Sales automation tools can help at all kinds of different places in the funnel. Prospect.io is a sales automation platform that helps you start conversations and improve sales teams productivity. Today’s guests, Forster Perelsztejn and Iulian Boia are Prospect’s Head of Acquisition and Head of Customer Success respectively. They’re joining today’s episode from Brussels.

Listen to today’s episode to learn more about Prospect.io, who they serve, and how their platform works. Forster and Iulian talk about their roles at Prospect, patterns in customer pain points, how onboarding works, and how the GDPR is affecting their work and platform.

Episode Highlights:

• Forster and Iulian’s roles at Prospect
• How Forster and Iulian’s roles at Prospect are aligned
• How customer pain points change or don’t change depending on where they are in the funnel
• How to order customer conversations based on experience with previous customers’ pain points
• The market that Prospect serves
• Prospect’s onboarding procedure
• What kind of work Prospect is doing with telephone numbers in light of the GDPR
• How Prospect is using analytics with their data
• Testing smaller samples sizes before moving onto larger audiences

Resources:

Prospect.io

Forster Perelsztejn

Iulian Boia

Full Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guests are from Brussels. I’m so excited. I have Forster and Iulian for Prospect.io. Iulian is in charge of customer success and Forster is customer acquisition for Prospect.io. So tell us about what it is that you do in those two areas. Are they aligned or are you separate entities within the company?

Forster: Well that’s a good question. They are separate but they are aligned in that. I am in charge of bringing customers into the company and Iulian is in charge of making sure they get the most value out of the product and ultimately stay with us. They are aligned in that, I’m not going to get him customer that are not qualified or that he did not work with.

Marylou: He is responsible then for making sure that they are long time clients of yours and I’m sure the feedback into what makes up a really great client for Prospect.io comes out at the work that you do Iulian, correct?

Iulian: Indeed. We work closely together I would say. So we try to align both on campaigns. We give feedback on the messaging. We run different ads and different methods of acquisition. So yeah, we try to work together. There’s always a feedback loop. So if I noticed that there’s a specific segment of customers coming from one of our competitor then of course, I bounce that back to Forster and he takes into account and we try to work more on that. We always try to align to make sure that we get the right customers, the ones that we can serve better.

Marylou: A big thing that I’m working on now with my clients is a notion of––once we’re working on getting a prospect to become a client, there are conversations what I call the sales conversation canvass where we’re having a number of different conversations at a relative position in the pipeline. We may be discussing particular pain points or themes through that conversation that eventually bubble up to the top as a high sense of urgency.

One of the issues that I’m seeing is that we’re having these conversations from a prospecting point of view but we don’t necessarily record what pain points are resonating so that when they get to become a client and you start working with them, it would be interesting to see, do these pain points that we start the conversation with also end up being resolved from a customer success point of view at the end when they become a client? Is it the same pain point that propagates throughout or is it ebbing and flowing depending on where they are in the pipeline?

And then the second question I have is, are those being recorded so that we can then take the order in which these pains are happening and their hot buttons associated with it and make sure that our nurture campaigns and future campaigns are ordered in the same fashion. So I’m curious, once you acquire a customer and you’re working with them now Iulian in customer success, are these pain points being recorded as to how you’re resolving them and if so, are you ordering any future conversations with new prospects in that order?

Iulian: Yeah. What I’ve noticed is that while I’m doing these onboarding calls with new customers, you do see the same things popping up over and over. So basically, when you get the same type of feedback, it’s usually about integrations from Prospect.io to different CRM tools. So whenever I get that stuff, first I pass it on to the product team and then of course it also reaches Forster in terms of acquisition. So we try to align with that.

That’s what I mentioned in the beginning. Whenever I hear something interesting, I make sure that I pass it on to the product team and to Forster as well so we can use that further. But then what I’ve noticed is that it’s quite repetitive. I just hear something once, I typically ignore it. But if you come back over and over again then indeed, I know it’s something valuable and maybe we should act.

Forster: The products we sell has a pretty short cycle so when I have a sense of the most important issues of our prospects and customers, conversations are usually pretty short and I actually try to scale as much as possible everything that touches to acquisition. In our case, conversation tend to be pretty short and customers can just try it out and have their money back if they’re not satisfied. In the meantime, most of the feedback will come to Iulian when he’s doing the onboarding calls and working on customer success.

Most of the feedback comes after the sale or in the few conversations we have before where people ask us question before they sign up. Actually, most of the feedback we get in and most of the pain points are after the sale is made because it’s generally the same pain points that come back over and over again. So that I assume that I already know most of what’s going to come out and I focus on that when I run campaigns.

Marylou: So tell us a little bit about Prospect.io. What market do you serve and what is your business process to onboard people.

Forster: So Prospect.io is a platform that aims at making prospecting easier and faster by taking the dull and tedious aspects of prospecting, taking them and help automating them so sales people can focus on what actually matters which is having conversation. Yeah, so Prospect.io is based on four main access that we think are paramount to this. The first one is list building, the second one is out of reach, the third one is analytics and the fourth one is integration.

So to keep it simple, list building is more about finding new prospects, finding their data. We have an extension that can help you find prospect’s contact data whether you’re on LinkedIn or on the company website or if you have none of it, you can just type in the first name, last name and company name and we will return an email address. You can upload your own list of prospects which works as well and we will verify the email address is valid. Because as you may know, data tends to expire pretty fast at the moment. So that’s the first aspect of the products. It’s building quality lists for deliverable emails down the line.

What’s important is when you have that list, you can reach out to prospects. We have cold emailing tool that allows you not only to have various steps programs but also to set up notifications to remind you to call that prospect or send them a message on LinkedIn which helps blend cold emailing into a more multi-channel approach if that’s what our customers are doing. We try to make our tool as personalizable as possible so that you can make the most of all the information and the research we’ve made on your prospects based on location, on their interest and everything that’s relevant to you actually.

One thing that are very good with analytics tool that allows you to, at the same time, I don’t really analyze each step of every campaign you send which led to some epiphanies among our customers. I think they realized that most of their responses came between the second and the fourth email and not in the first one. It is important because the insight you have from a campaign is almost as important as the campaign itself.

Also on the analytics side, we have a pretty cool reporting tool that gives like a general overview of the accounts where the CEO or the sales leader in general can take a look and really quickly see how the team is performing as a whole or each individual team member. Yes, so that’s for the analytics part. And also, budgeting is very important in this world and as a SaaS company, we use a bunch of tools. So our fourth access is integration. We want our customers to be able to use our tool in combination with all the other tools for CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, or HubSpot CRM. So they can combine our tool with theirs. We try to have as many quality integrations, natives or through Zapier so they can combine and have a good sales deck.

Marylou: A nice seamless desktop is what you’re talking about. From finding a prospect, working the prospect and then analyzing your activity. It sounds like you’ve integrated that whole experience for the sales rep.

Iulian: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And that’s one of our big differentiators on the market actually. There’s lots of tools who are not just doing lead generation or there’s lots of tools nowadays for cold email campaigns or for Outreach. What I’ve noticed and that’s also my experience as a sales guy, I hate switching between a lot of screens. You have lots of tabs open because you have a CRM system, you have a separate app for lead scoring and then you have another tool for research. So yeah, we try to bring as much as possible into one tool and keep it simple at the same time. It’s not always easy, but that’s the goal.

Marylou: Indeed. I’m really interested in the list portion of your framework. I know you mentioned upfront that you find and verify email addresses. What kind of work are you doing with telephone numbers. And the reason why I ask that is we all know GDPR is a new I think it was May 28, everybody had to convert over from a privacy perspective. It’s mostly impacting Europe but it’s going to be here any day now for US.

This is going to impact us because we got lazy and email, cold emails go out to people if we find their address but at some point in life, we’re going to be restricted. So I’m curious on that side of what you do the prospecting piece of the list build. Tell me about the phone numbers and what happens there.

Iulian: Indeed we started with that as well and we have this feature in the extension so in the tool that we use for finding contact information. But so far yeah, we have to be honest, we were still mostly focusing on finding company data and email. I think it’s just a small percentage of the contacts that we find phone numbers for. We started in that direction and there’s a long way to go.

Marylou: Long way to go, it’s tough and I think going back to the olden days when I started 30 years ago doing lead generation, all we have is phone numbers and we had direct mail. We didn’t have the internet yet. So we had the same issue trying to find a direct dial is really tough. We got a lot of 800 numbers, front desk numbers. But at some point, people are going to have to wake up and realize that email is not going to be the way to conduct business if we don’t have verified email addresses or permission to use. So a lot of the spamming that’s currently happening is going to go away very quickly. Those tools that have a phone number portion or at least try to get that piece of it to help with the sequence that you put together is going to be a real plus. So tell me about a typical client who would use Prospect.io. What are the characteristics of an ideal client for you guys?

Iulian: So it’s typically other SaaS companies. So they’re selling digital services, digital products. I think we would get our best to companies between let’s say three and something like 20 or 25 sales people, smaller sales organizations and then when it comes to profiles indeed, the best performing customers have SDR team already. So even if it’s a small sales team, they started implementing the specialized sales roles, so that’s important.

In terms of industries, most of our customers are based in the US. I think something like 60% US and Canada and then we serve the biggest markets here in Europe as well, the UK, Germany, France that’s pretty much in a nutshell. I wanted to come back to what you said earlier about using phone calls and using a multi-panel approach, indeed I see that a lot.

Our most successful customers, they’re also into social selling as well. I see that more and more as a trend especially after GDPR came into practice. Our successful customers are using LinkedIn. So sending invites, sending connection request before sending the first cold email. They’re using mutual connections that you might have on LinkedIn. You reference all of that when you try to get in touch with someone and after that, you send the cold emailing.

Typically, the reaction is much better. So I also saw that you had a couple of other people talking about social selling on your podcast. I think that’s really valuable information. If you use that in conjunction with phone calls, in conjunction with some new hot things that I see like embedding videos, small personalized videos in your old sequences, that works better. You need to use a lot of different tactics. It doesn’t just work with cold emails or cold phone calls anymore I’d say.

Marylou: I love that you’re saying this because yes, the more blended and the more different the sequence is in terms of the rhythm and the cadence of that sequence as well as the channels that you’re using for that Outreach is really important. We’ve got a couple of small tests here with video and actually found that it increased improvement. And you mentioned emails too somewhere in the beginning of this talk and what we discovered is that if you put the video on email number one, you don’t get as big of a response rate as if you move it to two or three. Two worked the best for us.

I got personally a 40% response rate for an invite to a workshop that I was doing. Now granted it’s not selling something other than the invite to the workshop, but it was really great to see that the video performed so well. Now tell me Iulian, on the customer success site. Obviously with this blended approach, there’s a lot of confusion over these types of things like when do I email, when do I use the phone, how many touches should I get, should I blend in social. Is part of your work in customer success looking at helping your clients try different things, test different things since you have the analytics in place, are you encouraging them to utilize your services from a customer success point of view to make sure that they are constantly learning about the differences in sequences in cadences, is that part of the work that you’re doing there?

Iulian: Yeah, absolutely. So it depends because we have different types of customers from solopreneurs, from the people who have just a startup idea of a product that’s already live on the market let’s say. They do sales on a constant basis. So then in that case, I just go into more general stuff. I try to show them how to set up a process and hopefully, they would afford to hire their first sales person soon enough so they have some consistency in that direction.

I’m also talking to more mature organizations where there is a sales development team in place that did have a very good process. In that case, we just bring some different approaches, different ideas. So it really depends on a customer-to-customer basis. But one cool thing that we try to do is we have this blog that Forster started just over a year ago. There’s a lot of information. Whenever you have some interesting experiences with customers, we try to write a case study and there’s also a sales course, cold email course that Forster started and that’s a free resource for our users.

So basically when I see that there’s someone who just needs basic information or trying to just start with their sales process using our tool, I basically refer them to the blog called cold email course and that helps a lot. In some other cases where the team are already more advanced, then of course we try to provide more value at it or more advanced knowledge there.

Marylou: That’s great. Now, let’s go to the analytics side of things. Are you aggregating the data from your clients that you can then give them an idea of the flow and the rhythm of the cadence as well? I’m just curious if since you’re offering a solution that’s Cloud based that’s correct, right? It’s a cloud based solution. So you’re collecting all these data points along the way of looking at response rates, open rates, click through rates, are you producing any type of documentation to give us a jumpstart? I realize it’s kind of hard to do that because we’re not usually segmenting it by industry but I’m just curious if you have been starting to collect that to give us an overall picture of when is the best time to call, the best time to email, the best time to do social based on the results that you’re finding.

Forster: Actually we do segment by industry.

Marylou: Good, even better.

Forster: Just to where the sense of where they stand compared to the rest of their industry. The more customers we get, the more accurate we can be in that area. We do get everything. I made a blog post a few months ago where I kind of am getting the data and figured out some best times to write and some—I mean how many emails you should send. But in the end it always comes down to customer-to-customer. It always differs, it depends on your sales cycle on its length and on the frequency of the various touch points you have.

I really don’t like to say, okay, you should email at that moment you should send me emails and not more or your subject line should be that many characters long. It always depends. I do the data because I was just interested in looking into it to see if I could just see some trends and I thought it was interesting for our customers and everyone interested to look at them. So I just published the results but I still said don’t take that into account too much or don’t apply blindly to see if it makes sense to you, if you find yourself in that.

What’s more interesting in terms of analytics is for every campaign you can see how many email opens, how many responses and click throughs. You can see it for every email and so you can have a sense of how you generally performed on the first email, how you generally performed on the second one and you can start various campaigns and actually compare the results from one campaign to another.

Iulian: Yeah and then I just wanted to add that what’s also interesting in the product and I would say a fresh feature is that especially for the people who are just getting started with sales prospecting. You look at your data, so we look at the results for each campaign and then we compare it to the average. On the right side of the screen, you’ll see some tips. So if we see for instance that, I don’t know, let’s say the average open rate is something like 45% or 50% and we see you’re way below that. You’re at 30%, you would see some tips included in the tool.

We try to help people. In the results of a each campaign, you have some things that would guide you along. If we see that you have a high bounce rate, there are some settings you can do. If we see that you just use one or two steps in your campaign then we’d tell you, “Our most successful customers have between three and five emails.” We like to use technology and the data that we have to work on that. It’s still in the beginning, it’s still in the initial phase but I think it’s a good start for a lot of people who are just starting with this. These tips are quite useful.

Marylou: To your point Forster, I agree. Data can be dangerous because if people are lazy, they’re going to follow the data that you presented as the gospel. That is not the point here. The point here is the fact that you are reporting on certain indexes, certain metrics that we need to be aware of. Yes, we’re going to have our own baseline, our own benchmarks but if we’re not savvy to know what is important to track or what is important to look at, then it’s a big waste of time for us because we’re just not looking at the right data to make actionable decisions. So I do love the fact that you’ve posted the results. But yes, I mean world out there, do not think that these are the results for you these are just the results of the data that happens to be in the data set that they’re aggregating.

But it’s really cool to see which different things from an awareness perspective that you may want to try in your own business. If you’re coming at this as a newbie, it’s overwhelming to try to figure out where do I begin? Where do I start? I think that’s what these data sets are good for and the analytics behind it is giving you some kind of guidelines as to the journey. what’s the success path overall not that I’m going to follow it because it may be different for me and I need to recognize that it’s different for me but look at this, they have data points that I can at least aspire to.

Forster: When I saw the data, I tried to interpret it. This is what it looks like and this is what it looks like for customers because of this random reason. For example why long subject lines might work is because yeah it’s long but if you get specific, your emails will get opened. I was surprised to see that very short subject lines and very long subject lines have the best results and that one’s between 30 and 45 characters.

It was important for me to say, hey, it’s very short and very long words because very short catches the eye quickly and very long works because it’s very specific. But it doesn’t mean that you should not have a mid side subject line, it just means that as always, relevance is everything. I think that if you’re a newbie, it can help you make sense of it and you can get something out of it even if you’re not going to use the data as a guide. You can use the interpretation that comes from it.

Marylou: You could use the logic from it and then the big overarching concept here people is test. Testing is going to help you more than anything else and apply the simple statistically relevant sampling theories. Don’t just do two records and say it didn’t work. You got to do a certain amount of records and there are distributions that tell us how many records will give us a confidence rate.

I’ve posted from direct mail those confidence rate numbers over and over again so you just have to make sure that you reach that sampling in order to decide, “Yup, this works.” Or “No, that was not working for us at all.”

Forster: Yeah, I would totally recommend our customers use certain techniques on various smaller groups so they can find what works best for them in their market. Then go for bigger groups of prospects. I would like to say test and then invest.

Marylou: There you go. I am with you on that and I go as low as 30 records in case you guys are wondering out there in the world. It’s called the Z Distribution. It’s just looking at a smaller data set, the margin of error is going to be wider so think of a bell curve but have it stretched out. That’s the margin of error. But still, 30 records is doable for a lot of people. Actually when I teach class, my students have to bring 30 records with them to class that they’re going to test while we’re working through the concepts of predictable prospecting.

They have to actually work live records and 30 is the number. So just so you know, it can get as low as that and then as high as in the thousands but as you guys said, test on a smaller sample and then invest in the larger sample once you’ve validated the smaller sampling size is giving you the acceptable margin of error that you’re looking for. Some people like to go 90%, some 95%, some less, it’s totally up to you in your industry.

