because by understanding the product and the market you’re in, by understanding the ideal customer profile, understanding the customer base, you can start to figure out who that ICP is and by that, ideal customer profile, I’m referring to ideal candidate profile. You want to make sure the people you bring on, they’re going to be people that can sell into the developer market. I knew that I had a decent sized network because I also run a meetup for Sales Hacker in New York where we have over a hundred attendees and I’ve seen most SAAS sales reps are very well rated. They probably attend, you’re not gonna want to hire six of the same types of people that do really well in SAAS sales and just bring them over into an environment like DigitalOcean. I spent a lot of time researching, building a really big candidate pipeline. I probably interviewed over 300 people and this is me actually looking at the Greenhouse reporting. We use Greenhouse. I interviewed over three hundred people to get to the first six. I’ve been here for almost three months. I would spend I spent my good first month and a half, 90% of time probably sourcing and interviewing. They originally wanted me to have six people by February 1 which I’m sure you’ve had a ton of experience probably hiring by now. It’s pretty impossible hiring six people on one month that you obviously want them to be the perfect fit, right? Marylou:    Right. Kevin:    You might hire six people but you can easily turn and burn them because they’re going to figure out that these weren’t the right candidates. I’m very, very confident in the team that I built, I hired a lot of account executive that they were the number one AE on their team. One rep that we have here is the fourth best rep in the company and they had a hundred plus sales reps. Another person we have was a team lead, SPR that was about to get promoted to manager but left that company to come to DigitalOcean because everyone we hire is a very, very rigorous process and they believe in a mission of at least the same reason why I came to DigitalOcean. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the title, it’s strictly on opportunity. If what we do here becomes very successful, then this first six is going to be the reason or the future of sales of DigitalOcean. The company will remember the first six people that left what they were doing to come on. A lot of people could say is it is a little bit of a risky venture but to build up a sales team for company that has had no sales is definitely not easy by any means. Marylou:     I can imagine, where do you begin? If you look at your customer base, I just was having this conversation with one of my colleagues, do you want to look at your customer base as the foundation for the future or is your customer base exactly opposite of where you want to go. The case study for Sales Force was all about the fact that they wanted to get into the enterprise market. Their client base was more wanted to licensed type of client but they wanted to grow into the other market. How do you juggle that? Have you thought about, what is your plan as you think through now you have these great sales people. What do you have in mind in terms of the ideal customer going forward? Kevin:    Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one of the things that I want to touch upon before we dig deep. I read this really great article from First Round Capital that really resonated with me and it’s something that I hold true to this day. They say that I believe I might have a background but I’m almost positive that they say hiring the builder versus hiring the architect. When I first came in in this kind of road, I really just interviewed with the executive team. One of the questions is what is it about you that essentially makes you have a competitive advantage of people who have more experience than you? Someone that has the experience in infrastructure. I think that, the advantage that I have is I’m always trying to build, I’m very process oriented. I want to build a predictable and scalable process, very similar to the title of Predictable Prospect and Predictable Revenue. That kind of resonated with me because in the article or the blog shared by Elizabeth, you can hire a builder who can go in there and they can get the first couple sales. They’re great as a contributor, they might have moved up to a manager, but they’re not good at setting up a sale for the future. What I told them was that where DigitalOcean is today. You can hire someone who can make that sale with the product that you guys have and all that, sure they might have infrastructure background. They’ll have that have advantage over me. But, what they’re not going to do and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to build a team very quickly and you’re trying to set up a process and set yourself up for the sale that’s going to come six months and twelve months down the line. What a lot of companies have done in the past is they try and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow very quickly and just hire that person that they think is perfect on paper right there, twenty years experience that came from that top company, a brand name company that everybody knows. They start to realize that they built it so fast that they didn’t really architect the sales process correctly and they didn’t set themselves up for success six months down the line, twelve months down the line. They were able to crush in the first five months but everything broke after that six month mark. That’s kind of the way I like to look at things. The reason why I want to talk about that first is when you look at DigitalOcean, where we are today, is that most of our customer base is, sure they’re spending $5 here and there which is why we have over $600 customers and we’re signing up over thousand customers each day. But you want to make sure that you’re building on a sales process that can help evolve that and turning those into some much larger customers. A good side of our customer base is actually we have customers that will pay us over six figures a month in infrastructure cost. Those are million dollars deals each year. The question that I’m kind of Facebook today, and my team’s space, how do we find more of those customers and get them to sign up with DigitalOcean and not go with something like Amazon Web Services. The upside is that the total address market is really wide open for DigitalOcean. We have all the brand recognition that we need. One of the interesting things and why we become so successful is we have a community team here that does a really great job of helping brand DigitalOcean. One of our core values, it sounds cheesy but it’s really true, is love. We’ve been able to build a huge customer base by really just caring about the developers that sign up. Our customers’ success team have less than 1% chance. When you’re looking at 600,000 plus customers, that’s very, very little people spinning down service on DigitalOcean. On top of that, we have a tutorials and community website where we get over six million hits a month. That’s a tutorials website on how to do anything technical, any type of application on not just DigitalOcean’s infrastructure but also Amazon, Microsoft or Google or any other vendors out there. We really just want to be a resource and the go to hub where the other technical question. It’s essentially like kind of the Yahoo! Answers for technical developers to come find a legitimate tutorial on step by step instructions on how to do something. Marylou:    I love that. Kevin:    It’s pretty awesome, right? Marylou:    Yeah. Kevin:    It’s actually when going back to the question of what did you first do when first got there. I was able to teach myself the product by going through our tutorials website. There wasn’t a sales playbook. It wasn’t watching this play book or the stack or this demo because when you’re selling infrastructure, you don’t have a deck or some sort of a user interface. Yes, we have a control panel but it’s not like a SAAS Application where it’s very robust and you can navigate yourself through the product and teach yourself that infrastructure is very, very complex. You have all these different types of applications, web applications that architect their infrastructure in many, many different ways. Our tutorials website does a phenomenal job of teaching even non-technical people how to understand it at the highest level. It’s really awesome. Marylou:    That sounds great. I think having that open forum for people establishes more of your credibility, establishes your thought leadership, so that people feel comfortable and trust that if they join your company that they’re going to be in great hands. Kevin:    Yup, absolutely. Going back to your question about what do we do to reach out to those customers. We do lots of different types. Whether it’s phone, email, social selling on Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever the case might be. The responses back have been phenomenal. The upside to joining DigitalOcean right now is that the light at the end of tunnel it’s kind of the same when you join a [00:23:23] sales person, right? It’s going to pay out dividend that you’re making and it’s obviously really risky. The growth that you’ll get because the FedEx is higher when the sales is now hundred. It is second to not going to be amazing, you won’t really get that opportunity elsewhere. The branding that we have when we are reaching out to these prospective customers is really, really amazing. Most of them are saying, “Hey, I really love DigitalOcean. Have you reached out to me three months ago, I definitely would have went with you guys. I didn’t even know that you guys were for production use. I thought you guys were more staging or testing environment.” The way the market’s been reacting to us when we’ve been reaching out to them has been really, really positive. We set up tons of meaning close it and selling up tons of deals that are going to close. How’s it really been like, “Oh, I’m not interested at all,” but it’s more been like, “I love what you guys are doing, I’ve actually used your tutorials to set up infrastructure on Amazon or Google. I didn’t even know that we could use you guys.” It’s really about prodding and knocking on the door and saying, “Hey, DigitalOcean is in fact ready for production use case, we’re not just built for developers, we’re actually built for larger teams of developers. That’s what we’re doing today. Marylou:    Right. What’s nice about the outreach channel is those awareness campaigns to show or gain understanding of where people are in their level of awareness is what Predictable Prospecting is all about. It’s really taking the content you have, taking the messaging you have and creating the actual touches so that you’re spanning across the different levels of awareness. One of the things we talk about in the book is there are multiple levels of awareness that you’ve really got to organize your content around so that you can bread crumb people and gently pull them through to the point where they want to have a conversation with you. I think that’s one of the biggest differences now that we can leverage a lot of the great content that was built for inbound knowing that inbound is really only addressing two levels of a five level awareness, latter. They generally, working with people who are interested because you have now taking the action as an inbound person to fill out a form, to engage with the website, to download a white paper. There is some level of interest, there is some level of excitement around it. But for outreach, we have three more levels that we have to write for and deal with. Like you said before, people weren’t aware that you did X. The content with process allows you to touch these people in a way that’s authentic, that’s respectable, and resonates with them at the level that they’re at.  And then you can track where they are so that you know when the optimal time is to place that phone call or to nudge as you said, to get the point where, “Hey this is something that you want to look at,” and they will actually be ready to do that. Kevin:    Absolutely. I think what you’re talking about is a little bit with just what account based selling is about. I know it’s a super hot topic but it’s just kind of selling smart. It’s looking at an account from a holistic perspective, taking all those different five pieces that you’re talking about and putting them together so that way you’re reaching out at the right time and really just trying to make things less, less cold, which is really the right way to do things. Marylou:    Exactly. We take it even the account based selling, the word account is account. But what we say is, I know it sounds like your culture is that we take it to the people within the account. Not everybody is going to be in the same level of awareness from a personal point of view either, the buyers. Now, granted if you have one or two buyers that you know you’re going to always have entering at certain points in the pipeline, then you want to make sure that your content is written for that person at that point in the pipeline for entry. We really look holistically at the people. Who am I sitting across a table from? When do I first meet them in the sales cycle? Is it early on? Is it mid? Is it late? Where is it? How can I warm up that chill, meaning that they don’t know about me or know how great things can be if they were as if a client of mine. Where are those points in the pipeline that I can insert content and leverage technology so that it drips to them in a way that’s meaningful? That’s what we have now which is just phenomenal but you have to sort of like you said, you have to have that process, not mindset, of mapping out. It almost looks like a transit map, like the Gartner Transit Map. It’s like where do these people enter? At what level of awareness are they at? What relevant content should we squirrel feed them and bread crumb them so that we move them along to the point where they’re sort of, “Oh, wait a minute, I need to talk to somebody now. I want to raise my hand and talk to someone.” That’s the beauty of outreach. That’s what we love about this particular channel is that A, we’re controlling who it is that we want to talk to which is what you said on account based selling. We’re also controlling the conversation of where we’re going to be talking to them and at what level we’re going to be talk to them Kevin:    I 100% agree. I think that one topic that kind of is very similar to what you’re discussing right now is sales and marketing alignment. With us over at DigitalOcean, we kind of even go one step beyond that, sales and marketing success alignment making sure that the entire buyer process has been moved along to the journey, that were hitting them at all the touchpoints, make sure that we’re extracting the most value out of them as possible. What I mean by that is you always want to get a holistic look into what’s going on in the account. The account use worth a million dollars and there’s things that you don’t see, you might not get all million dollars, that’s just something that we find unacceptable over here. One of the first things that I did when I got here is I met with the Director of Marketing and also the manager of customer success. We’ve very, very closely to get insights into each account. If you have five potential decision makers because it’s a much larger organization, we know which one of those decision makers have ever spun out what we call a drop foot which is a virtual machine at DigitalOcean. We know who’s interacted with marketing material, we know who to add retarget because they’ve never interacted with anything, we know who to reach out to because they’re interacting with some report material. It’s a very, very strategic outreach process. The only way to do that is really by getting yourself involved in account based selling process but also making sure that it’s not very one sided. You want to make sure that you’re online on all departments that are involved with this customer or this prospect before they become a customer. That’s always going to include sales marketing. More often than not, we’re seeing clues to customer’s success. That customer, they’re going to renew at some point, they might add up more licenses. In our situation, they’re going to be scaling their infrastructure. You want to make sure that there’s alignment across the board and that you’re getting visibility into that. Marylou:    Not only that. When you have customers on boarded, you’re learning how they describe why they chose you, why they went now. Those language snippets, those long term key words, whatever it is. That, when collected in a database, can be directly transportable to the top of pipeline conversations. I think that that’s an area that I’m sure that you guys since you’re focused on the account itself and you’re doing process based work will take that language and essentially recreate, modify, iterate the content at the top of the pipeline so that you’re reducing the lag of getting people to raise the hand. Kevin:     Beautiful point. I was just trying to not give away all of our secrets. Perhaps that’s definitely something that’s really important and we strive to do here as well. Marylou:    Yeah, that’s great. Tell us what’s in store for the next six months? How do we follow you to see what’s going on and where you’ve grown from here to there? Kevin:    You can follow me in a few different ways or follow DigitalOcean. We have a huge following on Twitter but I think if you are trying to get more following the sales process and see how it’s evolved is I’m trying to do a lot more blocking and talking about the team, where it was when I joined on day one, where we’re at on month six and where we’re going to be at on month twelve. I also run a Sales Hacker meetup in New York where we talk about a lot of this stuff. I’m available on Twitter. I’m also very, very active on LinkedIn. If anyone has a question, you can always shoot me a mail and I’m happy to give you more insight into what’s going on over here. Marylou:    Okay, perfect. Kevin:    We can always schedule a follow up call as well. Marylou:    A lot of what I’d like to do since the book is coming out in August and there’s a conference coming up in June I think in New York for Sales Hacker, right? Kevin:    Oh! That’s actually, I totally forgot to mention that, but yes, there is a Sales Hacker, Max will kill me if he found out that I forgot to mention that. But yeah, there’s an amazing sales conference, Sales Machine. We’ve partnered up with Sales Force. Lots and lots of good speakers going to be on there including guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, we also have all the traditional SAAS people going to be like John Barrows, Joe Conrad, and couple of other people on there so you definitely want to make it out there. I’m not entirely sure if we’re sponsoring the event but if we do, then you’ll definitely be able to get some updates on us there Marylou:    Perfect, so that’s coming up in June 2016, why don’t you give us your Twitter handle so that we have it? Kevin:    Yeah definitely. My Twitter handle is @kvn_chiu. Marylou:    Okay, very good. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you sharing an exciting journey to walk in the door and start from scratch. I love that. Kevin:    Definitely. I really appreciate your time and having me on. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed this.