Forster: Yeah, absolutely. We have some customers who have campaigns where they reach out to a few thousand of prospect at the same time. In that case, testing on smaller audiences can save you a lot of hassle and a lot of disappointment.

Marylou: Indeed. Well, we’re kind of running out of time so I wanted to make sure that the audience knows that we’ll put the blog information. It sounds like there’s some great information in there to get started. So if you’re thinking of pulling the trigger on this type of Outreach tool, recommend it. just think about when you start getting into this, let’s just do the simple math, you have eight touches, eight to 10 touches you decide you’re going to use in a campaign. If you have to keep track of all that manually, it’s like spinning plates at a carnival. You need your hand, your head, your toes trying to figure out where your members are in that sequence. And remember, it’s not just one membership going from one to eight as far as touches. You start with email number one for your first group of members and then the next week, you’re going to probably start a new group of members with email number one.

So now you have to remember two groups and then three groups and then four groups. so automation in using these tools is the way to go for follow up, to be consistent and also as they were saying, you can analyze anything about the email itself whether they’re getting opened, your click through rates on the assets, the content assets that you’re using to convince people to advance to a conversation with you and then of course the response rates of whether or not people are replying to your emails. Thank you both so much for attending today. It’s so great that you’re able to contact us from all the way from Brussels. By the way truffles in Brussels if any of you are foodies, the best ever. Wonderful, thanks again guys.

Forster: Thank you.

Iulian: Have a great day.

Making a sale is rarely a one-and-done encounter. Instead, it’s an ongoing process and a series of conversations, sometimes with multiple different people. In order to sell effectively, you need to be able to keep up with important details about each prospect, including what your last conversation entailed and when is the best time to schedule the next call or email. This can be a daunting task, but tools that allow you to streamline the process can help.

Outreach.io is one of those tools. Outreach is designed to help salespeople remember critical details and schedule ongoing conversations. Today’s guest is Nick Hart, the customer success manager at Outreach.io. Listen to the episode to hear what Nick has to say about what’s happening at Outreach and what he thinks about things like email personalization, referral strategies, and building and testing your processes before you implement new sales tools.

Episode Highlights:

• New things that are happening at Outreach.io
• Key things to look at for people who are looking for a solution like Outreach
• Understanding the different personas that you may be selling to
• How to approach sales from different channels
• Email personalization
• Referrals, and the benefits of a top-down referral approach
• Why it’s important to test and experiment with your processes
• The importance of providing value with each interaction
• Why you need to build the processes that work for you before implementing a new tool
• Why understanding and mastering tech tools for sales is going to be more important as time goes on
• How marketing professionals can help pave the way for the sales team

Resources:

Nick Hart

Outreach

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, we are coming to you sort of like live. I’m sitting right across from Nick hart. He’s the customer success manager at Outreach.io. I’m in Seattle having this fabulous conversation. We’ve been talking back and forth and realized, “We should probably tape this.” We’re going to go quickly pass it over to Nick, have him introduce himself and what he wants to talk about today, and then we’re going to just dive right in.

We have selected three topics we thought would be of interest and it’s based on his experience here with Outreach. They’re going strong. They have 300 people and a big building now when I walked in which is kind of cool. Without further ado, Nick welcome to the show.

Nick: Thanks, Marylou, thanks for having me. It’s good to be on the podcast again.

Marylou: Tell us what’s happening. What’s new in the land of Outreach?

Nick: I’ve just came off a strong Dreamforce week which is actually really cool because I got to go last year. It’s great to see that this space is now being validated. I noticed I get to spend a lot of time at our booth and just have people come by and say, “Oh, we know what Outreach is, we’ve heard about you. We just implemented you.” that’s really cool recognition to be able to see that from last year to this year.

Marylou: Well I tell you, we’ve always needed a good follow up software system and the fact that you’re blending all these different channels is just, it’s solving so many business problems out there because we do need to have an idea of who we’re talking to on the other end of the line and also how they like to consume information. So the fact that you gave us this multiple modalities of conversation in an automated fashion is fabulous. It’s a game changer for us.

Nick: Yeah, it’s been really fun. It’s a market that’s now being validated. There’s competitors in the space. Even Salesforce is talking about creeping into our space which we actually look at it as a good thing because again, it just means that what we’re doing is a real pain point that people need a solution for.

Marylou: Definitely. So you’ve been in this role for quite some time now. help us understand some of the key points that you’re still seeing out there that you’d like the audience who is listening to think about as they pursue whether or not this type of a solution is a good fit for them.

Nick: Yeah, well I think even before you look at a solution, you need to look at things. This is one of the points that I thought would be fun for us to talk about is, how do you define your entire strategy and who’s involved in defining what that strategy is? This is where we see a lot of our customers come to us and they think that Outreach is going to be the Holy Grail and it’s going to solve all of their problems. They come to realize that you can’t just throw a tool at your sales team and just hope that they build a process and they figure out what content works best with which buyers. That’s a lot of what we start the beginning part of our process and where I spent a lot of time on as a customer success manager here is sitting out with customers and saying, having a very real conversation of, “Who’s going to build this? Who’s going to do the upfront investment and define your process?”

Some of the things I’ve seen work really well, are getting cross functional teams and you’ve probably seen this in your work, get cross functional teams all in the same room. One thing that works really well is your marketing folks, they generally have a pretty good idea of who should be selling to. Hopefully they do, they know who your ideal customer profile is and they know who the key buyer personas are. Have them take a first pass at content and then have your sales people come in and humanize it.

A lot of time, sales people don’t like the content that marketing puts together but let’s be honest, marketing knows who your buyers are. They also know that maybe the campaigns that they’ve run against those certain buyers and what’s going to resonate best with that audience.

Marylou: Yeah, they definitely spend a lot of time working on persona development and some of that includes both external interviews and internal interviews. There’s the loyalty piece of existing customers if you have existing customers that plays into the definition of who’s going to be most likely to buy, who’s going to be the lifetime value, the higher revenue type of client and marketing does a really good job to get us started. But it doesn’t stop there as Nick said, what we need to do then is take those profiles and enhance them for the sales conversation.

For us especially at the top of the funnel, that means looking at who also directly or indirectly influences this particular persona. So marketing is really looking at one person. The decision maker primarily but there are also influencers that we need and we need to talk to via either an automated system like Outreach, or through a phone campaign, or social campaign in order to get our foot in the door. I mean that’s really what we’re trying to do. The people we meet at the top of the funnel may not be the people that marketing had ideally designed their personas for. But they’re going to get us in and get us to the point where we can advance that sale into the pipeline. So that when we do turn it over to an account executive, or we end up working at all the way to close, we’ll have all of the information that we need in order to have a more positive outcome.

Nick: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. I used to work with a lot of our smaller customers as well and they’re trying to figure out how do we put all of this together. Maybe our marketing team is one person right now and they haven’t defined all of our personas. What I told them, this works with small as well as large businesses but, go talk to the people that your customer success managers are working with today. Somebody hopefully is managing that post sales relationship and they know the exact pain points that you’re actually solving for that business.

So if you go and sit down with some of your account managers, CSMs, they’re probably going to have a good idea with what sort of projects they’re working on and why your product or service is contributing value. That’s always a great place to go.

Marylou: Not only that, they’ll have the language of the buyer because they’re having these conversations with the client already. The way they describe a challenge, a pain point, a nuisance or whatever is going to be in a language that’s specific to that role and we can take that language at the top of the funnel to be able to get people more interested and engaged because they’re hearing words and they’re looking at how we place the importance of a pain point in that certain order that would allow us and allow them to say, “Oh my gosh, they get me. They understand what’s going on with me.” And the way we know that is because we’re talking to our internal people who already worked with these folks post sale to get an understanding of the priority and importance that they place on a particular pain point.

Nick: Yeah, 100%. If our sales guys come to me and ask, “Hey, what does a sales ops person care about?” I can tell you first hand the last 15 conversations that I’ve had with sales ops people and the exact projects they were working on, the problems that they’re trying to solve within their business, that’s going to be a great ammo for a sales person to have when they’re trying to go after a cold account.

Marylou: So let’s pretend we’ve got our couple personas and we’ve segmented just for now, we have maybe two or three. What’s the next step that you would recommend once we have our personas defined enough to be able to say, “Okay, I think I need three sequences an Outreach. One for this guy, one for that guy and one for the third person.” What’s next?

Nick: Test. You just have to test. If you have a tool like Outreach or something that helps get higher volumes out there that’s definitely going to help you test faster. You can’t let perfect be the enemy of good, is that the way that the adage goes?

Marylou: Don’t worry, be crappy I say.

Nick: There you go. You just got to start. You have to start somewhere. Circuiting content out there. Whatever channels that you find resonate best with your buyer and you can experiment with those as well. I have a lot of people come to me and say, “Well, is it phone or is it email? Is it LinkedIn? Which one ‘s going to be best for us?” The answer is, it really depends on your business. It really depends on your buyer. Again, maybe while you’re asking what they care about and trying to define what messaging and pain points that you’re solving, but what messaging works in pain points or solving for. You might also ask them, “What channels are you on?” When you’re looking at other vendors or solutions, how are you learning about them and maybe you prioritize those channels.

What I think is most important is that when you’re prospecting, you can’t just come at somebody from one channel. Just because email might be the most effective for your business, it doesn’t mean that you need to do only email. What you want to make sure is that your buyer sees you as a human and by surrounding them from a bunch of different channels, that’s how you’re going to do it. They’re going to hear your voice in voicemails. You might say, “I’ve never gotten a call back from a voicemail.” It doesn’t mean that people haven’t listened to it. I think there’s actually a lot of studies that show that people are still listening to voicemails.

They may not be calling back but they know that you’re a real human. I think that’s really important. In LinkedIn, you may never get a response on LinkedIn but trust me, they’re going to see if you’ve ever gotten a connection request confirm, they’ve seen you as a human and it just helps build that personification of who you are and therefore makes it more likely that they’ll actually respond.

Marylou: Right. Now, what kind of questions do you get regarding the personalization of these emails? Does it matter based on the persona? How you personalize or is there a golden rule? What do you normally tell your folks?

Nick: Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s funny because too much personalization can absolutely paralyze a team. So one thing that our sales development teams started to do internally is they pre-build their entire sequence with all the messaging in it they do their customization on the first email but they’re only customizing the first two sentences.

So the rep doesn’t have to think about how I’m going to build this entire email message because every message is going to have a call to action. If you’re building persona based messaging as it is, you’re probably going to have a good idea of a couple rough bullet points of how you might help them. All we really need to show them upfront is that we’ve done our research. So grab something off their LinkedIn, something off their website and usually that’s good enough to kind of open up the door. I probably started there. But again, you need to make sure you have a good email format to start with. You need to make sure that you got the traditional Dick John Barrows, “Why you? Why you, now?” I’m reaching out because I’ve done my research, I’m your business for you as an individual. Here’s how I think that we can help you, here’s my call to action.

Marylou: Right. There is a flow to a well crafted email and it’s very analogous to the Hero’s Journey of your favorite movie where you feel this challenge, you’re triggered by some emotion that causes you to wake up and realize life is maybe not that great. Then you contrast that to, “Well, it could get better. There could be a good outcome and here are some examples of good outcomes that are out there.”

Then from there, you’ve got them sort of hooked about how do I go about doing this now. How did they do that? Is it a good fit for me? When you get them starting to ask those questions, you switch over to logic and specificity around, “Not only can we do it for you, but here’s who’s done it before you from a social perspective. Here’s the success they’ve had. Some are along the success path, they’re not yet to the pot of gold but they’re on their way to the pot of gold.” That is the perfectly crafted email, whet their appetite, get them engaged emotionally, switch it to logic to prove your point and then have a very simple easy call to action. Do not ask them to build an entire building. Have them bring a brick. That’s it.

Nick: Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. It’s probably one of the biggest problems that I see out of the gates. Sales people think that they have to cram everything into that first email and it’s really not. One of my customer said it perfectly, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” You know that you’re going to be getting hopefully eight to 12 touch points to these individuals. Just pace it out. One thing that I’ve seen, one thing I tell my customers is, you start a new thread at the beginning obviously. Every new email starts with a new thread and talk about a couple of things that are value adds for the organization, two maybe three bullet points at most. Then do a couple responses to that, “Hey, I just want to make sure that you got my note.”

I am still a big fan of those short and sweet because people busy. People are busier now than they ever have been. Is always you’re doing it politely saying, “Hey, bringing a stop to your inbox. I know you’re really busy but I think this could be really valuable for your organization.” Do it in a polite way. It still makes sense.

Marylou: Yes, be patiently persistent and pleasantly persistent.

Nick: Yeah, never ever reference failed attempts. Never make somebody feel guilty. They don’t owe you anything. If that first email that you worked whatever theme that you’re going on doesn’t resonate, then you do one or two bump emails to that and then you follow it up and just start a new thread. New value add, new way you think that you can help their organization. You do that a couple times and then hopefully find something that resonates with them.

Marylou: Yeah, a lot of times when I’m working with clients, I like to start off still to this day as a test with the old tried and true predictable revenue email looking for the right person at lost lamb approach. I’m not sure if it’s you. I did my research, it looks like it’s you but I’m not quite sure. If it is, great. If it’s not, if you could pass me along and let me know who the right guy is. Then email’s two through seven are what I call value theme emails which is what Nick was talking about. Why change, why now, why us? Your value proposition for the product is in each of those emails but addressing a nuance at the same pain point or a whole different pain point. But there’s only one pain point per email.

Nick: Now I have a question for you. So in that first email, you like to do a referral and do you like to do a referral across a horizontal referral or referral down? I’ve always recommended getting referred down because if your boss forwards you an email, the chances that you’re going to reply are much higher. But I don’t know if you think otherwise.

Marylou: I like the top down approach. A lot of my clients are afraid to start that way. They feel more comfortable, remember we talked about that bull’s eye at the direct—the person who’s making the decision is in the center of the bull’s eye. The people who directly influence him have his ear are the next ring out and then the third ring out are the warm influencers. They give you the sense that you could have a conversation with them.

A lot of my clients like to start there. They like to start there because it’s safe. I am kind of like, “Alright, if you want to start there, then let’s use the phone for that.” I don’t necessarily believe in using the email for that because think about this, if your boss told you to go talk to these people, would you not do it? Yes, right? So if you’re going high to low on that first email chances are, if the boss thinks this is something worthy of your time, he’s going to suggest strongly that you follow up on that. Whereas if you start with the receptionist to work your way up, it’s just really a difficult way to get in the door.

Nick: I agree yeah and I think in that same thing, where I see a lot of customers go wrong is okay, at the VP of ops is our guy, that’s our person. So I’m going to go build a list of 500 people that are VP’s of ops across a bunch of organizations and I know exactly what’s going to resonate with them and they throw them all into a sequence and then they just cross their fingers. It never works. I think a lot of times, people don’t think about exactly what we’re talking about, those rings of influence are around your ideal buyer.

So when you think about going after an account, those sequences that you have that are for maybe your VP or your C level or whoever it is that’s a step above your ideal buyer start there and then get referred down. One trick that I used to do back with my sales days is, I do the research on the exact person that I’m looking for. I’ll go to their LinkedIn and see what is their job description if they have it there and then I’ll go to the person that I feel like is probably their boss and say, “Hey, I’m looking for the person who’s responsible for X, Y and Z,” as they describe it on their LinkedIn and nine times out of 10 if I’m going to get a referral, I’ll get a referral to directly who I’m looking for.

Marylou: That’s a great tip.

Nick: And then it shows them that you’re doing your research because it’s very different than just blasting out a bunch of emails to all of the C level saying, “Hey, can you refer me to your VP of whatever.” That just looks lazy.

Marylou: I think the personalization that way where you’re taking maybe that first paragraph shouldn’t take you a whole heck of a lot of time. anywhere from two to 10 minutes, 10 minutes is kind of way out there but I like to think that we could do 25 of those a day of what I call hyper personalized emails which is starting with a good template a high converting template because with tools like Outreach, now you can actually see the performance of each template that you sent through that sequence.

So start with a high performing template, personalize the first paragraph and then you’re done. You get to send that out, we get to track the validity of the email in terms of the conversion rate and then we’ll know what position in that sequence eventually it should go. Should it go in one, should it go in three, should it wait till the end. We’ll know that because these tools now like Outreach allow us to get very scientific on conversion which we never had this before. So we were guessing a lot of the time which is not good.

Nick: Yeah and you know it’s funny, my customers ask me all the time what are best practices, what is everybody else doing and I always like to turn it on them and say, “I’ll give you a baseline but I love to be proven wrong.” So we’re sitting here saying, start high level, start with the referral, I would love to see somebody go on experiment and say, “Actually for our business, we found doing two or three first emails, telling them about what we do and maybe asking for a direct meeting before going to the referral.” Maybe that works but data is going to tell you that.

You have to again kind of going back to where we started, once you’ve got some personas defined, just start testing. Build a couple of sequences, build a playbook around how you want to engage with those individuals and then start measuring what’s working.

Marylou: And since you have done some interviews with your internal folks, your product management or product marketing people, the customer service, professional services people if you’re in a company that has multiple touch points for the clients, you’ll know the order in which to start this conversation. What pain point resonates best. And then think of those like little legos that you organize and those become the touches and eventually you’ll know which pain point should be in what position of the sequence so that you have a consistent high performing, high converting sequence. You set that aside and start working on the next segment and the next segment.

The point here is, these are systems, these are processes which by definition means you’re iterating, you’re testing, you’re constantly improving, you are never satisfied with the results you’re getting and you’re always working towards maximizing the return on your effort. But also a topic that’s near and dear to my heart is, you’re not fatiguing your list. If you do this correctly, your list is going to be healthier for a longer period of time.

Nick: If you’re contributing value on every interaction, people are not going to be unsubscribing, you’re not going to be burning them out. I think you nailed it there. The other thing too, I think we kind of mentioned this but just to make it really clear. When you go after an account, you want to pick all of the different personas around the individual that is ideally your key persona. Obviously, you can go after that key persona as well. But we always tell our customers and actually this is the way we do it internally but we have what’s called rule 52 which means…

Marylou: It sounds like NCIS rule.

Nick: We call it rule 52 and that is, when you go after an account that you need to have five people active in a sequence, when you go after five people no more, no less, two of those need to be executive level or higher which just ensures that the team is going after high level individuals and not just low level. For each one of those different personas that we’re going after, we have a slightly different strategy. Your people that are lower on the totem pole, we might do more automated emails and maybe fewer phone calls because we don’t want to put in as much manual effort to try and either get a meeting or get a referral from them.

Whereas the people that are higher on the totem pole, we need to show them that we really did our research, we’re going to do more social engagement, more phone calls. Again, that’s just the way that we do it for our business.

Marylou: I like that because I like to also do that relative position in the pipeline. So if you have a cold record that you’re not quite sure anything about it, you want to leverage technology as much as possible to kind of warm up that chill for you. I call it the “while you’re sleeping sequence” because it’s basically, your value prop is discussed through the sequence touches but you’re not physically stopping the sequence to get on the phone or do something manual.

That gives us the ability to then once we take those probably bigger sized data sets of records as we move further into the pipeline as people start responding to us, then I like to hyper personalize as we move from that cold to what I call it more of a working status. Where now we’re working to highly qualify or disqualify them based on what our criteria is for fit. And during trying to figure out fit, I like to hyper personalize because theoretically if we’re doing this right, we shouldn’t be working more than 25 to 40 records in that status at any given time as a sales executive.

A lot of my colleagues want their folks to handle 40 to 60 records. I’m gentler, I’m like 25 to 40 is my number. But they think if they can go even further than that. If we could each handle those 25 to 40 that are in that fit sequence, then if we need to go further and do more of a heavier qualification like at band or trying to figure out do they have money, am I talking to the right people, should we meet with their point people to see if this is something that they want to put on the docket or they’ve got initiative for. And then finally, should I start bringing in my resources now to work on this account.

Those are the further qualification, I have those. I like to see somewhere in the 10 to 20 range of those accounts because they’re so close to a sales qualified opportunity that we’re going to be talking to a fewer of those people because we got the last two more people. This is more for the more complex sales or bringing in more people and we’re seeing their side versus our side, and should I start bringing in my bodies and their bodies. So that’s why the sales conversation and what it takes to get from that initial conversation to opportunity is so important on how you set up these sequences and how you personalize.

You’ve got to know your sales process and it may change the same product, maybe sold a variety of ways depending on the buying scenario, the situation of the product. Is it sold on a department level, fast sale done. Is it a strategic initiative for the company? Or is it something that’s done maybe as a forklift upgrade. So we really need to understand how our products are sold and how they’re bought and do those also mean that we have to align our sequences differently based on that.

Nick: That’s such a good point I mean I just spent a few minutes talking about we have a rule 52. It was just because we know all our business, there’s about five buyers involved in the purchasing decision but if you’re selling into a Mom and Pop shop, they may be that you’ve got two people involved your influencer the person sitting at the front desk and then you got your business owners. I work with a lot of customers that are like that. So I can’t tell them, “Hey, go do this rule 52 thing.” This is not going to work for them.

Marylou: Even leasing, I mean I work with a lot of banks, leasing. They’re working with the owners of companies or the operations manager and that’s about it. Those are a million dollar sales but those are the people buying equipment and then the owner or the CEO is the one that’s responsible for trying to figure out if they can leverage leasing as a part of their business plan. Those are two people, that’s all they need. They wouldn’t be able to find five people to go after. It just doesn’t exist. So that’s why it’s really important to understand and map out.

I visualize you mapping them about either on a whiteboard, on the wall, on one of those sticky things and you sit there and you say, “Okay, what is our process? How do our people buy? Can we put them in buckets?” And if so, that’s how you begin to design these sequences because that is going to be how you scale it, how you make it consistent, and how you can make it predictable.

Nick: Yeah and it’s interesting, one thing that we’re talking about before we turned on the microphone was how it’s important to build this process before you ever think about putting a tool in place. I’ve got a lot of customers that come to us just trying to throw tool at a problem. Doing exactly what you’re talking about, understanding who your buyer is and how you should be engaging with them, that’s the first thing that you really need to figure out.

Obviously it makes it a lot easier to have a tool like Outreach but you don’t need to have a tool to help you do that. You just have to define it. I’ve seen people do it fine within spreadsheets. You can’t do super high volume but at least you can map out your process and you can say for these types of individuals, I’m going to do these types of touch points, and I’m going to do one on these days and then you measure how many meetings that you’re actually booking and if the process is working. Then when you really want to put fuel on the fire, then you come to somebody like Outreach.

Marylou: I think to your point, the more that we can do this without leveraging the tools right now because there are tools that again we talked about form versus function. Some tools do certain things and some tools don’t. So you have to really understand what are we, what’s our unique situation and then apply the tool to that. As Nick said, I mean I torture my clients and make them start with a manual process and only when we get consistency do we reward the team with technology.

They know they’re going to get technology because we tell them we’re not going to let them do this forever but we’re looking for consistency in the process and we’re looking to find and shore up the gaps and the holes and then whoops, we didn’t design that properly. Do that in a manual environment or at least a semi order automated environment and then and only then do we like Nick said, then they can see the follow up software on the horizon coming. So it’s a real reward, it’s almost like a right of passage by the time we get something in.

Nick: Actually this is a good segue because one of the things that I was thinking we could talk about is how to make sure that these new tools that you purchased don’t become shelfware. It happens so much in today’s world. I think a lot of this is symptomatic of people trying to throw a tool and a problem. One example of ways that we’ve seen this work really well internally is I’m sure a lot of vendors will say this, but you got to find somebody who’s going to own the tool.

It’s really tough in the space that we live in because we kind of sit in that nebulous space between sales and marketing. Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to find somebody who will own that. Generally if you want to get your investment out of any sort of solution, you have to have somebody who’s solely devoted to making sure that at the very least, it gets off the ground. Most tools today, you can’t just throw it people and they just start using them. Especially if it’s really involved within their process.

I guess one way to make this even easier to consume is, the more involved it’s going to be within their process or the more process change that you’re expecting the team or the reps to go through, the more ownership somebody’s going to need to take over that change management.

Marylou: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good point. What other things with the tool itself have you found in deploying it? Are these tools since the bridge is between marketing and sales, and you’ve had thousands of customers now, where are you seeing it fall generally?

Nick: Yeah, it’s funny about 30% of the time, the budget comes from marketing and we’re still seeing that sales development reports up to—actually what I generally see is more often, the larger the organization, the more likely the sales development reports up to marketing. I think the main reason for that is because the sales development reps are so, you got marketing that’s running bigger campaigns and they’re dumping more money into their campaigns and it makes more sense to have sales development reps following up on those campaign specifically. I think that’s probably why you see more sales development reps on the marketing side. I would still say the vast majority of the time, we see them reporting up through. I’m curious if you see different from your perspective.

Marylou: As you mentioned up market and larger enterprises, marketing is responsible for what’s called demand gen and they’ve been doing that for like since I was a kid which is a long time ago. So they have really mastered the analytics of finding out from the different channels. They have a lot more channels at their disposal or used to than we did in sales. We used to use the phone. We use email, direct mail, but they do these gigantic campaigns with pay per click, SEO, all the ways that someone could possibly engage and cast that wide net out there.

So demand gen is something that marketing traditionally run. Makes sense that this is a channel of demand gen that I used to call outreach before Outreach became Outreach. It’s us targeting the people we want, those whales or those bigger accounts with high lifetime value, high revenue potential, and high likelihood of closing. That then becomes a channel to them. It’s just another channel that we’re going to use, we’re going to put different names in there. They’re going to be based on prospect personas and an ideal account profile.

There probably will be fewer of the universe, so if we look at the total addressable market that your company can sell to, this would be the total serviceable market for Outreach. What is of that universe, what percentage can be put in this channel called Outreach that we’re going to spend our resources on trying to win this business. So it kind of makes sense that in larger companies, it would fall there because in the smaller companies, they may not even do demand gen. There may not even be a demand gen person. So it makes sense that until you get that, I don’t want to say sophistication because that’s not giving you a good service.

If you’re a smaller company, you could have really great marketing but there is a hierarchy of marketing in the larger companies that encompass a lot of different things. There’s also brand distinction, there’s people who are just worried about the logo and trying to get that awareness campaigns, and then there’s people trying to get actual business click through campaigns. so I think you guys so if you’re a smaller account, you have all this, it may not be under a demand gen type of person and that’s why it might make more sense for sales to own that as well. The problem I see with sales owning is you’ve got to have an analytic in there or an operations guy or someone who absolutely loves process.

Nick: Yeah, it’s so true. It’s funny everybody has sales more art or science and I think the further we go into the future, the more scientific it’s going. It really is. I think the salesperson of the future is going to be one who’s tech savvy, who can work their way around tools because you throw Outreach in somebody’s hands who has some decent sales chops. They’re going to run circles around the person who has really good sales chops but can’t figure out how to leverage technology.

I think that’s one thing that you really got to be, for anybody who is listening who is thinking about hiring people, I think technical aptitude should be at least a box that needs to be checked when you’re hiring someone in sales these days.

Marylou: Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of it too let’s think about this, because we can monitor through analytics, how successful a conversation is using these tools. That gives us a heads up on how should we organize our sales conversation in general. What’s working? What is allowing us to convert at a faster rate to reduce the lag in the pipeline which is what we want to do. Then we ought to look at how can we increase our return on effort. How can we make it easier? Higher impact with least amount of effort.

This is all kind of under the umbrella of operations to really figure it out because the data is what we start with. We don’t go by gut as much. We still use gut but we really look at a statistically relevant sample to help guide us with how we should be having the conversation. We can always override our data but, we have to use the data to begin with and a lot of times we don’t.

Nick: It’s funny that you bring that up because we actually have recently invested in a data science team because we believe that we need to enable our customers to be scientific about their process and perfecting what they’re doing. It’s a really cool thing. It’s like guided AB testing where we can actually tell you you’re doing an AB test to see if email A works better than email B and we’re going to tell you when you’ve reached statistical significance and which message that you should continue to keep using that’s resonated best with your buyer. It’s pretty fun.

Well actually one other thing I want to throw in there before I forget was, I always like to throw in just like little gold nuggets for people to take with them. We’re talking about campaigns and part of that is how can you get sales and marketing to work well together. It’s always been an issue but one thing that we found works really well internally and it’s working well for our customers is, when marketing goes and runs a campaign, they should write the follow up emails for that campaign.

Again kind of like we talked about before, sales can come in and humanize it but marketing is going to know what the content of that campaign was better than anybody else. I remember when I was a sales rep I say, “Hey, here’s a bunch of leads for you to follow up on. We’re just in a trade show, or an event we just came from.” So I have no idea who the speakers are. I have no idea what the content was. I don’t know what the conference, who was supposed to go. Now you’re asking me to follow up with these people and continue the conversation? You’re setting your sales development reps up for failure. Have marketing do the first pass and they come in and humanize it.

Marylou: Right and the other thing is, let’s borrow some of the already existing age old ideas from marketing when we did demand gen which is, every campaign has a unique identifier that tells us what value theme the campaign is centered around, the primary target which will be the persona that the campaign was centered around or targeting, when it was launched, what assets were put against it so that the STR has a really easy way to click on the asset to see ahead of time, what was in there, and they can make a more educated conversation based on that.

The tools are all there for us to use, it’s having again that ability to say, “Alright, we got technology here, we got technology here, how do we get these stuff to talk.” That’s going to be someone in the operation who will bring that in for you. It also means though that marketing has to be smarter about organizing their campaigns around value themes that you can then also piggy back on.

Nick: It’s funny, with a lot of the customers that I work with, one role that I’ve seen recently come up that I did not see a couple years ago when I started doing this is sales development ops. They have a devoted person to building this process. When you think your sales development reps are probably the most operationally focused of the sales team.

Marylou: They are.

Nick: Right, because everything that they’re doing is kind of, I don’t want to say rinse repeat because that kind of has a negative image.

Marylou: They work with a lot more records.

Nick: They are, yeah. And so you really need to build a process around that. Again, we see this first hand. If you have somebody who is solely devoted on building the process for that team, the payoff is going to be…

Marylou: Tremendous.

Nick: It will be. The greatest part about working in sales is that it’s so much easier to quantify ROI. ROI on a head count, you can see, we have this person in the role for a quarter, did we book more meetings? Did we get more opportunities? If no, then we should get rid of the role.

Marylou: Right. We can always fall back on the people. What we did with direct mail, we had it down to a science of follow up. There’s even a old books, one is called Scientific Advertising. It’s all about direct mail and how to do these follow ups so that you can leverage the mail to the chase the mail. Now we’re doing email and social but we’re chasing that. So it’s not any different, there of people who have come before you and done this successfully with millions and millions of records getting worse response rates than we’re getting now.

The response rates for direct mail were dismal. But they have the systems in place to follow up. So do a little studying of that era and you will find a few little tweaks in your marketing and then in sales ops and you will be able to have these conversations that are more pointed, on target. Taking that conversation and extending it and continuing it when you do the follow up instead of trying to start something brand new because you don’t know what they had been exposed to in the first place.

Nick: Yeah. it is an interesting thought, a couple of things I want to pull out of what you just said is that, the process hasn’t changed that much, the channels have but what works, still works today. If you do it responsibly and you do your research and you build the process right, it’s going to work for you. This is one thing that I’ve become more aware of and I think our organization has is that, if we empower people to do the wrong things, then it creates noise. And then we all end up fighting that noise. This is kind of my public service announcement. Let’s all collectively do what we know we should be doing when it comes to prospecting because it means that those channels that we’re going through today, we’re not going to completely burn out and they’re going to continue to be effective over time.

Marylou: So we’ve been listening to Nick Hart, Customer Success Manager at Outreach. This man works with millions of records, thousands of clients. He’s your go-to guy people. He’s the one who’s going to be able to really help understand different what-if scenarios. If anything, to get you thinking outside the box as to, “Okay, I may not fit into this vanilla type of baseline but there’s a baseline that I could start with,” and that’s really where this all begins. Find a baseline, get the metrics of that waterfall and then from there, you are crafting your unique waterfall, your unique metrics, your unique conversion rates and that becomes best practice.

Nick: You nailed it. I love it.

Marylou: Yeah, thanks so much Nick for spending this time with us today in beautiful Seattle, Washington.

Nick: Of course, thank you for having me. Alright, Great.

It may be possible to use manipulative sales techniques to sell people things that they don’t really want or need. But do you really want to do that, and is it really a good strategy in the long run? Today’s guest talks about the importance of centering the customer’s needs, even if that means passing up an immediate sale, and how that strategy can pay off in the long run.

Andrew Priestly is a business coach, chairman of the Children’s Trust, a publisher, and an author. In today’s episode, he talks about his background in teaching and then real estate sales, his psychology training, and how all of that got him to where he is today. Listen to the episode to hear what Andrew say about sales tactics, the impact of the internet, the importance of personal relationships, and his new book that features contributions from experts in the sales field.

Episode Highlights:

• Andrew’s background in real estate sales
• How Andrew started researching sales tactics and where they came from
• How the internet has affected the sales world
• The impact of Facebook
• The importance of personal conversations in selling
• Andrew’s book
• How Andrew went about getting contributors for his book
• The feedback Andrew is getting from his book’s readers
• The psychology of sales
• Why Andrew believes in the using sales tactics responsibly
• Why building relationships matters in sales

Resources:

Andrew Priestly

Sales Genius 1: 20 top sales professionals share their sales secrets

Full Transcript: 

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a gentleman who we connected over the internet, over LinkedIn, and he’s pretty awesome. His name is Andrew Priestley. He is a world-class coach but he’s also got a lot of other stuff going on. He’s the chairman of the Children’s Trust. He’s an author. He’s a publisher. The list goes on. Andrew, welcome to the podcast today.

Andrew: Hey, what can’t I do? It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Marylou: It is.

Andrew: With an introduction like that, I’m thinking, “What can’t I do? I want to try anything.”

Marylou: The fact that you’ve done a lot of stuff speaks to–it’s amazing. It’s what this profession allows us to do. Being in sales, being part of that whole environment, allows us to morph into very different things. You started out–correct me if I’m wrong–in the real estate vertical and became top notch there, but tell us about that story. What happened?

Andrew: It was funny because it depends on how far you want to go back. Originally, I trained as a school teacher. Can you believe that?

Marylou: I believe it.