Marylou:     Okay everyone, today we have a very special guest on the show. Jennifer, you go by Jen or Jennifer?Jennifer:      Jen. Marylou:     Jen Havice is the author of the brand new book that is coming out or is out already I think, right? Jennifer:      You know what, it’s going to be coming out middle of next month. Marylou:     So March 2016. If you’re listening to this podcast later in the season, it’s out. Jennifer:      Yes. Marylou:     Go get it. The book is called Finding the Right Message: How to Turn Voice of Customer Research into Irresistible Website Copy. I met Jen through a mastermind group where I went to specifically to learn how to write better emails. In our world, we’re really focused on trying to get the conversation started either via email or voicemails or even scripts that we actually use when we’re having conversations with people we don’t know at the top of the pipeline. When I heard about what Jen was doing with her research and her book, I thought she would be a perfect guest on the show today because it’s all about the voice of the customer. As you know for us, we’re trying to figure out how to start conversation. In order to do that, we have to say something that’s relevant to our audience, that resonates with them, that they’re shaking their head on the other side of the phone and saying, “Wow, this person really understands me.” I’d like Jen to talk about what was the reason for her writing this book in the first place and then take us through the steps so that we understand what we need to do as business developers in order to be able to create messaging whether it’s our website, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s an email, whether it’s conversation, but that we create the right type of conversation at the right time with the right prospect. So Jenn, tell us about the book. Jennifer:      Great, I had decided to put this together because I just continually get questions from people asking to all wonderful to have all these ideas on how to write better copy but how do I figure out what I actually need to write and like you said how to start those conversations with people and get them nodding their head so that they’re agreeing with pretty much everything you’re saying. What you really need to do is it does all go back to the research and asking questions, interviewing your customers and your prospects, doing things like sending surveys by email and on your website doing things like pop up surveys, just one question exit intense surveys, things like that. Beyond that, just doing some good old fashioned sleuthing online, looking at some competitor research, what your competitors are doing, seeing what their customers and prospects are saying and talking about when it comes to them. Places like review sites, Yelp, Amazon, all those types of things. Just being able to get a clearer picture of what your target audience is saying, thinking about what’s keeping them up at night, what they’re most interested and care about so that you can start to pull some of those ideas and those messages from them and start to use it to put your copy together. Marylou:     One of the things that immediately comes to mind is we have a tendency in sales to hit the ground running. We get a list or we have some accounts that are in our database that may have had some communication at some point in life. We pull them together, we do a little bit of research inside of the CRM, the actual customer relationship management system, and we look to see what kind of conversations they had. Sometimes there may be that they were interested in a certain product. We immediately start dialing the phone and contacting people and just talking about product. With your research, we’re not really looking for product information, are we? Jennifer:      No. That’s one of the things that so many businesses trip upon. Sort of thinking, “I need to start talking about what I’m doing. What our accomplishments are, what the new product is, all these new features, the bells and whistles, things like that.” When in reality, what you need to be addressing is how your product or your solution is going to be fixing that core problem for your prospect or your customers. Really understanding what those triggers are and the things that are motivating those people to actually come to you is one of the most critical parts of the whole process because if your solution, your product doesn’t solve a problem, then it’s useless. Obviously if you’re in business and you’re doing well, it definitely is solving a problem. But immediately when you’re starting to talk to someone or you’re addressing them on your site and your emails, you need to make it clear to that person or those people that you really understand their core pain, why they’re coming to you and also how you can fix it for them. Marylou:     Right. I can share an immediate example of that with the audience and that I received a call from one of my clients the other day asking me, “Marylou, did you tell this company to write to me about our content problem?” And I said, “No, why do you say that?” He said, “Because the line part of the email addressed what we were just talking about in our prior meeting about how we didn’t have control of our content, that we didn’t have content mapped, we didn’t have enough assets to be able to share our communications with our potential audience.” Because it resonated so much with him, he thought I had referred this vendor to him. Jennifer:      Wow. Marylou:     That’s an example of a vendor who didn’t come right in with the product but he came in with the pain. Jennifer:      Exactly. Marylou:     That’s what your book is going to teach us how to do. Is how to collect that data and where to look for that data no matter for a B to B company or B to C company, large, small, it doesn’t matter. We all have to go through this process. Is that correct? Jennifer:      Definitely. A lot of the examples I used in the book are centered around smaller businesses. Part of my aim in doing that, thinking back over it is to really make it tangible for people. Thinking about what are those core types of pains that all of us have around just basic products and services. It gets more difficult from times to think about how you’re going to talk about big enterprise solutions. You go about it the same way. I find sometimes when I’m talking about this with people that to make some of the examples or illustrations really more personal. It really hits home for people and they understand so that then when you do give them an example of a test done like a split test or an AB test done for a big enterprise solution on a site. You’re like, “I see.” It still is tapping into that pain point and how the solution is going to ultimately help solve it. Marylou:     The other thing too that this does is that it gives us, empowers us that we can do this on our own. If you’re working for a larger company right now and you’re listening to this call, you have the ability to do the research as Jen describes in her book. You don’t have to go to your manager or the director of marketing or whatever it is. You are empowered to do this because ultimately you’re responsible for generating opportunities. The more you know about the person on the other end of that phone or the person on the other end of that email, the better you’re going at making your numbers consistently and repeatedly. This information, while it may seem that it’s pen and paper-ish instead of tool based, you still have to get to the core of how to do this type of research and how to do it to improve your business. Jennifer:      Exactly. What I really try to do in the book was to make it super practical, to really help people by walking them step by step through the process of doing interviews and surveys and the survey questions. Then, actually mining all that information and pulling out what is relevant so that you actually have some actionable data to work with. And then once you have it, what do you do with it? And then giving some examples of how you can take what you’ve pulled out and actually apply it to your copy. Marylou:     So your book is three parts. I think I heard you said so. The first is collecting the data. The second part is actually analyzing it and the third part is applying it. Can you give us an overview of how to collect, where to collect some ideas or is there a difference between business to business versus business to consumer for example in your data collection process. Jennifer:      I would say the process is more or less the same and I actually have a couple of examples in there where—this is more on the mining front of that in going online and looking for messages online where I do talk about a B to B business that I was helping and I was sort of struggling with. Where am I going to look for some great information online where actual customers are talking about, it was very digital marketing agency? The process is the same, you just have to think about it a little bit differently and think about first where those people are going to be looking for the same types of information as you are. When you’re going online and you’re looking for where these customers or prospects are actually talking about solutions that are maybe comparable to your own if you’re not finding your own business out there being talked about, you just want to think about what are they are going to put into Google to go look, to find out more information. It may be articles online, looking at comments, what people are saying about a particular solution. When it comes to B to C and you’re talking about products, things that commerce wise are really easy to find online. Going to Amazon, looking at reviews of comparable products, seeing what people are actually saying about what they love, what they hate, why it’s working, why it’s not working, that sort of thing. That’s a great way to supplement your own surveys and interviews and things like that. Particularly if you actually have a small business or start up and you don’t have a sea of customers on an email list that you can survey, that a great way to get some of that voice of customer data. I would say one of the absolute best ways to get the kind of information that you want is just by talking to people, asking them questions, digging down to find out what their deeper why is, meaning why are they really coming to seek you out and use your solution or your product, whether that’s they want to feel more confident, they’re wanting to feel like more of a pro in whatever sort of business that they’re involved with. Whatever that sort of deeper why is, that’s what you really want to connect with. Marylou:     To give you an example in my world is I get people coming to me saying they want better leads. Jennifer:      Yup. Marylou:     When I ask them why they want better leads, they say because they’re not able to convert the leads that they get or they say they don’t have as many leads so I asked them why don’t they have as many leads and they say because marketing is not passing over enough leads for us to work, well why is that? I just keep asking what we call the five whys. Jennifer:      Exactly. Marylou:     Eventually, you drill down to that what we call root cause and in this particular case it was that the person who wanted more leads was also kind of looking towards a promotion and the promotion would have been a slam dunk if he was able to consistently meet his numbers. Even though he started off with, “I need more leads,” it really was about, “I want to improve my position within the company.” Jennifer:      Exactly. Marylou:     Those are two very different things that you’re dealing with. Jennifer:      Exactly and so that’s a phenomenal example. That really hits home about digging, digging deep until you can get to that deeper why. That’s the kind of message that’s really going to resonate with people. Like you were saying, thinking about how do I start that conversation? Just your regular communication versus website copy or emails. If you can get to the heart of what makes your ideal customers tick and what keeps them up at night, that’s really valuable information that you can use to start off a conversation, lead into a story like you just did and give people context around what you’re trying to sell. Marylou:     Right, and that there are others like you who have similar problems so there’s a consensus that you’re not suffering alone. There are a lot of people who are experiencing the same problems that you have. As you start getting them kind of leaning into your conversation, then you can start showing them others who have come before them via testimonials and endorsements. All of this under Jen’s guidance with research, you should be able to put together a compelling story to get someone who is very cold and not knowing who you are to the point where you can turn them into a sales qualified lead. Jennifer:      Right. Exactly, that’s a really different sort of take on the book and how you can use it. I definitely think that so much of this applies and it’s really just about process and it’s something that anyone can do. You just need to take the time to do it. Marylou:     Let’s get to the website side. I had this research that I’ve done and I want to be able to attract people as opposed to reaching out to people. What does this mean for my website? Once I’m armed with this information, what is the next logical place that I’m going to invest my time, effort, energy, writing skills, what have you, in implementing in activating this type of research? Jennifer:      What I normally do when I’m looking at an existing website is pull all of that great information together and I talk about this in the book. How to go through it and analyze it and figure out a messaging type hierarchy, what are the most important messages and what are the key items, things that are continually popping out. Once you’ve done that, the best thing to do is to actually get on your site and run through your home page or all of the pages on your site and look through and see where based on the information that you’ve pulled together, where do you think your customers or prospects who would be coming to it would be running into problems? You’re armed with this great information that’s telling you these people want this and they want that. There are certain things that are going to be major elements of friction for them and going through the page you can get a sense of, “Wow, we’re not addressing that big friction point here based on the research that we’ve just done. It’s become really apparent that people coming the site are going to need to know x, y and z and that’s nowhere to be found.” Marylou:     Almost sounds like a pre flight checklist where you actually have a list now because it sounds like what you give us is the ability to put all of these into a sheet of some sort. Jennifer:      Right. There are actual sheets on there, almost sort of like templates, that you can use as a starting point for yourselves. Actually taking that and then going through your site and applying it. Marylou:     That’s awesome. I could totally visualize that I have my checklist, my sheet, I’m looking at the page and I’m just reading the text and when I’m finished I’m going to go back to my sheet and say, “Okay, did we cover this, this, this, this and this? Why not this?” You have a process where you could make sure that if you know that person is going to land on that page or you have a good sense that they are, you had better cover the points that you found in their language, mind you, because you put that in their phrasing. Correct? Jennifer:      Right and that ends up being the most powerful and compelling messages when you can actually lift people on words and use it. Marylou:     Yeah. That’s awesome, great. After we’ve analyzed and created our sheets and now we’re ready to actually apply it. Is there a process for that that you suggest in the book as well? Jennifer:      Yeah. In the application section, I talk mostly about applying it to your value proposition. Things like features and benefits, I just pulled out a couple of core things that are critical on every website. There is definitely more things obviously that you can apply it to but kind of walking you through how you take the research that you’ve done to put it together and create a much more compelling, hopefully, value proposition. Your headline, your sub headline, how that relates to the bottom copy, and even just going through a definition, what a value proposition is and what it’s not and how all the elements work together. Marylou:     Definitely our listeners know the value of a unique selling proposition and how so many of us if I were to shake you at 3:00 in the morning and ask you what your USP was, I bet more than half of you would have trouble with that. Having that knowledge in that third part in giving and understanding of what Jen means by that can only help you as you think about how you’re going to start conversations with people. Whether they’re people you don’t know, they’re aware maybe, they might be aware of a problem but certainly not a product awareness and may not even have solution awareness. But if you’re lucky, they’ll be interested in evaluating. Most of our stuff is going to be in that unaware or problem aware stage and that’s about it. Understanding and being able to articulate your USP in their language, the way they phrase it, is going to get you a lot more appointments, demos, whatever it is that your next sales step is in order to get this folks towards a sales qualified lead. Jennifer:      Right. Beyond the phone conversations, applying it to your emails on thinking through what do these people need to hear in my email so that it’s going to hopefully compel them to respond back. Like you said in that one example where the person just said, “You’re talking exactly about my problem. This is exactly what I needed to know about.” And getting people to really nod along like, “How did you know what I was thinking?” Not to sound creepy but that’s sort of where you want to