Andrew: Yeah, I trained as a school teacher and my majors were in reading psychology. At the time, I joined a brand-new university and I got interested in creating a newspaper for the university. My skills in reading psychology helped incredibly there and, after about 10 years of teaching, I took a long service leave and stupidly resigned to start my own publication. That was probably the dumbest thing that I had ever done in my life because I could not believe how hard it was because I had the technical skills but I just didn’t know how to sell.

I was going out there and I was talking to the entertainment industry, the hospitality industry. You can’t imagine. I’m going into nightclubs at 2:00 AM in the morning to try and sell on full-page newspaper advertising, which was just, after six months, I was just absolutely burned out. I left that and it was actually a question of my values. Mary Lou, have you ever had experiences with people that they do something and go, “This doesn’t align up with any of my values,” because I had a young family and I think, “What am I doing hanging out in night clubs with a young family?” It’s crazy, crazy stuff.

I actually took a bold decision. I shot down that newspaper. I was actually in competition with Rupert Murdoch at one point and, for the record, Rupert won just so you know. He was a very interesting man to me. He was incredibly interesting to me but he said, “You’re not going to win.” I just loved his confidence, and he was correct because I was punching way above my weight, incredibly so, and we had a staff of 12 and he had a staff of 153 and we’re trying to do the same job as 153 people.

Anyway, I took the bold step to shut down the paper, which I did before it killed me. I was really burning out and, on the back of that, a friend of mine was selling prestige real estate and he said, “Hey, why don’t you come to prestige real estate?” Part of the training for that was you had to go and do, firstly, an agent and auctioneer course and then, after that, what you had to do was you had to do a sales course. We were being taught–do you know Tommy Hopkins?

Marylou: Of course, yeah.

Andrew: Yeah, Tom Hopkins. The book, I think from memory, was the Art of Selling or the Dark Art–it wasn’t called the Dark Art of Selling, wasn’t it? It was the Art of Selling. We were getting trained in Tommy Hopkins-style training, and that was all the rage in Australia at the time. I went and did this amazing course. I topped the course. I topped my alumni. I came out almost like straight A’s right across the whole lot there, and I got out into the field and none of it worked. Absolutely zero worked and I was really, really confused.

In fact, more than confused, I was devastated because I’ve got a young family and I’m thinking, “If this is going to work, what am I going to do?” It’s actually more serious than–it was just about me. It was, “Shoot, I’m not selling anything.” All this stuff was supposed to work so I remember trying to do puppy dog closes on a $2 million-property, wondering why the people fought and backed away slowly. It just wasn’t good. Stop me if I’m talking too much because I love talking about sales.

In this particular situation, I remember one day that the turning point for me was this lady came into the real estate office and I wasn’t on the top of the of the router that day so I was just watching what was happening. I saw, outside the window, this lady talking to the guy who was the head of the router and said, “Take me and show me your property,” and they disappeared. Five minutes later, she came back and she was scowling and growling at this guy. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. He came in and he said an expletive and walked off.

About 15 minutes later, I went down to get a coffee and she was sitting there with her husband and I said, “Hey, just out of interest, you went out with my colleague but you came back. You seem pretty upset. What was going on?” She said, “Well, I told him that my husband has just had hip replacement surgery.” Back then, it was quite a serious operation. She said, “I don’t want a two-story house and I don’t want a sloping block. Guess what the first house he took us to was.” It’s a two-story house, sloping block. I said, “Take this back. We’re done.”

I said to her–we don’t have any bungalows. We don’t have any single-story dwellings on a flat block. It’s waterfront land. It all leads down to the canals. It’s waterfront wet blocks. I said, “Even if your husband had a boat, he wouldn’t be able to take the boat over the sandbar with a hip replacement because it’s too bumpy, but I know someone about 20 miles down the road who you could buy property from and I’ll look after you.” “Do you want a commission?” “No, don’t worry about that,” and so this lady went away.

A couple of days later, another lady came into the office and she said, “I want to buy here because our kids want to go school and it’s a nice neighborhood.” I said, “Look, if you live over here, you’ve got to drive four miles up to the junction, two miles along there and four miles back to the school. You can see the school so why don’t you teach your kids to ride a bike and then they can get to school really quickly?” I said, “You’d be better off living over there.” My sales manager absolutely went nuts.

The context was–you remember Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, those movies, that’s what our sales room was like. They used to have these rah-rah sessions and, “We will sell. We will sell,” and you had to stand up on the desk with a power hat on and a sword. “I am the best. I am the best. People will buy from me,” that sort of stuff. We were going nuts just chanting. I thought, “Man,” I was losing the will to live listening to this stuff. Anyway, the thing was, though, that it just didn’t resonate at all. Any of stuff resonated.

What happened was I started this little quest to discover where did these ideas come from, where did these sales tools come from. The sequel to the lady story was about, four months later, a man walked in and he said, “Is Andrew here?” Somebody said yes over there and the guy said–he didn’t look friendly. He said, “You met my mother three months ago.” I said, “Oh my god, who’s this? What have I done now? How bad is this going to get?” He said, “You didn’t sell her a property on this estate.” I said, “Which by the way, my dad’s got the hip replacement.” “Oh, yeah. I remember. How’d it work out?” “Really, really well, and my mom said, if you want an honest salesperson, go and see Andrew.”

Marylou: Awesome.

Andrew: I sold three properties at that point to this guy because he was the head of an airline and he wanted to get a precinct for his CEOs and sees where it is and he bought three properties. That game me a lot of pause for really thinking it through. What just happened there? What just happened? I started to get referrals. The lady who bought with a school, she sent some friends over–her parents, for example–that they would love to live here. They don’t have school kids. “This guy, you can trust.” “He didn’t try and sell me anything. He was more concerned about–” it was really good because I know parents who live over on the island and they say it’s absolutely–you think the mom drops her child off to that school. She’s got four miles to the junction, two miles across, four miles down. What does that add up to,10 miles?

Marylou: That’s a lot.

Andrew: She’s doing 20 miles twice a day in a car. That gave me a lot of thought. Then, I started to think, “Where did these ideas come from? Where did the puppy dog clothes come from? Where did the hand grenade start–which we don’t talk about now?” Do you get the idea? I started to read and, at that point, I left real estate. I went back to university. I did my industrial organizational psychology degree and I got interested in doing factor analysis. I got interested in serious research. I actually picked up on–I loved the reading psychology part but I really wanted to go into abnormal psychology and look at that.

I started doing loads and loads of reading. Eventually, I ended up reading right back to about the 1840s and 1860s when they first started publishing–people started writing stuff about selling and sales. It’s fascinating. It was really fascinating, what I found. I’ve read about 256 factors that are involved with selling, which chumped down to about 10 things, which pretty much closely follow a high-value multi-step sale now. Are you ready to sell? Have you got the knowledge? Do you have a prospect? Can you build rapport? Can you qualify? Can you present? Can you close? Can you handle objections? Can you do the customer service? Can you do the admin? All that sort of stuff.

Marylou: Now, let me ask you a question about that. Has the internet changed any of that? Has the internet allowed us to bypass these behavioral cues because of the ability to know more about our prospects or is it, in your opinion, behavior is behavior, doesn’t matter how many tools you throw at it; There’s still a process that people go through to buy something or to feel comfortable to buy from you?

Andrew: I’ve got a feeling this is a loaded question. You’re actually the expert on it. I’ve been reading your book and you know this question backwards. What’s the answer?

Marylou: The answer is what? I want to hear what you have to say.

Andrew: It’s a funny thing. The context that I’d probably provide when we talk about internet–and it links back to what I was saying before. The context here for me was, if I was to sum up selling from about the 1840s right through the 20th Century–and, in fact, I’d say that people worldwide–the world changed in 2004. Something happened in 2004 that just changed everything. Big cycles go in about a 20-year span so, in 2004–we’re only just coming out of that really big, big dream that happened in 2004. Do you know what it was?

Marylou: No. What?

Andrew: It was Facebook.

Marylou: Okay.

Andrew: See, and Facebook–part of that, the year before that was WordPress came out and Zuckerberg got the idea, “Oh, shoot. I could actually–I don’t have to try too hard. I can use something like WordPress,” and then, a year later, YouTube came out, 2005. To get into Facebook, you had to be in his alumni or you had to know somebody. It just wasn’t open to anyone and he created this, if you like, sense of–the little black book was back and who do I know? It was about relationships and not a lot I can trust and those sorts of things.

If I can sum up selling from about 1840s right up to about 2004, the word, I’d say, is transacting. A lot of times, we say, “Look, buy something from me and I’ll be your friend, but I want to sell you something.” A lot of the tools that we were learning were how to get people to close and transact, but it was all down to transacting. From 2004 onwards, I think what we did was we skipped a beat, in my opinion, in my experience. Can I validate this? I’m not sure, but my gut tells me and my heart tells me that even back when I was selling real estate, it’s about the relational thing.

Even if you make contact with them, people still want to make a connection with you, still want to know a little bit about you. We know that some people won’t buy unless they buy the salesperson. Other people have different motives of buying. I think the internet certainly leverages that and gives a smarter intel, if you like, but I actually think, too, if you talk about a big-ticket high-value sale, I still think it comes back to that very relational, get-to-know-me, get-to-understand-my-needs, qualify-me-properly, don’t-try-and-flog-me-something-because-you-can-or-you-have-to. I don’t know if that answers it, but that’s the sort of feeling.

Marylou: Yeah, there’s this notion that behavior has changed because we hide behind electronics, but I submit to you that, as you just said, it eventually will come down to what I call belly-to-belly conversation, meaning across a table from someone, they getting to know you, you getting to know them, you getting a good feel for how they roll, so to speak, and they getting a good feel of how you’re going to transact their business with them and whether you are trustworthy.

No amount of technology can help us with that; it has to be our humanness and our authenticity that gets us there. All these tools do is get us to the point where we can selectively choose, especially from an outreach perspective, who we want to have these conversations with, what’s a good use of our time and whether they’ve engaged enough with us so that the conversation makes sense right now in this moment to have that conversation with them.

Andrew: Totally. I think more so because we are shifting our perspective to more relational things where LinkedIn is very much–I doubt if you would have had me on this podcast had we not chatted.

Marylou: Correct. I didn’t know you existed until I saw you on LinkedIn.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s true, and we reached out and we had a great chatter. We had a good chat and a good connection, particularly in sales and professionalism, things like that, but, in the same thing, everyone who’s a piece in the book sales genius, which we just put out there, every single one of those authors, I spoke to. If I didn’t feel right, I didn’t want them in the book. Do you know what I mean? Because, I think, I also, too–with selling, I take the obligation to my readers as a publisher really seriously. I don’t want to put a sales book out there where people go, “Oh, yeah, it’s just like everything else.” I want people to look at it and go, “That was really good. I can trust these authors.”

Marylou: Let’s transition now to the book. Before, when we first met each other, this was a gleam in the eye or it was something you were thinking about doing and, boom, it became actionable, which I love about you that you have an idea, you put it into action. That is our motto as an outreach business development, is take something and put it into action. You’ve done that so tell us about this book. Tell us what happened.

Andrew: Firstly, Mary Lou, I did an expression of interest on it first. I started talking to people about it so it wasn’t just I wake up one morning with an idea and, “Let’s do a book.” I had the idea for a long time about–again, selling for me is an honorable profession and it should be done with the utmost responsibility. I learned that through prestige real estate. I didn’t want to ever sell a house to somebody because I could, because I wanted to go back a year later or two years later and they say, “Andrew, that was a great house. You really did a good job for us.” That was what I thought about deeply. I wanted to go back to people, look them in the eye and they say, “I’m so glad you sold us this property or that you were our agent.”

I was talking to people. “Do you think this is an idea?” There’s a lot of sales books out there. I think if you Google search or if you do an Amazon search, there’s hundreds and thousands of sales books out there so how is this one going to be different? I started talking to people and saying, “What’s your take on selling? Just tell me how are you different from whatever’s out there,” and then that’s what turned into–I kind of think, “God, that’s genius, what they’re thinking,” so Sales Genius was the name of the book on Amazon.

I put out a call to action on Facebook and I said, “Look, I’m thinking of writing a book because I’m a publisher. If you’ve got a take on selling and you’re interested in writing a short article, about 1,500 words–I didn’t want it too long–something you could read over a coffee, would you like to participate?” I was deluged and then it was a matter of going and talking to those people. Subsequently, we ended up with 20. I think they’re just brilliant. We’ve got some amazing people in our first book, people who–it does what it says on the team. They’re peak performance. I think you’re the #1. You did the foreword for the book, didn’t you? How did I call you into doing the foreword, even?

Marylou: Simply by asking, Andrew.

Andrew: That’s exactly what it was. There was no calling. There was no spin. There were no inducements.

Marylou: No, just a simple request, no reason why, no compelling reason.

Andrew: Why did you say yes?

Marylou: Why? Because I felt that it was a great project to get like-minded individuals all from different walks of the sales pipeline itself to give a comprehensive, short yet sweet overview and actionable book. It was just great to get everyone’s opinions, and those who read the book can pick from the ones they like that resonate and apply. That’s the biggest thing about this book, is it puts you in the position of action.

Andrew: Yeah. I know I think you’ve said something really, really important here, that there’s a good cross-section of 20 people, some of them going, “No, that’s not me,” but some–and I know this because I’m getting feedback where people say, “I love that article.” I read the articles and, yeah, it was okay but, for some people, they’re going to go–that’s kind of the game-changer for them, but it doesn’t happen unless you actually take action on it. You’re right, 100%. If you don’t actually do anything with it, what was the point?

Marylou: Exactly. The book is on Amazon, yeah?

Andrew: It’s on Amazon as a paperback. It’s in 12 countries. I got #1 in five categories in the UK and I think in Australia, and it got to–America’s a much bigger market but I think it got to about #4 or #5 in America, which, to me–if I could get a sales book into the Top 100, I’d be happy. If I could get it in the Top 50, I would happy. What’s the feeling? You’ve done two bestsellers. What’s it like when you look at it and you see the numbers racking up?

Marylou: It’s just wonderful. It’s a great feeling to know that people are taking notice of your body of work. The big thing for me, though, personally, is that they’re taking action on it. I would like to hear from people when they’ve applied something, some part of the book, which I’ve been hearing from a ton of people about that. That’s, to me, the most gratifying–it isn’t the number of sales but the number of people who’ve applied the information within the book and can cite specifics as to what they did and what it meant to them to actually do that.

Andrew: It may not be quantitative; it might be a thing like I had someone email me the other day who said, “The thing I got out of the reading the book was, ‘Shoot. Actually, sales is pretty good and I should be doing more of it.'” I asked him, “What has it translated?” “I’ve just been contacting people more.”

Marylou: See? That’s awesome.

Andrew: There’s a difference between, “I should contact more people,” as opposed to, “You know, I should contact more people.” Do you know my sales manager, going right back to the prestige when he was looking–because we had the old leaderboard system, who’s on top and blah, blah, blah. It was dog-eat-dog in the real estate game back then. I don’t know if it’s changed but it certainly was then. I was doing okay on the leaderboard and my salesman just said, “What are you doing because you’re not doing what we do? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, you get your credit card out and I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing,” because it was a commission environment where everyone was poaching everybody’s ideas. I honestly thought, “I don’t even think you’re going to get it anyway. Just be genuine. Care about your client. Try that one and see how that goes.”

Marylou: Listen to their request, like with the woman who needed a single-story home for her husband. Listen to that and let them know if you can or cannot make that adjustment. Like you did, you referred her out. That speaks volumes to me.

Andrew: From a psychology point of view, I hate to say it but there’s a lot of sales techniques that actually work. You come to an ethical point where you say, “I know I can use this technique on someone but should I use this technique on someone?” To me, that lady, for me, was–I couldn’t sell her a house. I couldn’t say, “Look, somehow massage the property so that they somehow like it.” I said, “You know what? There’s no properties that you want like that here.” I was just straight, up and down, nor did I want to take a conjunct with her and take a split on the commission or anything like that. I wanted someone to look after her because I know what’s it like to do a sale. You really do earn those commissions.

Marylou: Exactly. It’s that whole karma thing, though, and the law of reciprocity at work. I think that’s what separates the really great salespeople from the not-so-great salespeople, is that they think longer term.

Andrew: Yeah, I think so and I think, at the heart of it, when I talk to people about sales and they talk about stunts, and tricks, and techniques, and how can I use this, and blah, blah, blah, at the heart of it is a desire to manipulate others, which, to me, there’s your problem right there. My approach has always been help somebody make an informed, adult decision, a grown-up decision. If they can’t do that, if the decision is, “I don’t want to buy from you,” I respect that.

Marylou: I think choosing your path, though, is the path of the high road. It’s going to serve you in the long run especially now since a lot of these tools that are available for reaching out and contacting more people are ubiquitous. They’re lower cost so it leaves more room for mass contact that’s not a value. If you put yourself on that higher road, I think you’re going to win more often than not just because you are spending the time to be more authentic.

Andrew: I think it’s a great point you make. One of my colleagues is an incredibly bright, young man who started out as a physicist. He got into AI and particularly with a focus on decision mapping and then using the data to make better decisions. However, the caveat there is we have to use this responsibly because people can be manipulated, but you can also get the wrong customers for the wrong reasons as well. People can buy from you but they end up being a nightmare for you.