go with it, just really understanding what your customers are thinking about and pondering and worrying about so that you can address not only their pain but also all of those hesitations and concerns and anxieties that they might have around purchasing from you or signing up or do whatever it is you’re hoping to help them to. Marylou:     Right, skepticism, it runs the gamut so you have to preempt and pre-strike. Jennifer:      Right, right, and also know when to offer up that information. Marylou:     Exactly. Jennifer:      That’s another really important thing. You don’t want to do it too soon and you want to have it where it needs to be depending on like you said how aware they are of the problems and solutions and also your brand. Marylou:     The thing is that when you understand how they phrase things and you do your research, you would be able to map out where that behavior, where their thoughts are. If you’re preparing a landing page for example that you want to focus on those folks who are aware of a problem but not necessarily aware of the solution, that language that they’re going to use is very different. If you have someone on a landing page where they’re aware of the product, by all means you’re going to mention your product name because they know about it. Jennifer:      Right. Marylou:     By understanding which phrases that they use that these certain steps or thought process stages, you’re just going to have much more compelling copy whether it’s on a website, whether it’s a landing page, whether it’s a button as you said, or in your emails, voicemails, scripts, everything else. Jennifer:      Right. Exactly, and hopefully you can use that to weave a good tale and add some of the storytelling that draws people in and makes you seem relatable and somebody that they actually want to talk to. Marylou:     Talk to and you’re credible and you’ve started to build trusting rapport which is what we all want to do. Jennifer:      Exactly. Marylou:     This is really a great little slipper of all that you do. What got you so interested in this particular—I don’t know what to call it. Jennifer:      It’s interesting. I am going to be doing a short talk at a Conversion Exo Conference next month which is only a 15 minute talk so trying to get everything— Marylou:     Kind of crammed in. Jennifer:      Yes. I was thinking of the word. It’s really centered around— Marylou:     Speed dating? Jennifer:      Yes. It’s really centered around value and how do you convey value in your copy. It all ties back to this bigger message which is we’re not listening to our customers and we need to be listening to our customers. The only way that we’re going to be able to adequately convey the value of our authors or product solutions, whatever, is by understanding what they need to hear and putting that together with compelling copy. It’s been something that’s spinning around in my head for the last year or two. It’s just continuing to jump out at me and you know when you keep finding connections everywhere. The customer research piece has just become a lot more important to me. I just think it’s fundamental in terms of the copywriting and really anything, trying to optimize your websites, your emails as you know. All of the different processes that go into marketing to people, it’s just absolutely critical that you understand them. Marylou:     It’s funny when for a very long time voice of customer, VOC initiatives were mostly customer service related. It’s so nice to see it come over to business development, to sales, because effort is a big thing. If you go to a website, it takes so much effort to figure out what you need to do next or if your wording is such that you’re trying to basically make the customer figure it out versus you telling them and not so that they logically and comfortably know where to go next. That’s the difference that Jen is offering up here by having you really think through not only what to say to the customer but what the experience they’re going to have when they hit your landing page or hit your website or read your email. This is all about the effort, the experience that clients will have once they read your content wherever it’s placed. Jennifer:      Right. Letting them know that like you said, you’ve taken the time to understand them. The type of messaging that you’re putting forth is something that they care about which really it needs to be centered around them, not you. It’s about kind of a mindset shift to a certain extent. I think a lot of us marketers pay web service to the fact that it needs to be about the customer but then when it comes time to actually put the materials together, the campaigns together, it just shifts back to making it about ourselves because it’s easier to just talk about ourselves. We’re all human and for as much as we don’t like to admit it, we’re selfish creatures and we like to think about what we need and what’s most important to us. It’s really about hitting home to people that you need to be thinking outside of yourself and your business and what the goals are of your customer. They need to be in alignment with your own, otherwise your business isn’t going to survive but you need to be constantly thinking about what goals your customers have and how are you going to achieve them because if they can achieve their goals, you’re going to achieve yours. Marylou:     Exactly. Well, Jen thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it. I’m sure the audience is going to want to know how to get hold of you so could you give us a couple of ways to reach you. Jennifer:      Yeah. Definitely. You can find me on my site which is makementionmedia.com or on Twitter which is @jenhavice and then I will also give you a link where people can go if they’re coming to your site with the podcast and they can get more information and read some other things that I’ve written. Marylou:     Great. The book again is Finding the Right Message: How to Turn Voice of Customer Research into Irresistible Website Copy. I’ll add email and other types of copy from Jen Havice. Thank you again so much. We loved having you on the show. Jennifer:      Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Marylou:          Kyle is a pro at continuing the conversation with prospects. There are so many touch points. It could be hard to keep track while being genuine to your leads. Using tools in your sales process has become non-negotiable but implementing those tools into your current systems isn’t easy. this is where Kyle excels.    Kyle is the founder and CEO of SalesLoft, a company that helps businesses move target accounts into customer accounts. In this podcast, Kyle reveals how targeting prospects in your market is changing, ways to start the conversation at top a funnel, tips for implementing tools into your sales stack, and where to start when developing your stack. Hey everybody, this is Marylou Tyler and today I have a very, very special guest. Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft is with us on the phone and I’m very excited about what he’s been doing with his company. Rather than glorify everything about what Kyle has done, I want him to tell us where he’s been with the company, where he thinks things are going, and why you should be listening to this call. I think this is the call for you that’s going to really set in motion your ability to predictably generate revenue for yourselves to make your commissions and do it consistently so that you can scale. Now, Kyle is an expert in many, many areas and he especially has been focused on top of funnel, is that correct Kyle? Kyle:               That’s right. Marylou:          Yeah. Although we all get kind of pulled into opportunity to close one, this really is all about how to get those conversations started but more importantly how to continue the conversations so that you’re reducing the lag in the pipeline. Without further ado, Kyle welcome, so happy to have you on this podcast today. Kyle:               Thanks for having me, Marylou. I really appreciate it. I’m super excited about our conversation today. Marylou:          Perfect. As I said, I would like you to tell the audience your startups. You had an idea that you took and made just a fabulous product line out of. What got you started in doing this particular portion of the sales pipeline, where you’re going with that, and how do you see the future for the work that we’re doing in the business development? Kyle:               Sure thing. Let’s take a step back just really quickly. I’m the founder and CEO of SalesLoft, started the company in 2011. We provide an application that helps companies convert target accounts into customer accounts. Just to get that out of the way so you all know kind of my background, where I’m coming from. I think Marylou and you alluded to it, and we’ve talked about it before, we’re really in the middle of one of the most profound shifts in business and in the profession of selling where things are changing so dramatically. Marc Andreessen wrote a blogpost on Wall Street Journal that said ‘software is eating the world.’ I’ve got a daughter, she’s two years old, baby Brooklyn and I’m pretty sure when she grows up and gets old enough to understand it, I’m going to tell here that there are going to be two jobs in the world. One is the job that the robots tell you what to do, the other is the job where you tell the robots what to do. We want her to be on the side of telling the robots what to do. We want our customers, we want the world to be on that side of kind of moving from that industrial age to knowledge worker age. Selling’s being disrupted, it’s the world’s oldest industry, it’s the largest industry. If you look at global economies like China, the way you measure them is by GDP. That’s just another word for sales. This industry that’s gotten a lot of management software and a lot of executive level stuff with CRMs and some of the applications that exist but really the actual function of selling, of connecting with buyers in a human way, of identifying the right companies that are target accounts and converting those over to customer accounts, that’s being revolutionized. We’re kind of sitting right in the middle of that. There’s an Albert Einstein quote that says, “The significant problems we face today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that we were when we created them.” I think that’s kind of a testament to what’s going on right now. We see this industry as marketing’s had a lot of technology but sales has really been operating in an old school fashion. We want to engage our buyers with lots of sincerity but we also want to be targeted and have frequency of how we communicate with them. That’s the shift that we’re seeing as an executive and founder of SalesLoft, that’s kind of right where I sit. Marylou:          You mentioned two phrases that are near and dear to my heart, one is targeting and let’s start with that. What does that mean and how is that changing? Kyle:               For companies today, there’s a lot more information data processes that allow us to identify who are our best customers, which potential prospects would be right for us. It’s kind of the opposite of the whole ‘boil the ocean’ situation. We, as business leaders, want to identify who’s going to get the most value from our product service or offering and then how do we identify those companies based on data points or specifics of what makes them unique. It all starts with targeting. You talk a lot about personas not only of the actual individual buyer but also the accounts. It’s important for companies to understand who your target accounts and who are the target buyers within those accounts so we don’t waste time going after them. Marylou:          Okay. There’s a new book out, I don’t know how relatively new it is, the Challenge Your Customer. They talk about this new term called a mobilizer which is a buyer but it’s more of an influencer. They have this magic number now, I think it was 5.4. Especially when you’re going upmarket, there are more potential people who are going to be sitting around the table or at least involved in the conversation somewhere in relative position of the pipeline. It’s really important that you consider not only the companies, the people within the companies but not only the ones that are going to actually buy but those who directly and indirectly influence. Do you agree with that? Kyle:               Yeah, absolutely. I have a specific example. I was sitting in a board room just last week in Salt Lake City with a big potential account and we were meeting with the VP of sales whom we’ve had a great relationship with and is pretty excited about what we’re doing and things that we can add significant value to their organization. In walked the sales operations manager whom we had spent a little bit of time with but hadn’t gone as deep as we had with the VP. Now, the VP is sitting there and he’s explaining his excitement around what we’re doing and the sales operations person says, “Well, we’re not getting this unless I check it off.” It’s interesting because sales operations reports to the VP, doesn’t hold the budget, doesn’t really have the authority or anything like that but the VP trusts that person to be their advisor and to be the person that helps make that decision internally. In fact, the joke was that, the sales operations person said, “This VP gets excited about lots of technology all the time. If we bought all the things that he wanted to buy, then we’d be overloaded.” It’s a specific example of how there are people inside the organization that make a big impact and make a big difference even though they might not be that ultimate signer that we kind of—back in the old school days the sales, we always look out for the person who signs the check. That’s the only person we need to connect with but it’s dead wrong today because specialization inside the organization, these VPs and line level executives, they may not know tech and integrations and what’s going to work within their process-oriented environment nearly as well as the people who are really behind the scenes making all that happen. Marylou:          Great information. The second term that you used that’s near and dear to my heart is frequency. Can you elaborate around that please? Kyle:               We’re seeing an industry that the companies that are most successful with their sales communications are using this idea of touch points. We talked about earlier this idea of cadence of touch points which are how many times you’re reaching out to you prospect over which mediums. There’s also some other elements but one of the strategies we’ve seen lately in just kind of standardized it around this idea of a seven by seven, seven touches over seven days and some people do nine touches in 13 days but we’re seeing this a lot with organizations that they create their cadence of touch points. The variables here are how many touch points over which medium, is it email, is it phone, is it social, it could be even things like direct mail or targeted advertising but then which persona is it to inside the organization, is it the VP of sales, is it the sales operations person? Then, even another step is which person that your organization is making that connection. We have some strategies here at SalesLoft where the sales development team will reach out to director level accounts and VP level accounts but then my VP and me will reach out to their CEO and their board members and things of that nature. It’s multi-selling to multi-buyers but it all wraps around this idea of frequency of touch points. Gartner has a report that says it takes eight touch points in order to connect with the buyer but the average company is only doing two per prospect. There’s a gap there and we need to fill that in with more touch points but we want to make sure those touch points are sincere, unique and personalized and not just spam blast. Marylou:          It’s funny, my head is spinning because I’m doing the math in my head. Without technology Kyle, how can you—let’s take that 5.4 number. 