I’ve sort of looked at that but it goes back to what we said at the very start. It’s still that relational thing. It still comes back to that. This is what I’ve learned through being a chair of a children’s charity: It’s real people, real lives, real situations. You’ve got to really care about the person on the receiving end and you can’t fake that. I don’t think you can.

Marylou: Not at all, no.

Andrew: I wanted to make a comment about your book. It’s an amazing book.

Marylou: Thank you.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s one of those books when you pick it up, you go, “Ah, god, this makes sense. Of course,” but I like the fact that you haven’t dumbed it down. You haven’t dumbed down processing and things like that. You’ve actually challenged people to really think about, “Okay, how does what I’m saying apply to what you’re doing?” and I’m going to that step. I hate it when you get a book which is, “Do this and everything would be amazing.” What you’re saying is, “Do the hard work and things will probably be amazing,” which I love about the book.

Marylou: It’s all about iterating. Being a process expert and spending my life in process, it’s about setting it up so that you’re constantly iterating and improving. That’s why it’s called Process Improvement and it just happens to be a sales process. My favorite chapter in the whole book is about the prospect personas because it’s all about the people like we’ve been talking about this whole time. It’s all about who you’re going to be sitting across the table from, either virtually or in real life, and solving real-world problems that they have but understanding what it is that motivates them, that engages them, that resonates with them so that they want to have a conversation with you. It’s not really thinking outside the box; it’s just understanding who they are, what activities they’re doing, what jobs they’re trying to accomplish, and they’re frustrated, trying to get them done.

Andrew: Hey, tell me this: Why do you do this? Why do you sell?

Marylou: I do it because I love interacting with people. I love finding out about people. That’s why I’m a real good door opener as opposed to closing the business. That requires an expertise, a relationship-type of expertise, longer term that I am not inherently possessive of. I am definitely one that loves to understand about people, who they are, what makes them tick, why this, why that, but not necessarily getting engaged and married and spending years together. That’s not necessarily my area of–

Andrew: This is sales, not therapy, is it? We didn’t just switch to therapy, did we?

Marylou: I always kid my–because I’ve been married forever. It’s like, that’s why with that and my kids are the only things that I’ve done forever. Everything else, I prefer the kind of love them and leave them approach or love them and hand them off to somebody else approach but, yeah, I really like understanding, “What is it that makes you tick? What are you struggling about? What do you love? What do you don’t like as much and how can we figure out if this is a good fit? Are we good a fit for one another? Is there something here we can work on together or not?” I’m totally okay with yes or no, go or no-go. I don’t want to be in limbo. I don’t like being in limbo, and that’s the quality of a business developer; we want outcomes.

Andrew: We don’t want the maybe zone.

Marylou: No, we don’t want the maybe land. No, we want yes or no, love us or hate us. Either or, they both work.

Andrew: That’s okay, and there’s a couple of assumptions that sit under that. A lot of people do stupid stuff because the assumption is there’s not enough business out there. I hate to say it but there’s a lot of business out there. There’s a lot of money to be made out there for the right reasons. One of the things when I was doing this research on the sales: There was a time when you had to be an end-to-end seller, where you had to have the readiness right through the admin, through all those 10 key phases I talked about, which I identified.

What’s happening here–you probably noticed this. For example, when I get into–some of my clients are in engineering, for example, and there are very strict laws that cover procurement and whatever, and they’re not allowed to do things like–a salesperson isn’t allowed to do a close or an objections handling. All they can do is qualify and present, for example. I went to a very large engineering firm recently and they were doing closing techniques. I was looking at their sales process, briefly met their sales process, which pretty much template-d under what I’ve looked at.

I said, “Why are they doing closing techniques? They’re not allowed to do closing.” The people in the room were bored but there was someone doing closing techniques from the 80s which, I thought, “No, that didn’t work back then. Why do you think they’ll work now?” but you go into some really amazing organizations. I’ve been working with a bank recently where they do that. “Let’s start a relationship.” There are people who specialize in starting relationships and then they hand it over into qualifying and making sure it’s a brilliant fit.

They don’t want your business if it’s not a brilliant fit, and they really say, “It has to be a brilliant fit. You can’t get 4 out of 5. It’s got to be 5 out of 5 criteria,” and that’s just to start a conversation. “You’re not a client for us and we’re not the provider for you,” and that’s a gutsy sort of thing to do. Then, there’s people who then handle the procurement and closing. I think that’s the other thing, too: You don’t have to necessarily put yourself under the pressure during the whole end-to-end thing, really.

Marylou: Right, but they’re still–48% of my audience is still doing all roles even though the predictable revenue book written in 2011 talks about separating those roles out. Culturally, some companies still in the US want their reps to do all roles. What I hope to do is at least say, “Okay, when you have your prospecting hat on, this is the work flow. This is the habit.” It’s like, “You need more of yourself into a whole different type of person,” which is unfortunate because it’s very difficult to do for one person.

If we have the luxury to separate out the roles, yes, exactly what you’re saying. There are people who specialize in dating and getting people excited about what they have. Then, they turn them over to somebody else who qualifies and gets the teams involved, gets down to the nitty-gritty of design specification, et cetera, et cetera, and then there are people who, once they become a client, they manage them, they keep that relationship going with cross-sell, up-sell, but, yes, that’s the ideal in a lot of these more complex, whether it’s a multi-stakeholder type of environment. It’s really a way to go but a lot of people don’t do that and a lot of people won’t do that until they see some consistency on the top.

Andrew: Yeah, some of my larger clients are very much what you’ve just described there but SME clients, yeah, they do have to do the whole end-to-end thing. They’ve got to go and prospect and then go and meet and present and qualify and close and handle objections and then maintain the relationship afterwards. They’ve got to do all of that stuff, yeah. I guess the thing that–and we’ve got Jackie Jarvis, for example, who was one of the authors here. She’s talking about authenticity and is a big speaker on that.

One of your colleague’s in the book, too, Allison. It’s the same sort of thing. It’s, “How do you manage those relationships?” I’m an Aussie but I live in the UK and Brits are incredibly relational. They get very, very sensitive if they upset somebody. I want to do that. They tend to manage those relationships very well. I like that aspect of it. It’s always resonated with me. I don’t want to sell somebody something and then have them turn around two days later or two years later and say, “I’m not happy and you sold us a pup,” although that pup you’ve got, I wouldn’t mind buying that one. Look at that dog of yours.

Marylou: Larry the Dog is on our screens right now.

Andrew: There’s this Labrador. The eyes of that dog, I’m thinking, if you just walked into a meeting with that dog, it’s like, I don’t know whether the dog’s got your eyes or the other way around but it’s sort of–and the smile. You’ve both got the matching smiles. Folks, if you can see this, it’s just a classic photo of this Labrador we get. Give me the contract. Let me sign something so I can just pat that dog.

Marylou: Yes. For those of you listening, Larry is a rescue dog that we picked up and adopted. He was supposed to be a PTSD service dog but, unfortunately, he became the dog with PTSD so we ended up adopting him. He has goldfish eyes, almost. He’s got those bug eyes. He’s very cute.

Andrew: I love Labradors. They’re just lovely, aren’t they?

Marylou: Yeah. The book here is Sales Genius 1, 20 Top Sales Professionals Share Their Secrets. Andrew Priestley is the publisher. Get it on Amazon. I’ll put it in the notes so that people have an easy link to get to that. The Kindle version is very affordable and it’s got some great tips for you to start activating into your sales process and get the ground running. Andrew, thank you so much for your time today.

Andrew: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Marylou: I very much appreciated you having on.

Andrew: Yeah, and listen, thank you for your time, too. I love your book and you should do a plug for your book, too. If you haven’t picked up Mary Lou’s book, you need to rush to the internet straight away and just download it. Don’t think about anything else. Just get the credit card out and buy that book and then destroy it with a highlighter. Read it, read it, read it and read it. The good thing about our book is everybody’s contact details are in there. They want you contact them. They want you to say–if they can help you, they’ll help you. It’s not, “Yeah, I’ll try and flog you something as well,” but they’re really nice people. I take that back. They’re really good people. They just want to help and share generously. Your book is just like gold. It’s pure gold. If you take the time to read it and think about it, it’s a brilliant book, yeah. Thanks for having me as a guest. I appreciate it.

Marylou: Loved having you. Talk soon.

Today’s guest is someone that you’ve heard on the podcast before. Donato Diorio joined us on a previous episode to talk about the virtue of voicemail and how to handle voicemail properly. Today he’s with us to talk about a different subject.

Donato is the founder and principal consultant at a company called DataZ, and today he’s going to talk about data. Listen to the episode to hear what Donato has to say about what led him to put together a strategy for assessments, where the data that he uses comes from, and the importance of considering sentiment in data assessment.

Episode Highlights:

• What got Donato interested in putting together a strategy for assessment
• What led Donato to build the systems and frameworks at DataZ
• How Donato differentiates between different roles
• How Donato can quickly assess the health of the pipeline based on the data
• Where Donato’s data comes from
• How sentiment factors into Donato’s work
• How to get a data assessment from Donato
• How Donato’s services can help clients in specialized industries

Resources:

Donato Diorio

DataZ

Transcript: 

Marylou: All right. Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest has been on my podcast before. His name is Donato Diorio. He originally talked to me about the virtue of voicemail and how to do it properly and we still, by the way, use his process for that purpose today in part of my assessment and actual activation of the voicemail systems that we use for prospecting. Today, though, Donato’s going to talk to us about data. He is the founder and principal consultant at a company called DataZ, and it’s all about setting up and assessing a strategy for having a predictable pipeline that you can scale, that’s consistent, that generates revenue and a reliable forecast. Welcome to the podcast, Donato.

Donato: Thank you, Marylou. It’s great to be back.

Marylou: Yes. I know and you know putting together a strategy for assessment is a daunting task, one that I wish there was a tool for that, and I’m hearing now that perhaps that is the route you’re taking. My first question to you is: What got you interested in this particular type of strategy for assessment and what led you to build the systems, frameworks and methods that you currently have at DataZ?

Donato: Great. As you know, in the past, I founded and grew a company called BroadLook which was acquired by RingLead. I served as CEO for a while and then later as an adviser. During the time at RingLead, I had a lot of engagements with people that were looking to fix their data. That was a challenging process because I had this 15-20 years of experience with data, data-mining, analysis and all these things, and then you’d have a unique situation of Company A is very different from Company B.

You’d have a four to five-hour conversation typically over a period of weeks or months, and then it came to the point where, “Let’s get your data to look at it.” By the time everybody approved it and we got the data and we looked at it and I’d come back and I’d understand everything going on because I’m an expert at data, I’d say, “Well, it seems like you’re having this issue,” and it’s like, “Actually, no, Donato. The data that you did, the analysis of, we only used a third of it. This other stuff is hidden in our CRM.”

So let me go back again. I’d say, “Okay, let me look at that one-third of the data that you do use and analyze that.” Over time, it doesn’t take long to get beat on the head to realize, “Wow, there are series of questions that I do ask. I need to encapsulate them.” That is the hardest part. Luckily, my wife, who is a PhD in psychology and understands testing, gave me a short course and a bunch of books to read on testing, and validation, and creating a test that is valid. What I ended up with is I have a humanistic data assessment tool because, invariably, you could look at the data and say, “I see this,” but then the salesperson says one thing and the marketing person says something else. It’s not their experience.

By crafting, it’s actually 90 questions. It takes 10-12 minutes and it’s on what’s called a Likert scale. A Likert scale is, if you remember it, “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree” so they’re only putting in a number. That’s it. You may ask a question. Let me throw out a simple question here, something like, “We have identified consistent data standards for all our systems that contain account company and/or contact person data.” That’s a question to ask them. It’s a positive data question.

If they say, “No, we’re horrible at this,” I know they have a problem with their data strategy. I know they have a problem with their best practices. I know that normalization is an issue. By looking at the sum total of the 90 questions that touch on different concepts in data, I am able to get to the heart of the issue very, very fast. That five-hour back-and-forth conversation, ask questions, get the next person on the call, get a sample of data, all that is brought down to a 10-12 minute assessment and then a 15-minute initial call which we talk about the findings.

Marylou: Now, in this assessment, you just mentioned before that you hear one thing from marketing, you may hear something else from product management or sales ops. In your test, did you differentiate by role? Is that an option to say, “Hey, tell me about your role,” first or is there some demographic?

Donato: I can tell you’ve been doing this. Yes, I have a sentiment analysis in the test. There’s a role. The questions are random so when you see the questions, you don’t see them in order, like, “This isn’t an admin question. This is an admin and another admin question,” or sales, and sales, and marketing. There’s a role for each question in terms of who it’s heavily weighed to answer that correctly. That is a sentiment. Questions are either positively or negatively stated. What I’ll see, first off, is I’ll do a sentiment analysis and if I see that all the negative sentiment is “9, Strongly Agree”, I know there’s some serious problem.

The nice thing about this is I’ll show them the result and say, “Here’s the area you scored a 9 on for the negative and here’s the ones you scored or actually shows a 1 on for the positive-related questions.” What that leads to is one of the first things I do is I’ll say, “Who’s on your team?” What I like to hear is sales, marketing and admin-related persons. If I give them all three the test and sales answers this question, “Marketing is delivering fantastically. We have all the company and company data we need to sell effectively,” and sales says, “Uh-uh. That’s a one on a scale of nine,” marketing says, “That’s an eight,” I stop right there.

I’ve got them all in a room. They’re looking at a screen and I’m saying, “Guys, we can’t go forward until we get alignment.” Then, the next step I have them do is, “You have to take the test together. You have to take the test together and agree on where you are on that continuum because if you don’t have alignment, that’s like the kiss of death for a consultant.” You start engaging with somebody, you get buys and some sales, marketing, who may have a budget for data and things like that, says, “Uh-uh,” and the administrator–we may need somebody who’s trained in sales force, trained and more credible, trained in the local but he’s not, and we also assess that. What’s the skill level of the people that are doing the process?

The first thing that I do is I look to get alignment and, if not, then, “Okay, you’re not ready to move forward. No matter what you do, you’ve got one person saying one thing, one another, and a third person. You’ve got to get alignment first.” After alignment, then we look at the setting and then we start looking at all the other things.

Marylou: Okay, very good. In the course of 10 minutes, you can really assess the health of not only alignment and enable it and everything else but also the physical aspects of the pipeline that they have in place currently. Is that correct?

Donato: Correct, and I focus on the data. I am not doing anything within this test as it relates to sales training or sales effectiveness because all those things are a dependent variable where the data is that variable that everything is focused in. I want to focus on the best of my expertise. Yes, as you know, I can go in and teach them how to sell effectively and how to go a three-by-three approach, voicemail and all that stuff but my focus–there’s a lot of people that do all this stuff. I really want to focus on the strategy because I can bring the highest value for the time spent.

Marylou: Definitely. I always say, for me, I’ve got the funnel sales process. That process really amplifies and accentuates where their skills or mindset issues are festering. It doesn’t solve them; it points them out in glaringly obvious details as to where things are falling apart or leaking but it doesn’t fix it. It gets them to what I call a prioritization list of, “Okay, we’ve got 36 things wrong. What are we going to fix first?” and try to organize it with them and impact versus the actual effort to do that. I love this idea, and I know I am one of those people where it takes four to six weeks to figure out where we are on average. It’s a huge time-waster for consultants and for the client because we’re biting into our activation timeline by doing all those assessments that take weeks, and weeks, and weeks upfront. This is great. What do they have to provide you when you say “data”? Where are you grabbing data? What are the sources of the data?

Donato: The thing is I’m not actually getting the data because what I found is that you take the data without the story that comes with it and you have misinformation. After you look and the data comes later when you get an agreement–and, sometimes, that’s when I might tap out. I’ve built relationships with all the data vendors. Of course, I’ve got relationships. If they need something that my old company, RingLead, does, I could send them there. I found one company that was looking–what it call came down to is they were a machine-learning application and they needed massive amounts of data from big tractors, the real-time, internet-thing data.

They’re trying to build this whole process on not enough information. I went out and I found the company that has that data as an exhaust and I connected them so they got a billion records of data of this real-time data in terms of what tractors are doing. They are like the big CAT type tractors. Looking at what the underlying need is, getting to that fast, it was clear. They thought it was their sales process or they identified the wrong people, and what it only came down to is they didn’t have their algorithms changed because they didn’t have enough data to input to it so I found it for them.

Again, that’s an offshoot but it happened by going through this process. It’s like, “You don’t have a sales marketing or a data management problem; you have a data input problem. You have a lack in data.” The interesting process is that you mentioned, “What do you do first?” The category that each question affects are, from the top, data strategy, the core strategic choices that you make. What are your philosophies? Then, best practices. Then, documentation. If you don’t have the stuff documented it’s not real, it’s like a goal. If it’s not written down, it’s a whim. What are the company goals? Is it written down?

Then, tools. What tools? What data sales marketing systems are you bringing in? Because if you try to bring tools in and you don’t have your strategies assigned, a lot of times, vendors get a bad rap. Somebody goes and buys something because a sales rep wowed them, which happens. There’s some great reps out there. It’s like, “Listen to this one guy. I’ll buy anything this guy shows me because he’s just so good, but do I need it? I don’t know.” You get the tools only after you get the strategy down.