5.4 potential prospects that we need to touch and we need to touch each of those seven to ten times. How the heck do we keep that straight if we’re not using a tool? Help me understand that. Kyle:               You can go to amazon.com and buy three cases of sticky notes if you want. That’s one option that you can do, or you can have systems in place. Some companies can do it through real sophisticated kind of CRM adjustments with those ten to kind of not really get the job done and then there’s products that do it as well. Shameless self-promotion, we have one of those products but there’s great vendors in the space as well. That’s kind of why this new tech stack has emerged and why companies are getting lots of funding and having some success in this marketplace. Marylou:          Now that you open this term stack. It’s funny because upmarket accounts, we don’t really talk about stack because as you mentioned with the sales ops guy, we call them tools because it has to go through a process of betting to make sure that the tool fit into the corporate structure, what other tools are involved. What is the concept of a stack and tell us where your software, your offering fits within that stack? Kyle:               Yeah, cool. I think if you look at the most common sales stacks out in the marketplace, they certainly revolve around the CRM system, salesforce.com being the most popular of modern cloud-based CRMs. Some of the smaller companies have things like HubSpot, Close.io and then some companies have Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar, a few other ones but those are some of the most popular ones. Usually, companies have a data layer that’s providing data of target accounts and prospects. That could be data.com, discover.org, there’s so many of them, companies like Datanice, a bunch of really great companies that are helping pool information in. Then, a lot of companies have LinkedIn, it’s almost its own stack layer to find additional intelligence on the people we are calling into and then there’s software for helping you with your email, sales emails, and software helping you with voice and phone dialers. The most popular dialer in the marketplace, maybe insidesales.com although we’re coming after their business a little bit. Some of the more modern ones have combined the dialer with the email to complete the sales development or sales communications piece of the stack and those would be technologies like SalesLoft, Toutapp, maybe Outreach, those are some of the competitive players in that space. I think that kind of makes up the stack. But then there’s also tools like Tinderbox for creating presentations and companies like Echosign and Docusign for digital signatures, CPQ for configuring price quote. There’s a number of them but those tend to be the core tech products in a modern sales stack. Marylou:          It’s becoming more best practice too because I think, especially with the cadence and frequency pieces, people are getting harder to get a hold of, they’re not sitting in their offices waiting for the phone to ring or waiting for you to enlighten them on how great your product is. Kyle:               That’s right. Marylou:          When I worked in the contact center space back in the dark ages, we were really worried about something called best time to call. Let’s talk about SalesLoft since that you’re Bailiwick, that’s what you know. Is there a way now to take and leverage the analytics coming out of SalesLoft so that we can maximize the best time to email, the best time to call and do you that across the modalities of whatever you’re feeding into frequency, you can track metrics around conversion rates? Kyle:               Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s one of the big components. Another big component—I’ll dive into the analytics after this but one of the biggest components is just that accountability piece. Our software and other software like it can help you tee up the cadence of touch points that you want and then it holds the wrap account, we talk about the sticky notes right? It is that guide that says, “You need to make these three phone calls or these 40 phone calls, or these twenty emails or these social messages. It just keeps you on track. It’s almost like bumper guards for your sales process. But then once you start making those communications, you start sending those emails, leaving those voice mails, having those conversations, then it starts doing things like say, “This is the best time to send emails. This is the best time to make phone calls based on this persona. Here are the best subject lines, here are the best bodies of emails.” There’s some fun things that you’ll love, Marylou. One day, I was sitting—I actually work out of our sales work development lab, we’ve got 16 sales development reps on the phone every day and I started thinking, first I was kind of grateful that I wasn’t making a bunch of cold calls but then I realized if I was, what would I say? It’d be a little different than what my team is saying. I started brainstorming, and I thought, “I would say some pretty disruptive, kind of pattern interrupt type things because these folks are getting a lot of cold calls, I want to surprise them a little bit and start an interesting conversation.” I started to write these down and I go, “Well, it would be really great if we can measure which ones are the most effective.” Cold call opening or warm intro opening or whatever it is. In our software, we identify three different types of phone call openings. We recorded them in SalesForce as a pick-down list, a drop-down list and the reps started making all the calls. What they would do inside of SalesLoft is they will record which opening they will use. There’s a drop-down, “Hey, when I make the call in the phone dialer workflow, just click the drop-down.” What happened is after we ran a bunch of these phone calls, we were able to see which one created the most meaningful conversations and we were able to run an analysis. Interestingly enough, it was one of the cute pattern interrupt type approach, it wouldn’t work forever because eventually people would get rid of it but the cold call was, “Hey Marylou, this is Kyle Porter from SalesLoft, what did I catch you in the middle of? Marylou:          Sounds like… Kyle:               They’d be taken back a little bit and they’d say, “Well, I’m kind of doing this, what’s up?” And then you’re like, “Well I’m calling because of—” We saw that it had a lot more effectiveness than, “Hey Marylou, this is Kyle Porter from SalesLoft, we can help your reps convert more target accounts into target accounts through communication.” It’s not all about us and kind of pitching sales. It’s kind of more relaxed than interruptive. We were able to measure that that was more effective. Now over time, we would measure against other things and make sure we’re always innovating. But yeah, time a day to phone call, time a day to email. Which cadence is most effective, is it more effective to make three emails and two phone calls than two emails and three phone calls or whatever it is? All those analytics, if you had a system that captures your communication you can also have a system that analyzes it and creates insights based on it. Marylou:          It’s amazing. I was just in a conference at New York City that I helped with the workshop. One of the most frequent questions we got in our workshop was how do I setup a cadence or should I email then phone or phone then email or this and that, these and those. It was just like, “You know, it really depends.” Kyle:               That’s right. Marylou:          It really depends. You’ve gotta start somewhere though. I love the fact that you have that in your tool. What I want the audience to recognize is that it’s in the tool but you can optimize it. you constantly iterate it. You don’t set it and forget it. You’re constantly looking at it in order to be able to reduce the lag in the pipeline. I don’t know if you all remember but page 42 of Predictable Revenue, there’s a formula on that page. I have been pretty much the last five or six years focusing on that as my thesis. One of the parameters in that formula is reduction of lag. The frequency that Kyle has implemented in his software offering allows you to start to reducing that lag because you’re going to know the shortest path to a meaningful conversation and then from that meaningful conversation, getting them through to the fit call and then generating an opportunity. Kyle:               You hit the nail on the head. It’s different data for different companies, so I can’t sit up and tell you that Wednesday at 9:00 AM is the best time to call somebody and I can’t tell you that phone is more effective than email. I can tell you that if you’re selling to VPs of social media at technology companies, you better be touching them on social, you better be touching them on Twitter and Instagram. But if you’re selling to a commercial construction general contractors, I doubt they need you to Snapchat them. You’re probably going to be text messaging, and phone calling. It all depends on that persona of who you’re selling to but if you have a system that allows you to measure it then you have a system that allows you to know what’s right for your business in your particular instance. Marylou:          Exactly. Kyle, people are sitting here thinking, “Okay, this is really cool.” How do they get started? What do they need to do to be able to sort of figure out, is this something that could be helpful to me, what do you usually tell clients or prospects of yours in order to prepare for putting in a tool like a SalesLoft tool? Kyle:               I just recently pre-ordered a book that comes out in August. I think they may want to pay attention to that one. I’m super excited about it. Certainly every time we talk, I’m energized and excited and I learn new things so I can’t wait to read Predictable Prospecting. There’s lots of great source out there. There’s great resources at Toppo, it’s a research advisory business that you might know about that got some cool stuff. We put a bunch of things on our blog to help you, we’ve got a playbook called Sales Development Playbook that we share for free, anyone can get their hands on it. It really outlines a lot of these areas that can be helpful to you. There’s just great information. Once you’ve got some ideas on what you want to accomplish, start to road map out your process and then start looking at some of the software that exist in the marketplace and see if there’s some of that that fits you. I don’t want to say go out and just buy it but certainly, you want to evaluate what’s on the market to help you be a better seller or help you be more modern and understand technology and help you understand how the fastest growing technology companies in the world are depending on sales communications product in addition to their CRMs. Marylou:          The other thing to let everyone know is that the portion of the pipeline that Kyle specializes in is reaching out to people. It’s not waiting for people to come in necessarily. He’s very proactive in the work that he does and that is the channel that will allow you to have more predictability because you are the one who’s targeting these people, you are the one who’s reaching out with a message that resonates and that instills a sense of urgency in them so that they will want to contact you back. It doesn’t mean that it replaces attraction-based marketing or getting people to fill out a form or do all the other stuff they do to get inbound to you, but it does allow you to be able to mold where you want to position your product in the marketplace, how often you want to have new clients come into the fold and then be able to scale that so that your forecasts are a lot more predictable. Kyle:               That’s right. Another thing when you talk about inbound, SalesLoft gets 2000 inbounds a month. We generate just as much revenue with outbound as we do with inbound but I tell you what, one of the biggest lessons that I learned here is that someone will come to our website, raise their hand, ask for a product capabilities overview, fill out a form and then they won’t respond to our first two or three phone calls and emails. Guess what, they’re going on cadences. They’re going into cadence just like an outbounder will. The other thing is that most of the time, if I look back historically at all of our inbounds, most of the time it’s not one of the core decision makers of those 4.5 people that are buyers at each of these organizations. For every inbound lead we get, we quickly analyze who else at the organization should we contact and those people go on our cadences as well. That’s what we’re seeing with great businesses out in the industry is that they are generating tons of inbound leads and they’re also doing lots of outbound but they treat the inbounds like outbounds when they come in and that helps you be most effective all the way around. Marylou:          In my terminology, for those of you who follow Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting, what Kyle is saying is when it comes into what we call working status, it doesn’t matter the source of the lead. Whether they come from inbound, direct mail, trade show, it doesn’t really matter but it goes through the process that an outreach will go through which is working that lead, looking at that bullseye of direct and indirect influencers, getting them into a touch sequence with the idea and the goal to qualify them for fit and get them towards opportunity. Kyle:               Exactly. You have different cadences for different personas. A trade show lead might have a six-step cadence. An inbound, someone who downloaded an ebook might have five-step cadence. An outbound might have twelve. It’s different dependent upon that persona and then again you can use math to determine which ones are most effective. Marylou:          Without a tool, for those of you who are math majors out there, it would be crazy to try to keep track of this and something like just the CRM or like Kyle said, I envision a sticky note wall. It’ll be crazy. If you have 4 accounts you’re working on, maybe. Kyle:               It’s certainly becoming the rise of the salesperson that not only understands human interaction but also does understand process and technology and a little a bit of math. Not a lot of math but enough math to understand the equation of connection. One of our shared friends, Jeremy Donovan of GLG, their reps aren’t going after too many accounts yet they have lots of cadences because they have so many different personas at those organizations and lots of different touch points that they’re going over and Jonathan’s obviously your co-author on the book which makes me even more excited to check it out. Only 20 accounts but 30 cadences at times. Marylou:          Yes, a lot of my clients, because I’m an upmarket person, have 100, that’s it. 100 clients that they’re going after but they’re very large clients or they are clients that are distributed globally so they need to be able to touch Europe, they need to be able to touch Canada, they need to be able to touch US. At the end of the day, it’s like a lot of small accounts but it’s rolled up into one. It’s still the same process and it has to be done in a way that as you said, is respectful, authentic, meaningful so that you can split-test and try different things to make sure that you’re constantly iterating to get the best conversation and reduce that lag from that formula so that the pipeline is more predictable. Kyle:               One last thing I’ll add on that, one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen and probably one of the things that’s changed the maybe the most since Predictable Revenue is—you all did such a great job with distributing that process and idea to the world that a lot of people have adopted it. What it’s done now is it’s opened up an opportunity for sellers to differentiate themselves by becoming even more personalized and customized in their communications. We find that the best companies now in modern revenue generation, they’re not just looking at how many companies did they reach, they’re actually focusing on the top of the funnel conversion of companies prospected to companies connected with. If I’ve got two sellers let’s say Bob and Kelly, and Bob reaches out to a thousand accounts to get ten appointments or to get ten qualified opportunities but Kelly reaches out to a hundred accounts to get ten opportunities, Kelly is much more effective than Bob. She’s more scalable, she’s more dependable, she’s more cost-effective. Most people who have CRM rules that say if they’ve been touched in the last 15 days or so, no one else in the sales team can reach them and Bob just ate up 990 accounts that no one else can touch for the next 15 days whereas Kelly only locked up 90. I think that’s a big one and I know that you’ve talked a lot about that as being effective with your communications is super critical now as well. Marylou:          Quality over quantity has always been the message even with Predictable Revenue. Unfortunately, Predictable Revenue in some places is taken as a spammer kind of effect where you just spray and pray and that is really not the idea behind Predictable Revenue. It’s always been about quality. It’s always been about meaningful conversations. I’m really excited with what you’re doing and it’s just raising the bar to be able to be more authentic, to be able to reach people with meaning. That’s what it’s all about now. We have the tools, we have the technology, let’s be human. Kyle:               People are always going to try to take the easy road out. It’s just like anything, if it’s worth having, it’s worth putting in the hard work. One of my friends, a guy you know, John Barrows, he has this idea that’s really entering the era of the death of the average sales person because if a robot can do it then we don’t need you. Robots can do a decent job of communication, not a great job but they can do a decent job. If you can only do a decent job as a seller, then your future may look bleak. This whole idea of advanced personalization, really understanding your buyer, connecting at a human level, picking the right companies that you have a mathematical assumption that can get value from your solution. A lot of this stuff really makes up the next generation of selling, these are some really cool stuff that you’re all over and I’m excited to talk with you about. Marylou:          That’s great, Kyle. Well, listen, I don’t want to take more of your time, I know you’ve got a busy day. How do people reach you, what’s the best way to start a conversation with you around this topic or anything related to sales? Kyle:               Sure. My email address is just kyle@salesloft.com. I pretty much respond to every email. I look forward to chatting with anyone who’s on here today and then you can find me on Twitter as well I’m just @kyleporter so if you’re into Twitter, I’ll be happy to communicate with you there. Just so honored to be here today. When I started the company, we had really nothing but we had your book. You’ve been a role model of mine and your influence and thought leadership has really been the forefront of our business so we owe you a lot. This industry in general is really doing some amazing things. This top of the funnel momentum represents the biggest innovation happened in selling in the last decade. It’s an honor to be here with you as we discuss it and an honor to have listeners right in the middle of it. Marylou:          Thank you so much, Kyle. I really appreciate it. Kyle:               You’re welcome. Marylou:          Hey, listen everybody, follow Kyle on Twitter because he does post a lot of great content and that’s another way to get the latest and greatest news coming out of not only SalesLoft but what’s going on in the industry so make sure you follow him as well, okay? Alright Kyle, thanks again. I really appreciate your time. Kyle:               Awesome Marylou, thank you very much.

Marylou:    In your current deal that’s finishing up, you examined the entire pipeline and you actually assembled, activated and optimized from beginning to end. Correct? Ash:     I would say not so much the assembly part but the optimization definitely. Into some degree assembly, I mean they had an existing process in place even if it wasn’t codified or documented. They were closing business without my help or before my help. My objective over the course of the last three months was really to help them document and quantify what they were doing, how they were doing it and then step in on occasion where there are some obvious improvements that they can make to the way they do things. Marylou:    Okay. What was the biggest sort of validation that you saw what people continually                struggling with especially with the work that you’re doing? Ash:    I think the main thing I’ve realized in the last three years—before this I was Optimize Lead for about three years and I built out their inside sales organization so I had a global inside sales org running the inbound and outbound SVR’s for a few years.  The biggest thing I’ve noticed throughout the entirety of the sales cycle is that the work that you do early on the sales cycle really has an order of magnitude effect on what happens on the end outcome. For better or worse, what you do in the discovery stage of your sales cycle is going to have a really positive impact or negative impact downstream. Any growth talks a lot about this and ties up with management the importance of getting things done early on as opposed to trying to fix them later on in the process. The main thing I’ve noticed a lot of young sales organization need help with is really setting their sales cycles up in a way where they think of it as a project to manage. With the projects that you’re managing, what you want to do is you want to lay out the deliverables early on and make sure that you get buy in from every stakeholder in the process. For example, you’re the project manager to the salesperson, you need to get the buy end of the person on the other end of the line, the champion that, “Hey, we’re going to need to do x, y and z on day five, days a, b and c in order to get you guys live and up and running and reaping the benefits of our solution by the date that you said you need it, by the compelling event date let’s say.” Most sales people just fail to do that. Let’s just work as if my sales project is a black hole and hopefully this will close and I’ll just start pounding at what I need to get and then people go ghost, people go missing and it really ends up with some very unfortunate circumstances. The importance of just setting expectations early on in the cycle and getting buy ins from the other parties involved on the customer end primarily are really, really important. I found that just implementing that alone has had huge improvements on things like wind rate, average deal size. Marylou:    It’s funny you say that because one of the things we talk about in my new book is about mapping the buyer journey, what we call it. It’s almost like a gigantic mind map of the steps that buyers typically take in going—since I specialized just at the top of the pipeline from cold context through qualified opportunities, we map out the various paths that a particular prospect can take and we do that for every single potential buyer because we also have the issue at the top of the pipeline of when are people actually going to enter. Since we’re starting cold, we may not even get to the decision maker, we may know the name of the decision maker but we may not even get to that person but we still need to keep them in the loop. I like what you’re saying. Have you implemented a mind mapping type of methodology or how do you get people to actually to sit down and talk through beginning with the end in mind and backing up all the points along the path. How do you do that? Ash:      That’s a great question. The main thing that you want to do here when you’re creating—I don’t like the idea of mind maps for sales prophecies or they make sense, a mind map is a far more accurate depiction of what the customer buying process looks like but the problem with the mind map that I have and why I don’t use it is because they are messy apparently. Typically, a mind map is messy. There are a lot of different end outcomes, a lot of different paths to getting there. In sales, particularly in middle to bottom of the funnel, you really want to make sure that you’re in control, that there’s a linear path that you always follow. There are maybe some steps that aren’t necessarily needed to check off in certain sales cycles meaning a smaller company, you might not have to go through a lengthy legal or procurement review process and that’s fine. It should always be linear because you should always as the project manager try to have control of kind of a linear path and move things along that path. If you don’t have buy ins from your customers that they’re okay with it, you don’t really have a deal. I don’t know what you have but you don’t really have a deal that you can forecast. Marylou:    You have a lag in the pipeline. That’s what you have. Ash:    That’s pretty much it. You have a bunch of stuff there, it’s a probabilities game at that point and I don’t like running deals that way. What I try to do instead of a true mind map is do some customer research, understand how a snapshot of your customers got to you and what the buying process looks like from their perspective. It’s important to do this from the buyer’s perspective because a lot of sales organizations actually end up trying to build out what the journey looks like from the seller’s perspective and then you end up using language. That’s not very powerful or compelling for the buyer. Why does a buyer give a shit if you need this deal closed by April 1st, you know what I mean? They don’t care. What they care about is, “Hey, we have this event that we’re launching mid-May and in order for us to reap the benefits of your analytics tool and understand who should attend that conference, we need to have this up and running by let’s say April 15th which means we have to have the deal signed by April 1st.” You want to work backwards from that kind of implementation date or date of benefit. But regardless, it’s not terribly sophisticated but it kind of journey that I would map, it’s more of a linear kind of process. That’s along the way that each party is responsible for, usually a spreadsheet is just fine. The most important thing is less so the map itself and more so what the map signifies. It signifies that the person on the other end has bought in. That they say at some point, “Yes, I agree to do this on April 1st. I agree to do this on March 27th. I agree to do this and you will do that in parallel.” Once you have that buy in, negotiation down the line becomes very easy. Marylou:    I was just on the phone last week with a gentlemen who talked about a book that was written in the 70’s called Getting to Closed. He focused on dates and activities within dates as mapping from opportunity down to close. I liked where they were going with it because that also presented what you say is a linear progression and it also is time sensitive. The new odds to that was trying to, which they didn’t really talk about back then but now with the buyer journey and the fact that buyers are more informed or seemingly more informed because they have the ability to search and do other things, the overlay of the journey to a time sensitive type of linear progression seems to be a great combination in order to reduce the lag in the pipeline. Ash:    Absolutely. I actually just read a blog post about this. I’d love for you to check it out. I’d love to check out that book Getting to Closed. Marylou:    It’s called Getting to Closed. Ash:    Yeah. I’m going to check that out. I think it’s right up my alley. There’s a book I just read about this stuff. If you’re interested in checking it out, it’s called Project Managing Your Way to the Gong. It’s on sales hacker. That’s the biggest thing. It’s just a good discovery where you set expectations and get alignment and then from there kind of managing everything. That’s mostly what sales is. It’s kind of the way I’ve learned to sell. To sell is doing good discovery, understanding what the problems are on your customers and then turning that into the need for a solution, educating your buyers about why your solution solves their problem. From there, it’s just really proper discovery or proper expectation setting. I’m saying, “Hey, in order for you to reap the benefits of this, you and I are teammates, we are working towards a shared goal. In order for us to achieve that goal by the date that you need to achieve that goal by, we need to do x, y and z together on these dates. Are we on the same page?” If you have agreements, that’s fantastic. If you have some objections then you try to overcome the objections. But if you have someone on the other end of the line who’s just not interested and not willing to cooperate, not willing for you to be the project manager on this path, then you don’t really have a sale. Marylou:    Yes, exactly. To what level are you feeding back information to say marketing? Or if they do somehow fallout and go into a nurture status, what types of pass you need to help people find to get them back out of nurture, back into the working cycle or at the very least feeding that conversation back to marketing so that at the top of the pipeline they are now armed with better conversation topics? Ash:    That’s a great question. The first was I think what kind of actions do you look for that imply to the sales team that this person is ready to come out out of the drift and back into the sales cycle. Correct? Marylou:    Yeah. That’s the first question. Ash:    There are some explicit things like for example they reply to an email or they go back to a website and say I want to talk [00:12:07]. There’s the explicit ways for something to come back into nurture or come out of nurture back into the sales cycle. They reply to an email saying I want to someone on sales or they fill out a contact sales form, pretty obvious. But then there’s the less obvious stuff like for example they’re in our product, in a pre-trial perhaps, and they perform a series of actions that we know from a probability perspective signifies a high likelihood that they turn into a customer soon. There should be a trigger in your marketing automation or CRM that automatically pushes that as a behaviorally active lead back to a sales person. Marylou:    That’s great, and we do a little bit of that at the top of the pipeline too. We call them behavioral indicators and what we do with them is we watch to see if they’re ready to be put into our calling queue so it’s a little bit different than what we’re talking about. We look at clicks, specific content that they’re interested in. We look at, if we can get the time spent in the depth of interest on the website itself. We also track their path movements, whether they’re deep and focused or they’re shallow and erratic. We look at the frequency of the activity versus inactivity, and then as you mentioned downloading forms, opting in, asking for a rep, attending a webinar. And then of course what we hope for is the email replies, the inquiries, the direct “I want to talk to somebody.” We take all those indicators as well but the call to action or the focus is to get them into our calling queue. Ash:    Exactly. In many ways, it depends on how your sales organization is structured. It actually can be very similar to what you’re describing at the very top of the funnel. It’s just more a matter of that kind of actual loop. The bottom of funnel kind of pushes back the top, sends an SGR and gets the notification. Maybe in some organizations, they even call back. It doesn’t really matter so long as there’s that kind of connectivity loop there. Marylou:    Perfect, and so that’s coming back into the funnel. What happens if they are nurtured? They’re not ready, they’re not coming back in. What is the process there that you found that is the most successful? Ash:    So you’re saying, can you please clarify? Marylou:    Their behavior isn’t giving you a clear map as to whether or not you should engage with them so you need to sort of force the engagement. At the top of the pipeline what we do for example with those nurture people is recycle them back in as if they’re new again. I’m just curious when they fall out further down into the pipeline from opportunity to close, what process have you worked for those people who are just not even budgeting but you think are qualified. The accounts, you know they are in your ideal customers profile, etc. Ash:    Right. Good demographics set, just not at all responsive, what do you do then? Marylou:    Yes. Ash:    That’s a harder question. I don’t know that I have the perfect or the right answer for this one but I think there’s a reason they’re allergic to the idea of reaching out. Usually what I think it is is just lack of awareness of what the solution is, what the problem is actually. There’s this kind of unconscious incompetence level that exists particularly around risk averse market majority, or they don’t necessarily know that the way they are doing things today is a problem. Those are the hardest people to sell to in my experience because the people that realize that they have a problem, it’s only a matter of time before you convince them that you’re a good salesperson, that your solution can fix that problem. The people who don’t even understand that the Sony Discman that they’re carrying around is just crap and they should operate an iPhone, those people are harder to convince. You first have to make them aware of the fact that there is a problem and then and only then can you really start selling them your product. I think the reason I’m saying all that is because education and agnostic marketing is the most important thing at this stage.  That’s what I always say here, the Henry Ford thing, “If I ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Marylou:    Right. Ash:    It’s not about marketing them towards the solution, it’s about marketing to them in a way that allows them to understand that they have a problem. Marylou:    We’re definitely on the same page there. The precursor to all of this was Eugene Schwartz’s’ Breakthrough Advertising so that book was written on my birth –, 1950’s, my birthday decade. It talks about the five levels of awareness and being respectful of where the buyer is at in that consciousness. What you’re describing is what he calls that they are unaware or they think they are aware of a problem but don’t know if there’s a solution or don’t even know there’s a vendor that can have that solution. Ash:    Exactly. Marylou:    Those levels are best residing in marketing’s hands in terms of the long term nurture. As soon as someone lifts a little eyelash then we take them in at the top of the pipeline and start getting them sort of warmed up and warm up that chill to a point where they want to engage with the sales executive. Ash:    Exactly. You got it. Marylou:    Tell us about your new venture when you comeback from your travels? Ash:    I will be joining Heat Analytics as their VP of Sales. They have currently a very high functioning albeit inexperienced sales team that’s doing very well but definitely can use a little guidance. I’m going to help them, take them from where they are now to the next level, truly excited about that opportunity. Marylou:    That’s great. If people are listening to this conversation and wanted to get to know you, your work, how to get a hold of you, what is the best way that they can do that? Ash:    I have my website ashalhashim.com which is my full first name, last name .com. I also have my consulting website brownflag.io where we post some content over here and there. We talk a little bit about our offerings and our background. Go to saleshacker.com, check out Ash Alhashim. I’m on there. I have quite a few posts for you guys to check out. I’d love to get lots of feedback on them. Marylou:    Okay. Ash:    Of course online, all those social media channel on Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. I’m pretty active on all of the above. Marylou:    Very good. I like to compartmentalize myself because when I want people to think of Marylou, it’s sales process, it’s top of funnel. When we think of Ash, can we put you in a box a little bit for the sales engine or are you like all over? Your beginning to end. Ash:    I like to think of myself as beginning to end. I do think of myself as marketing oriented salesperson but definitely that API point between marketing and sales, the handoff which I think is crucial in any organization that is high functioning. I take pride in really understanding demand generation, digital marketing, event marketing and offline marketing as well as I can. I do have a day job after all but I take pride in understanding that domain and working collaboratively with marketers to achieve a common goal. Marylou:    You know it’s funny you mentioned about the sales and marketing alignment. I’m actually talking with an expert on Saturday, that’s all he does. He specializes in sales and marketing teams working together mostly for lead generations so he’s more up at the top of the funnel as well but. That’s becoming a really hot topic and we really depend on marketing, at least the content assets because at the top of the pipeline where we’re trying to start conversation, we’re linking through and clicking through to content, to try to understand where they are behaviorally as we just discussed before. Ash:    Absolutely. Marylou:    Taking a long piece of content, the longer post and the way I describe it is we flip it sideways and from there we create persuasive content assets that we can link to in our cold emails so that we can see what’s of interest to people, what they’re clicking on if they’re signposting or breadcrumbs to a lengthier piece of content that helps us gauge where they’re at behaviorally so it’s very helpful. Ash:    That kind of stuff is super, super helpful because the buyer who is not fully engaged,  getting feedback from them is totally very difficult at the moment to really understand. Marylou:    And then when you get them further in, they’re also less committed so your point about they’ve got to be committed to the process and shown how to go from a to b to c to close. Ash:    Exactly. Marylou:    It’s all starts with what is this level of engagement that they have. Are they just appeasing us or are they truly, genuinely committed to changing their lives and transforming their business. Ash:    Absolutely. Marylou:    Well thank you so much Ash for your time. I’ll put on this, I’ll get all of the first, last name and all of that for everybody so that they can follow you and watch your progress at Heat Analytics. That’s awesome. Ash:    Awesome. It was really nice meeting you over the phone and I hope to see you all. Marylou:    Yeah, thank you Ash. I’ll talk to you soon. Ash:    Thanks Marylou, bye.