After the tools, how is your admin? Do you have the right admin people? Are they trained correctly? Are they certified? Data, strategy, best practices, documentation, tools and admin are the first six and each one is in a hierarchy with data and strategy being in the top. When you said, “What order?” I know the order asking the question because I see where the biggest problems are and I could then say, “Look, if you make these changes in your data strategy, your score–” because I do give them a score on the areas–”Your score will dramatically improve if you fix something at the base of the pyramid.”

Then, you’d go through all of the things like more data manipulation things like normalization strategies, re-duping, segmentation, fixing your account data then identifying your total available market. If you don’t know what your total available market is, you don’t know how to sell. You’ve got to break it up. How do you attack it? Then, your contact data, then segmenting titles and then your email verification. Then, of course, you’ve got compliance. If all these things are in I’m rattling them off because it’s nothing that I’ve been doing except this last six months but it’s brought clarity to my own 15 years of interactive Q&A. It speeds it up.

Marylou: I love this idea. You heard me. I’m stuck on, “What data are you pulling? What is the descriptive data that you start with?” and you’re like, “No, I don’t start there. I start with the people, the strategy and the sentiment.” I heard you say “sentiment” and it just went in one ear and out the other but now it’s coming back in. Tell me about the sentiment, a perception of a marketing person versus reality. How do you prove that when you’re showing them the report? When you tell them to get alignment, what does that mean for the marketing person who’s convinced that the data is clean? How do you go about, then, giving them the instructions of, “Okay, here’s what you need to do next.”

Donato: I think what happens is the sentiment helps to address the deeper problem, which is the first thing, which is the alignment. The way I do the sentiment and the alignment is each of the questions–I have a bar chart that I give them. It’s very simple. It’s very dumb and simple to look at. I break it up by role, which is sales, marketing and admin, and then by the different areas, the data, strategy, best practices, documentation and tools. What you’ll see is, in each of those categories, you’ll see where sales, where marketing and where admin scored in one thing in terms of how they felt they did and the other is how often–because you could actually leave questions blank. If you don’t know, you are allowed to leave a question blank.

I can score the test on, “What’s the ultimate you can do if you answer every question?” or I could do an adjusted score saying, “Of what you’re comfortable answering, here’s how you did,” because, the first time through, I gave somebody a really low score that was doing really well and I had to go back and re-factor. They were like, “Donato, this area here isn’t important to us. We don’t have companies. We only have contact data because we’re consumer-focused.” It’s my mistake. So, back to the drawing board, that’s when I came up with the idea of having an adjusted score so if they start going, “No,” like, “Okay, we’ll go to the adjusted score.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Testing is a tough business and having a valid test and designing it correctly. A lot of times, you’ll see it in a test like a personality test, an NPI. It’ll ask you the same question in different ways, and what they’re actually doing is they’re asking with a positive sentiment and they’re asking with a negative sentiment, and there’s a differentiation between how you answer. You could tell that some of the–if you answered a 7 on a positive question of the same topic, then you should answer a 2 because it’s balanced on a scale of 9.

If you don’t, that’s how testing works. You could determine how that person is leaning in the test, that they tend to weigh things negative more than they weigh things positive. Again, my clients don’t ever have to know any of this stuff but what the end result is it gets them shaking their head, “Yes, this is me,” when I start going over the results. That’s the simple of what you want to get to after them taking the 10-12 minutes. I just stop 20 minutes past.

Marylou: Yeah, the assessment. I understand now where you’re going. I love this in so many ways, especially this whole idea of planning makes predictable rather than execution. You mentioned it with tools. I see this all the time. It’s form over function and we have the same issue where they’re enamored with the tool. “The tool is something that everyone has so I need to get one as well,” but then they find out, “My business processes are not mapping to the tool. I have to change my business processes to work with the tool,” and it’s the wrong way to do it. I see it over and over again so I’m so happy that you’re adjusting that.

I’m sure people in the audience are salivating over this, thinking–we’re in the fall of 2018 when this is being recorded. We’re getting ready to do our planning for 2019. Boy, wouldn’t this be smart to go into Fourth Quarter, planning sessions, to have a better picture of where we truly are on the spectrum of “Are we ready? Do we have what it takes to create a predictable engine?” How do we go about reaching out to you or what do you got to offer the audience so that we can start this process and learn more about where our disconnects or gaps are?

Donato: I made it simple. I had it all developed on the website so you can go right to my website, which is DataZ. From there, there’s a top link that says “strategic data assessment” and, under there, there’s actually two assessments. One is the strategic data assessment and you just click on it. It brings you right to a Google form. You fill your stuff in and that’s it; it’s that simple. There’s no interaction you need to do with me. I’ll get notified, and I’ll do a 15-minute free consultation in terms of–you don’t see the results.

The results are tapping on the call. I’ll probably have a streamlined version that is automatic. Right now, there’s still a lot of backend stuff I have to do to press a couple of buttons but, right now, we get together on an UberConference like this where I show them the assessment. Some people are like, “Okay, let’s go. What do we do next?” Then, of course, we talk about the consulting. Sometimes, it’s like, “Donato, this is great. This reaffirms what we’re doing is correct and it gives us a better level. We’ll keep your contact information.”

It’s a great engagement method for me because, now, I get my business exclusively from the result of this. I said “no” a couple of times because they were like, “Marketing and sales have different answers and they both have to approve – let’s wait, guys. Let’s get this down first.” I want to win. So far, I’ve got testimonials from 100% of my clients so that record, I want to keep and make sure that we’re right for each other.

Marylou: Right, and it’s so important to start knowing the baseline. You’re giving them that option of really understanding, “As we move forward here, are we as a team ready to this, A, and do we have a good fit with you, the consultant to take us to where we want to go?” This is great, Donato. What I’ll do is I’ll put these links inside of your bio on the page for us and, if they want to get ahold of you, let’s finish this conversation by giving us an idea of–we know how to get to the website. How else would you like us to reach you?

Donato: I’m on LinkedIn. They can connect with me that way, and all my contact information is on the website as well. They could reach out to me. If you Google me, I’m the easiest guy on Earth to find.

Marylou: With your name, Donato Diorio, I would think so most definitely.

Donato: By the way, there is a second questionnaire on there. It’s a dataset questionnaire. Let’s say somebody has a list that they want to do something with. This is just 10 questions that help me understand what they’re trying to do with a particular set of data. I can give them, “Okay, you need to go to this company, this company and this company.” I don’t do the data manipulation myself; I point them to the direction of the great vendors that are out there and do that. I focus on how to get them and giving them the sorts of steps to get them where they want to go.

Marylou: What about the opposite of that? I’ve worked with a lot of clients who are having a difficulty finding a list vendor based on their ideal account profile. I’ll give you an example. I have a client right now who’s Europe-based in Americas and they’re looking for diagnostic centers. That’s not a zoom info type of thing or this typical lead sources. Could this help them for finding what they need to do, including maybe outsource, and build the list manually or is this more of, “Hey, here’s your list and go.”?

Donato: Part of what you’re talking about as far as designing and acquisitions strategy, that is something that I do in the consultation process as well. I’ve got one that I’m building right now. They’re looking for restaurants. They sell a scheduling software and they want to get every single restaurant around. They’re setting up vertical datasets. That is my other business that I do. I have a list that I build right now, my primary list of government. Everybody at the city, county, state and federal level, all the contact data in that verticalized dataset.

Marylou: Wonderful. For those of you out there who are needing to find an alternative to the standard list companies, which most of my clients are in that boat, then this is another test that can be taken on Donato’s website in order to get a starting point of where these best contacts are, especially as we’re working through the design of the ideal prospect personas, the influencers that we can talk to. Now, I’m getting into the sales process but the list is our lifeblood and, a lot of times, the current standard lists that are out there are not working for us, especially if we’re in specialized industries. Donato, thank you so much.

Donato: You know, you always make me better. I was going to say, based on what you’re saying there, I think I need to create a third assessment, which is, “I want to build a list,” because usually we really don’t focus on that. You see that? You just upped my game there, Marylou. Thank you.

Marylou: I would definitely send my clients over to you because I do have–it’s not boutique per se but it’s a dataset that is not a standard dataset. These are not tech companies selling to sales and marketing or IT. They’re companies that have very real needs, very real markets but they’re not necessarily the standard scraping that’s out there with all these list vendors. I’m going to hold you to that and build that assessment, Donato.

Donato: Okay, you’re the guinea pig. You know that, right? You know that now.

Marylou: Yeah, I’m fine with that definitely. Again, thank you so much for your time, Donato. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. I’ll make sure, for everybody, these notes are out there. Go take that assessment, you guys. This is the Achilles heel of putting in a predictable system, is to get that planning piece, the assessment piece. This added overlay of assessment is so important for cultural change as you move strategically to where you want to go, which is increased revenue and a reliable forecast. Thanks again, Donato.

Donato: Thank you, Marylou.

 

Prospecting involves more than just one conversation. It’s a series of conversations, and as the prospector, it’s up to you to keep the interactions going. This can result in a lot of work. You need to remember when the last time was that you talked to a particular prospect, work out when the next good time to contact them will be, and figure out what to say – and you have to repeat this process for multiple prospects. Luckily, there are tools that can help streamline this process for you.

Today’s guest is Nick Hart, a strategic customer service manager for Outreach.io. Outreach is a tool that performs much of the work for you. It can help you plan your follow-up conversations, make sure that the correct messages are being delivered at the right times and to the right people, and prevent you from forgetting or delaying crucial follow-ups. Listen the episode to hear Nick explain what Outreach does, how to use different types of messaging, and what types of email statistics Nick sees on a regular basis.

Episode Highlights:

• What Outreach does
• How Outreach helps salespeople get the right message across at the right time
• The importance of being both efficient and effective
• How certain types of messaging can help prospects see salespeople as real people, which can make prospects more responsive
• How asking permission can be a form of a call to action
• How to slow down and space out value ads across multiple emails
• The importance of crafting different messages for different personas
• Statistics for email open rates, reply rates, and bounce rates

Resources:

Nick Hart

Outreach

Email Nick at: nick.hart@outreach.io

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hi everybody it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest you’re going to love, Nick. He’s a strategic customer service manager over at Outreach.io.

A lot of you know that we love Outreach. Outreach is, for lack of a better term, he’ll explain it more, but it’s of a great follow up tool that does a lot of that plate spinning for you, and thinking for you so that basically you come into your office and you’ve got a nice little to do list every day, and it handles all that background virtual assistant type stuff really well to help us improve our follow up which is what our role is all about, trying to get more meetings.

I’ve asked Nick to come on the show today to talk about things that he’s seeing out there since he’s immersed in millions of records on a daily basis. He is like the analytics engine I’m sure and I’ve asked him to come on to talk about his role and to talk about some of the things he is seeing so that you guys are prepared when we enter 2019, and with all this regulation of what to do and how to maximize your return on effort. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick: Thank you Marylou, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on your podcast. You said it perfectly kind of what Outreach does and the space that we live in, and what I work with, but it would be helpful for me to give you a little more context there

Marylou: Oh yeah definitely, go ahead it’s all yours.

Nick: Specifically Outreach , the world that we live in is helping salespeople streamline their workflow, and so we found that sales people today more than ever are inundated with nonselling related activities and that’s what’s really helping solve that problem, getting reps back to actually spending more time doing selling, so helping with the automated follow up process, tell reps when they’re supposed to follow up with the right type of message at the right time, and then making sure all of that information gets back to sales force.

When we started in this space, it was predominantly in the world of what we call sequences, just helping you figure out when you’re supposed to follow up and why, and with what type of message, and we’ve since evolved into all customer facing teams, so your customer success managers, your renewals managers, your account executive, our strong point is definitely in the in the prospecting space, but we’re seeing a ton of all customer facing teams using Outreach to help streamline the way that they’re communicating with their customers.

Marylou: Yeah, that’s great. Right now, we are focused on prospecting that is my area of expertise, but it is, anyone who touches the potential customer, prospect in this case, or the client, once they come onboard and are in your family, you want to be able to keep that conversation going because we’re all affected by that shiny object syndrome of, “Whoa, there’s something over here I need to look at.”

We want to keep them happy, we want to keep them engaged, we want to keep them loyal so that they are clients for a very long time. You mentioned something that was really interesting to me, the right message at the right time, can you elaborate on what that means for Outreach?

Nick: Absolutely. When prospecting, there’s a lot of different trigger events if you would that tell you when you’re supposed to be engaging with your prospect. That might be found through an external source such as something you found on someone’s Twitter, or their LinkedIn, or maybe in their 10K, or it might be the way that they’re engaging with the contents that you’ve sent out.

I guess when we talk about the first category, a lot of times in prospecting, we do a traditional type John Burroughs what do I do now type of messaging where we find a trigger event about the company or about the individual that we’re reaching out to, and that’s how we start our introduction.

It’s definitely timely in that regard. Sometimes, we don’t have that type of information though, so you might just have to go with the best that you have. You might know about the person’s persona, you might understand what they do based on their LinkedIn, but you don’t necessarily have a timely reason to reach out rather other than, this just looks like the right type of person who would find benefit from what our organization does.

What we can do is, we help service other types of engagement activities, or engagements, or inputs, I guess, if you would. For example, when people are opening your emails, or when they’re clicking on links, you can tell that this person is more interested and we can treat them differently.

I think it’s good to customize your emails for sure, but I also think that it’s important to put forth the effort with those people that are the most engaged, and that’s a lot of what we help people with, surfacing when people are engaged so you can really focus on them at the right time, so as they’re engaging back, as they’re clicking on links, opening content, or engaging with the content that you sent to them, you can engage back in the right way.

Marylou: Yes, so it’s morphed into building that relationship that pre-conversation relationship so that when you do get on the phone with them, or when you do schedule those meetings, there’s this implied trust and rapport that you’ve already established prior to getting on the phone. It is a “warmer” conversation that you’re going to have.

The other thing that I love about what you guys do, we are all really great at sales conversation, that’s why we’re sales professionals, that’s why we chose this field. The problem is, not that we don’t know how to have those conversations, but we don’t get enough of them to get better and better.

You know as well as I do time in the saddle, when you are doing something on a daily basis, you’re going to get better and better at it. So you have the ability to help us have more of these conversations, so that we can deploy the sales methodologies that are all out there scattered all over the place, and how to close, and how to handle objections, and all of that other thing, but we need more of those conversations in order to get better.

Nick: I couldn’t have said it better myself, and I think what’s really interesting, too, is that we’re in a bit of a transition period. When I think about the way that this space has evolved in the last two years since I’ve been with Outreach or even before then when I was in the sales role. We noticed that a lot of these tools came into the market, and we now are giving the power to the salesperson to get email volume out there, and get call volume out there, and now we noticed that the effectiveness of that if you’re not careful, when you’re not trying to fine tune that engine and get better and better content, and better and better messaging, engaging at the right time becomes less effective over time.

There’s more noise, we’re trying to cut through that noise in order to engage. If you look, and we see this in our data as well is that over a very long period of time, if you’re not constantly improving, your reply rate will slowly get lower and lower.

There’s that constant iteration process, the way that we always say it internally is, we want to help our customers become more efficient, which is that first portion I was talk about, as well as more effective. If you’re not focusing on both, your effectiveness will just eventually gradually decline, so you have to make sure that you’re focusing on not only getting enough volume out there which is what you’re talking about, getting enough at bats, having enough conversations where you’re constantly refining that process, so that you can become more effective as well.

Marylou: Right, so it’s the impact and effort, and we’re constantly tweaking, adjusting, analyzing iterating, improving, testing and what’s beautiful about these systems is that, we’re not sitting there using our very precious non selling related time.

We are taking that time that used to be admin and popping it into this automated technologically advanced thing, so that we can then focus on what kind of conversation should I be having? What level of awareness are they at? What’s the purchase intent if they’re at this point in that journey? Where should I be focusing my conversations so that I can advance that person through my funnel, and get them to an opportunity to close, so that we’re both hyper engaged, we’re both excited about moving forward because we’ve warmed them up enough so that they feel confident that they’re going into this with good decisions that they can make along the way?

Nick: Right, yeah, that’s exactly it. What I’m kind of hearing you say is, you want your buyer to see you as a person, as a real person, and that’s why I think we’ve talked about this before, you can’t just be solely reliant on email, and that’s not because email can’t be effective, but it’s a lot harder for your buyer to see you as an individual, as the person that you actually are on the other side of the keyboard when they only receive text emails from you, and that’s why I think social selling is becoming increasingly more important as well as making sure that you’re on the phone.

Actually a perfect example of this, there’s always the debate as to whether or not I should leave voicemails or not leave voicemails. A lot of time sales reps will say, “I shouldn’t leave a voicemail because they’re never going to call me back.” Well, the purpose of the voicemail is to actually make you seem like more of a person. They hear your voice, they know that you seem like you’re a nice person, or a good person. They’re probably more likely to respond to your email or respond to one of your LinkedIn in mail messages because it’s a lot easier to hit unsubscribe on an email than it is to reject a person when you see them as a person.

Marylou: We just did a little mini test in my class about LinkedIn, this was a request to fill out a survey, this was a list where we’re first levels, we’re connected already in some fashion to the person we were placing the request, so there was a warm connection because we, at some point connected to one another. We placed a request in a fashion that was more of ask, and then we placed a request in a fashion that was more permission based. The ask, the direct ask was sending them the link for the first response was like at 3%.

When we did it where we were more personal and asked permission to send them the link if they wanted to fill it out for us, we got 17%. It was really wild to see that. So there are some unwritten rules even in social that go even further into permission based in some cases, not all but the fact is, we tested.