Marylou:    We’re here with Max. Max is actually now living in New York City, right? That’s what you said?Max:    Yup. Marylou:    What brought you to New York? Max:    Good to be back. I’m from here originally, my family is from here, my nephews are here. They’re getting to those fun ages where they can actually do things with you. That’s cool. I want to go to their basketball games. It’s just like when I was younger and I played hockey. That and my family and my games. I got a very good relationship with my nephews and my sisters. Excited to be back and be around them, and be around my family. The other thing is moved out to San Francisco for career purposes. I think I’ve gotten pretty far establishing network and can maintain that network, keep growing that network in San Francisco. But San Francisco is just one industry and really mainly start ups and growth stage  companies and I think for our business we really want to push going up stream with a little bit more to some bigger companies. I think being back in New York will help with that effort as well. Marylou:    Tell our audience when you’re in San Francisco what the main function was. A lot of people know that about Sales Hacker. Tell us more about what motivated you to get that up and running, where you see still a big gap in our knowledge of sales, sales process and how are you working towards helping people work through those gaps. Max:    Yes. On the surface, realistically, there’s I think 16.5 million people with Sales on their title on LinkedIn and maybe about 5 million with a marketing title. You can get a full degree in marketing but you can’t take one single college course in sales. There is already a problem with the education that these people are getting. Pile on top of that none of this organizations they want to grow and take one step backward to take two steps forward because they can’t miss their number or even jeopardize any kind of slow growth. They’re not really training their reps properly. They’re not really learning new things and there’s no way to do that on the fly. This is something that we were doing at YouToMe, we’re building sales process from scratch trying to figure that out on our own and always wish there was some kind of formal education. All I had was books like Predictable Revenue. Now, there’s a lot more books that are out there to help you like Trisha’s book, Mark’s book, my book. Back then, there wasn’t a lot. There was maybe the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, The Challenger Sale. You kinda go in there just on your own or with books. We want to basically bring the community together and say what if you can tap into to Bill Binch, the SVP of Sales from Marketo who took them from zero to IPO. What if you can tap into his brain for a little bit, get a presentation on how they build up their process. We wanted to get the community together whether it’s hearing it from the VP of Sales at the largest company in the world or a practitioner like a SDR turned into Director at a super fast growth company. I think you’d get a ton of value out of it no matter what your role was, whether you were a founder starting from scratch, or a VP of sales at a post IPO company. Sales has changed more than ever before I think in the last two, three years due to the advancements of technology, the accessibility, and really cheap data and information available to sales people and to the buyer is obviously everywhere. Sales is really going through this transformation and we’d like to be the one not only to help train people and get them up to speed but evolve it. Marylou:    Okay. Are you focusing that on the entire sales pipeline from cold connection all the way to close one? Max:    Yeah. Honestly, I think customers success is the role of that also. Even after you close one, you’re looking at upsell, resale, cross sale. That’s sales, what is this? Lifetime, Marylou:    Lifetime value. Max:    Lifetime revenue per customer. Getting the afternoon trying to blank emails and it’s been a short day, I have no excuse. But you are, you want to talk your revenue per account. Marylou:    Right. Max:    You want to get that up as high as possible and that’s the sales function those customers’ success reps are selling. They’re playing the same game. I think you’re looking at core areas being sales development, the closing roles, the account executives, the customer success function and even the ops that enable function which has become so important in recent years that wasn’t really there before. Again with the advancements in technology, there’s no that kind of like Sales Force for CRM admin is now more of an operation person. Not only do the financial operations part which is CTQ like sending the proposals out, make sure the payments are done, accounts receivables but also build the sales back on top of their CRM into that system, into that process and make sure that’s efficient, optimizing, that as they go, testing and measuring and looking at the numbers and helping the VP with forecasting such as sales operations. Sales enable them to roll which is to be somewhat of a product marketing role but now supplies sales with all the collateral on what information they need to do the best job that they can. I guess that’s five different roles in a bucket that enable operations together into four but we’re there to support everyone in all those levels and all titles. Marylou:    Is it a certain company sizes or is it, if I’m starting my career in sales and I’m not really sure how and where to begin, that level. And then I mess to the level of I’m a seasoned sales professional, I’m in a larger company but I want to be more efficient and more effective in the way that I do my sales. Max:    Yeah. Marylou:    All those folks? Max:    All those folks. Marylou:    All those folks. Max:    If you look at it because of what had happened over past two, three years in sales with the advancements of technology that I was talking about, pulling the data and information. If you’re a VP of sales at SAP or GB or something like that. You’ve been in sales for fifteen, twenty years. There are processes that you’re doing that are still valuable and valid processes but there’s technology that’s out there right now that’s been created the past two, three years. They can help those processes to become maybe ten times more efficient. Imagine if you can get 15% even, or 5%, or even 1% of your sales rep’s time back just by implementing some cheap piece of technology, a relatively cheap piece of technology, that automates these mundane tasks that they do, data entry or whatever it is. 1% of your sales could that lead to 1% more revenue. If you’re that VP of sales, the SAP or GB, what is that on the bottom line if every VP of that company implemented that one piece of solution, that one piece of software. We’re there for the guy who thinks he knows everything, but hey you don’t know everything because things are changing. We’re there for the founder of a two person startup that built a really awesome piece of software but has no idea to how to sell it. He’s a technical guy, maybe came from MIT or Harvard or something like that, build this awesome product but doesn’t know what to do next. Or, you’re the first sales hire of one of these companies and you’re trying to figure out from scratch. It doesn’t matter what your experience level is, probably I think there’s always something for you. Marylou:    I think a lot of what I’ve learned over the last few years after the release of The Predictable Revenue was the focus on sales process and then sitting on top of sales process or sales skills. Now, you’re adding a Sales Stack which some people might not know that term but it’s taking these different apps and software systems that are available now and combining them into a recipe almost. Max:    Yeah. Everybody’s got a CRM, you got to attract your customer. Marylou:    Yes. Max:    Somehow the conversation happens. You consider that kind of like middle of a spoked wheel of your stack. And then you have all these other processes that go on top of that. Regeneration or data enrichment, finding new contact information, email tracking, phone support, all those different types of things are all part of your sales stack. There’s predictive software out there now. There’s account based intelligence software out there, there’s contextual software that tells you how to interact with your lead, what content they’re going to find relevant, all those different things comprise of your sales stack. If you go through the entire sales process and you’re like okay, I need to go figure it out who is my ideal customers profile, there’s tool out there now that will help you. Okay, here’s what your product does, here’s the industry that you’re looking for, here’s the title that you’re looking for, here’s the contact information, you contact that person. Here’s a technology that helps you track when you contact that person, how you contact that person, helps you optimize how you contact that person, and how you contact other people. There’s a company called Crystal Note that even tells you how that person interacts with other people. You download a browser extension and in your inbox, when you go type in somebody’s email address, it will tell you, this person is outgoing, they like the new patriots and they’re interested in whatever, now you have some things to talk about. Marylou:    Right. Max:    There’s all sort of things out there that make your job easier. Small pieces of technology, some are free, some are really cheap, that can help you infinitely and those are all part of your sales stack. Marylou:    Okay. If I were starting out then and didn’t have a sales stack, maybe I have a CRM, or maybe I have access to a marketing automation system of some sort that will help automate or some of the emails or nurture sequences that I have. Besides those two pieces of what I consider core, what’s the very next piece that you would recommend for people to get? Max:    It kind of depends on the business. Marylou:    Okay. Max:    Yeah. If you’re building your business from scratch or if you already have a business and you’re trying to make it better, either way you’re going to want to figure out what your sweet spot is. We write your customer profile is, how they like to interact with people, so whether it’s phone or email or similar ways. There’s a lot of companies there now that help you go out find your ideal customer profile. You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, there’s Metamark, there’s Data Fox, there’s a bunch of companies that will help you find exactly who you should be targeting and what your low hanging fruit is. There’s a company called Node that’s coming out that does something in that area. Come pick sales, come pick intelligence. The next step would be to figure out how those people like to interact. You have email and you have phone. Some of these clients actually do both and optimizing emails or tracking emails. Those companies are in there. I’d say those are probably the most important things. One, getting contact, the right contact information. Two, making sure when you contact them it’s fully optimized. Marylou:    Wow. It’s funny cause I have a client that did a lot of work in IT Advisory. They’re a very large company and they’re coming out with a marketing product similar to the IT world that has all of the tools that marketers could possibly use. They’ve built this gigantic transit map so that if you’re entering from different points in the marketing funnel, there are all these tools that are set up that you can then click on the tool and then it’ll give you information about the tool, pricing range, and then who to contact. Are you developing something similar, Max? Max:    A road map? Marylou:    Yeah. Max:    Yeah. I mean, not really. Marylou:    No. Max:    It’s probably something we can tackle in the next year which would be pretty cool. I’d say it varies so much. One of the key things in sales is that we can sit here and give you all the education in the world but there’s never going to be a silver bullet. One guy’s business is different from another woman’s business. It’s all different. Even a very similar product can still have a very different sales model and both can be right. Marylou:    Yeah. Max:    I don’t know if there’s any kind of road map. There’s obviously a path that can be proven that you can build out and say hey if you follow this, or you should be following this, you should be going in a good direction. Again, like the original Predictable Revenue book, pretty much no matter what your business was if you were hunting, if you’re doing outbound, that was a relevant book. I say relevant, not like just follow this to a tee and you’ll be successful but build your process off this and you should be able to figure your process out through. Here’s a framework to work off of. I wrote my book in a similar fashion with a lot of different technologies included basically saying here’s the framework for how to get there, the concepts, and some tactical advice and technology that you can use but you got to piece it together yourself because nobody knows your business like you. Again, there’s no silver bullet. Marylou:    There’s no silver bullet but I think as you mentioned there are frameworks, systems, maps; at least a general way to get from point A to point B. Max:    Yup. Marylou:    It all comes down to understanding who your buyers are, understanding which accounts and clients are going to bring you the highest revenue potential and the highest likelihood of closing. And then also understanding how they buy. Max:    Yeah. Marylou:    And whether or not you can help to push them along and pull them through the pipeline. I heard you say you read Chet Holmes’s book. He had a lot of statistical information in his book that actually still someone applies today for the outreach, for outbound. I still use his Waterfall as a baseline starting point. Another thing you pointed out is you have to test and you have to continually iterate because there is no perfect plan. You have to be in that mindset that you’re going to continually tweak until you get to a point where you have some consistency in whatever channels you end up going after. Max:    Yup. Marylou:    Very cool. How do people keep up with you, Max? You’re all over the place. What’s the best way for us to follow you? Max:    Yeah. Twitter, I’m on Twitter. LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn. My book comes out at May 31st. I think it will release the second edition of the book. Marylou:    Okay. And the book’s name? Max:    Hacking Sales. Marylou:    And what’s Twitter handle? Max:    Yeah. Twitter is @maxalts, LinkedIn is Max Altschuler. We have our conference on June 15 that we’re conducting with for Sales Force called Sales Machine where we have Gary Vaynerchuk, Arianna Huffington, Fredrik Eklund from Million Dollar Listing, Billy Beane from Money Ball, Seth Godin and Simon Sinek speaking along with I think twenty or so different practitioners in sales operations enablement, customers’ success, and sales leadership. That’ll be fun with them in New York, June 15 and 16. Marylou:    Okay. That is coming up. This will actually air before that comes up. Max:    Great. Marylou:    We’ll make sure that people know where to go. Max:    I’ll give you a special code for everybody. It’s nice discount. Marylou:    That’d be great. That sounds like a great show for sure. Max:    Yeah. Let me go up. Marylou:    Well thank you Max for your time, I really appreciate it. There’s a lot of good learning right now at saleshacker.com. I think I’ve read for 300 of the blog posts that are out there. Max:    Nice. Marylou:    Good materials out there, people. Make sure you’re starting to learn. As you may have gathered from this show, it’s all about continuing your learning process, trying things out. Some may work, some may not but tracking where you’ve been so that you can continually refine and make that pipeline of yours consistent so you can scale it if you want. Thanks again Max, really appreciate your time. Max:    That’s right. Thanks for having me.