We wanted to see since we’re connected to them, “Hey, here’s the link, go fill it out.” Versus, “Hey, I’ve got this link, I think it would be really helpful for you. A lot of your peers are filling it out, it would be really great if you can do that, but I want to ask your permission to do this, so send me a reply, yes or no, if you want to do it, or no it’s fine, too.” And that was a big difference.

Yeah, you’ve got to test a lot of this conversation, it’s almost as if we’re going from channel to channel, email to phone, to social to direct mail, to fax even in some cases my clients still use that. You’ve got to think about the language that is going to be accepted in that medium. It’s not the same across the board.

Nick: Right. It’s interesting because I work with a lot of customers who are trying to craft the perfect email, one thing in that same realm that you’re talking about is having to have a clear call to action.

A lot of times, people confuse having a clear call to action with being overly pushy, and I don’t think they’re the same. What I love about what you’re just talking about is we can still have a very clear call to action, and our clear call to action is, “Do I have your permission to do X, Y, or Z?” but a lot of times, reps will say, “Well, I don’t want to be too pushy, so I’m just going to send them an email that has all of these resources, and all of these great things that they’ll benefit from.”

When I get an email like that, you’ve got 15 links, and you’re talking about all these things you do great, or all of the value that you could potentially offer me, I get lost in that, I don’t know what you want me to do, I not understand the purpose of an email as a buyer? I think you’re spot on, I think it’s contributing value within that email, and then making sure they have a very clear call to action, and that could be something different than asking for a meeting, you don’t always have to ask for a meeting in an email. It could be referral. It could be permission. It could be advice.

Marylou: It could be a helpful document that I wanted to send you, a direct questions document, it culminates with all of the questions that may be spinning around in your head right now, so go click over there, my gift to you, no strings attached.

Nick: Exactly.

Marylou: It’s really like that, and because we have these tools, we can afford to do that, we can string things out over the course of time, take our ideal sales conversation as if we were sitting across the table from our ideal prospect, and break that up into chunks of conversation and send it out over time. It’s not any different, because we have more records in a lot of cases, not always, but we have more records to work with, we can afford to spread it out, and also with tools like Outreach, we can segment those conversations.

We may have one conversation with a marketing person at the company, and a completely different one going on with the sales operations people, in their language, when they’re ready to consume, but they’re all running simultaneously. We don’t have to remember, “Okay, what did I send to her on this date?” That is all now offloaded, which allows you to focus like you said on perfecting your sales conversation, and that conversation to advance people in the pipeline.

Nick: Yeah, that’s absolutely it. One of my customers said it perfectly, they said, “To marathon, not a sprint.” You often see salespeople do exactly that, they go and they cram 15 bullet points into their first email and go, this is value, I’m contributing value on this email, but the problem is that, you’ve again made this so hard to consume that your buyer is going to read the first line and just unsubscribe.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I like to put maybe one or two value ads in each email, and space out over time, and then the other thing that you talked about is having that multithreaded conversation.

I think this is another area that we see a lot of people overlook. It is just a common oversight, I guess I would say. A lot of times, we’ve seen this trend of the account based prospecting and what a lot of people have interpreted that to be is, let me grab all of the people that could potentially be involved in a buying decision within this account, and let me hit them all with the same email.

I’m doing my research, I’ve looked at their 10K. I know what’s relevant to their business, but it doesn’t quite cut it, and the other thing, I mean there’s a lot of things I wish I could go back and tell my former STR self, but I think if there is one thing that that’s coming to mind right now is, the people that you’re talking to, they talk to each other.

If I send an email to 15 people within an organization, and it’s all the same email? The chances are at least a couple of them are going to lean to each other and go, “Did this guy Nick just send you this exact same canned email?” “Yeah, we’re not going to talk to this guy, we’re definitely not going to talk to this guy. He’s phishing for a meeting. He says almost the exact same thing.”

You’re right, you need to have a different message for every different persona that you’re going after.

Marylou: That’s the ideal, you’re going to start probably generic, what we used to do at Predictable Revenue is we say, “Look, grab three records from the company, it’s okay to send them the same generic one, start getting a sense of who’s bubbling up first, and that’s the first person to pull out and then create your own conversation canvass with that role.” Because a lot of times, clients don’t know well, where do I start? Which role of my five roles is going to be the one I should spend time crafting a sequence for?

It could be a lot of work, it seems like a lot of work, it seems a bit daunting when you first get into this. But it’s a nice way to chip away at the response, and see who bubbles up first then they earn the right to have her own sequence, and their own conversation path, and then eventually, yes, you want to get as segmented, as narrow as possible because that will affect the response rate.

Nick: Absolutely. I think for those that are listening to this podcast that are early on in their prospecting days, or trying to figure out what the personas are that they should be going after. I think a great action, or a great process to go through is look at the deals that you’ve closed. If you’re using Salesforce, go into Salesforce, figure out who is involved with those opportunities, who are your buyers, run a report on it, see what types of titles you have, and those can start to become the buckets for your personas.

Then go talk to the sales people that actually close those roles or better yet, go talk to your CSMs or the people that are working with your customers, if you’re trying to figure out what value do you drive for each one of these personas, go talk to them, and ask them, “What kind of value are you getting from our product or service?” Then create those buckets and start with the biggest buckets first. You might start with more of a generic message, and then take off one or two personas like you mentioned, and those start to become your persona based messaging.

Marylou: Now, another thing that we get confused about and you since you deal with millions of records over there, do we need to have content that goes with each email, or can we say give ourselves a break and have dialogue in an email and every so often have a click through, or what are you seeing as best practice in that? Let’s pretend I have eight touch sequence over 32 business days, is content needed for that, and if so, how much?

Nick: I don’t think it’s a perfect science, honestly. We don’t we don’t track that data. There are certain areas that we like to be prescriptive, and there’s others that we don’t. One thing that we did find is, depending on what your call to action is, you really only want to have one.

If you’re trying to book a meeting with someone, then you probably don’t want to have a hyperlink in there as well. Because what’s going to happen is, they’re going to read your email, and click on your hyperlink, and now they’re not in their email anymore, and they’ve forgotten what the call to action actually was. Hopefully, they’re rooting around on your website and doing a bunch of research.

What I would say is, don’t do all one method, so don’t ask for a meeting on every single email, and don’t hyperlink to content every single time. If you’re using a tool like Outreach or any other tool that’s helping you measure your reply rates on emails, you can actually compare them against each other and see which ones can be better.

We found that actually reply rates without links are better for that exact reason that I was mentioning because we’re distracting somebody with a link and we’re sending them elsewhere. I shouldn’t use distracting because it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just again, it is a marathon not a sprint, so just know the purpose of this email, email to within my 10 email sequence is to give them some content. My call action here is this collateral form.

Now the other thing that I love that I don’t see people using that often are actually PS lines. If you are going to kind of break the rule and have two call to actions, a PS line is a nice way to not completely distract somebody so, “Hey, I’d love to book a meeting with you. How does your calendar look for a 15-minute call next Tuesday or Wednesday? PS, here’s an article I think you should reference.” It’s still really clear for them what you want them to do in the email, but there’s just that little extra added bonus for them as well.

Marylou: Yes, you must be an old soul then because that’s going back to the direct mail days where PS is not all the time, but worked really well. I still use them in my emails, and I do a combination of help, help, help ask, but I still put that predictable revenue email one occasionally in which helps me hone in on the right person in case I’m in a department of 35 marketers and I’m trying to find the one person of those 35 who do what I want to be able to sell them on.

I do have the help, help, help ask, a three to one ratio that I use, and I start my folks out on that pretty much, on the help, help, help we do sometimes add click through, or we put within the body, right in the body, a problem and how it was solved.

So it will probably agitate them, we introduce a problem, we agitate them, and then we solve the problems.

We use a lot of persuasive copywriting techniques in the emails that I help clients design, and my students especially, to make sure that we try these different things out in an AB split test type of environment, and the PS I found and the Johnson box, that is a direct mail again and it’s drawing the eyeball, it’s like a link, it’s before they head links, but it has asterisks or a bar around, it’s like a box, and inside the box is the material that you want them to look at. Your eyes naturally go to that spot.

So we test a lot of times to see if there’s a Johnson box inserted, move them quickly through the email to our click through, or our pain point, or our solving the pain point, or whatever it is, the customer testimonial, whatever you want to throw in there, and chances are in a lot of cases, it does well there as well.

Nick: That’s interesting. I’ve learned something.

Marylou: A lot of this is old school direct mail, that’s where I came up from the ranks when you had to really think about because it was hard dollar cost to send a letter with stamps and paper that you need to do a lot of planning, so I’m a real stickler for planning as much as possible because, executing is expensive, and planning is not. That’s my whole view.

Nick: Yeah, I love it, yeah that’s good.

Marylou: So the other question I might ask before we go because I don’t take a lot of your time here, you have I’m sure in your head, some of the statistics. I read an article that you wrote that just totally flipped my world around. You were talking about the follow up statements that doesn’t help much, what kind of set of benchmarks could you share with the audience of what you’re seeing? First of all what the benchmark is? Why is it relevant? Why do you think it’s important? And if there are any advice that you have to improve that, let us know.

Nick: Absolutely. There’s a couple, let’s start with just overall email stats on an individual email basis. The first is, we see across our entire customer base that about a 30% open rate is fairly standard.

Actually a funny story, I had a customer the other day, this was a couple months back, and he was using Outreach to send out all his emails, he came to me, he was completely perplexed he goes, “I just don’t understand, we’re getting 40% open rate.” I was, “Yeah, what’s the problem?” he goes, “Well everybody should be opening this email. I mean why wouldn’t they? Who doesn’t open their emails? We should be getting 100% open rate.”

So I thought that was funny. We’re seeing about a 30%––27% is specifically the last time I pulled the data is what we’re seeing for an individual email open rate. The next is reply rate. Now the other thing to keep in mind, the only caveat––all of these stats that I pulled are specifically for the outbound prospecting type motion. That what we’re talking about here in general but just keep in mind that if you’re going to take these stats back to your CSM team, it’s probably going to be very different.

Marylou: This is targeted with Outreach, this is not necessarily blended inbound, outbound nor is it a referral system, it’s targeted Outreach where you’re selecting the records that you want to go after.

Nick: Exactly. We’re looking about 30% open rate, we see about a 3% reply rate, 3% to 4% is kind of the sweet spot on emails. Then bounce rates, obviously you want to keep those as low as possible, a lot of that’s going to be indicative of the data provider that you use as well as just following good email deliverability best practices. I could spend an entire session on what are good practices and what are bad practices when it comes to email deliverability.

But what we’re seeing, if you can keep that below about 3%, that’s awesome. If you’ve got something drastically higher, you want to work with your data provider to figure out, can you give me some better data?

Marylou: Yeah, what’s going on? If I did that case study in Predictable Revenue where we are comparing to of these vendors one against the other and the bounce rates were 30% online and I think 3% to 5% on the other one which meant, I had a lot more time to deal with it, because at that time, we had to actually pull those records, we didn’t have a marketing automation system yet to help us take those out.

There was a lot of admin time spent just managing the list, and taking care of the list, and cultivating new names where if we had a good rate, then we wouldn’t have to worry about that. It’s going to replenish itself once the records were in incubation, we can then replenish it. But this case, almost least 30% got replenished as I go in order to make more numbers.

Nick: Exactly. One thing just because I work with a lot of these data provider companies out there, if you go, or if anybody listening to this goes to them and say, “Well, Nick from Outreach says that we should begin at 30%.” That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s 3% across all of your emails that you’re sending, so if you’re reaching out to a prospect and sending them hopefully 7-10 emails a piece, and that’s going to dilute the bad data, or the inaccurate data that you might be getting from your data provider.

So definitely don’t go to your data provider and ask for a 3% bounce rate. Otherwise, you’re going to leave. I don’t think anybody can get close to that. I work with the best of the best. The other one that I think is really important to highlight is opt out rate.

I work with a lot of sales teams that are resistant at first to include unsubscribe within their emails, and I always feel like it’s important to explain why it’s critically important.

We talked about being in a GDPR world where not only is it legally required, but if you don’t allow somebody the option to opt out of your email, the first thing that they’re going to start doing is marking you as junk, and this kind of gets into the email deliverability best practices but if you get marked is junk enough, then that’s going to ruin the reputation of your entire domain. It means that you’re not going to ever be able to send them emails again, as well as your colleagues may never be able to send them emails. You want to watch out for that.

The other problem, too is that, if you don’t have an unsubscribe link, then you’re probably going to get a high number of people that are responding saying, “Unsubscribe.” So when we’re looking back at those reply rates, they’re going to be artificially inflated. You really want to watch out for that because you might think you have a killer template that you’re using , or a killer sequence and in fact it’s just a bunch of people telling you, “Don’t email me again.”

Marylou: Yeah, never contact me again. Let’s go back to the reply rate just to make sure I understand, the audience understands, that 3% to 4% is that individual or is that across the sequence?

Nick: That’s an individual email reply rate.

Marylou: Okay, so the cost of sequence you can aggregate.

Nick: Yeah. I was going to come back to this, so that the last piece is that if today you’re not using a tool like Outreach, or anything that’s helping you automate this entire playbook, or all of your touch points, it’s going to be hard for you to pull this data but arguably, I think the most important number to look at is your overall sequence reply rate, or your overall effectiveness of the campaign that you’re running.

Between all the different touch points that we’re having, so our phone, our email, our social, how effective are we at actually getting this prospect to respond to us? What we see as a good baseline is around 12%.

Marylou: Okay, and does it matter whether it’s blended, meaning multichannel, or email only? Do the rates change when you have that data to say, I have some clients who are very resistant of using the phone on the cold sequences, they want to do an email only, what we call wake up to chill campaigns and while they’re sleeping, they’re getting people to reply. I know that’s not recommended, but do you have numbers for that type of campaign versus a blended phone, email, or multichannel, or is it both multichannel?

Nick: It’s blended. Every organization’s reply rate is going to differ, whether email, or phone is more effective, you might have an abysmal email reply rate simply because your buyer is just not on email that often, that doesn’t mean to leave email completely out as well as vice versa.

For example, you look at us, we sell predominantly to sales people, sales people are often at their phones, and sales leaders even are usually pretty accessible on their phone. We actually get a pretty good phone response rate, and our email response rate is a little bit lower.

So we would get almost a 10% answer rate on phone, or email is lower like in the 2% range that might be completely flipped if you’re selling to IT. The nice thing about looking at about 12% is that, that’s a good baseline again for you to kind of focus on between the two.

Marylou: Yeah, and what we look for is baselines because we know there are so many different situation as Nick said before, the prospect persona, and how they like to consume information, and read or whatever they like to do, is what drives how you’re blend books, and what your blend response rates are going to be, and there is a difference sometimes between IT marketing, and sales that’s my sort of area. They vary wildly, depending on the persona, but I know that so I know how to plan for that when I’m doing my blend, so that I have those conversations filling up the pipeline, and there’s no peaks and valleys.

All of these things allow you to almost practically perfectly design your sequences so that you’re not doing those peaks and valleys of trying to fill the funnel up. So within the quarter, if you’re on all rolls like a lot of my folks are, you are trying to close business, it’s so hard to try to think about prospecting at the same time.

If we have tools like this where you can turn it up, amp it up a little bit, get that going, and that way you can still close business and have automation help you need maybe more or less depending on where you are in your cycle of sales.

Nick, this has been such a great conversation, how do we get a hold of you to learn all that you’ve been learning so that we get smarter, too.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been really fun. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn again it’s just Nick Hart, if you want to shoot me an email as well, I’ll give you that, it’s nick.hart@outreach.io.

If you’re curious about product or just what we do as an organization, feel free to reach out, if you just want to network, do so as well, I always welcome it. Marylou, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Marylou: My pleasure, it was really fun, and I will add being an Outreach user for years now is, there’s a lot of training materials on their website, and you could go there whether or not you are an Outreach user or not. Start learning and understanding especially since we’re moving into these more sophisticated and strategic sequencing and cadences.

There are a lot of things that these tools do now that are beyond what we thought ever could be possible. As Nick said, they can halt the sequence so that you can send a direct mail. They can do all these weird things now that allow you to be in total control of your sales conversation, that presales conversation, and as he said, you’re taking it all the way into the pipeline, so nourish your sequences whether they are clients, or maybe they’re prospects waiting to come back in later.

These are all areas of the pipeline, physical locations where you can apply these sales conversation canvasses to keep your prospects and clients engaged. Thanks again Nick, I loved having you on the podcast and take care.

Nick: Alright, it was good chatting. Bye.

When you’re prospecting, having just a little bit of information can be the key to getting your foot in the door and growing your pipeline. Timing your call or email just right or having the perfect conversation starter can make all the difference when it comes to making a sale. If you know that the company you’re looking at has just launched a new project that can benefit from the products you sell or is getting ready to evaluate solutions for the type of service you’re selling, you’re better able to strike while the iron is hot.

Today’s guest is Alex Greer, the founder and CEO of Signal HQ. Signal is a type of technology that you can use to help you get the kind of information that you need to make your sales pitch more effective and help you strategize more easily. Listen the episode to hear Alex explain what Signal HQ does and how it can help with sales.