 Marylou:    There you are!Stefan:    Amazing. I’m just outside London. Marylou:    Tell me about you. I found you, as you know, through a search. Stefan:    Yep. Marylou:    Cold Calling 2.0 is what I usually search on and you popped up. Tell me what it is that you do and how you serve our audience. Stefan:    The story is very simple where I read the book about, I don’t know, five or six years ago, it must be. I love reading, I love trying to learn new techniques, new ideas, new business skills, etc. Something just resonates about it with me because I’ve got a printing background. I have a family printing business. I had a small team about five to six sales people. I was always just frustrated where they were never caught doing what they said they would and what I wanted them to. Marylou:    Right. Stefan:    I realized that actually the problem was round-peg square holes. They were good at closing deals but they just didn’t want to prospect. They just make any excuse. As soon as we decided we need more clients, get them on the phone. Yeah, yeah okay. They do it for an hour and they go, “Oh, I’ve got to go out and see a client.” They’re gone. They go and see one of their on-going clients for a cup of tea or coffee. Marylou:    Right. Stefan:    Not prospects. I just realized actually the problem was me. I had to learn new skills, I had to put new systems in place. That’s when I started learning as a printer, you’re printing marketing collateral for people all the time but printers, traditionally, in this country anyway, I’ve got pretty bad marketing skills. That’s where I have to change. I have to learn new skills. Predictable Revenue is one of the books that—I did marketing programs, and courses, and seminars, continually learning. Predictable Revenue just resonates with me and we tested it and it worked, amazingly. Then, we started to say, This has got to have—there’s people out there who want this. There’s people using telemarketing agencies and I try telemarketing internally and outsourcing and it’s just— Marylou:    It’s hard. Stefan:    It’s hard as hell. You have to put an awful lot in it, a lot of money, a lot of time, over a long period of time to see if it works. With a commoditized service or product like printing, especially where there’s internet desktop publishing, actually telemarketing printing has declined significantly. It just didn’t work. I want to develop our services and our products, what we did I just lost the love. I’ve been printing all my life and all my dad’s life as well. It just changed. It just wasn’t fun anymore. Whereas actually, working with entrepreneurs of a business, sales directors, help them grow their business, it’s fun, that’s what it says is right. Well I’ve got my printing business called Print Republic and the marketing business is called Marketing Republic. Marylou:    Okay. Stefan:    We help people grow their businesses. We use Cold Calling 2.0 as the foundation of cold service. We did some inbound stuff like social media, we did some other things as well, but our fundamental service is helping become the secret source to our client’s sales teams by providing them highly qualified leads. Marylou:    That’s great. Stefan:    That’s basically the background. It’s fun. I actually really like it because one, I’ve got a great team of people. We’ve run campaigns in 21 countries. We’ve done it in Cantonese, in Mandarin, in Spanish, and Aussie-English as well. We’ve got clients in Iceland, US, India, UK, obviously. It works. It really works. Not for everything, there’s some things, with any prospecting process, you have to take into consideration it’s not the magic answer to everything but with the right proposition to a hungry market, we get results. Marylou:    It’s interesting you say that because just this morning, I got an email from one of my colleagues who is starting to branch out into China, Spain, Germany, Japan. He’s from the UK as well. We all know, or we think we know that there are cultural differences in Europe. France versus Germany versus even UK. I have some clients that are in the UK as well. We have to craft those cold connection emails a little bit differently. We have to really take advantage of studying the culture of each. How have you overcome that? What are the types of things you do when you’re preparing for a cold connection email that is going to be processed through the predictable revenue framework? Stefan:    I think the most important thing with any prospecting is testing. There’s no point to saying, “Cold Calling 2.0 works. Let’s just suddenly go mad and run up a program straightway.” With any marketing campaign, direct mail, telemarketing, anything, you test. Of course, it’s research. When we go live, we want to talk to not just our direct clients, you know the keepers and the director in that business but more importantly the guys on the front line, the sales guys. They’re the guys, the cold face of the sales process, they know their clients, they know their prospects. When we get those guys on board, it’s hard to understand what it’s like for them or what their clients like. The most important thing we ought to do is try and model success. I modeled the Cold Calling 2.0 and with the client’s sales process, we used one module, they’re best clients not just any client. Lots of us have got clients who drive us down on price, cost of service, they’re so demanding. We don’t want those sort of people, really. You got to really think who’s your best client, where do you have maximum value to, people who appreciate that value, how do you model that and profile that and find more. We start small. We start with very small amounts of data, pretty simple emails, we find out what works and then you get feedback throughout the process of firstly the email but also the telephone calls and then you start to understand how people behave, what sort of conversations you have. It’s all part of that learning loop, really. You’ve got to make sure it’s really important to know what happens after you’ve handed a lead over to our client’s sales team. We want to know is it successful or is it bad, is it a poor lead? Because we don’t want to be blindly carrying on prospects. It goes for an internal team or whether an outsource provider will ask. You need to know what’s happened off the hand over to the sales team. If it’s converting quickly into a lead, you do more of that. If it’s really not, it’s a bad lead, find out what’s wrong with it and if you can change that, I think that’s the key for us, always learning and always refining that process. Once you have got it right, you then scale it up. You never take it for granted, you’ve got to keep testing all the time. Marylou:    Another thing too is that when people read that book, they immediately think instant success. A lot of times, the struggle that I have working with clients, there’s a crawl, a walk, and a run. It’s what I call stages and Aaron used to say this as well, that we could hit a home run right out the gate but it could be a one hit wonder. You know what I’m saying? What do you find on average, I know this is kind of a loaded question, it’s really based on probably the up market or wherever you sit. What do you find as a typical ramp from a crawl to a walk stage where you’re actually starting to see some consistency but it’s still not quite there? Stefan:    This is the golden question that everyone of our prospects asks us. How many leads can I expect from a campaign? I always turn it around to say what are you doing now, how effective is that, how many leads you’re generating from that activity. I at least expect to match that if not improve on it with a systemized approach. It’s all about how much effort you put into it, how consistent you are with that system and what your marketplace is like. We’re not just doing it for our own business, we’re doing it for a whole range of different services and products and clients, everyone is different. Some clients, we’re generating a new lead every single day, qualified lead every single day. Other clients, they’re happy with one a month because it’s worth four, five, six, seven figures to those people and the lifetime value is excellent. If they find one new lead a month and convert one in two, one in three is where whatever, half a million, a million or more. That’s a good return on investment. If you’re selling something for four figures, you probably want more than that. But again, if you’re selling to market place that has a real apathy about your product and service, whatever the system you use, it’s really hard to generate massive results because if people aren’t hungry for it, there’s no demand, it’s commoditized or whatever it is, it’s really difficult to do. I think typically, one team properly with a consultative sale, high value, we’re looking somewhere between five to fifteen opportunities a month. That kind of range. A good month is five to fifteen, an average is probably seven to eight of what we’re wanting. That’s from our top clients, the people we’ve worked with. They’ve got that high value, consultative sales process and process services. Marylou:    That was what the book was designed on. The waterfall for the book—I still use the same waterfall even though the book was released in 2011, written by 2009 so it’s really outdated. I still use the waterfall from that book which is very simple. It’s 50 emails a day per SDR, 250 emails a week. Of those, we have 100 conversations, meaningful conversations. What I mean by that is if you’re driving down a highway, a meaningful conversation means you move to the next mile marker or out, you exit off the freeway. That’s a meaningful conversation, you’ve learned some things. We want 100 of those. Of those, we get 10 to 15 to go through our disqualification or discovery call and then of those 8 to 10 move to a sales qualified lead status or SQL we call here in States. Stefan:    Same here. Marylou:    Same there? Okay. Then, like you said, the hand off is so important because we have this metric that is SQL to SAL which is Sales Accepted Lead. It sounds like you already covered that because one of the things that I see a lot is we’re off prospecting, doing our thing, but then when it gets to sales, they don’t accept the leads. Our goal is somewhere in the 90% to 95% acceptance but I’ve worked with some clients that was down to 40% range. Stefan:    Really? Marylou:    Big disconnect. Yeah. Big disconnect. Some of it is culture, some of it is the sales reps in the field want close business. They just want to go out and close it. Some of these leads have to be worked as if they’re starting from scratch but we have the connection. The cold connection is now warm, they have a need, we’ve used some type of disqualification criteria but there is still disconnect. The SQL, the SAL which we don’t talk about in the book is something that is really very important for us here because that drives predictability like you said, going all the way to close, close one. Stefan:    I completely agree. The clients we’ve worked with, they’ve got a problem. Their sales team need more leads. The good thing is the hand overs, they’re actually grateful and eager to take those leads on because for those guys, that’s what they want. I think there’s always that learning curve with any campaign to understand what a good lead, and what an SQL looks like. It’s not black and white always. When you’re selling to large organizations, large corporates, you don’t phone them up and say, “I’ve got this amazing product, I’ll send you over an order form.” It just doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t. It could be our client sales process vary from three months minimum probably up to two years. I always say my job task was Chief Conversation Starter because that is what my business does, we start conversations. Marylou:    Hey, you stole that from me. Stefan:    I did. I did steal it from you. That’s exactly what I did because it is absolutely true. Marylou:    It is true. Stefan:    That’s what we’re about. You don’t close deals over the phone, there’s sort of process. We start conversations. I absolutely thought, “My god, that sums it up in three words. We start conversations.” That is what this process is all about. I think that is what people get once we explain it to them. When you’re handing over that lead, you’ve just started a conversation, you qualified, and sometimes we have email responses that don’t respond for three or four weeks and then all of a sudden you get an email back or they don’t respond through anything a cold email or anything. Out of the blue, you get an email back and you can see the trail where it’s going around the business and it’s a senior person that says, “We’re ready to talk to you, when can we meet?” It’s like, “Wow, we haven’t even spoken to these guys, they haven’t respond or anything.” I always say to our clients, we’re in the interruption business, we’re ready to speak to those prospects right now. Doesn’t mean they’re a bad fit if they don’t respond, it just means they’re not ready. You can’t force them to be ready now if they’re not ready. They don’t want to speak. It doesn’t mean that you don’t persevere. At the right time as long as you’re still persevering to chase that lead with that prospect when they’re ready, they’re ready. You can’t make it happen, these guys are busy. When you’re selling a high level, you really do get engagements with Cold Calling 2.0 but only when they’re ready to do it and that’s the whole point. Marylou:    Exactly. I think, like you said, there’s breadcrumbs that we leave. One of the things that I like to share with clients initially is you’re going to see a spike or a little bit of a lift in inbound because we’re reaching out to these people. We are resonating with some people but they may not reply back but all of a sudden you’ll see them on the website poking around or they fill out a form or they download a white paper. All of that can be attributed to the outreach cold connections because they all of a sudden are waking up out of their sleep. Stefan:    You’re putting yourself on their horizon, aren’t you? That’s the thing. They might never have heard of you before but if you keep that gentle poke every now and then, “Oh yeah, I recognize that.” All of a sudden they start investigating. Some people don’t like to have sales to call them up. They like to do their own research before they take a call or respond. They like to make sure it is a good fit and they’re not wasting their time. That’s how it works sometimes. Marylou:    One of the things that’s really frustrating sometimes for me is this overwhelming sort of massive let’s just do inbound. The problem with that is there are five levels of awareness. Inbound really deals with interested people that are aware of a solution to their problem and then also people that are ready to engage. But, there are three other levels that when we’re doing our outreach programs, we’re working with those three levels which is the unaware level, they don’t have a clue, they don’t know they’re not happy. You have to kind of wake them up out their stupor and say, “Yes, this is a problem and you should be aware of this.” Then you have those people, it’s like you open the refrigerator door at night, you know you’re hungry but you’re not quite sure what’s going to solve the hunger. Stefan:    I know the feeling. Marylou:    That’s also our domain. That’s also where we say, “Here, this is a really great cheesecake sitting right here that you absolutely have to have.” I think that it’s a disservice when you put all of the eggs in one basket and not—outreach doesn’t work for everybody. But when it’s blended with all these other mechanisms, even direct mail in the States now, we’re sending postcards out again. Why? Because it’s a novelty for people to get a postcard. We embed it into our outreach streams. We do postcard, then we make a follow up with a phone call or an email but it’s in a sequence, it’s in a good rhythm. We experiment with everything like that because we don’t know what’s going to resonate with our clients, intended clients. Stefan:    I totally agree because—it’s a novelty, like you say, from a printing background. DM was a huge part of my business, we have millions of printed DM. All of a sudden, it kind of went off a cliff primarily because our clients are financial services and the crash, they kind of stopped. That’s when we look at other ways of doing it but it’s definitely coming back. We’re seeing an interest in DM from clients as well but integrated campaign and those things of the same entry. You’re right with the inbound thing. I have this conversation we’ve got inbound campaigns going on. For me, that works very well for some people. The trouble is you don’t know, apart from paying traffic, you don’t know who is visiting your site. They could be your best ever client or it could be someone who’s just browsing, they’re never going to buy but they’re interested in what you do. You can’t always determine what it is. With an outbound campaign, you’re defining who it is you’re reaching out to. You’re profiling them and it is much more targeted. You might get a million businesses on your website but if no one buys, it’s just ego. I’d rather be having ten conversations with really good prospects than have a million people on the website with no sales. Marylou:    That’s what I describe as minnows versus whales. In the book we call it Recast the Wide Net and your reaching out but you’re going to get a lot of babies in with the big fish. Outreach is all about targeting the accounts in that quadrant—I don’t remember in the book, but it’s the highest probability of closing with the highest revenue potential for you. That’s what we’re going after and we have to—but we have to be respectful of where they are like you said. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll talk to you but our job is to continually ping them with relevant content and relevant messages that get them sort of leaning in, thinking this might be something that I could use or that I need. We keep after them in a way as Aaron used to describe as patiently persistent. Stefan:    That’s sales, isn’t it? That is the ought of sales. Marylou:    Yeah. Stefan:    To have results, you have to be persistent. So many salespeople give up after I don’t remember the stats but it’s after I think two or three. Marylou:    Two or three. Stefan:    If you keep going 8, 9, 10, the odds are converting, great increase. Marylou:    Definitely. Stefan:    It’s the perseverance.  That’s the pain we solve for our clients where if you go to sales team they’re prospecting, they’re trying to close those deals all they’re doing that, the prospect then jumps off a cliff and they close deals then they start again. Whereas we provide the source where they’re consistently prospecting all the time. The sales team are just focusing on closing deals. We keep replenishing that pipeline all the time. Marylou:    The separation of roles is one of the main principles of the book. Not everybody can do it. Smaller companies may have just two sales people. What we try to get them doing is let’s get in a rhythm. Tuesdays and Fridays, or whatever day, Tuesdays and Thursdays, let’s take the two-hour block time and that’s our prospecting time. We close out all distractions so that we’re just prospecting. As soon as we can, we move to a separated model but sometimes they don’t have the luxury of that especially in the startup community where they’re just struggling to get a team together. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that but on the smaller guys, we start them off, if there’s one guy we start them off with half of the time prospecting or we look at the balance of what they should do. The other thing too for us now is the focus on account selling, account-based selling where AEs, account executives, have their top 20 accounts, top 10 accounts whatever it is. We teach them how to sort of partition their day so that they are doing prospecting into those larger accounts as well. The model has sort of been morphed and hybridized all over the place. Stefan:    Completely. Marylou:    At the core of it is we’ve got to set the time for prospecting. We call block time and you got to do it consistently because that reduces that peak and valley of the pipeline. Stefan:    I think the mistake that I made in my printing business was that hiring what I thought are expensive, experienced, capable salespeople, that was sales tied up. Actually, the realization wins specialization in roles is absolutely crucial. Now as you say, most sales people can prospect but once you’re established and you’re at a certain level, I think, in my experience personally and the clients we’ve talked to, those guys kind of don’t want to go back to doing that, it’s going to credibility and I did that when I was starting out. Marylou:    Junior. Stefan:    It’s a junior role. Now I’m just dealing out with it. I’m selling the big deals. Whereas there’s nothing inferior about prospecting or beneath people. It’s equally as important as closing deals. It’s just the mindset I think, but it’s just fine as long as there is a consistency and the dedication to that process. Process is the absolute crucial factor for me because it’s so easy. We say it all the time, I’ll give you an example where we had a client who about a year before we started working with them, we are at contract stage, the day before we’re supposed to go live waiting for the contract. The Marketing Director called me up and said, “I’m really sorry Stefan, we see poor plug us on this deal.” He wants to bring in-house. Okay fine, this stuff happens. What they did was a classic thing where they hired two telemarketing people. They bought a list, they wrote a script and then they left them to it. Nine months later, he called me up and said, “That contract, I still got in my desk. Is it still available?” Yeah, it is. He said, “Why?” I said, “Well, we did have two people for nine months, not the same people. One left, one had to be replaced, one got fired. But after nine months, I haven’t created a single opportunity.” The perception was it was cheaper and better skills are bring in house instead of outsourcing. Very quickly, we we’re 80%, 90% of their pipeline just because we had a proven process. We worked with them for about 12 to 15 months. It was amazing. Nine months of the course of two people without a single opportunity. It was transformed in a couple months really. Marylou:    It’s a great story. Stefan:    It wasn’t his decision. He was sort of that it was going ahead but the CEO pulled rank I guess but proven to be wrong and was brave enough to go actually wrong source it. We must re-help transform the business. Marylou:    Those of you who are listening to this broadcast, the framework, the sales process framework that’s Predictable Revenue and soon to be the book that I’ll be releasing called Predictable Prospecting, but it is a model that can be outsourced or in-housed. Here, Stefan is talking about an outsource model that works really well. Stefan:    It really does. We speak to people all the time and then some people just want to do an in house. I’m fine with that. It’s one of the works individual business. I want to take on clients who really wants to use our services. They want to do in house, they want to stick to what they’re best at. That way, we’ll be closing deals. They just don’t want the aggravation of sourcing data, creating emails, contents, following up and being persistent and consistent at that. They just want to close deals. That’s where we come in. I don’t mind, as long as businesses are doing an element of each part of the sales process to get results, that’s the important factor for me. I don’t want to take anyone’s business for people who don’t want to value it. It’s important to decide what is right for each individual business. It’s more than feasible to do this in house. You just have to be dedicated to it and learn, and have the right skills, set the right management to get better at it because you don’t hit the ground running day one, it can take time. You have to have the skill set internally to monitor what’s happening with every email on the sequence, response rates, what’s happening and how to refine that, how’d you come up with an idea to make it better. Once it gets on telephone, it’s all the same thing. That’s the important thing. You don’t just say, right I’ll use this process, we will buy data, we’ll write emails and off you go, it’s done. It’s an ongoing learning and that’s the important factor. If it is in house, those daily analytics of understanding what is going on in your prospecting, over time it does become predictable. I see you try and predict that predictability as well but ultimately, this room wasn’t built in a day with the prospect in processing. It doesn’t just happen. As you say, sometimes you come out the blocks 100 miles an hour, you’ll already amazed. You get results quickly, a lot of time you can take from anywhere between one weekend to six months to really get it right. Marylou:    Right. I usually say three months because we go through an assemble process and a lot of that is finding out why we matter in life. Those discussions are tough. Why change? Why should people change? Why change now? And why you? We go through it. I have now a 28 step processes that I get people on board which is an assemble process and activation process and optimization which is really necessary in order to continue to build consistency in your lead generation whatever framework you’re going to be using. I think that three months is a good time. We certainly have done it faster and we’ve certainly taken longer to do it but three months is like a number. 90 days if they’re very committed to working through the assemble piece then we have a good shot. Stefan:    All our contracts start with a 3-month term. Whatever process you use, there’s still the individual elements of it that you have to test to get right. If someone’s doing in house already and then you outsource it using that knowledge, of course it hits the ground quicker. But if you’re starting from scratch, I will say three months because it’s exactly the same as you because it really does take that time sometimes to get it right. Even then, it can sometimes take longer. It’s not a clock. It doesn’t suddenly get all three of us and you’ve got magic. It’s an ongoing process. Sometimes you almost don’t know you’ve hit it because you’re just working continually to make things better but you start looking at the trends, that’s when you can start seeing this is the parameters that we’re working to. Then you know. Marylou:    Perfect. If I am looking to have a service put in to my company like yours, how do I reach you? What’s the best way for us to get a hold of you? Stefan:    Well, Marketing Republic, just Google that, you’ll find us or my name is Stefan Boyle, on Twitter @mktgrepublic, YouTube find me on there, Instagram, kind of a bit everywhere, you have to be. Marylou:    You do. Stefan:    Google Marketing Republic and we come straight out. Marylou:    LinkedIn. You’re on LinkedIn. Stefan:    Find me on LinkedIn. Definitely, yes. We actually use similar principles of Cold Calling 2.0 on LinkedIn as well. Marylou:    Yeah, I do too. I have a whole process in place for clients and that’s what we’re talking before about the sales reps, the AEs. Instead of calling it prospecting, I call it networking. That seems to resonate better with them but it’s a process of building your network on LinkedIn but it is at the heart of it, prospecting, it’s Cold Calling, it’s the ability to start conversations with people we don’t know. Stefan:    What’s really interesting I find because it’s really deemed to be as a networking site is that people still use the same principles as anything social media, is the business social media platform but they’d launch into it sometimes. I get messages all the time from SEO companies, outsourcers where I’ve no idea who they are. The first message is an absolute essay, a thousand words, I don’t know even know who you are. Apply the same principles to reaching out, building relationships, engaging with those people, almost exactly the same principles of Cold Calling 2.0 on LinkedIn as the same as we do we’re building LinkedIn into our client campaigns as well. Marylou:    That’s great. Stefan:    Dual approach. Marylou:    Well thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed speaking with you about this and I think everybody is going to learn a lot from this Cold Call. Stefan:    I hope so. Thank you. It’s really nice to speak to you. Marylou:    Thank you too. Buh-bye. Stefan:    Okay, buh-bye now.