Episode Highlights:

• What Alex did before becoming the founder and CEO of Signal HQ
• What Signal HQ does
• Why Alex started Signal HQ
• Which types of signals Alex’s company focuses on, and which types of signals might also get focus as time goes on
• How Signal HQ can help prospectors prioritize and make the most effective decisions about how to use their time
• Why sales teams are slower than other departments to pick up on some newer technologies that can help them sell more effectively
• How the data provided by Signal HQ can help sales people start conversations with prospects

Resources:

Alex Greer

Signal HQ

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Alex Greer. He’s the founder and CEO of the company called Signal HQ. When I first heard that term, I immediately thought artificial intelligence. But I’m here to tell you that Alex’s work is just far beyond that piece of the puzzle. I’ve asked him to come on the show today to talk to us about what he’s been working on, where he’s come from in order to be able to present this great solution set that he’s coming up with, and also to set some of the misconceptions about what’s happening in the future for us in sales as it relates to these new technologies. Welcome, Alex, to the podcast.

Alex: Thank you, Marylou. I’m so excited to be on your podcast. Thanks for having me.

Marylou: You obviously are the founder and CEO of Signal HQ, but you’ve had some sort of path to get to this point. Tell us a little bit about your background, what got you so passionate about this topic, and the work that you’ve done prior to starting your company?

Alex: Sure. About 10 years ago, I graduated from UPENN with the degree in Mechanical Engineering and as most engineering undergraduates go, I haven’t practiced engineering since. I have been in sales my whole career.

It’s only recently with starting up Signal HQ that I’ve really put those engineering skills fully back into practice. But that engineering and kind of the mathematical problem solving mindset has landed itself well to my sales career and the way I view the world.

I spent six years selling architectural lighting. My parents are both architects and I found my way into the lighting business before deciding to switch into the tech industry. I got my big break in tech working at Cloudera in 2015. That was two years before we went IPO. I was there through the IPO which was a very exciting time.

I joined the team right when we were starting our inside sales team in Austin. I went from being an outside sales rep to just getting my foot on the door as an SDR, a sales development rep, setting meetings for the closing reps at Cloudera and was responsible for booking meetings at the $5 billion and up commercial accounts in north central regions like Chicago, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and places like that, Detroit. I got some really great exposure to some great AEs and lots of great mentorship internally within the company.

An opportunity opened up to join our growing enablement team because we were really expanding our sales team worldwide at the time in early 2016. I’ve been developing quite a few techniques to help our team be a lot more efficient with our prospecting techniques, so that we could generate pipeline more quickly and more effectively.

They wanted me to teach everybody––all of the new hires we were bringing onboard, as well as the team abroad internationally. Over time, my skills grew and was promoted several times within Cloudera to senior manager of inside sales enablement.

In 2017, I joined Medallia as a Director of Inside Sales Strategy and Enablement to help them get started with the new Austin, Texas based inside sales team before deciding to venture out on my own and start Signal HQ.

Marylou: You’ve definitely earned your stripes. It sounds like, especially, the feet to the fire in build mode and learning new things. Tell us what led you to this path now with Signal HQ. Tell us about what Signal HQ does.

Alex: Signal HQ is really a manifestation of two really big things. One is my kind of engineering brain’s desire for maximum efficiency and the other part is born out of a frustration with the inability to—I don’t know if inability is the right word—but our teams, at the last couple of companies that I worked at, we invested, as many companies do, in a variety of different sales acceleration and sales intelligence technologies, and being a practitioner and diving into these pieces of software, I knew how to use them inside and I knew the value that they brought and would teach it to everybody else. But when I looked at the user statistics, I saw that only a very small percent were really actively using these technologies on a regular basis.

Most of the team would use it maybe once or twice a month. Then there would be another 10% that never logged in at all. There was a lot of money that was not really being utilized even though we have this valuable information.

I felt like there was an opportunity in the market to really capitalize on the variety of different, what I’ll call “buying signals,” that ordinarily you’d have to set up across a number of different systems––four, five, six different websites and pieces of software and cobble together the insights in your mind and figure out which ones to prioritize.

I felt like there’s a way to pull all of those together in one place and also to more proactively deliver this information in the hands of each individual contributor and build it in a way that’s part of their workflow as opposed to requiring them to log in to a more static database and pull that information out.

That’s at a very high level of what Signal HQ is about, it is capitalizing on all of the buying signal so you can, I like to say, prospect smarter and not harder.

Marylou: I know for me, personally, when I have a number of different channels and people talk about me and I see all of these, what I call, signals pop up, there are so many of them. It’s like the email engine. I get so many emails per day, I can’t really weed through them all. The same things happening in a lot of respect with these signals and I don’t even know how to prioritize them, where to begin with that? How that works? What I should be doing? Can you explain the intent of a system like this? Is it that you fitted your topic counts, for example, is that one way to use it so that anytime, anything of value, however that’s defined, becomes newsworthy that you’ll get that notification or somehow it tells you that this has happened, so you can act on it quickly as opposed to weeding through 150 tweets and trying to pull the ones that you think might be relevant?

Alex: A point of clarification and I’ll expand on the question about accounts is Signal HQ, as of today, is really focusing on intense data which is data about if people at a company are actively researching solutions across third party sites or even on peer review sites, it’s a really, really exciting new piece of data that hasn’t been operationalized very effectively in the sales landscape, that’s where we’re starting.

The intent over time is to pull other types of signals such as major project initiatives, financial events, job alerts and promotions and that sort of thing, so that we can fulfill that vision of having that centralized signal system.

Now, when it comes to how exactly you start getting the information about your accounts, one of the really big drawbacks of a lot of the systems out there is this notion of having to feed at existing accounts in your CRM and then getting results back against only those accounts.

Marylou: Correct.

Alex: The problem with that is when you’re working with a company’s internal CRM, everyone’s CRM is not perfect. There is various levels of really good, good, bad, or total disaster. Depending on what seat you sit in and how realistic or cynical you are, one of those words will resonate with how you feel about your team’s CRM.

But the fact of the matter is, it’s really tough to have every single company that fits within your ideal customer profile, or I know you like to call it ideal target profile, have it already all filled out in your CRM, perfectly organized by location, and then allocated perfectly across every single rep.

Signal HQ is designed to really be a very dynamic tool as opposed to a static tool in that you can set a couple of different parameters, you could say, “Okay, give me information on only accounts owned by Marylou,” or we can also set a criteria based on some thermographic settings, we could say, “Okay, Marylou is responsible for midwest states with annual revenue above $1 billion,” and you’ll be able to see results come back that are across all companies, whether they’re in your CRM or not.

This is so important because you’ll be able to say, “Okay, this signal is coming from an account that’s already a customer system, great, here’s a couple from some prospects, but wow, this company is doing something really interesting and it’s not even in our CRM at all.” I really want to make sure that our customers are gathering information on companies and their market regardless if this exists in their CRM or not, so that they can make the most use out of their time and capitalize accordingly.

Marylou: I love that. I love that because one of the exercises I do with clients is to determine the segments, tiers of accounts because we have some clients with have lots of accounts, some not so many, but we are able to take the sweet spot accounts, put them in the bull’s eye, the next layer out would be nice to have account, but we’re not going to spend a lot of time on them and then there’s this everybody else category.

It’s great for that if you’ve categorized, you can also see what you think if you have those accounts. But like you said, a lot of times, when we start working on the list, one example is my co-author Jeremy, we did a profile on the ideal buyer for his product and we came out with Betty was the name.

Betty, we’d looked in their database, they were 500 Betty’s that they could sell to. But then when we went to LinkedIn and just did a very—and you’ll teach us more about this—but a very simple search on the role of Betty, there were 50,000 potential Betty’s that we could go after, but our database, our house list only have 500. It’s like, “Oh, we’re in trouble here,” but you’re saying not to worry about that because you’re looking at in aggregate, holistically, the parameters that fit that criteria regardless where they reside, whether it’s in your in house list or they’re out there in the world, if you need to go after within your defined parameters. Love that.

Alex: Exactly. This problem becomes especially acute for companies out there that are selling to smaller businesses or startups. The thermographic lists that are out there are mainly tailored for capturing the largest companies in the world. That’s where the most abundant information exists.

But even the little teeny tiny companies are posting jobs or making announcements that are relevant to you and your solution. If you haven’t set up the system to tune in, so to speak, to those signals, then you’ll completely miss them if you’re just relying on a kind of set account list that you pulled into your CRMs, so really, really important.

Marylou: Definitely. We were talking offline about marketing and how some of these advanced methods and systems technologies are being adopted or at least looked at by marketing and we were talking about the disconnect with sales, why do you think sales is a little bit slower on the uptick to start using some of these technology or getting an understanding of how this can benefit them in maximizing efficiency or like I like to say, return on effort, what do you think is the disconnect there or the alignment issue there?

Alex: A great sales mentor of mine early in my career had a really great word that he used whenever there was a problem or a disconnect, he called it an opportunity. He’d say, “That’s an opportunity right there,” so I’m going to use that word because it’s spins it into a positive way. There’s an opportunity to help with this alignment and again, equip sales people with information that aligns better with their workflow and kind of meets them where they are.

I’d say the marketing organization, especially in demand gen has become very technologically savvy, understands the importance of a conversion funnel and maximizing every step along the way of a potential buyer’s journey when they’re exposed to your marketing materials so that you gather up the most qualified leads.

Marylou: Right.

Alex: There’s a lot of technology that goes into that. As a result, they’ve become very technologically astute. Sales people, on the other hand, their focus has been more primarily on the written and verbal element of sales and focusing on maximizing those conversations. That’s not a bad thing, that still needs to occur.

But what is happening, especially here in 2018 more than ever, is we’ve tried a lot of venture backed companies where the pressure for growth and pipeline acceleration is more important than ever and the sales team really can’t just sit on their laurels and wait for marketing to deliver these precious good leads. Even then, not all of the leads are necessarily that great.

It really becomes an incumbent on the sales person if they’re going to hit their number whether it’s the number of meetings, new opportunities or closed business, if they want to meet or exceed their quota, they’ve got to hunt for new business themselves, they can’t just wait for marketing.

That’s where the opportunity lies to really equip sales people with informational way that makes sense to them, it’s easy to interpret, it’s part of their workflow. Frankly, above and beyond that, you could create a feedback loop back to marketing and have a dialogue where the sales team shares what they’ve been finding successful with their prospecting techniques, marketing shares, their insights, and then you have this wheel of innovation happening internally within the company.

Marylou: Yeah, that would be great. I think a lot of times too, there is this notion that they’re talking to the masses so the masses gives you a bigger data set and statistically more relevant results or information so that you can proceed or since we’re not as large of a data set for us, you’re not sure if you’re really going down the right path by the results you get back.

I think that’s another thing that sort of keeps us from like, 30 records versus 30,000, I think that that has a lot to do with adoption and that we have a limited number of accounts to work with usually.

Alex: Exactly right. For the sales listeners on this podcast, put yourself in marketing shoes for a minute. You may want to have a conversation with your marketing team and learn what tools they have at their disposal because I think you’ll find it shocking, the amount of information they have on an account level basis that you have no idea existed.

Speaking of these large numbers, from a marketing team’s perspective, a lot of them, whether they’re comped on it or not, they look at the number of leads they’re ultimately producing. The tools they have at their disposal now include things like they have visibility into the number of emails that are opened versus how many are delivered, that’s their open percent, that’s a conversion metric they track, also the number of clicks on links within those emails, that’s called a click-through rate or CTR, that’s true with the emails, that’s true with advertising.

They’ll look at the amount of traffic to the website and the tools that they have at their disposal now often are broken out by company. There’s technology that’s able to tell, “Okay, this traffic is coming from a computer that’s associated with this particular company, so we’ll chalk up that statistic to Acme corporation.”

Another thing that marketing teams are increasingly investing in is intent data. I mentioned this earlier. There’s data that’s now being packaged up and being made available to marketing organizations that says, “Hey, people from this company have shown a recent spike in activity researching solutions in your space.” What the marketing team does is they say, “Okay, let’s take this big huge data set that tells us the amount of interest on a company by a company basis on these solutions and let’s spend our marketing dollars on the companies that are showing recent interest.”

They’re not really looking at the account by account basis of this interest, they just say, “Okay, here is a big data set that says all these companies are interested. We’re going to spend out marketing dollars on these companies.”

Meanwhile, sales is none the wiser that the named accounts and accounts in the territory that they’re responsible for, there is all of this information that’s living in the marketing team’s house that has very rich data on their specific accounts. That is the really exciting opportunity that I’m excited to tap into and really make easy to put in a sales person’s hands for their set of accounts that they’re responsible for, so they can make better prospecting decisions.

Marylou: Yeah. That’s great. Love that. I think what’s really cool about that, too, I’m working on a speech right now for a follow up and a lot of the push back I get from sales reps as to why they don’t follow up is that, “I have nothing of value to say. I feel like I’m bugging them.” With this type of data, they’re conversation starters. For whatever you’re seeing there, they are a reason why––I call it “reason why conversation,” that’s coming through that allow you to pick up the phone if you’re a phone person, or send an email, or do a direct mail, whatever it is, whatever method you’re going to be using. I would mix and match to those methods. But this gives you that conversation opener that you’ve all been wanting.

Alex: Yes, yes. I get this question a lot from customers of, “Okay, I have this intent data.” Let’s say I’m selling data science solutions and a company is showing strong signals around big data machine learning and IoT, internet of things, connected devices. They say, “I’ve got this information like what do I say to the person,” and it can be a very innocent statement, you just say to the person, “Hi, Marylou. I’ve been doing my homework and I understand that there has been interest from your company in solutions around data science, machine learning, and IoT. We offer solutions that cater specifically to that. I believe we’d really be able to offer a great solution and value for that. Would you be open to having a conversation?”

Something along those lines, I’m sure there’s better way to phrase it. But you don’t have to pretend or hide the fact that you know this and you also don’t have to outright say, “I have access to a tool that gives me all of this information on the cookies that track you across all these websites,” you don’t have to get into that. But if you just say, “Hey, I’ve been doing my homework and I understand you might be interested,” that’s usually what’s needed and people understand.

Marylou: The other thing is, we are masters of the conversation. Once we’re given a little piece of information, we run with it. We’re not fearful of starting conversations with people we don’t know. We’re open minded to getting whatever little crack we get of information, just a little tiny bit that we can formulate into an opener, so I don’t buy that we can’t do it, I just think we’re stymied by the fact that we receive this information, no different than if you are in a golf course, if you’re in a bar talking to colleague or whatever and they gave you some insights into an account. You’re going to use that information to further your plans, it’s no different than that.

Alex: Here’s the really key distinction though which is again what I’m so excited about offering this with Signal HQ is most organizations out there, when a salesperson is reaching out, they’ll look at a couple of things. They’ll make a decision to reach out to a company based on some type of thermographic fit which usually includes an industry and/or a company size.

If your company has had success selling to financial services firms, you might start selling to other financial services firms. If you have a lot of success appealing to the VP of Marketing or the CMO, then you’ll try to reach out to other people that fit that. But there’s not much more that goes into that other than they happen to be a good fit from that standpoint. But you have no idea whether there’s any type of compelling event happening within that company that makes your solution timely; whether they have announced the project, or a new initiative, or currently evaluating solutions, you really have––given the current paradigm of the way people work, they really have no clue.

Maybe one step beyond that, you might go to what’s called technographic fit. If you’re selling a solution or a technology, you might check and see, do they have some type of legacy technology that yours is better at solving, replacing, or a competing technology?

But again, if that’s all you’re relying on is that thermographic or a technographic fit, then you’re still kind of shooting in the dark, hoping that you maybe caught somebody at the right. Whereas it’s really exciting to be able to have a very solid idea that there’s some type of compelling event, a new project, a new job post, a new spike in research intensity that will inform your decision and to make sure that that precious amount of time that you’re spending selling to folks, you’re reaching out to people that are actively looking for a solution.

Marylou: Yeah. Definitely. Wonderful. We’re getting to the top of the hour here and I want to make sure people know how they get a hold of you. We talked a little bit about a potential place they can go and get a checklist of things to get started, why don’t you take it away and let us know how to reach you and what’s on the horizon? What do you plan to do for our audience in order to get them started along this path of figuring out whether this is a good solution for them?

Alex: Yes. I’d say first and foremost, I’d love any of you to reach out to me directly, LinkedIn is a really good place, linkedin.com/in/alexanderpgreer. I’ll also create a landing page TBD on what the link name will be, but I think it will probably be signal-hq.com/marylou, but we’ll include that in the show notes, too and that will include some content in there for you that you can use to assess your readiness for this type of solution internally or just some techniques you can adopt right away.

Those I’d say are the two best things and of course, we have a contact us form on our website if you’d like to learn about our solution in particular, just go to signal-hq.com and you’ll find a really nice, shiny obvious button for you to contact us.

Marylou: Okay. We’ve mentioned the checklist, there’s one to three things that you can get started right away and start seeing immediate results, probably more so than you ever thought, just simple things that Alex put together for you. Then there’s some near and long term options for you as well.

It’s always good to have a conversation if you’re getting serious about this concept of maximizing the return on effort, getting a high level of impact with least amount of steps, then this is really the type of process that you’re going to want to review and perhaps deploy in your organization.

Alex, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate you coming on the podcast today.

Alex: Marylou, I had a blast. Thank you so much.